Good Grief

So I just finished Ann Hood’s The Knitting Circle, which is one of a handful of books published in the last couple of years with knitting as this theme for recovery and connection between women, and it was a fast read, I got to cry reading it which was a little unusual for me, I think I needed the cathartic cry. As a sidenote, however, I have to mention the importance of proofreading, because when a character is in the hospital waiting anxiously for news of a sick loved one and the nurse offers to send in a ‘chaplin’ the image in my head of consolation with a cane and funny mustache is REALLY distracting. Still, it was strange reading this right on top of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Am I in a morbid place, needing to consider...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 26, 2008 | 0 comments

That’s what you get

I have a list of things I have in my head that I intend to blog about: 1) questions about the trade-offs of community and friendship because the way my family’s life is structured now it feels like we have a richer sense of community than we’ve ever had but less time we’re investing in individual friendships. Which leads to the related question I’ve been pondering, 1a) whether the price of participation is conformity, and if that’s true for a community (suggested by Jennifer Niesslein) if it’s more true for a friendship… Related to blog topic 1b) the changing nature of friendship in my life and how people I have never or seldom interacted with face-to-face can be as dear to me as they are, The completely unrelated, 2)...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 19, 2008 | 5 comments

Intimidated

So before bed last night I noticed we hadn’t used our home phone all day and thus had not noticed a voicemail. It was from the school counselor at our kindergartner’s school, asking us to call back. I am embarrassed to describe the anxiety I felt and how I tried to analyze the message, “She called us Mara and Raven, not Ms. Collins and Mr. Zachary. Surely if it were really bad we’d be getting Mr. and Mrs. treatment?” In our last six years as public school parents, and even the year before when our oldest was in pre-k, we’ve sort of gotten used to — or maybe you never get used to, but gotten less surprised by — getting the phone call from the school telling us some way some son of ours has failed to conform to...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 11, 2008 | 1 comment

Raw

Somehow today we stumbled into the routines that carried us through before the holidays. Right now, I am waiting for my little studio to warm up so I can practice with violinist and my violist before we go grab dinner and take our cellist to his lesson. I am steeling myself for waking up tomorrow morning when Raven has already left for the airport and even though this is a one-night trip, I know it will be followed with another trip next week and one two weeks after that and I won’t flip the page on the calendar and look any further ahead than that. I have accomplished nothing on my list of things I should get to today, and am capable of just enough self-examination to ask myself if the way that makes me feel is proportional to the situation. I may joke...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 7, 2008 | 3 comments

Too Many Toys?

Or what Raven did during his days off: check out our newly sealed basement floor! When we moved in, we had plans to finish the unfinished basement, but the contractor our realtor had recommended didn’t return calls and we have had enough bad experience with contractors in Dallas to realize we didn’t have the time or energy or disposable income to really devote to a major house project like that right now. I still would love to have a second bathroom for our family of six, but we have settled into this house pretty comfortably. Except for the basement. It has not been an inviting place. Mostly it was towering stacks of moving boxes, boxes waiting for recycling, boxes of things that didn’t into the house from the previous house and...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 6, 2008 | 4 comments