How to look ahead

Or thoughts from your exhausted narrator

I am so tired right now, in the way that we all are tired, but also in a specific way because last night we had to pick my younger daughter up from the airport at 11pm, which is, I’m afraid, hours after my usual bedtime, and I thought I might nap on my (perfect) couch for a bit, but I was adrenalized and tense (it’s funny that now I have to worry about planes crashing when my only anxiety about flying before, which was already huge, was waiting and inconvenience) (I am already certain that I will never visit Asia or Australia in my lifetime because I honestly don’t think I can be on a plane for that long) and just as I was dozing off for a second, I heard a text on my phone, which turned out to be not my daughter but a friend who was texting at that ungodly hour. And my phone was turned on, which it never usually would be at that hour, but I was waiting for my daughter to text so that we could leave for the airport once she landed.

It is a 15-minute drive from our house to the airport. It seems insane to me, who has mostly flown out of New York City my entire life, to have a direct international airport so close by, and that it’s easy enough to meet someone there without even having to get out of your car. So that when the text from my daughter came, exactly when it was supposed to, Tony and I got in the car and headed out. Yes, this was a two-person operation, as neither Tony nor I can see in the dark, and as he drove and I navigated, we somehow got to the airport, but I accidentally led us directly into the parking garage where we kept climbing and climbing up each level, seemingly the only way to go. This is exactly the sort of thing that would have made me have a complete breakdown had I been driving, but Tony calmly figured out how to reverse our direction and we climbed down from the parking garage. And then once we were out of the garage and heading to the arrivals area, I marveled at how Tony was able to move on from this incident, whereas it would have taken me hours to recover, had I been driving. (My most famous driving breakdown happened when Tony and I were driving from South Carolina to D.C. I had been driving on the highway for like five hours when we finally reached the street my friend lived on. Tony pointed out a parking spot several feet ahead of me, but I had reached my limit. I could not drive another second. I was simply done. I got out and just stood on the sidewalk, shaking, while Tony parked the car.)

And so we picked up my daughter, whose suitcase had somehow not made it to Albany just yet and would eventually be sent directly to our house. The suitcase was apparently on a later plane. Anyway, I then somehow could not get to sleep, as adrenalized as I was, and I must have sometime after midnight but then managed to wake up at my usual time (6ish). What I’m getting at: I don’t feel great. And yet.

My daughter just returned from Mexico, a bit sooner than she had planned. She was supposed to help convert a Danish ship that was docked off the town of Mazatlan from a schooner into a brigantine (as one does), but the tools needed to do this were stuck in a shipping container that, due to bureaucracy, was stranded somewhere, so there wasn’t much to do besides scraping off paint and the like. Soon, she will leave for a seasonal sailing job in the States.

This is neither schooner nor brigantine, but a small ship in Mazatlan.

My daughter, who just graduated college in December with a degree in anthropology, is a sailor. My older daughter is a wildlife biologist. They have so many interests and know so many things that I don’t know, and I love that about them. This is actually my favorite thing about parenting, and it always has been—to have my kids go out and explore things on their own and then come back and tell me about them. Of course, I loved introducing them to things, but I was never the sort of parent who insisted my kids like the music I like, for example. I preferred to introduce them to music and books and history and art and such and then let them discover what their favorite kinds were. But it’s true that some of our tastes overlap.

At the beginning of the year, I thought that I couldn’t possibly write now. Or if I wrote, I couldn’t write about the ordinary things that interest me. But it seems that I can. Or that I want to. If we were to meet in person, I might never stop talking about what’s going on right now in the U.S. and how we can trace nearly all of it (the power of Trump and Elon Musk, the Democrats and their fear of doing literally anything) back to Citizens United v. FEC, which gave all the power in this country to the wealthy and made every single politician beholden to billionaires.

But that’s for another time and place. For now, I’m thinking about how the ice and snow has melted at last and how the first smell of spring (any day now!) is going to make me swoon. And in the very immediate future, how I am going to read and go to bed early and do my yoga and my puzzles tomorrow morning and keep doing this thing, whatever it is. The sun is setting later and later these days. There is always something to look forward to.