even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: going to the thanksgiving parade

imaginary outfit: going to the thanksgiving parade

Instead of going to family in Ohio, Delaware or Massachusetts, we decided to stay in the city and have our own small feast this year. Tomorrow we'll get up and walk to the parade, just to see what it is like, and then we'll head home for a day of roasting and braising, kneading and concocting, and sneaking treats to a yellow dog (well, I'll be doing that) before curling up with blankets and hot toddies to watch old movies.

We have a lot to be thankful for this year. We are grateful that we are in a place, new as it is to us, that feels like home already. A lot of that, for me, is due to you, the people who visit this blog. It's been a place of steadiness for me in a season of change. Since we've moved, I've discovered a ready-made world of new friends and neighbors waiting for me thanks to the community of readers that has somehow grown up around this site. They have made what could have been an incredibly lonely time a wonderful one.

So, readers met and unmet, vocal and silent - thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: going to the thanksgiving parade

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