The Observation of a Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. I got some news that made me happy. I came home after work and ate a weirdo celebratory dinner of guacamole and delicious homemade chicken soup. While I was eating, a song that I'm currently obsessed with and have listened to at least five times today alone came on, so I put it on loud enough to be annoying and didn't care. I took a bath - a bath! this means that my bathtub was clean enough for me to voluntarily sit in, naked! - with a silly candle and an actual flute of champagne and two delicious new books to read. I took a photo of the candle and the champagne perched together on the edge of the bathtub and almost put it on instagram, but then I realized you could see the toilet framed just behind them, which of course made it all a little weird. I got all wrinkly in there in the meantime; it was grand.

I love the word grand. I dig how it automatically makes you sound Irish and lilting and jovial, even if you've said nothing to deserve any of that.

Happy days are uncommon sometimes, particularly during a gray, long winter. It is important to pay attention to them when they come, to notice them and, as a result, inhabit them fully. Otherwise they just slide by and before you know it, you're just another day older with nothing to be thankful for.

For Christmas, my cousin Kim gave me an antique glass jar that was empty except for colorful little slips of blank paper. She said that for every good thing that happens this year, I should pick one piece of paper, write it down, and stick it back in. Then, on New Years Eve next year, I should take them out one by one to remember and honor all those good things - no matter how small - that happened as the year passed.

What a simple, beautiful gift. An empty jar that I get to fill with my own happiness. For perhaps the first time this year, I'll have a few to add this week:

• The way it felt to watch Carousel at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. It was a concert performance with the NY Philharmonic, rather than a traditional stage show, and it was one of the most glorious musical moments I have ever experienced. I cried so hard when it was over that my husband had to stand with me in the balcony and wait for my internal storm to settle so I wouldn't fall down the stairs and kill myself while wailing about how sad and perfect all those dark images were: The park bench they fell in love on when they were young. The wife's childlike faith in his goodness, even after he failed her, even after he beat her. The way he dies so recklessly, so violently. The star he plucks out of the night sky to give to the dancing teenaged daughter he never met in real life, and the way he hovers around with such intense protection during her graduation, but she can't see him there. The falling blossoms on his aging wife, so many years later. But mostly, it's the idea of having one last chance to go back to earth after your death and do one simple good thing, one shining moment to set it all straight, and failing at even that. How perfectly, perfectly human and dark. I have gotten teary at performances before of course,  but after this one I *literally* could not stop crying. It was astounding. Also, oh my god Nathan Gunn. Holy shit, people. He is magic. 
• The fact that I JUST NOW REALIZED they recorded this performance for PBS!!!! April 26th! Ahhh! 
• Being out to dinner afterwards, singing in my seat and dancing along with the bad radio station, shoving pieces of garlic bread into my mouth with wild abandon and absolutely no manners. For a few minutes there I was just lost in it, whatever "it" is, and I felt like myself, and I noticed it. It is the noticing of your own happiness that is important, folks. Paying attention is the thing. Otherwise, I was just an annoying girl singing too loud over her crabcakes. 
• I went to Target on Sunday night. I spent an inordinate amount of time selecting new candles for my office, because I guess it turns out I'm a creature of habit and I can't write without a candle next to me. I love Target. Something about the vastness of it all, the great red and white florescent scentless joy of organized commerce, just soothes my tired soul. 
• Tonight, of course. Good news and guacamole and chicken soup and champagne and books and a bathtub that is clean enough to climb into without twitching. 

So ok, a random visit to Target may not make it into a memory jar, but the way it felt to watch Carousel will. Having a quiet, happy night tonight will. There is a beauty in noticing the simple things and clinging to them as they pass. I suppose that writing is, in essence, my memory jar. This blog, my copious email habit, my journals, all of it is just a way of capturing and preserving both the good and the bad.

I still don't know if that bent towards preservation is a good thing or a bad thing. I wonder about the people, so different than me, who just live their lives forward and never look back. That could be healthy, I suppose. But how do you learn? How do you honor who you were and where you came from, and then choose - with real sureness and direction - where you're going next? Sometimes I think those people are healthier than me, and sometimes I think it's all bullshit, and mostly I think, who the fuck cares? We are who we are.

So much of art is just encapsulation anyway; the effort to grab onto a moment and preserve it. Paintings, sculptures, plays, movies, photography, writing, all of it - it's preservation, it's story-telling, but it's more than that, too. It's illumination. It's paying attention to the world and how we all move within it.  It's taking a simple moment, a simple story, and lighting it up. It's finding the spectacular hidden inside of the ordinary.

How could a world that makes a show like Carousel be anything other than beautiful?