You and Me - No Doubt
Today is my birthday and I'm remembering. That's what they're for, these days.
It's hard because the day is so beautiful, one of those last bright blue-skied days which begin with a mist that masks the view here until the sun warms the air and it all dissipates into a bright and lovely day, looking like Summer but with that edge that keeps you back from the brink of the dream it's not over yet and somehow it's appropriate, how can it not be, that you gave me Late for the Sky as my present and I receive Bryter Layter as another, still more in the form of seeds and pots to plant them in which fill me with such excitement and hope; two pearls, one for each ear and a caring hair cut cause me to stand and stare for some time. I want to stay in this present, but my presents and the date keeps prompting me to think back.
I don't feel worthy of all these gifts but I vow to make myself so. I feel guilty about many things and top of the list is not studying things sufficiently. If I had to speak in my defence I might explain it's because I mostly feel inundated and panicked so unable to know what to focus on and also suspicious and wary of absorbing other peoples' thoughts. Strange perhaps for someone who enjoys the arts, but looking at what I've been prepared to absorb, there's a pattern in there which speaks for itself and lets me think for myself also.
I think about how we can struggle to gain an identity and maintain parts of that identity which nourish us fundamentally, how that kernel of us that some others and the way our world has been structured seems to want to keep chipping away at. From my point of view.
I've always been preoccupied with how to be. When life feels full of possibility, that's a luxury we can afford to indulge in. I enjoyed reading Sheila Heti's book, How Should a Person Be, reading it long after living through the decade she was writing about; one's twenties, when those of us who were and are still fortunate enough to imagine many ways of living and can even afford to try some out, though it was still a turbulent time in my experience, filled with a panic which reached a crescendo towards its end and even though one inevitably makes choices, some reluctantly, others involuntarily, one never ceases to question and review them throughout subsequent decades; that is, if we are fortunate enough to live through them. Standing here, looking out at this day, I feel somewhat stunned.
Now six decades on from where this all began, I'm suddenly thinking how I've come to want to be in terms of a food, and I think it must be alot like a dried Hunza apricot. They're something I became extremely fond of when I was pregnant. They don't look very appetising, wrinkly, dark browny orangey things, and rather expensive, but they have this lovely little kernel in their middle, a tiny shell, which if you crack open, gives you a very small nut, rather like an almond. It's said to contain a very rare vitamin and I got very hooked on chewing on the toffee caramel flavoured apricot and cracking open the nut in the middle to eat too. I ate alot of them before a good friend warned me that the nut also contained a very small touch of arsenic, not unusual in the kernel of fruits and probably not toxic in such microscopic quantities, but still, enough to make me pause and think about the way things might be both nourishing and poisonous and how the balance might be so finely held that it's very difficult, probably impossible, to quantify.
And I've just read that they are left to go over on the tree and picked when they have over-ripened, which adds to their allure for me. I'm squirrelling this day away. All it's sights and sounds and tastes are going into my store of amazing memories.
First posted during the pandemic. It came out in a strange format which I found impossible to change, so I've republished it here, as a correction, and a reminder.