Moments

I like watching Project Runway with my daughters. They tell me they like it too; every Thursday night when a new one is on, we watch the designers compete, create, cry (so many criers), and console the one booted off the show. I like this ritual with my girls because we talk about what we like and don't like, what fashion is or should be, what art is or should be, and we all have different opinions. Talia surprises with her fashion sense; it's not always dark and sometimes has splashes of color, but never pink. Chloe appreciates the back stories and the process; this information always informs her decision about who should stay or go, but she is also aware of TV producers and their agendas for the show and advertising revenue. I'm always amazed at how smart they are, and of course I'm proud of their accomplishments.

If we can't watch on Thursday night because school nights are filled with so much homework, theirs and mine, we record the show to watch on the weekend. That is, if their schedules permit. At 13 and 16, they have demands on their time from friends and clubs and sports. I told Talia the other day that I couldn't quite remember the year I turned 13; I remembered 12 because I started 7th grade at Hocker Grove Junior High, and I remember 14 because we moved and I started 9th grade at Blue Valley High School. Thirteen seemed to be a blur. This morning I had a flash of a 13-year-old memory. I was at Coachlight Skate Center on a Friday night with two or three girlfriends from school. Roller skating was a past-time popular in the 70s, and we embraced the skating around the ring for a few hours, the snowball (when the girls stood by the wall waiting for the skating guys to come pick them to skate, sometimes holding hands--we wouldn't talk, just skate and hold hands, or not--all very strange now that I think about it), the pinball machines, and the snack bar. My parents or older sister would pick me up when the rink closed at ten or eleven. Is this all I have of 13?

The friends I skated with were also friends who were at all of the sleepovers I went to. We took turns spending nights in our different basements or rumpus rooms. We ate chips and drank soda (a treat for me that I never got at home), and played Truth or Dare. Perhaps I've blocked out the year I was 13 because of all of the bad Truth or Dare memories? I'm happy that my girls don't seem to play it all that much with their friends. But who knows? I didn't tell my mom anything. My girls tell me most things, but Talia admits that there are some things she won't tell me. OK.

Talia asked me yesterday whether if one day she were at a party and she called me to pick her up because she was drunk if I would pick her up. I said yes, I would pick her up whenever she called home and needed a ride, regardless of the reason. She then asked if I would be mad. I first said yes, and then thought that would make her decide not to call, so I qualified it with a maybe not really mad but disappointed response. She said, "I'm never gonna do that Mom!" OK

During a commercial break in Project Runway, Chloe said that I can't die because she wouldn't be able to live then. This was in response to every one of the designers explaining a personal family loss during the show. Chloe noticed that they all had a loss in their immediate families, which we knew throughout the show, but in the beginning of the finale, the final four competitors seemed so similar. I started to wonder if artists do need suffering as a muse. It seems so.

Earlier that day in the car, I was listening to All Things Considered. They were interviewing the poet, Maria Howe, and she read her poem "What the Living Do." She had written it as a letter to her brother who had died of AIDS, and it became a poem that speaks to many people who have suffered the loss of someone they were close to. It seems that she needed that suffering to inspire that poem, which was phenomenal and had me spellbound on my drive to the library to pick up Talia (one of my many duties as the family taxi). I think I prefer the poetry of Tomas Transtromer who I only recently heard of because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. In his work, he finds the miraculous in the ordinary and notices the transcendent in the mundane.

Sometimes moments with Chloe and Talia are miraculous.