A Sweet Unrest

Crease Your Party Dress

Everyone calls it amateur night, and maybe I am in fact an amateur, but I love New Year's Eve.  I can't find even one person willing to go out and dance the night away anymore but if I could find such a person, and a babysitter, I'd don my paper Happy New Year tiara and hit the streets in heartbeat.

A close second to a night of revelry is looking in all the shop windows this time of year.  I can't get enough of the party dresses.  And I especially like it when it's early, before the shops are open and the sidewalks are filled with people.  The contrast of all those festive clothes with the quiet, empty street gets me every time.

The best date I've ever had- so far- was on New Year's Eve.  It was a first date with someone I'd known kind of in passing for a while.  I was on the verge of poverty at the time but nonetheless I took my Christmas money, which ought to have gone to things like tuition and books, and bought a new dress.  And it was so worth it because the whole night was magic and lovely and the whole thing was magic and lovely and all these years later, I still have great memories and I still have the dress.  Buying a dress like that is an act of hope, and every once in a while things turn out even better than we could possibly hope for.  Isn't that what celebrating the New Year is about?

And so, even though those days are long gone now, I still get giddy when the nice dresses and the glitter and the confetti appear in the store windows again.  I want to go into the dressing rooms and egg everyone on a little bit, buy the dress, buy the dress.  And then go out and mess it up a little.

Happy New Year, and thank you so very much to everyone who read and commented this year.

Ella Fitzgerald - What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

(so many good versions of this tune, but do any of them beat the original?)

What We Want

Until that last one, it'd been a long time since I'd posted any poetry.  I'm still reading it though, and still thinking about it.  But maybe I don't feel as coherent about it, or like I have anything to add to it.

Compounding the problem is the fact that about the time I started to go AWOL from the blog, TypePad, bless them, started upgrading their system and they keep at it- and while I'm sure this is all to the good, every time I log in the posting template looks more and more foreign to me and as I poke around trying to figure it out I feel the way my mother looks when trying to work the TiVo remote.  

Nevertheless, on with the show.  I like this one and it feels seasonal to me.  Not Christmassy, but end-of-year-ish.  I think some of us, even if we don't make resolutions (which I don't) still think about the year that is gone and the one that's coming down the pike and what we like about our lives and what we don't and, well, what we want.  

What We Want

What we want

is never simple.

We move among the things

we thought we wanted:

a face, a room, an open book

and these things bear our names-

now they want us.

But what we want appears

in dreams, wearing disguises.

We fall past,

holding out our arms

and in the morning

our arms ache.

We don't remember the dream,

but the dream remembers us.

It is there all day

as an animal is there

under the table,

as the stars are there

even in full sun.

-by Linda Pastan, in this.

I really like the bit about 'the things we thought we wanted... now they want us.'  Overall,  this poem evokes for me those times when I know something needs to change but I don't know, or maybe can't admit to myself, what it is.  I felt like this a lot when I was younger and I feel it much less now- now I know more what I want, I remember the dream- but I still relate to the poem.

Thoughts?

I hope Santa was good to everyone.  

Separation 

Your absence has gone through me 

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its colour.

 -by W. S. Merwin

Found here.

Take The Longs Way Home

Adam's post about Woolworth's gives me the courage to express my own feelings of drug store loss.  Longs isn't as famous as Woolworth's but over the years I bought mind-boggling amounts of glitter eye shadow, glitter lip gloss, body glitter and glitter nail polish there, and I'm truly sad that it's been bought by east coast giant CVS.  I've been to several CVS stores and while compact and efficient, they lack the easy, quirky charm of Longs.

Longs is just the right size, not as overwhelmingly sprawling as say, Target- a place that causes me to feel small and confused the second I step through the door- but bigger and more generous than a CVS or a Walgreen's.  Longs has a little bit of everything.  You wouldn't necessarily want to buy your underwear at Longs but if you had some kind of freak underwear emergency, you could buy underwear at Longs and that's the point. The same goes for anything you can think of- crackers, gardening supplies, stationary, a paperback novel or book of crosswords if you find yourself lonely and without reading material at 10pm.  Longs has one or two of everything you could possibly need to get through life.

I grew up spending my allowance money there, on candy and magazines and make-up, but my most memorable purchase was as an adult, when my beloved great uncle was in the hospital without much to do.  He loved music, so one day after work on my way up to visit him I stopped at Longs and bought a walkman for $15 and some $2.99 cassette tapes- Tony Bennett and Glen Miller- and lots of batteries.  I'll never, ever forget the radiant smile that came over his sweet face when I put the headphones to his ears and pressed play.

Tony Bennett - She's Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)