Connecting the dots.

On Sunday morning I was lying in bed, awake but not awake if you know what I mean.  My brain was buzzing and I was considering getting up but my eyes were closed and I wasn't in a hurry to open them.

I felt a figure lying next to me, a figure that was not there when I went to sleep and was now sticking a pair of freezing cold feet under my pajama jacket. 

It was my 6-year old daughter and she had climbed into our bed in the middle of the night as she  often does. She now lay between me and my wife in her contorted way of sleeping that resembles a body that fell out of the sky from a very great height and splayed limbs in every direction at angles usually only acheivable by ostriches or years of yoga training.

Very often this means I will end up with feet on my face and my wife will end up with fingers up her nose and a heavy head on her stomach.  This time my wife was getting a break and she was right up against me; her feet and knees were up againsts my back and her head was right next to mine.  I could feel her breath on my face once I was able to turn around in her direction (a harder task than you think since I was basically clinging to the edge of the bed with my arse-cheeks by this point).

I lay there with my eyes still closed, feeling happy and protective and warm.  My brain is telling me that this could be the good old days.  This is one of those moments that when I am an old man and she is grown up, I will be to grasp onto this memory and smile and feel that same warmth and protection no matter what the future holds.  It is a feeling I never want to end.  I am like this for a while, just savoring the moment.  I listen to the rythm of her breating and feel the inhale then the exhale on my face.  It is perfect and nothing can spoil it.

A few minutes later something happens and we switch places. A memory rises from the depths of my sub-conciousness and in this memory I am the child and I am lying right next to my Mum.  I can feel HER breath on my face.

It shocks me because it is so vivid and real and I want to open my eyes but I don't want to lose the moment or the connection to my Mum who has been dead for 8 years.  This might sound spooky but it is far from it, I feel the same sense of warmth and protectiveness that I had towards my daughter before except that this time I feel like they are being offered to me.  I have an overwhelming sense that everything is going to be alright.

I now lie there listening to my Mum breathing.  I remember this feeling so strongly that I recall I used to time my own breathing to breathe in when she was doing the same.  I had this idea in my head that when people breathed out they only breathed out the bad air that your body did not want.  Since we were lying so close together I could not breathe in when she was breathing out or I'd only get the bad air.

As I lie there happier than I've been in months I realise that I've discovered something very primal, something which is always there but rarely acknoledged.  A connection between a parent and a child that, no matter what happens in ones life, never goes away, and no matter what I know  I am incredibly lucky to have reached this point.

Long may it last.





 

Particles.

I come up the stairs from the platform of the 42nd Street subway stop to the bowels of the Port Authority bus station and I am confronted by a highway of humanity moving in two directions at once in front of me.  I feel like I am standing completely still in one of those long-exposure photographs where one thing is in focus and everything else is a blur.

I stand watching for a while, I put my hands on the railing at the top of the stairwell I just emerged from and deposit some skin cells.  It occurs to me in that moment that hundreds of millions of people have deposited skin cells in the same place.  I start thinking about how many people have shed skin cells in the subway and then in the Port Authority bus station.  All of that humanity, all the flakes, all the DNA, melting off you in your effort to get from Point A to Point B.

I'm overwhelmed by the thought and the possibility as my mind's eye sinks down to an atomic level and the walls seem to swim with matter.  I can see every particle and I feel like I could push my hand into it like it was made from jello.  It would be egotistical of me to think I am at one with the world but I am not at one with the world, I am just contributing to it, adding my cells to the millions who were here before me.

Sometimes New York does this to you.  Fear loves this place and sometimes you will find it dragging you by your head and there is a startling moment of clarity when you realise that you are one single pea in a giant concrete pod filled with 12 million peas. 

For some people this makes their brain explode, for me I love it.

I don't know where last year went.  I started about 4 or 5 posts but never actually published anything.  I'd like to say that they didn't meet some kind of high editorial standard but to be honest all of them were just half formed ideas that never got completed.

I had a good year, just not a very exciting one and I'm not the kind of person who can write about mundane things even though my definition of a mundane thing might slightly different from yours.  I'm not the "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the theater" storyteller, I like the absurd, the surreal and the harmless.

I turned 40 in March and in April ended up in the emergency room with an asthma attack, my first one in 12 years.  This prompted a bit of soul searching as I had not only aged a decade, I was also the heaviest I'd ever been and completely out of shape.

Because of this I then spent a good deal of the summer walking the NYC Greenway and then after that just kept on walking.  By the end of October, and by the reckoning of the little app on my phone that tracks me like a student loan debt collector, I had walked about 370 miles.  I ended the year feeling in slightly better shape than I have in a long time.  I will endeavor to keep this up throughout 2013.

On the current affairs front it was an election year, and although I had plenty of bad things to say about Mitt Romney, I did not have many good things to say about Barak Obama so I generally kept my head down hoping Obama would win but only because I was more afraid of the other guy.  This is not democracy, it's a 2-party card game with a marked deck.

The year ended on a rough note with the 2 Sandy's.  Hurricane Sandy which had me living at work for 5 days and provided me with a few images that I will never forget, and then the Sandy Hook School shooting which was just too unspeakably horrible.  The name Sandy needs to go in the bin with Adolf, no more Sandys please.

And now I think I am up-to-date.  12 months in 6 paragraphs.  Not bad at all.

New Year Resolution.

I have one New Year Resolution.  To get over my writer's block and actually write something this year.  There.  Fucking done!