even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: 37

imaginary outfit: 37

I woke up today to my husband, a cheeky baby in his arms, wishing me happy birthday and offering me a plate of English muffin and mushroom omelet. Nora was perched at the foot of the bed, patiently waiting for stray bits of toasted muffin. To me, wonderful things in life include:

any excuse to stay in bed just a little longer
waking up to delicious breakfast smells, especially of the egg and muffin variety
cheeky babies
yellow dogs at the foot of the bed
Sean

In a little while, we'll push the stroller up the hill for our big family walk, and we'll admire the bright leaves. When we get back, I'll spend time sitting on a floor quilt, watching Hugh practice exciting things like scoots, head swivels, toy grabbing and baby gabbling, and doing all kinds of goofy things to make him smile. My mom is coming over later, and we'll get to laugh over the baby and think through important things like first Halloween costumes. Sean will come home and sing the baby to sleep, and I'll go out and meet up with friends and a passel of strangers to make wood-fired pizza in a barn. When I get home, my family will be waiting for me.

37 is feeling good.

I had the baby three months ago — only three months/already three months! — and my body still feels a bit strange and unfamiliar. Soft, forgiving things are particularly comforting to wear, and make me feel better about petal-soft baby cheeks rubbing against my shoulder. And imaginary outfits always fit perfectly.

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: 37

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