Missive # 18: Wildly Improbably Options

There is a legend in my husband's family about the time pop quit the ad agency (he's an artist) in frustration, left all four kids with his mother in law and took his wife to Mexico for six weeks. I'm trying to treat this period as my Mexico. 'Cept I'm not in Mexico (Martha's Vineyard this week, vacationing with the Obamas). Also, my kids are not with my mother, my step mother or my mother in law. And also it's only for a week. But whatever. I am still contemplating wildly improbably options.

I just wrote to a friend that I am practicing insight meditation to open my mind to these previously unconsidered notions. Perhaps I should explain my method. The first four days here it rained and the wind blew. Nor'easter style. You would think the god who is our president would order up better weather for his vacation. But perhaps like me he just wanted an excuse to read ceaselessly. I wonder if he is also on book # 5.

As a minor digression, here's what I've read this week:

1. Anita Brookner's Strangers (heartwrenching loneliness)
2. Jeanette Wells' memoir The Glass Castle (affirming)
3. Jayne Ann Krantz Burning Hot (trashy mindlessness has it's place)
4. Bad Things Happen which is a first novel by an author who's name escapes me but a first rate mystery
5. Menonite in a Little Black Dress, also a memoir by another forgotten author but funny

If my friend Elise ever finishes the current Janet Evanovich I'll read that next. Otherwise it's Ian McEwan's Saturday. And actually since tomorow is Saturday perhaps that's as it should be.

That digression was not in fact a tangent but the point. How I practice insight meditation. I read. I also sit in the sun, at the beach, on the porch and watch the sky water clouds letting random thoughts pass through. Wildly improbably options.

Just this morning I was thinking about how much I love music. It is my mother's greatest frustration that I don't have a piano because despite years since the last time I touched a piano, I can sit down and play simple pieces well. I love the piano. And listening to music of any sort. I would truly enjoy being a programmer or producer or musicologist for Muzak or some other company that programs the sound track of your life. I'm one of those people who actually listens to the music in the grocery store Urban Outfitters Buddha Bar and tries to identify the songs I have in my collection. Is it too late for me to go back to school for music? I hear Columbia has a great program.