Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Sweet 16 Has Turned 51

I woke up this morning thinking about my life.  Being a tiny child, and my grandmother’s presence.  She would come stay at our house fairly frequently.  I’d get into bed with her and we’d have long conversations.  The bulk of her, the slight smell of her, her toothless mouth, her accent.  When we would visit her in the city, she would take me to the playground.  “Gon play” and she’d sit on a bench and watch me.  A black coat, a black hat with sequins on it, ever watchful.  The playground was all concrete.  There was a big concrete turtle, or maybe it wasn’t so big; with footholds molded out of it, so you could climb on top.  There were walls of concrete with footholds, handholds.  And the usual swings and stuff.

I remember being out of school, first job, first apartment, we were starting adult life but we were just children.  I was very much still being formed.  Margaret was always there.  Back then people talked on the phone, even me.  Hours, hanging on the phone, receivers tucked under our ears while we moved about, long phone cords so we could carry the phone around.  Me in Tarrytown, she in Brooklyn.  Yet we couldn’t keep apart.  I’d go down, in my cheap little white Mazda 323, sometimes stay the night, not always.  One night I headed back home in the rain and spun my car around on a BQE on-ramp.  I remember going into the turn and the car just kept turning, until I was facing exactly the wrong way.  I quickly and tremblingly did a K-turn and got back in the right direction and drove home slow and chastened and how in the world was it that nobody was speeding up that on-ramp right behind me?

Then I was living in Manhattan.  Hot, stinking Chinatown streets in the middle of summer; and in the dead of winter, the vast concrete in front of City Hall & the court buildings, making me feel the cold piece of rock that we live on hurtling through space.

Then things happened so quickly.  I met Xopher at the end of 93, he in Ithaca, my in NY, for over a year.  Then he was in NY for a year.  Then we were in VT, first it was just a vacation, then I was leaving everything, the job I loved & the city where I was happy, for the new life I’d been dreaming of since I was a teen, to strike out somewhere new, somewhere not NYC, somewhere clean where things were smaller and where I could maybe could be normal.  Then we were renting, but then 6 months later we bought this house, and a year later we married.  We had no idea what we were doing, couldn’t have known.

Sometimes lately I startle myself all of a sudden with the thought, “But I’m just a kid!”  Once recently I was walking through the mudroom and my eyes fell on some dirt, and I looked around at the mess and dirt and thought, “We are just kids!  We don’t know what we’re doing!  Living in this house making a damn mess of everything…”  And then the other night, I guess I was thinking of how I’d been touching or pulling up some weeds or something, and wondering if I’d washed my hands, and whether I’d touched food, and thought, “I’m just a kid!  How is it that I have not poisoned myself yet?  Or electrocuted myself?”

I am still the kid I ever was.  I play silly games in my head, sometimes in real life.  I hope no one realizes.  All the dumb things I do.  I’m the little girl with the older brother, bigger, smarter, snottier, but she wants his attention.  Wants him to think she’s smart, wants him to think she’s worth hanging around with.  Wants his love.  Except now that’s my husband over there.

How is it that I’m still here?  Because I’m in the universe where I happened to make it for 51 years.  I guess there is another universe where I got smacked into on that BQE on-ramp and was snuffed out at 22.  I suppose plenty of universes where I did poison myself, or electrocute myself.  The universe where I stayed in NYC and X drifted away.  The one where I married the HS bf and moved to Wichita.  The universe where we elected Donald Trump president and all got a new novel coronavirus.  Damn!  I end up in that one, seriously!?  But it’s also the one where we elect Biden in 2020 and end up shaking our heads like it was all a bad dream, and we swear we’re sorry and will never do it again…

 

My Life Is Just a Foolish Game

Sure, a worldwide pandemic, the worst civil unrest since the 60’s, barreling towards a presidential election half the country won’t accept as valid anyway…  and it is a sign of my utter self-centeredness that I still say 50 was a good year for me.  On the inside.

You are the sun,

You are the rain,

Your life is just a foolish game

You need to know

It’s all a flow

And it happens all again & again

Apologies to Lionel Richie.

 

Book Corner 2020.30

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My Dark Vanessa

This was a disappointment. I was expecting a nuanced story about a teacher-student affair. But it was a story about abuse. None of the characters were likeable. I’m glad to be done with it.

I don’t think it benefited by all the going back-and-forth in time. We knew the climax well before the end; a little suspense would have improved the story. Towards the end there was an incident that I thought was going to give an interesting plot twist, but it went nowhere. Thus there was no satisfaction in reaching the end – except that I didn’t have to spend another evening with 100% dysfunctional Vanessa (does she NEVER have a happy or successful moment?) or icky Strane (just yuck, yuck, yuck).

Weird thing that annoyed me: the oddball one-syllable last names almost everyone had. One person’s last name was only two letters long. It was a strange affectation (and yes, I know I’m strange for noticing and getting annoyed by it). (  )

Book Corner 2020.29

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The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

I got all the way to the end before I realized there was a glossary of poker terms there. THANX, KINDLE. Grr.

And I read basically the whole thing without really understanding even the rudimentary rules to Texas Hold ‘Em. But that’s OK! Because it’s not about the hands and how they went. It’s about… life.

Konnikova has written a fairly unique “my year of” style book. She decides she wants to master poker in a year. A lot of random things have gone wrong in her life at once, and somehow she feels that studying poker will help her learn to understand the role of random chance in life. What makes the book unique is not only that it actually takes her more than a year to do what she sets out to do (and she sticks with it anyway even though that “ruins” the premise); but that she injects very little extraneous detail about herself. Once in a while we get in on a conversation with her husband or mother. She seems to have no kids and live in Brooklyn, but she doesn’t dwell on either of those things. She doesn’t dwell on herself at ALL, except as a student of poker. It’s wonderful! She’s a journalist, and that may have something to do with it.

So basically, what we learn is, you gotta know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em, just like the song says. It’s so cliche, but I used to say it too; before I became more enamored of my Domino theory of life, I had a Card Game theory of life: there’s the hands you’re dealt, but then there’s how you play them. When my father was ill, every day felt like another really tough card. And I thought about the big areas of my life and how I’d played my cards, and there were some plays I was really proud of, some I’d always doubt… And I thought about how my brother was refusing to play these tough rounds at all. And it was a really helpful metaphor. And when I try to explain why the Kinks song “Better Things” was for so long the only thing that could cheer me up, I could only say it was something about the particular phrasing, “I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.” So many things are beyond our control – we just FIND them. And I was finding crappy things right now, but the law of averages implied that sooner or later I would surely find BETTER things. Those are the cards you’re dealt.

Oh wait, I was writing a book review. For Konnikova, it seems to come down to stoicism. She becomes successful when she can control her emotions and just play, play, play. She throws in some helpful quotations here and there, and the most appropriate seems to be from Kipling:

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same…”

She has to learn that anyone can have either a triumph or a disaster through no fault of her playing (though she can certainly have a disaster through her own fault, too). Anyone can get lucky or unlucky. Successful pros just keep playing – and learning – and adjusting. While there’s LOTS and lots of poker, poker slang, and poker play-by-play along the way – the life lesson ultimately comes through. (  )

 

Addendum: it’s high summer, with lengthy daylight, which does not lend itself to indoor computer work; hence the blog posts few & far between.  See you on the rainy days.

Ten

This makes ten skeins in the current “season”, though I have only four in custody, having sent six out into the world.

Olive green on the right is the new addition.

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But moving on to jewel tones… here’s my amethyst:

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