Category Archives: Love

A Day in the Life

Just Posted, Life Is, Love

Thursday morning I went into my youngest daughter’s room. She is home between adventures.  It’s 7:00 am. Phone alarm singing. Of course she doesn’t hear it. Never has.  I quietly nudge, whisper wakes ups, and then rub her back. Purrs as if she’s a kitten. I stroke her head. Steeped in a drowsy tranquility. This doesn’t happen often anymore. The morning can wait. I look at my hand twirling her tangle of curls. It looks like my mother’s hand. I’m getting brown spots.

My eldest daughter is at the hospital waiting for labour to begin. Her first child. I’m going to be a grandmother. I remember holding her in my arms. Tick tock, the hands of the clock, gingham rocking horses, round and round, rhymes, prom dresses, butterfly kisses.  Raindrop tears, hers and mine, over the years. A river flows between us.

My middle daughter is sleeping in the room next door. This too is a moment. She doesn’t live at home. I go in to say good morning. Light coming through the childhood curtain, single little bed, still the ruffled white linens. A ladybug is crawling across the cover. Like a picture in a storybook. Ladybug, ladybug fly away…  Make a wish.

The baby came after eight in the evening. Morning to night. Life changes. Love happens. Something shifts. A miracle. He rests his perfect tiny hand on my daughter’s chest. We leave the hospital three hours after he is born. She can no longer remember a life without her son. Life begins again.

Friday evening. Baby had not yet been in the world for twenty-four hours. We gathered for dinner in her new home. It’s Shabbat. We light the candles, share Challa, drink sweet wine. Welcome to family. I sit at my daughter’s table. Look at what can happen in a day. What we can create. How much we can love.  Sometimes we think that a day is not enough, we complain of all the reasons this or that cannot be accomplished today; or we never get around to doing what we want to do, no time, too busy, another day.

A day in the life. A day can change everything.

Hearts of Stone

Just Posted, Love

Today the ocean was gentle. The lullaby of waves lulls me, as the ripples lazily lap to shore and it is that exquisite shade of turquoise, so clear that you can see the shells under the surface. Collecting shells is my holiday pastime. I can be consumed for hours; they are all such beautiful little miracles. I have been finding shells and stones shaped like hearts.

Stones that have been tumbled and caressed, then set on a journey to the shore for discovery.  These pieces of love that catch my eye along the sand allow me to recognize the magnitude of small moments. How we treat people around us. The time we spend together. The opportunities for kindness, the moments of intimacy, an encouraging word, a hug, listening, truly listening without distraction. Love resides in these small moments.

It is in these details of a life lived in the abundance of love that will sustain us over time. The hearts of stone and shell remind me that love is everywhere. We just have to be open to it.

Stones of love
embedded
waiting
washed ashore
ocean kiss
found
a rush
then tenderness
retreat
again
white sail
face the wind

If you are open to love
it will be
everywhere
In foot prints along
the sea
hearts of stone
on the beach
love’s chameleon
like the lizard
on the rattan chair

My skin
is changing colours
as the green blue
waters recede
I am in that wet sand
carved
from the sea
and I can
feel the rush
of the water
and within me
the sound
like a conk shell
I carry it with me

The wind across the sea
ripples
White sails
a silhouette
against the sun

With love
Jacqui

 

That Kiss

Just Posted, Love, Muse

I love watching movies. There are those scenes that project on my inner screen, and songs that inseparably accompany key moments. Almost Famous; the bus scene singing Tiny Dancer – I was right there. There are nuances that feel like they write my life, and characters I could step in to. And, of course great style cues, Audrey Hepburn, and significant good hair days, Meg Ryan. If my life were cut as a movie trailer it would have to include a segment or two from the chronicles of my filmography.

When I was a girl we had an Admiral television set. You know the kind that was housed in a mahogany cabinet like a piece of furniture and was the focal point of any upstanding side-split it the sixties. The Wizard of Oz played once a year with an introduction by Danny Kaye. It was truly event television. On that night we ordered a pizza and got the blankets and pillows ready to camp out on the carpet in front of the TV to watch the film. This movie is noteworthy for me, not just because of the forever enchanting story, or the magic of black and white turning to colour, or every unforgettable song, but because as cliché as this sounds, it made me believe and ignited my imagination.

I simply adore Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Each scene has a moment that captivates me. One of my favourties is when she is sitting on the window ledge at the fire escape, wearing her signature cropped pants, flats, and a scarf around her head, playing the ukulele and singing Moon River. All the trimmings of Holly Golightly are stripped away here and she is at once so vulnerable and at peace. If my life had a sound track it would be Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. Here is a fun fact. At the first screening of the film at the preview, the head of the company at that time, said “Well we can get rid of that song.” Audrey stood up at said “Over my dead body.”

Silver Linings Playbook, It’s Complicated and Something’s Got to Give are my ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ of recent chick flicks. At any given moment I can be Jennifer Lawrence in a dance competition, Meryl Streep smoking a joint in the bathroom, or Dianne Keaton, living in what I imagine to be my natural habitat – white beach house, and collecting white stones and shells along the shore. Not to mention she is a writer. Aside from the dance, sand and weed, at the crux of each film is that angst of heartbreak, disappointment interwoven in charming and serendipitous ways of dealing with the pain. If I see myself as a character in a film, it would be in that way. Stumbling upon the kinds of experiences we create or fall in to as we discover who we are, and how to get through the day. And, just like the dance scene in Silver Linings, each piece, each step of our journey collaborates and culminates in the acceptance and embracing of the life we have.

The secret is out. I am a hopeless, wearing my heart on my sleeve, romantic. So, I will close with Cinema Paradiso because the cinema of our lives should most definitely end with ‘that kiss’. I can still remember being in the theater mesmerized. It’s a small film and packed with so many beautiful little cinematographic intimacies. Here is the montage of kisses that closes the film with the stunning love theme soundtrack by Ennio Morricone

And also a photo montage with the names of the almost fifty iconic kisses that appear.

Fini

Julia

Life Is, Love, More Posts

My mother-in-law used to close her eyes as if by doing so she could close out anything that was weighing on her mind, or unpleasant in her life. Confrontations she didn’t want to have, realizations that were too late, the Cancer that in the end would claim her life. Next month will mark a year since her passing and she is very much on my mind.

For most of my married life we would speak almost every day. We shared a lot of secrets. I miss her. There were so many details of her life that I know she still wanted to tell me, and much I wanted to talk to her about. That is the pain of loss. Those missed moments. Those are hard to reconcile.

The other day I closed my eyes to shut out some things I didn’t want to deal with and I understood her. She was an intensely private woman, and rarely would allow anyone to see what lay beneath the surface. Julia was in every explanation of the word a ‘remarkable’ woman. Her particular passion for life was born from the hardships of being raised in a tight walk up in Toronto’s Harbord village in the 1920’s. Her parents were immigrant Jews and she the eldest of three; and the one with the absolute yearning for her own bed, heating and beautiful dresses. She married and moved to the same situation in her husband’s small family home. She worked hard and created her way out.

Her particular gift was her vision. And with that she orchestrated and navigated the voyage from shoes distributed in the basket of her husband’s bicycle to the flagship store on the best retail corner in the city. He might have had the charisma to charm his clients and suppliers in New York, Florence and Milan, but she had the foresight. She understood what branding the store was before it became a catchword in the industry. She knew it in her bones.

She was our Jackie ‘O’, with her small frame, beautiful features, legs that could enchant a sailor or president, and a flare for putting herself together that honestly deserves a coffee table book. This was very much a big part of who she was and the image of the public Julia, but there was more to her. I knew the intellectual woman who was open to far-reaching ideas, incredibly well read, interested and interesting, who loved art and science and was deeply inquisitive. And I loved how she felt at home in my home. And, the whimsical side of her, that sat at tea parties with my daughters, and kept the soft bunny we bought her on her bed.

I thought I would have more time with her. In her last days, she would rest her head on my chest as I tried to stroke the pain from her forehead and shoulders. I can’t tell you how that feeling of her releasing any façade to me, the softness and the love that I felt from her in that small moment resonates through all of me.

I understood the things she locked away in her heart when she closed her eyes. I think that is why I feel her so profoundly in my chest, as I write this. In some ways it has connected us like a locket, with both our pictures on the inner sides and closed.

I’m too fat to have an affair

Love

I’m fundamentally a good girl. Up the up staircase, in through the revolving door. I have enthusiastic sense of responsibility and commitment, and will drop anything I am doing to help the people I love…. You get the picture. I feel like I am always the last to know, open mouthed, wide-eyed, in shock at the details about the lives some women lead. I’m far from sanctimonious, but honestly I think I’m missing a gene. I really don’t get it! Other people have affairs. Apparently they are more common than I could imagine. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Not that I necessarily want to have one. Even if I did, I have way too much of a conscience, I would analyze the decision to death, chart the pros and cons, and inevitably revert to feeling too guilty. In any case, I’m too fat to have an affair. But, I must say, the inner version of me; that beach body me, whose footprints in the sand lead elsewhere, well, that ‘me’ might be intrigued. I still wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it. And, what about my husband, you might ask? Well, I’m not sure he would notice, and if he did he would probably be thrilled. It would let him off the proverbial hook!

You see though, having an affair is cheating. And I’m not sure I could reconcile this. I would be always putting the shoe on the other foot. But, Samantha (Sex in the City) contends, “The act of cheating is defined by the act of getting caught.” Am I hitting the bottom of the barrel by trying to actually rationalize having an affair in terms of Carrie and Samantha? Is there something deliciously contraband about a covert affair? Have I watched too many romantic films, or is my heart yearning for one last dance with love?

Indeed, there are different kinds of love, and ebbs and flows of love and desire and ups and down in marriages. So why am I even writing about this! Is it some kind of menopausal crisis? It’s more of a realization that this is a time in my life where it’s okay to think about me. To consider what it is that I want to experience. To discover what I am about as the kids move out and my husband has retired. It’s most definitely time for me.

The other night I had dinner with a friend. She told me that I needed to have an affair. That I was too vibrant to be sitting at home all the time, and l deserve a big love story. That would be nice. She also told me that if I insisted on wearing pale lipstick instead of coral that I have to have smoky eyes. Hmmmm. I think I will explore the smoky eye idea. The affair? Well…