Thanks, Velma!

I got home from a trip to Brooklyn to visit our son and his wife and their two-year-old, Nate, very early this morning.  Unfortunately, my husband and I came home with the same wretched cold that had dogged our heels the whole time we were in Brooklyn.  We had spent the whole time in Brooklyn sniffling and hacking and sneezing and whining and feeling pitiful and sorry for ourselves.  Our daughter-in-law had the same cold and our son and Nate had a minor version of it, so many of the things we had planned to do got cancelled.

So I opened email this morning (after sleeping a few hours) and what did I find but a wonderful comment from someone named Velma about a posting I made last year when I first started Real-Life-Journals.  I went back and read the post Velma was commenting on, and I realized there IS a point to keeping a journal and even to blogging about the thing, even when it's as thin and pitiful as my journal from the past two weeks is.  So this post is for Velma, to thank her for inspiring me.  I dug into my journal from this week and it looked pretty lame, not one bit like an art journal or even a visual verbal journal.  It looks more like notes taken on the back of envelopes.  And I decided, well, that's what it is and that's what real about it.

This first entry I made the day I came down with the cold.  I had hiked to the Brooklyn Museum, one of my favorite places in New York as well as one of my favorite walks (and our kids are moving in two weeks from Park Slope, where they've lived for twelve years, to Maplewood, NJ, so we will no longer live in this neighborhood when we visit them).  I really wanted to be out and about as much as possible.  But it was icy cold and very windy, and by the time I got home  I knew I had made a big mistake.  At any rate, this drawing is of a very fine divination and healing piece in the African collection.  I would like to place my cold in a clay vessel and be done with it.  I have some clay. . . .

The next piece reflects the fact that we spent a lot of time sitting around the kids' apartment.  On this day I had cooked a calzone from a Nonna Stella YouTube (lezione 14) and a kale salad.  Nate and I had had a conversation about the subways that his dad takes to his job in Midtown.  Nate loves all train things, including subways, and is currently fascinated by numbers.  I was trying to figure out how to get to Erik's office by subway, thinking we would go there the next day if we felt up to it (we didn't), and trusting Nate to be a good source of information.  It turned out that he was exactly right!

This third page reflects the continuation of the wretched colds.  We were slumped over tea in a neighborhood cafe on the morning of 12/31 watching pigeons fluff out their feathers as they roosted on top of a building across the street.  I ran out of energy and never finished the drawing.  The recipe was from the night before.  I had copied it from Kerstin's recipe journal as I remembered it from another trip, way back when the kids lived in DC the year after they finished college at AU.
So, yes, these are pretty pitiful entries, but I think they're worth making.  And my vow for 2012 is A Page A Day and a posting once a week.  Pretty daunting, and I've already skipped yesterday.  But onward.  Someday this cold will fade away and the days will grow longer and the mornings will be warmer than the 15 degrees we had this morning.