Wrestling with Restlessness

Posted September 07, 2007

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There's a bottle of wine and a row of empty cups. "Would you like to taste the red or the white?" he asks, showing me the one bottle, and I can't decide. "Can you tell me a little bit about both?" "Of course. The red is kind of rich and dark and moist? And the white is kind of light -- well, of course it's light, since it's white -- and sweet and dry. They both taste like apples and also like smoke." I choose the white, and -- still unopened -- it is held over one of my cups with a "glug glug glug" sound that appears oddly to be emanating for the mouth of the sommelier himself. Birdy grabs the cup out of my hand and drinks from it with an almost identical "glug glug glug" sound. "It tastes like apricots," she announces.

I'm starting to wonder if, on our recent trip to Quebec with friends, we might have brought the kids with us on too many wine and hard cider tastings. They seemed so busy with their activities: Ben and his friend Ava tangled their fingers over embroidery-thread friendship bracelets; Birdy played with her magnetic dress-up bears. Who knew they were actually paying attention? "To make it?" Ben is explaining now, "We mix one cup of alcohol" -- he pronounces this alcahawl -- "with one teaspoon of fruit punch. And then we let it evaporate. Which is why it's so dry." Birdy is still clutching her cup and her stuffed animal. "Do you have a bathroom here?" she asks. "Like a hippo bathroom where my hippo can go?" I hope nobody raises an eyebrow when the kids want to play "Wine Tasting" in the pretend area at school.

But after a hard week -- we are sad about the untimely death of an old friend, the mother of one of my very favorite teenagers on the planet -- I'm in the mood for comic relief. And I'm not getting it from the (ceaseless) rain outside, but within the house, there's no shortage. I sit in the living room with my computer, trying absurdly to write while the kids balance themselves on the back of the couch to wrap their arms around my neck and kiss my hair with their lips and kiss my hair with an X-Files Agent Scully figurine. "Do you want to go into the study to work?" Michael asks gently. And it's a sensible question, but I don't. I just want to be here, where everybody else is, where my life hums with, well, with life itself. Even if one thing leads to another, and before you know it Michael is strumming the Billy Joel "Brenda and Eddie" song on a ukulele. Then he switches to guitar, Ben joins in on his guitar, with Birdy on a plastic whistle, and they jam a rocking version of "If I Were a Rich Man" and then a serious, gorgeous rendition of the Patty Griffin song "Top of the World." There is much dancing around in underpants, and it is both silly and beautiful.

I can be so awkward sometimes, trying to create special moments as if I'm following the directions in a kit I ordered from a catalogue: we'll light this candle in this way accompanied by this feeling; we'll read this poem together and be very poignant and sober. And other times, the blessings just wash up in unbidden, unexpected heaps on the shore of my day. The trick I'm learning is not to pass them by. Not to leave this happy scene to check my email or put the kettle on. "I'm wrestling with restlessness," I said to Michael earlier this summer when we were on the beach, and he'd laughed but said, "You really are. I can tell." I'm trying not to skitter away from the sitting still or the chaos. I know it's boring to say it, so obvious that it's almost silly, but the lesson of death is that we die -- which is the same as saying that we're living now. Our friend's parting command to the people she loved was: "Dance." And so we do.

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Wrestling with Restlessness

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Wrestling with Restlessness

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