Of Coats & Woodstock

This is a picture of MyKid fooling around in my down winter coat. I've had this coat since before MyKid was born. In fact, as I've often related to him, when he was a baby I carried him around in a BabyBjorn while wearing this coat.

MyKid is now 11. Seeing him in this coat, I suddenly realized I've lived my entire adult life at the height of an 11-year old boy.

It's a sobering thought. I could riff for pages on what it's like to be the shortest kid in the class, the shortest woman in an office, and then the shortest oldest woman in an office. What I can't do, however, is tell you how many times people haven't seen me in a line, or in the subway, because I disappear behind much taller people.

I think it's part of the reason I felt so at home in Jerusalem. My height was just not that unusual there. (I also feel comfy on the Canal Street subway station in Manhattan, for the same reason.)

I guess this is just a time that I'm taking stock and trying to figure out where I will fit in in the work world, when I finally return.

One last note -- if you're of a certain age, or you ever visited/lived in the Catskills, you must see Ang Lee's movie, Taking Woodstock. It's a joy. Lee is such a talented director; he totally "got" the time and the place.

You'll be awash in nostalgia and cry for our loss of innocence. Sorry, let me restate that. What I meant by that pathetically inadequate and hopelessly trite sentence was: the movie brilliantly represents a time and a mood that some of you might recognize. Watching it, I felt sad for how innocent we were then and for the youthful optimism we lost, and how we lost it.

I remember listening to older people speak about things and wonder what they might have experienced in life that enabled them to understand life so much better than I did. What had made the world so much more transparent for them? Then, I seemed to understand so little of what was happening around me; I was clueless about how people operate and think.

Experience and T-I-M-E changed all that.

T-I-M-E

Amazing things can happen in even the most ordinary of lives.


A family-related business deal of MyMan's recently fell though. Yet, within a few days, a former agent at MyMan's firm resurfaced and is now helping to regenerate MyMan's business.


MyMan has been looking at the negative side of things, of late. Suddenly, last night he got a phone call asking him to participate in an early morning minyan. One of our synagogue members is saying Kaddish for his beloved son. Not feeling too well and sidelined with a bad cold, MyMan still raced out early this a.m. to participate in the 6:15 prayer service. Sometimes being asked to do a good deed for another person really takes you out of yourself and puts everything else in perspective.


The title of this blog, T-I-M-E refers to a story MyMan told me when we were first dating. When his first marriage broke up, he had a friend in whom he confided. The friend said that the only thing that will help get past the pain is T-I-M-E (which he spelled out for him).



You just have to see things through and believe things will get better. And you know what? Sometimes, just sometimes they actually do!