This past weekend was not my weekend to have the girls, and so one of my tasks was to create new index cards for our movie collection (the old ones were color-coded, and my aesthetic tastes have changed and I want them all to be black ink on white cards now). When I showed the girls the new system, Felicity hugged me and said so sincerely, “I love you, Mommy, but you have too much time alone. You need a friend.”
It was too sweet.
I perhaps do have too much time alone, but it’s all good.
(I listened to a new-to-me podcast while I was redoing all of the index cards called 80s All Over in which the hosts dissect every single movie that came out in a certain month of a certain 1980s year-I listened to January 1980 and February 1980 and both were completely fascinating.)
Of course, I also read, and the book that I’m reading is too wonderful not to gush over, even though I still have about a third of the way to go until it’s over. Daisy Jones and the Six came so highly recommended by many people whose opinion on books I trust and it has not disappointed.
It’s fiction, but written as an oral history of a band’s creation and ultimate demise. I’m sure that it helps that I love oral histories (my all time favorite being Live from New York, which such a dense look at my most beloved Saturday Night Live). It’s an interesting approach that I appreciate as a reader and a writer and a complete and total lover of dialogue.
The band at the center of the book, not by accident I am sure, is reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac. I grew up loving Stevie Nicks, as girls of my age do. But Fleetwood Mac, like all the things about the last few years of my life, became a lifeline to me when I couldn’t find words to describe what I was grieving at the end of my marriage.
(I sort of always want to tell the people who reach out to me to ask how I managed to handle the grief, “You will have your Rumours period.” I don’t, because of course not everyone is me, but I always think it.)
My Rumours period began with just listening over and over to the album, and to “Silver Springs,” which of course was Stevie’s contribution to the break up album that got shunted aside. I dived into these peoples lives, Stevie and Lindsey most especially, and I would sink every night into the sadness of their relationships ending and marvel at how they had the ultimate karma of making each other sing these songs about their infidelity.
I still have days where I just want to sink into their grief, find solace in the fact that I’m not all alone in trying to make sense of what to do with the bits and pieces of a relationship that has no home anymore. Living in the aftermath of a person that you loved turning into someone that you do not recognize-that is what most of those songs are to me.
I also had the absolute joy to see our high school production of The Music Man and it was absolutely wonderful. I say again and again that my girls and I are so blessed to be a part of a public school system that values the arts as well as sports, and I truly mean that with all of my heart-I wish that all kids could have the kind of well rounded education that East Muskingum Schools provided to me as a student and that they are providing my kids.
And Tiger Woods won the Masters, and Saturday Night Live was new, and I had a glorious weekend, mostly alone.
This Holy Week is full of all the things-track meets, piano lessons, Passover dinner with friends. So it was grand to have a weekend to myself to be quiet and get my book geek on. Even if, as my girls so gently try to point out, I maybe need to get a life.
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