An improvised life

I solved a Rubik’s cube last night. I started learning on the flight from Boston to Seattle as we were moving back to Juneau after three years. I like how planes limit my options and force me to slow down and focus. Without the Alaska Airlines crossword or meals (covid danger), we were even bored-er than usual, so I finally assented to Alder’s offer to teach me to cube.    I remember when the Rubik’s cube was all the rage in middle school. I made a few half-hearted attempts and never solved a single face. The Rubik’s cube always carried with it a vague whiff of failure. Then in December, for his Project-Based Learning class Alder was to choose something he didn’t know how to do and learn it.    “I think I want to learn to do a backflip,” he said.    My mind leapt to C-4 spinal cord injury, paralysis, and wheelchairs. “Mmmm,” I said, feigning neutrality.    “Or how to solve a Rubik’s cube.”   I shrugged. “Maybe that would be a little more prac...

Despite growing up in the Boston area, I feel like a kid who’s been blindfolded and spun around trying to pin the tail on the donkey when I drive around Boston. When we moved here from Alaska three years ago, my then 9-year-old son Alder and I experienced acute disorientation. Our sense of dislocation was spiritual and social, but also profoundly geographic. In Juneau, the roads end in every direction. The mountains and ocean that bound Juneau tell you where you are, and which way is north. Here in the northeast amidst the tangle of asphalt and buildings we felt lost, severed from nature and nature’s guideposts.  So the notion of following a continuous waterway from the suburbs to saltwater intrigued me. It took three years from idea to execution, but on Saturday we kayaked from the Upper Mystic Lake in Arlington to Boston Harbor (or at least, to tidewater). I pressed Alder into service as my adventure buddy, and three more friends joined.  Our route took us...

Parenting an 18-year-old right now is like being blindfolded in a leaky lifeboat in confused seas, one rogue wave after another slamming us. What guidance can I offer on the cusp of her graduation from high school? What comfort?  She wants to help, wants to be part of mending this broken world. What can she do that doesn’t feel like an empty gesture, virtue signaling, or preaching to the choir of her “woke” friends? Her questions are mine, only more urgent. She is on the cusp of fledging (– but where? how? I am moving, dismantling the nest. Her summer job at overnight camp is gone, and with it her summer home. Her dishwashing job and babysitting gigs are gone. Graduation will be piped into our dining room through my laptop, the inadequate conduit emblematic of our evanescent plans, our fading certainties. The uncertainty is all-encompassing, too much most days to talk about.) Last night we walked down the street with Rosie’s small homemade Black Lives Matter sign and my sm...

On Monday I participated in New York City’s annual count of unsheltered homeless individuals. Our team of five, including two West Point students who’d been bused down to volunteer, canvassed some 16 blocks between midnight and 4 a.m., asking everyone we encountered whether they had a place to sleep that night, and if they would like help. A few people laughed – we told people we were supposed to ask everyone, but the implication that we thought they might be homeless was comical to the briefcase-toting executives heading home, and to the jovial beer-drinking group of Eastern European-sounding men who had perhaps just gotten off work.  Between moments of levity were scenes of profound despair. We passed a group of five white people scattered on the sidewalk with their dirty blankets and personal detritus, faces scabby and gaunt, with the prematurely withered air of drug addicts. They told us they were staying there for the night and no, they didn’t want to go to a shelter....

Saturday marked nine years since John died. Rosie and I were in California. It was a beautiful and busy day – we woke in the home of devoted cousins on John’s side, and went to sleep in the home of generous cousins on my side. In between, we visited Santa Clara University, where I communed with my late cousin Paula Kirkeby, who died three years ago of metastatic breast cancer. I found Paula’s bench next to the museum where she donated some of her art collection. Paula was an art dealer, a renegade, large in body and spirit, who made me feel beloved and special despite the generation and continent that separated us.  Paula told stories with a particular breathiness, moving from hushed conspiratorial tones to riotous head-thrown-back laughter along with eyerolls, head shakes, hand gesticulations, mock outrage or maybe real outrage. It was always theatrical, always exciting to be in Paula’s orb. Her husband, a tall Dane named Philip who died before Paula did, would greet me wit...