Gratitude, somehow, for 2023

Folks - what a year (bad version) it has been! This maybe-ostensibly-a-travel-blog site has been moribund and at this point we're looking at more than a year delay in catching up on travels (holy moly it's been over a year since Morocco! Big yikes in re the passage of time!) but y'know, the death of a student, death of a sister, and one of the roughest rehearsal processes of my life... it adds up, I regret to say. I'm a couple days away from kicking off the new semester/rehearsal process, and (I gotta be me!) am daffily optimistic that I'll be back in catching-up-on-posts business once the frenzy of week-one prep has subsided. Am I wrong? probably! In the meantime: did you know it's possible to be grateful even in the midst of the worst year of one's life? IT IS IN FACT VERY MUCH SO! After the jump: ye aulde annual (I thinke!) list of gratitude! For 2023! Aroo!

Memories and haps of 2023 that I dang well cherish

1. Let's start with the big one: after about ten months of dragging our heels (okay, I dragged harder, what can I say I was nervous) my thoroughly wonderful partner Jenny and I decided we were gonna make a full-on go of it, relationship-styles! (I am using her preferred language here) (Update: I am being informed this is not in fact her preferred language, what can I say, relationships are complicated.) In my brain/heart this happened in Sicily, though I think we were in Barcelona when it got firmly articulated. Romance: it's NEAT!
2. Leaping way back to the start of the year: getting to see a full moon over the Sahara in Morocco was: very cool!
3. Although I should also say, perhaps more vivid in my memory (should I be writing this here or saving it for Morocco blogs, why not both I guess) is the incredible, I-didn't-know-it-could-be-this-way breakfasts in Fes on the roof of my riad
4. Or do I wanna talk about the cave I slept in on the way back to Marrakesh after the whole desert thing? OK look: I have some complicated and not-all-positive things to say about my time in Morocco, but there was some Good Stuff Also, hey.
5. Directing my first musical, with the incredible help (and occasional hectoring-with-love) of my colleague Becky. Did I cry through the last two numbers pretty much in their entirety? SURE DID! Do I currently feel that the cast albums for that show don't capture how incredibly full of longing and yearning those songs are? SURE DO! Might I go listen to them anyway to try to catch a feel again? GO TO BED!
6. Spring breaaaak! In Luxembourg! Memory of gratitude: wandering the streets with Jenny (pre making-a-go-of-it, mid-Pat-being-a-garbage-head-coward), hearing an accordion in this beautiful banker's city and immediately wondering how long the accordion player would languish in prison for doing anything remotely interesting in this dull town.
7. A May gathering at my folks' place with all the siblings and partners present for a warm-weather gathering featuring their new service-dog-in-training foster Inez! 
8. A photo of a student, now passed away, fully engaged in an acting class exercise that had her simultaneously livid and elated as she glared at me from the stage. (There is a diptych-like photo of me climbing a railing away from the same student as she threatens me with a champagne bottle, we have fun here.)
9. Arriving at Agrigento at the moment the ancient site opened, and having the landscape fully to myself for what felt like a full hour before larger crowds started emerging
10. Finding the basically-perfect flea market in Palermo and visiting every Sunday, always wondering if this would be the Sunday that I'd snag a Some Like it Hot TV tray for my friend Tim (spoiler: I blew it, the TV tray remains in Sicily)
11. Revisiting Venice for about 24 hours after seven years' absence and finding it just as charming, magical, and moving as my last time there. (Then, once it got to be past 10 AM, finding it less so. But still with plenty of magical nooks scattered throughout the city!)
12. A long conversation with a guide in Marseille about the protests and violence that had just ripped through the city in the wake of France's racist policing excesses; learning about underserved neighborhoods and shifts in policing practice that Macron had brought into being that split law enforcement from the communities they ostensibly served.
13. An incredible group of generous, openhearted, talented, kind, and fun collaborators and actors at the Shakespeare & Co workshop in NYC. Insane waves of gratitude as my nervousness about not belonging in that room kept washing away in the face of their supportive embrace. I MISS DEM.
14. A Central Park lunch of hot dogs with my old friend Monica and her adorable daughter Brynn (who has finally relented and allowed me to be called Pat and not Bob)
15. A long - long - Ross Walk at the end of a long physical workshop day, winding our way through central park before I had to beg for a little time perched on a bench
16. A bittersweet memory with a touch of gratitude: when my sister messaged to let me know she'd received a terminal diagnosis, I was on a train to visit Jenny. About twenty minutes later, I was in a gorgeous park in Beziers waiting for a train connection, able to be surrounded by nature while I talked to one of the most amazing humans I've ever known as she processed some of the worst news I could ever imagine.
17. Another bittersweet memory, in a summer that featured a monthly catastrophe: getting word that my dad had had a concussion in a cycling accident that caused short-term memory loss and a hip fracture (all seem to have mostly - maybe entirely? - healed by now)... again, horrible news, but somehow being able to take it on the first day of a trip into the Spanish mountains with Jenny and her friends Sophie and Annie gave it some kind of natural-world counterbalance.
18. Hey did I mention this Spanish mountain trip? Instant grateful memory: a massive storm just slamming into the mountain home where Sophie lives, forcing our shepherd's pie dinner to happen via candle light as the world sank into blackness and thudding rain.
19. A coffee with Jenny's friends Asun and Gricia that, in very typically Spanish style, turned into a long midday lunch on their rooftop terrace, with gorgeous white asparagus and an array of fuet and other tasty treats. An excess of loveliness and laughter as Jenny and I presented our sparring narratives of how we got together.
20. Another rooftop terrace, this time at dinner, as I got into deep nerdy territory talking theatre history with Jenny's friend Isabella's high school aged child, recently returned from school and fired up in all the most delightful ways.
21. Telling Jenny I don't need to be sold on Barcelona as a nice place to live and almost immediately being taken to breakfast at a hole in the wall seafood restaurant with the most incredible calamari I've ever had in my life 
22. A perfect gray-morning London day as Jenny and I stumbled across a perfect bakery, took in some exhibits at the Tate Modern, and snagged a perfect little lunch at a garden museum during the (approx) 6 hours we had in town before hopping trains to Glasgow
23. Hearing Jenny getting quieter and more awed as our drive out to Mull got more and more remote, moving to single-track roads and slowed down by herds of sheep. Andrew Bird playing on the car stereo. Only getting in one car accident the ENTIRE WEEK!
24. Not gratitude at the time, but grateful for the story: our day visiting Iona, which featured me somehow having to eat three scones in one day, all fully against my will but all made necessary by us missing the window for real food at every cafe we stopped at
25. But also Iona: on a beautiful sunny day, on an early ferry, with the tall grasses and faded grave markers and ancient churches (ruined and extant) and the strong sense of place that makes it special. 
26. Building a fire in a cottage every night, and waking in the morning to find footprints outside our door from the cows we saw at the pond just downhill from our back yard.
27. A long tea with my friend Sarah, talking about our relationship histories and how we've ended up where we are, stunned to realize we've known each other for more than half our lives now.
28. Jazz on Mull: a "well it's a cultural option why WOULDN'T we" idea that suddenly turned out to be a pretty fantastic concert. Arts: when you support them properly, everything is better! (Feel free to subscribe to my Scottish Arts Council screeds, they really know what's what over there.)
    
29. Getting a Calvin and Hobbes book in Spanish from mom and dad, one of the most wonderful and generous/thoughtful/supportive/delightful gestures I could have imagined this Christmas
30. Just a vague memory of so much walking around Amsterdam, whether on audio tours or just ambling aimlessly, endlessly charmed by the city's atmosphere and easy humane culture. An immediate desire to return together.
31. Kat's birthday, her last, celebrated with the full family at hand.
32. Jenny committing to almost a month back in the states in the hopes of meeting Kat before she passed.
    
33. (The heavy stuff really in play starting here, I guess.) The gratitude that my pre-grief at realizing that Kat could die in a hospital in NYC and I'd never see her again helped me unlock a whole wave of understanding what was coming. A second wave of gratitude when she made it to Illinois for hospice.
34. I will never forget, will always be grateful, for the sensation of returning to see Kat when she'd come home. Her seeing me over dad's shoulder and saying "Pat!" Hugging her and feeling us both shaking with tears as we both knew why I was there.
35. So many moments in September and October of simply holding moments in time. Holding her hand in mine, her wedding-band-tattoo weaving its way permanently into my memory as she drifted in and out of sleep. Her wounded irritation at having her chair reclined while she slept. "I don't think it's very nice to prank someone while they're sleeping."
36. Learning that my best friend Hilary is training to be a death doula, and having her at my side to walk me through Kat's release from this version of existence.
    
37. One last big one: after a mishap derailed Brian and my plan to duck out for a breather and some lunch, deciding to bring Burmese food home for a family lunch. Seeing Kat's eyes widen as the aromas hit her, getting to delight her with (almost certainly crummy, grocery-store-bought) Thai iced tea. Getting to share with her and Brian a hint of the travel and food memories they shared. Finding out later that this was her last solid food.
38. Another big one: realizing how much my family makes room for feeling, even if we're not demonstrative per se. Crying all the three-hour-drive-home when she passed, crying with mom and dad evenings when visiting during her hospice time, crying through the service they held at my parents' church... I've had vanishingly little time to process her loss (and only recently has the crying shifted from anguish that someone with her spark of life and joy and generosity could be killed by cancer, to a more selfish "I wish I could share things with her still" kind of crying) but every window when it's erupted has been welcomed and met with sympathy and love. Christmas morning was one such moment, crying with my mom and knowing it would be okay - that the day would be better for it.
39. Dad's joy and pleasure seeing the show I anguished over all fall, making up in one fell swoop for all my frustrated feelings of compromise and inadequacy and shortcoming.
40. A rooftop drink with Jenny's brother and his partner, shortly followed by the first of several highly animated dinner conversations over delicious food. Immediately feeling welcomed and included and taking great joy in her home life.
41. Getting to include Jenny in the Black Nativity tradition at Christmas; even with the silence in which we all palpably were thinking of Kat, and her dancing and singing around the table every Christmas eve, realizing that our love for her was what fueled the grief, but also what kept her alive in us and in the carrying forward of that tradition, with Jenny adding a new page to its meaning and import.

I mean, look. There is much grief woven in these memories, and I'm crying writing a bunch of 'em. But it's also true that I could get to forty-one memories that I'm profoundly grateful for and feel that I'm barely scratching the surface. (I like aiming for one per year that I been alive, and if this year didn't kill that trend, I don't know if anything can.)

What's true: I've been, last year and in some days of this early new year, as unhappy as I've ever been. And I've been as content and happy as I've ever been. And I am, for the moment, keenly aware that we are promised nothing, and that it's all fleeting. Desire and suffering and all that jazz. I thought often this year of a parishioner and friend of my parents who, in one year's Thanksgiving service at our church, stood during the communal "borrow a mic and say what you're thankful for" and essentially noted that in the wake of his wife's passing, he couldn't yet see anything to be thankful for, and didn't know what to expect from the future, but persevered in thankfulness in some mixture of hope and faith. That's where I am some days. (An automatic trigger for my grief-sobbing: Joe Pera haltingly saying "I don't know if I'll ever be able to find that again. Or if I'll ever be able to feel all right again.") And other days I feel a peace that passes all understanding.

But I remain grateful, and not just because some (I think very obvious!) things in my life are uniquely wonderful in this moment, but because I've come to know that the seeds for the best things in my life have always been carried in the hardest or worst things in my life. And I can be patient and wait to see what unfolds next. Inshallah, I'll be back on this nonsense again in twelve months, running the list up to 42 and possibly looking at the world from a very different vantage point. (I might even have posted about Morocco by then?) Until then: thanks, to any of you who still read this dang thing, for being the people in my life that you are. I hope you know how much it has meant.