It's like the weather--Thanksgiving Monday I was roof top bound, donning my bikini one last time, reading in the sun, and there was a period of this week where we didn't see the sun for days. And Friday dawned, cool, and clear, the trees starting to show bare. My friend A. was here Friday night, visiting ( I think for both of us the 'highlight' of fall, a little oasis in a pair of busy lives; when I think I am busy I think of her and need to give myself a shake). So Friday night was about conversation, soul-searching, reflecting, and looking at not only our adult lives, since we've known each other (coming up to the tune of almost twenty years), but also all those big-life things: love, death, change, aging. Facing life on life's terms, the things you just 'know' and the things that you weigh in on with all that you have, and still don't get an answer back.
We hit the AGO Saturday am, after staying up talking, tarot-reading, (drinking) Friday night. There is a Chagall exhibit on until January of next year, and it was definitely worth taking in.
Then there were the posturing 'Toronto types' doing their thang at the gallery--always entertaining. One of the features of the exhibit was a small table with pencils and square pieces of paper for the patrons/visitors to express where they felt their favourite place was--you could write something, sketch something, and then leave it behind for others to look at. I was fascinated by this. It was inspired by Chagall's love for his homeland, a place he was quasi-exiled from in his early adulthood. I thought about my favourite place, and various things popped up in my head, all of them, as the majority of the pieces left at the table represented--physical places, towns, cities, countries. I wonder, though, if the emotional places that people may have come up with were too personal, painful, to really share? A favourite place can relate to many things, on an emotional level. A time in ones life, a moment with someone, a special day, all of those things count. I thought about a favourite place for myself, and really, it is usually one where I am in that ideal headspace--my mind isn't tricking me into castatrophe thinking, I'm not 'creating a worry'...I'm just in the moment, I'm running, or I'm reading, or I'm deep in conversation. Those are some favourites of mine, just skimming the surface for now.
Saturday lunch was at a pub across from the gallery with a waiter who had a personality all his own, pub-fare lunch, bad coffee, then a walk back through the oddly-empty Toronto streets, then A. grabbing a cab to the airport to get back home early Saturday afternoon.
I was in my apartment, sunshine streaming in, pleasantly tired, cleaning up and putting dishes away, doing laundry, and really, not much of anything else.
I walked to the grocery store a few hours later, the sky darkening with clouds, (no rain though) and then made a quick dinner while, in the spirit of Halloween, one horror movie after another played on the tv.
I dealt with my mail, read the paper and some magazines, and was asleep by eleven, the previous late night taking its toll.
A baptism for my friend T.'s son started off today, and in about thirty minutes I have to drive uptown with a designer friend of mine to do a quick consultation for a possible new client.
The backdrop of today is that it's Sunday, and it's been, for the most part, a week of unexplained, free-form melancholia, and stress, but as A. said, and as I sometimes forget, in the frenzy of work, dealing with my mom's house, the bank, the aftermath of death (yes, that word again: grief), it is that roller-coaster ride, robbing me, if I let it, of the ability to just BE, and just LIVE--without feeling like I'm running a race, against myself, against time....against death itself.
But just the fact that I'm sitting here, mid-day, apartment clean, laundry folded, dishes put away, attests to the 'good' of this weekend--conversation and reflection fuelling quiet introspection, reminding me of all the things in this life that deserve so much recognition and gratitude.
I haven't run this week. The touch of the stomach issues I've had put me on a focus to down water and just kind of monitor things--and I focussed instead on sleep, my cure-all. So, running may happen later, or maybe walking will.
I have a few new songs on the ipod, I have a couple of books on order from Indigo online (Joan Didion has a new one out called Blue Nights and Nile Rodgers wrote a memoir called Le Freak), I'm just waiting for them to ship to me.
I also have Natalie Goldberg, and the Thunder and Lightning book, and I am still working on the post about her and her books.
So.
That's the weekend update, for lack of a better term. Up, down, in the middle, and the sun keeps shining.
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