Love and New York

This past weekend, I had the supreme pleasure of singing in the wedding of my dear friends Julia and Olivier.  It was nerve wracking and occasionally frustrating and absolutely amazing.  I love singing, and this is the first time I've sung for friends with whom I am this close.  Luckily, I was able to sing the processional - "Ave Maria" - from the side of the altar, thus staving off a complete sobby meltdown upon seeing Juls come down the aisle in her stunning dress.  The ceremony was beautiful and I felt like I was getting a special treat as I sang from the front of the church; looking out at all of the happy faces there to celebrate Juls and Liv's special day made my heart grow three sizes with every hymn and psalm.

I spent that weekend in the company of old friends - Juls, Liv, Ben, Lucy, Katy, Lee, Dan, Tiff - and new ones.  The night before the wedding, Lucy and Lee and I went to see The Hunger Games while we waited for Ben to make his way to New York, then engaged in a traditional Olivier orgy of food and drink.  On the day of the wedding, Liv, Ben and I went on a rescue mission to the post office to pick up presents for the mother and father of the bride that had been trapped there.  (It's not a wedding until you've defrauded a government agency!) Later, I curled my hair perched on the edge of the couch while Ben napped and Katy buzzed around getting ready.  I felt so lucky to share this stunning weekend with people I love so much and for so many reasons.  These are people who know me better than anyone, and who bear me up when all else fails.  I am nothing without my friends.

Normally, any weekend with this group leaves my heart singing, but this weekend in particular was exceptionally stunning.  I felt throughout as though I was in a museum dedicated to love - love of all kinds, of all shapes, of all sizes and details.  From the time I arrived on Thursday for the rehearsal, much was made about the impending clash of cultures - Julia's family is Irish, stoic, dryly hilarious, and somewhat feelings-averse, whereas Olivier's French/Puerto Rican blend is effusive and more or less a whirling vortex of bisous and hugging.  There was only one sure thing: it was going to be spectacular.  And so it was - there were so many moments of beauty in these connections and interactions.  Those two families are definitive proof that love is a many splendored thing.

That's what I thought about, the whole weekend: just how many kinds of love there are, and how many were on display.  The ease of conversation between long-distant family members brought back together.  Little stories about everyday life that shape sisters and parents and children.  The drive to produce an orgy of food for visiting friends the night before your wedding.  Fussing over getting everything perfect for the ones you love; snapping when it isn't, glowing when it is.  Worrying about the welfare of a pigeon who has taken up residence on a balcony in Queens, and her two eggs.  A musical war between inappropriate rugby songs and old Irish songs and, mysteriously, rap.  Unfunny non-jokes made to ease the nervousness.  Shaking hands at the podium.  Hugs and yelling and dancing.  Tears.  Nested hands.  They're all manifestations of love, and it is nothing short of miraculous that so many of these wove a soft blanket around this wedding.  I believe in miracles, yes.

There is one more love that I couldn't help but notice that weekend...the love you can have for a place.  The reception closed with Sinatra's "New York, New York," with the dance floor packed with dangerously-high-kicking friends and everyone singing along.  There are New Yorkers who can be obnoxious about New York, but there is no denying that there is something special about it.  You cannot visit New York and not feel it's frantic, beating heart, even in the quietest neighborhoods, and you cannot, having felt this, question that your time in New York, there in that moment, wherever you are and whatever you're doing, is just one small part in a long, grand, strange, wonderful story that has been written for centuries and will go on for many more.  At 3 in the morning I looked out the window of the Cuckoo's Nest, from the afterparty, and watched Juls laugh with her friends, in her stunning, billowing dress, head sailing back, one small moment in the life of the City but so in control and the sole owner of the night, and thought, "this is a special place."  And it is.

Congratulations, Juls and Liv.  I couldn't be luckier to know you.

Our Love is Like Byzantium

I don't really like poetry generally, but when I DO like it, I love it.  Like this one.

Our love is like Byzantium
must have been
on the last evening. There must have been
I imagine
a glow on the faces
of those who crowded the streets
or stood in small groups
on streetcorners and public squares
speaking together in low voices
that must have resembled
the glow your face has
when you brush your hair back
and look at me.

I imagine they haven't spoken
much, and about rather
ordinary things
that they have been trying to say
and have stopped
without having managed to express
what they wanted
and have been trying again
and given up again
and have been loking at each other
and lowered their eyes.

Very old icons, for instance,
have that kind of glow
the blaze of a burning city
or the glow which approaching death
leaves on photographs of people who died young
in the memory of those left behind.

When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church
that was burned down long ago
and where only the darkness in the eyes of the icons
has remained
filled with the flames
which annihilated them.

--Henrik Nordbrandt
(translated by Henrik Nordbrandt and Alexander Taylor)

The Theotokos of Vladimir

Bli Sterk, Norge.

I've started trying to write about Norway many times this week, and every time I get stuck.  I'm a political scientist, so I want to say something comprehensive and true about the political factors that were in play during this violence, but that's not what I, the person who is incidentally a political scientist, want to say, and it's not what actually drives me to write about it.  There is no dearth of writing about Norway, and I could probably just leave it alone and no one would notice.  But I can't leave it alone because it won't leave me alone.  So I thought about this and I think I know how to write about it.

My Mom spent a year in Norway after her graduation from Middlebury, making friends and taking classes and learning Norwegian.  When we were kids, she used to swear in Norwegian so even if we DID repeat what she said, people probably wouldn't know.  Crafty lady, my Mom.  Unfortunately, we eventually got older and increased our powers of persuasion, and we used them to make her tell us what she was saying.  This wasn't as satisfying as one would hope, as is so often the case with swearing in other languages; you're expecting a one-to-one translation but it often turns out that someone's getting called a moldy foot or something.  The standby for road rage was pretty good, though.  It went fy faen i helvete, du er en drittsekk, which is "the devil in hell, you're a shitsack."  We adopted "drittsekk" as a kind of family shibboleth, because we're really classy like that.  This led to a really great family moment several years later when we were visiting Norwegian friends in South Carolina and overheard a tantrum-throwing six year old call her mother a drittsekk, to our immense collective amusement.

Many of Mom's friends came to visit us over the years, and we still exchange Christmas presents with many of them.  One visit was from her host parents, and Reidar, who was a beautiful painter, went down to Little Indian Lake to paint and somehow, despite speaking no English, managed to charm the faces off some kids fishing down there.  They sent him home with a still-flopping and fairly large fish in a plastic bag (?????).  He came rolling up the front walk with this fish in a bag yelling "fiske, fiske, fiske" and we put it in the clawfoot bathtub and fed it fish food flakes for three days before sanity was mustered and we took it back to the lake.  (In retrospect, he probably expected that we would kill and eat it, as you do when you get an edibly-sized fish.  He did not realize he was dealing with suburbanites.)  All of these visits were equally great, because Norwegians are generally wonderful, and Mom seems to have befriended the absolute best of Norway, which is not surprising if you have ever met my Mom.  The longest visit, though, was from Cecilie, my parents' exchange student.

Mom and Cecile at my wedding in 2009

Cecilie arrived in Worcester in 2006, and she is awesome.  Longtime readers of this blog may recognize her as "the Weege," who came on a cruise with my college roommate and I in an incredible lapse of good judgment on my mother's part.  ("Take the underage Norwegian entrusted to my care on a cruise under the supervision of two drunks?  Absolutely!"  IT WAS FINE, DON'T WORRY, MOM.)   [NB: longtime readers will also be glad to know that Cecilie, her family and her friends are all okay.]  Cecilie and I really hit it off, and we had a total blast going on adventures and talking and hanging out.  She was also a constant source of unintentional humor.  For example, she once came home from school having removed large chunks of skin from her legs by falling off her bike.  I know that doesn't sound very funny.  Here's why it is: she fell off her bike because she was eating yogurt while riding.  With a spoon.  She and I have kept in touch and she came back to stand up for me at my wedding.  This allowed us to relive another humorous incident.  Cecilie was going to prom and wasn't interested in, you know, Googling dress size equivalents, so she just kind of ordered a dress in a size that sounded good.  I'm still not sure how she breathed at prom, because it took Mom and I both to wrassle her into it.  Who does that?  The best part is, J. Crew, whence my bridesmaid dresses came, doesn't ship to Norway, so she had to ship her dress to my parents' house and see if it fit a couple days before the wedding.  Kind of time sensitive, so obviously, she did the pick-a-size-any-size routine again.  I don't know, you guys.  It worked out okay both times though, so maybe I shouldn't mock.

In any case, we talked a lot about politics and culture, because there was a lot of stuff that Cecilie ran into that made her wonder what the hell was in the water over here, as well as a lot of stuff that she was simply curious about.  It's thinking about these conversations that make me feel so sad for Norway in the wake of this massacre.  Talking with Cecilie showed me that Norwegian culture simply does not include violence and guns in the same way that American culture does.  This is not to say that there's no crime in Norway and everyone has a faintly glowing halo floating above their heads at all times.  Instead, it means that you would not buy a gun for "home defense" because first of all a human life is more sacred than physical property and secondly, why would you stand and deliver when you could escape, stay safe, and call the cops?  Resorting to violence is simply not a thing, and in many cases, not an option, because there are so few guns.  I offered to take Cecilie up shooting with friends while she was here, and she was amazed that average people would just HAVE guns to take to the range to shoot around.  She didn't totally get what I meant when I said we could go shooting because her prevailing understanding of guns did not include random people having them.

It's hard for Americans to imagine a culture so bereft of guns and so adverse to violence.  Even if we don't own guns and even if we don't like guns, we are still bombarded at all times with violent imagery from every kind of media.  Guns and violence are glorified and held up as solutions to problems, and even when they're not being glorified, they are often treated as a common fact of life.  That is simply not there in Norway.  Now, imagine that you are in this culture, and let's even assume that you're pretty cosmopolitan and you know about gun culture in the US and you kind of get it even if you think the American gun fixation is weird.  It's still something that's Over There.  Imagine this, and then imagine Anders Behring Breivik.

Breivik's actions were shocking even for we jaded Americans.  The idea that someone would gather children around and open fire on them, that someone would fire on children swimming away in a desperate bid for the mainland, that someone would bomb government buildings...these are shocking ideas.  These are shocking ideas even to people who remember Timothy McVeigh.  These are shocking ideas to people who remember September 11th.  They are the acts of a dangerous and evil man.  But even as we are shocked, Americans should remember that this is a thousand times worse for Norway, not only because the death toll was proportionately worse than September 11th and because it happened on Norwegian soil, but because these attacks represent a leap in conception of violence so much greater than it would be for us.  We shouldn't count our high tolerance for violence as a positive, but we can understand how it would be some insulation against at least a small part of the trauma.

I read an article today that included some texts from one of the young women stuck on Utøya who survived.  She texted her mother "I love you even if I still misbehave from time to time." Her mother told her to "give a sign of life every five minutes."  For me, all of Norway is in those two sentences.  That Julie, a 16 year old, would think to mention that she still misbehaves from time to time while hiding from a gunman, seems to express such a fully realized love that my heart breaks as I think about it.  Her mother's asking for a sign of life every five minutes - five minutes!  How could you have the strength to ask your child for something so reasonable, instead of begging for continual interaction?  I could write another 10,000 words and never hit on what it is about these phrases that is so Norwegian.  They are so real, and so practical, even in the most chaotic possible circumstances.  It is my hope that that same resolute attachment to truth, strength and the Norwegian way will carry Norway through this terrible time and emerge stronger than ever.

Bli sterk, Norge.

Dance Like No One is Watching (or, Alternatively, a Gigantic Russian Man)

This has been a trying week, vis a vis politics and bullshit.  There have been a lot of weeks like that lately.  It may just be the stuff I've been reading, but the fact that it exists doesn't change in response to my willingness to engage with it.  When a giant ball of bullshit falls on Capitol Hill, it makes a sound whether or not I or anyone else are listening.  If I go to a lake in the woods with nothing but flipflops, a bunch of beer and a chair, turning off my cell phone and not checking my email, the bullshit in which we live our lives will carry on affecting someone - some people I care about, some people I don't know.  That can be crushing.  The thing is, though, you have to still go to the lake by the woods.  You still have to look for the good in people and things.  You can't just ignore it, but you have to surround what stresses you with a belief that for every person intent on fucking up our world, there are a dozen who want to fix it, and who work at that goal in tiny and wonderful ways, and who sometimes change the world.  You have to be that person. It takes less than you might think.  Love your friends, love your family, seek joy, create wonder.

And perhaps most importantly, dance like a goon.

via Russian Machine Never Breaks

Have a great weekend, everyone!  Change the world every moment of it.