We came early, four carloads of us, and perched politely on our padded chairs, scanning the program for my niece’s name. She is so pretty (blonde, blue-eyed, with that sort of bronze glowy skin I previously thought only Malibu Barbies possessed), and so smart and sweet-natured, that it seems almost unfair for her also to be preternaturally musically gifted. It’s as if God decided to cash in all His chips right when she was born, like just this once He said, “Forget the whole flawed humanity thing. Let’s just get one completely and totally right for a change.”

So there we were in this huge concert hall, specks in the sea of other families of other talented teens, and finally the concert began, the rich classical music swelling and billowing over all of us. And suddenly I got that same feeling you get sometimes at the beach, when you are sitting in the sun on your towel in the sand, and you sort of forgot that there might be thousands of other people who might go sit in the sun on their towels on the sand too. But there you are, amidst way more humans than you’d imagined, with their sunblock and cigarette smells, their radio and kid sounds. Then if you can accept that there are thousands of other people sitting on their towels on the sand just like you, all facing towards the ocean, if you can close your eyes or look way out toward the horizon, where a ship the size of the Statue of Liberty looks like a toy boat, you get this feeling: this almost dizzy feeling of unity, of being one of many instead of one of one. You can get the same exact feeling standing outside late at night, staring up at the stars. You can dissolve into the rest of the universe, feel your molecules melding into the mix of other molecules in the air and sky and galaxy. This is a way to experience the Divine in your day-to-day life.

It is a relief. You thought, perhaps, that you were the center, that the way you blew it at work the other day or yelled at your child with such anger that she burst into tears was really it, the center of the day, or the family, or the world. You thought it was incredibly important. And there on the beach, or at the concert, or staring up at the starry sky at midnight, you realize: nope. I am not the center. I am one of the teeny, tiny, microscopic points. Thank God.

It’s all in the perspective. I think a lot about perspective. Once, after I’d had several miscarriages then by mistake gone to a movie where one of the main characters had a miscarriage, I was sobbing in a public restroom. I used to do this a lot. Several women came in and out of the restroom, and I really think, believing in the kindness of strangers as I do, that if I hadn’t been inside a stall they would have perhaps tried to help out a little. I heard them listen, hesitate, quietly walk back out. I think they might have wanted to put an arm around me, hand me some wadded-up toilet paper for Kleenex, maybe slip me a Xanax. But they took my location, my choice to remain in the stall, as an unspoken request to be left alone. So I stayed in there crying by myself, my husband waiting patiently in the lobby, which wouldn’t have been all that unusual, as I said, except for the fact that this time, I couldn’t seem to stop. It was like I’d understood before that I had experienced these wrenching losses, and that some of my friends had also, but this completely innocent fictional character in a movie now too? No. It just made life seem impossible, out of the question.

But it was our date night, we’d gotten a babysitter, our dinner reservations were made. Despite my intense angst, I was super hungry. I really wanted to stop crying and go out to eat. So I prayed, again not unusual for me, but this time, I prayed to Jesus. This pretty much never happens. I always go straight to the top, to God. But at that moment, I wanted to talk to someone who had suffered, so… “Jesus?” I said inside my head, eyes closed. “I’m just wondering how to get through it, the suffering. I don’t know if three years of wanting a baby really compares to three days of horrible agony hanging on a cross, but it seems like there’s at least some correlation. So please help me.” Then I waited, crying.

And inside my head I saw the stars I love staring up at at night, whenever I get the chance. I recognized the feeling, the wonderment of staring up at the stars. But it didn’t make me stop crying. And then, as I watched, the stars wheeled around so that instead of being over me, they were under me. Same stars, different angle. And I stopped crying.

This is really all I can tell you. I didn’t see in my mind if or when I’d finally get my baby, or that she would be a girl, or that she would be dangerously tiny but otherwise perfect. I just saw the stars underneath me. The stars looked almost exactly the same from up top, by the way. Nothing about them had intrinsically changed. It seemed to be me who moved. Suddenly I was looking at  life from far above myself instead of from within myself. I couldn’t tell if that was how Jesus saw life, or God, or simply the stars themselves. Was I supposed to see life in this way from now on? Would I remember to? I didn’t know. I only knew that I saw the stars from up top and my sorrow disappeared and I got to go eat dinner. It was all a matter of perspective.

Back to my genius niece’s concert: it was lovely, and quite amazing that a bunch of teenagers playing their violins and cellos and flutes could arouse this feeling of the vastness of the universe swirling around us. Even our two-year-old sat transfixed through much of the concert. Afterwards, at dinner, as our entire family sat around several tables waiters had jammed together, my protegee niece’s dad stood up to make a toast. He raised his glass and cleared his throat. I thought the time had come to recognize this young woman’s talent, a well-deserved moment of praise and parental pride. Her father looked around for a moment at his daughter’s sister, cousins, aunts, and uncles. “To all of our children,” he said. “They are each so incredible.”

I liked his perspective.

But, mercifully, I barely had time to consider how incredibly inconvenient this would be, or how unbelievably careless I was, or what I should do next, before my home phone rang. A man wanted to know if this was Tara Greenway? And if I had lost my BlackBerry the previous day? He apologized for calling my home phone. He’d emailed me the night before but hadn’t received a response (because I hadn’t checked my email, because I couldn’t find my BlackBerry…).

I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d dropped my BlackBerry in the middle of one of the busiest streets in New York City, but the guy who picked it up, instead of hacking into my email, or finding my personal information and stalking my children, or making a five-hour call to Tahiti, made every effort to return it to me. I gushed heartfelt thank you’s. By the time I arrived at the man’s office half an hour later to pick up my BlackBerry, I realized my feelings for this man, this honest, kind soul, were approaching a sort of puppy love.

“You’ve renewed my faith in mankind!” I told him. The rest of the day, I told everyone what had happened, and because everyone I run into also lives in New York, they were all just as surprised and delighted and impressed as I’d been.

This is not the first time I’ve felt stirrings of passion for a complete and utter stranger. There are all the men who have stopped and helped me carry a huge stroller with a heavy toddler in it up the subway stairs. “God bless her,” they often say as I thank them. If only for a few moments, I love those men.

There was a girl who ran after me to give me a five-dollar bill I’d dropped, at a time in my life when losing five dollars mattered. There was the woman who rescued my kitten when she ran out of my apartment once without my noticing as I was leaving, and returned her to me when I came back home. There was the huge homeless man who gave me directions instead of mugging me when I practically tripped over him, one late night in a deserted subway station. I was 22; it was my first month in the city. As I turned and walked away, presumably looking scared to death, he called after me, “There now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I still want to reach back through the years to give that guy an appreciative hug.

Then there’s the friend of our birth mother’s who was in the birthing room of the hospital during the birth of our daughter. She had met our birth mother only a few months before, but she coached her through the birth, staying by her side through every agonizing moment, including those emotional first few minutes after the birth: the time our birth mother said hello and goodbye to her baby.  This complete and utter stranger, in contrast to every other friend and family member of our birth mom, encouraged her to follow through on her adoption plan. Who knows how important a factor this was in our birth mother’s ultimate decision to sign the official adoption papers after the birth? Weeks later, that complete and utter stranger who was there when my daughter entered this world took the time to print out and mail to me hard copies of the photos she had taken of our baby just after she was born — an incredibly precious and rare thing for an adoptive mommy and child to possess. Although she moved out of state a few months after the birth so doesn’t have close contact with our birth mom anymore, she calls on our little girl’s birthday every year. “How do you remember?” I say. “How could I forget?” she says. I love this almost-stranger.

I mention all this because I am in some amount of conflict as to how much love I should really expect from complete and utter strangers, and how much love I should reasonably, healthfully give in return. You see, I’m from a small town, where there really are no complete and utter strangers. You say hello to everyone you meet on the street, of course, because you know them, or your parents do. You help mow the lawn or rake the leaves when someone is sick; you bring over a casserole when someone dies; you drop what you’re doing and help out other people, as a matter of course. You love and are loved.

In New York City? Not so much. I am in an almost constant state of mild and bewildered disappointment in my fellow man, because my fellow man typically does not say  hello to me when I pass them on the street. They don’t smile when they ring my groceries up at the grocery store. They don’t tell me when my purse is hanging open a little, instead choosing to swipe my wallet from said purse. (I am a slow learner. Some variation of this has happened to me at least four times in the past twenty years. I keep forgetting I live in New York and not in Houghton.)

So why don’t I toughen up? Get some freaking boundaries? Realize I’m not in Kansas anymore?

Because I refuse to give up: I want complete and utter strangers to love me. And I want to love them. I want to be, I am, the person who coaxes a smile out of  the overworked, underpaid check-out girl. I am the New Yorker who patiently pantomimes directions to tourists who speak no English, the sucker who misses my train in order to escort them to the right subway if they’re especially confused. I am the neighbor who knows the names of the families on each floor of the five-story apartment building next to our house, and says hello to them whenever I see them, forcing them to say hello back to me (though this took years to accomplish and I still can see them stiffen just a little when they notice me… presumably thinking Dammit, there’s that nosy woman who insists on asking me how I am every time she sees me, now I have to stop and say hi).

I want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony… and, you’ve probably noticed: the world has God-awful pitch most of the time. But not all the time. Sometimes — fairly often really — a guy returns my BlackBerry. A woman rescues my kitten. And I keep believing, and keep loving, and keep running into love, everywhere I go.

The thing that made this birthday special, almost divine, was that I decided that on that day, everything I did, said, or thought, would be good enough.  I decided that for the whole day, I would be incredibly kind to myself, the way I am most of the time to other people.  I would be patient, considerate, polite; I’d laugh at any little joke I made to myself in my head.  If I did do something I felt was wrong, I’d forgive myself, and let myself off the hook guilt-free.  That’s right.  Without any self-lecturing or self-loathing, I’d just automatically forgive myself, right there on the spot, the way I forgive my children when, every once in a while, they look at me with wide somber eyes and say “Sorry, Mommy.”

I have to tell you, it was incredible.  In the morning, almost right off the bat, I yelled at my two-year-old, because instead of getting dressed and getting in her stroller so we could make it on time to an appointment, she ran around the house buck naked laughing like a hyena.  She is one of the few people I know who looks absolutely adorable buck naked, but still.  After five or ten minutes, the charm wore off, and she didn’t seem to be taking into account that it was my birthday and all.  So I yelled at her.  I also may have grabbed her and thrust her little limbs into her little clothes in a much firmer way than was necessary.  On a normal day, I would have spent at least the next hour feeling by turns guilty and falsely accused (by myself!) about this.  I would have swung back and forth between deep remorse (“how could I treat her that way?”) and desperate self-justification (“she needs clear boundaries”).  It is actually quite time-consuming.

But, because it was my birthday, I forgave myself.  It took about five seconds.  I barely knew what to do with the rest of my morning.  There was so much space in my head now.  What do people think about when they don’t take the time to analyze their every thought and action and deem whether each is morally justifiable or not?  What do you feel when you don’t feel guilt?

The answer, I can now tell you, is:  you think about whatever is going on around you at the time.  You feel the sun or the rain or the chill breeze on your body. You listen when your child is talking to you.  You notice little things that normally may slip right past, lost in the pointy chaos of remorse.  (That day, my birthday, I noticed that when my toddler hops like a frog across the room, she says “Rabbit, rabbit,” instead of “Ribbit, ribbit,” as if she thinks frogs are calling for rabbits to come out and play.)

It was just so fabulous.  I decided to extend the whole thing a bit.  I decided to spontaneously forgive myself the day after my birthday as well.  That day was the real test, because I did something that I have always gotten furious with myself for.  I got lost.  I have lived in New York City for over twenty years, and I have lived in my present home for over four years, and I think that I should be able to go about my business in this large but extremely familiar city without getting on the wrong train and ending up in Harlem instead of Brooklyn.  But every few months, I make a mistake, and I get lost.  And then, I get unspeakably angry with myself.  And then, I start to cry, yes, cry like a six-year-old girl who’s lost her way.  It is so embarrassing.  (Once when I was in the crying stage of getting lost, a total stranger stopped me there on the street in Manhattan and asked me if I was all right.  It happened to be on one of the anniversaries of September 11th, and he seemed to firmly believe I was a World Trade Center widow.  He wouldn’t leave me alone until I explained that I was crying because I couldn’t find the address of my new hairstyling salon since I was on West 28th Street instead of East 28th Street.  I felt so shallow.)

So I got lost the day after my birthday.  I got on the wrong subway, and by the time I realized it was hurtling through the dark far from my destination.  But, because I was in such a euphorically good mood left over from being so nice to myself the day before, I remembered, just before I entered the angry phase of getting lost, that I was going by this new forgiving-myself policy.  And I didn’t bother to get angry.  I thought I might still cry, but no.  I didn’t even want to cry.  That’s when I realized that the crying phase had actually been caused by the anger phase; I’d been crying in response to how furious I was at myself for making an unintentional mistake.  So then, instead of getting off the wrong train and getting on the right train in an uncontrollably emotional state that warranted deep concern from passersby, I just got off the wrong train and got on the right train, all happy.  It was so simple.

Then, and I’m not making this up, I got lost every single day for the next five days.  It was remarkable.  I got on the wrong train several times.  I walked the wrong way for ten blocks, I went to the wrong office, I was just a complete and total screw-up.  I wasn’t particularly tired or distracted; I wasn’t going anywhere I hadn’t been dozens of times before.  I just kept getting lost for no apparent reason.  I am positive it was the universe, or maybe my inner self, testing me, or giving me practice: “Lost again.  Late again.  Are you sure you’re going to forgive yourself?  Again?!  Really?”

And I did.  Every time.  After a while I even got amused.  ”How cute,” I would think to myself.  ”I got lost again.  Time to forgive myself.”

So, although the way-cool cowboy boots my husband got me are incredible, and the framed picture of my children my babysitter got me is precious, it turns out the best birthday gift I’ve ever gotten is from myself.  It’s my birthday, my year, my life, and I’ll forgive myself if I want to.  And I want to.

1)  ”Sweetie, I shoveled the possum.”

2)  ”So then they tied her down to the table with sheets and stitched the nail back on.”

3)  ”Thank God for Disney.”

Let’s start with (1) the possum.  It’s the simplest.  One thing about the new country house that we all love is the difference in animal life there.  In the city, an animal sighting is almost always a bad thing, beginning with alarm and ending with an urgent yell to my husband to destroy or at least banish the animal, because said animal is invariably a mouse, roach, or pigeon.  Those are pretty much the wild animals we have here in New York City.  But in the country, we gleefully spotted a groundhog that came into our backyard nearly every day, lounging around and adorably munching apples that had fallen from our apple tree.  Our backyard also hosted two deer, several frogs, countless squirrels and chipmunks, dozens of iridescent-winged dragonflies, billions of crickets, and one exciting day a medium-sized snake.  Then there was the huge snapping turtle in the middle of the road nearby; we actually stopped the car to move him to the side of the road so he didn’t get run over.  (He didn’t like that, and yes.  He snapped.)

The possum we found at the very end of our long driveway was, as you may have guessed by the shoveling remark, dead.  We were first saddened by this:  it seemed probable that he had been hit by a car.  (Though possibly, we told our 10-year-old, he lived a long happy  life and died of natural possum-related causes.)  Soon enough our melancholy at the temporal nature of life passed and we began to wonder:  what the heck are we going to do with this dead possum?  So that’s why Larry shoveled the possum off the road and into the bushes.  He believes in composting.

I guess it’s time to explain (2) the tying down with sheets and the stitches.  Have you ever had a two-year-old with a crushed fingertip and an itty-bitty fingernail hanging from it?  I do hope not.  But if you have, then you know that you rush her to the nearest ER.  And you know that they don’t just let the fingernail fall off, spray some Bactine on it, and hope for the best, the way they did when we were kids. (One friend told me that when she was little and crushed her finger in the car door and it swelled up horribly, the ER doctor burned the tip of a paperclip with a lighter, poked it into her finger to drain the fluid, then put some iodine and a Band-Aid on it and sent her and her horrified mother home.)  But for our baby, they decided to stitch the teeny nail back on, to preserve the nailbed for the new nail to grow in, the doctor said.

“You realize you’re going to have to put her under general anesthesia to do that,” I said.  I can’t even get her to sit down and eat her applesauce; I knew I’d never be able to get her to lie still while a surgeon stitched her fingernail back on.

“We have something called papoosing,” said the doctor.  ”But actually we used to just call it sheeting.  Because we basically tie the child down with sheets to the table. It’s necessary.”  He left the room abruptly and without further explanation. It had taken him about two hours to get to us at all, having larger problems there in the ER than a toddler with a hurt finger, and clearly he didn’t have time to waste with niceties.

The procedure was just exactly as horrible as it sounds.  At one point I became afraid that my sweet baby might have a heart attack, because she screamed so hard for so long that for a minute or two she went silent and started just gasping and gulping.  I’d never heard of a toddler having a heart attack, but you never know.  ”Do you think she’s going to have a heart attack?” I said to the nurse.  The nurse said no, and asked if I wanted a cup of water, which made me wonder where his priorities were.

Strangely enough, I started liking the doctor halfway through the procedure, as I watched him again and again attempt to take a stitch, stop when the baby flailed her hand a little, attempt it again. He never uttered a word, just doggedly pursued his goal while his small patient fought him with every fiber of her being and I cradled her head, whispering and murmuring to her as she screeched. When he finally finished, they were the tiniest stitches I have ever seen, like something on the inside of a wedding dress, except in black, with a little dried blood around them.

This was the first full day of our vacation.  Each day after that, for 10 days, we had to take the dressing and bandages off our baby’s teeny finger while she howled with fear, wash it with soap, spray it with antiseptic, and re-wrap it.  (She was brave though, and tried to comfort all of us by yelling periodically through her tears the things we kept telling her: “It’s not going to hurt!  Easy-peasy! Easy-peasy!”) This explains (3) my deep and rather sudden appreciation for Walt Disney and all his descendants and cohorts.  Because if it weren’t for TANGLED, Disney’s version of Rapunzel, we never, ever would have been able to change those bandages every day.  Only the bright mesmerizing graphics of a cartoon and the brain-etching songs of Mr. Disney’s studio could have kept our little one’s attention long enough to perform our medical maneuvers.

This is not what I’d planned.  We went to the country to unplug, to read Laura Ingalls Wilder books, to do arts and crafts with wooden clothespins and yarn.  It was only my base lower nature that threw that TANGLED DVD from Netflix into my computer case in the first place. But oh, how grateful I became.  How humbled I was.  I didn’t even try to cover up the fact that my two-year-old and ten-year-old can now both recite nearly every lyric of TANGLED in a near-autistic manner, complete with character accents and inflections.  I decided to think it is cute.  Because I admit it saved our collective butts.

The divine moment in all of this?  After that long morning in the ER, where one little girl suffered and screamed and sobbed; the other little girl, compassionate to the bone, sat for hours helpless and horrified on her beloved little sister’s behalf; and we parents swung madly between empathy, guilt, and sorrow — after all this, my two-year-old, as her daddy lifted her out of her carseat when we finally got back to the little house, looked straight at me as I sat recovering in the front seat and declared loudly and clearly: “I’m okay!”  She was smiling.

I was sitting there re-living every awful second.  She had already moved on, living in the present moment, bodhisattva-like.  Being in the present moment, she was able to feel the joy of being out of the hospital, back home, lifted up into her daddy’s strong arms.  She doesn’t yet know regret.  I guess just about all her moments are divine.  I’m just trying to get back to that, to babyhood, to being in the now.  Maybe I’m a little closer now, thanks to the two pint-sized teachers God has given me.

Our two-year-old doesn’t seem to like the little country house.  I can tell by the way she WILL NOT SLEEP THERE.  First she won’t go to sleep — it takes two hours to put her down for her one-hour nap — and then she won’t stay asleep.  She often sleeps through the night now, in the city.  In the beautiful, quiet, fresh-aired country?  Wakes twice every night.  This makes the people around her suffer in various ways and degrees.  It feels like she is a little despot, the Jekyll-and-Hyde ruler of our tiny kingdom, a petite queen whom we all adore and who adores us, except for these inexplicable episodes she falls into, in which she makes impossible demands, which if not fulfilled cause screaming tantrums and if fulfilled only lead to other, more impossible demands.

Anyway, something about this particular weekend of sleeplessness carried over into our regular week.  My husband and I just couldn’t catch up.  We couldn’t catch up on our sleep, and we couldn’t catch up on our joy somehow.  It seemed gone.  We fought, which is unusual for us, though we tried to stay civil for the sake of the children, working together to serve dinner and put the kids to bed, all that. But of course the children knew anyway, in their own ways.  ”What are you fighting about?” my ten-year-old asked me the morning after we had tried to hash things out, and I couldn’t have explained even if I’d wanted to.  I knew what had led up to the fight, the specific events and comments, but in a larger sense, I sort of didn’t know.  I almost said, “The idea of life itself, the way it heaves up and down, and it seems like you have come through the down part and are finally coming to an up part, but then it suddenly turns in on itself and you realize you have no control whatsoever, but it’s not like a fun roller coaster, more like a falling airplane that never quite crashes to the ground. And sometimes you get confused and tired and blame the person you’re sitting beside.”  But it seemed like not quite the right thing to say to a little girl.

At any rate, we decided we definitely should not return to the country house this past weekend.  We should stay home, where we had some chance of getting a full night’s sleep.  It seemed like a good idea, until Saturday morning, when we sat in the living room looking at each other and realizing that we had two days of emptiness, sure of nothing except the incredibly dependable humidity in which New York has been immersed for as long as anyone can really remember.

But I knew we needed a shot of joy, so we decided to take our toddler to the zoo for the first time, after her nap.  One of the great things about having one child seven years older than the other is that the older one thinks the younger one is cute, and actually enjoys seeing her experience things for the first time just about as much as we do, rather than seeing her as a rival.  So a trip to the small Central Park Zoo, which may not have seemed like the most exciting thing to our older daughter, seemed like a good prospect.  But getting ready, which now involves several long negotiations of the type parents of two-year-olds often have, about whether one should or should not wear shoes when they go outside, for example, was not joyful.  Actual tears were shed.  ”Why does everything with her have to take so long and be so complicated?” our older daughter, who has an inherent understanding of shoes and their benefits, lamented.  Sometimes I’m afraid she will never have children of her own, after watching how hard it seems to be for her parents.  (“I remember it used to take my mother an hour just to get my little sister’s shoes on,” I can imagine her saying to her future husband as she swallows her sixteen hundredth birth control pill.)  But by golly, we had laid our plan, and we stubbornly stuck to it.  We were going to the damn zoo if it killed us.

A line several blocks line greeted us once we finally arrived.  ”We don’t have to do this,” my husband whispered to me, but I felt otherwise, and my spirit began to rise to the occasion.  ”Look!  Balloon animals!!” I said, and I think Larry knew we were definitely doing this thing. He seemed to accept his fate, and stood in line while I took the girls to get a monstrous salted soft pretzel and a blue balloon shaped like a doggie.  So we ate junk food; and watched sea lions wave their flippers at us while they gulped small silver fish; and saw a great polar bear swim back and forth from an underwater observation point, his huge soft paw pads pushing off the glass window right in front of our faces.  We petted sheep’s deep woolly backs and fed goats food pellets from our bare hands.  We capped off the day by eating at a restaurant, where our little despot was for once too tired to scream or run around bothering waiters and other customers.

The next day, we went to the Friends Meeting, which felt deeply spiritual, then went to an air-conditioned mall and shopped, which felt deeply consumeristic.  But somewhere in this rather ordinary weekend, we re-discovered our joy.  It was right there the whole time, near the baby’s shoes I think, underneath some bills and papers.  We had to look for it, but it wasn’t far away.  It wasn’t even up at the country house; it was here, at home, in the middle of the noisy city.  We’ve stopped fighting.  I cannot remember what we were fighting about, except in the vaguest terms, and I think my husband feels the same, though I don’t plan to ask.  I plan to revel in the joy, the ordinary day-to-day life stuff, which does sometimes if you think about it too much seem a bit like an out-of-control airplane, but which more often seems open and airy and full of possibilities.  Anything can happen.  It will happen with these people beside me, my husband, my girls.  It is good.

It started so long ago that I can’t really remember the first time I met everyone’s favorite pioneer girl.  I do remember that when the television series Little House on the Prairie came on, my mother thought I’d be excited, since I’d already read nearly the entire Little House series… but I  refused to watch it for the whole first season. Was I was already snobbish about tv adaptations from books, at age 9?  I do remember feeling disdainful that the producers apparently hadn’t even known to start the series properly, with the first book, in the Little House in the Big Woods.  They were missing out entirely on the incredibly fun time Mary and Laura had playing with the pig’s bladder blown up like a balloon, the way Laura’s bad cousin got stung by all the bees, and how to make maple candy by pouring fresh maple syrup onto snow (which of course I tried to do one snowy day, though it was a devastating failure). But soon enough, I succumbed to Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon’s earnest ways, and now when I re-read the books — yes, I’m re-reading the books; I already told you I’m obsessed, okay? — I always see in my mind’s eye Pa looking like a buff Hollywood actor, and Laura looking like Melissa Gilbert when she was a kid.  Though, as anyone truly obsessed by Laura Ingalls Wilder should be able to tell you, Laura’s eyes were actually blue, not brown.  You see, how television corrupts history.

I think the real reason behind my little tv adaptation ban, though, was that I felt exposed and a little betrayed.  I loved Laura, and I sort of somehow thought I was the only one.  That a major network should suddenly take my Laura and broadcast her all over the country according to their own interpretation seemed just wrong.  I had thought of Laura as mine, my kindred spirit from a previous century.  The Little House books made me feel like the thoughts and day-to-day life of a little girl were important, significant.  I didn’t love the Little House books because I was interested in learning more about the history of the pioneers who settled the Midwest in the late 1800s, of course.  I loved the Little House books because I loved Laura.  I felt connected to her.  When I felt bored or taken for granted, I composed a little narrative in my mind about what was happening, a la Little House.  (“Tara didn’t feel like going to church, but every Sunday morning she must go.  So she put on her dress, her white tights, and her shiny black Mary Jane shoes that were hard to buckle and hurt her feet, and she went.”)  It fascinated me that the writer of the books referred to herself as Laura instead of “I.”  It made my own life seem much better when I thought of it in this way. (Another fact for obsessed Little House fans:  the very first draft of Little House in the Big Woods, rejected by a publisher, was written in the first person.  Only the subsequent draft, with a bit of editing and advice from Laura’s writer/editor daughter Rose, was written in the third person.)

There is a point to all this, other than going public with my obsession.  I’ve been thinking even more than usual about Laura and her family lately.  I think it’s the disconnect I feel from the earth and the stars, something that has always bothered me about living in New York City.  I love the city, moved here as soon as I graduated from college and never left.  But I miss the earth and the silence and the sky of the country: I miss walking my dog at night, breathing in the sharp lovely air, and feeling the earth and sky around me permeate my every cell.  The sense of perspective staring at stars gives you is irreplaceable.  And every year I spend in the city, the sense of disconnect and loss becomes a bit worse, until lately it’s almost visceral.  So.  I slowly and slyly convinced my husband that we needed a very small weekend house upstate, on a little land… for our children, for the girls, of course.  He totally fell for it.  And we spent the last year looking for a house… a little house!!… and turning down one after another, accompanied by a very patient real estate agent.  I knew I would know it when I saw it.  And I did.  It is only coincidence, I am sure, that there is a smokehouse beside the small stone house we bought… a smokehouse!  Why, I can pull out my Little House books, and go over how to smoke a pig. Now all we have to do is find and slaughter a pig, and we are all set!  Another coincidence:  there are woods, one might say Big Woods, in back of the house.  And a Lake, which I’m pretty sure looks sort of Silver at certain times in the moonlight, is down the road.

But there are, in fact, a number of differences between my lifestyle and Laura’s.  Ma did not have to pack up everyone’s bags late on a Friday night to get to the Little House, and do the same thing less than 48 hours later to come back, and Pa fought no traffic as he drove.  Laura and Mary did not harp on Ma during said traffic jam as to why they were the only ones in their class without an iPod.  If toddler Carrie constantly whined “I’m hungry!  I’m hungry!” then just as constantly refused each and every bit of food offered to her, there is no record of it.  Also, I am sure that if Ma had bought a box of macaroni and cheese to make for lunch, she would have remembered that she also needed to buy a saucepan to cook it in.

But despite all this, there were so many divine moments in our new little house in the country.  There is the way that, once there, my ten-year-old daughter seems to be enveloped by the atmosphere of the 80-year-old cottage and the surrounding woods, and, somewhat miraculously, has not once  asked if we are going to get a tv there, or if there is an Internet connection.  She did ask one time about air conditioning (which we also are not getting), but since it was 104 degrees, she can be easily forgiven for that.  On Sunday she was woken up early by birds (“There were big black crows looking in my window and going ‘CAW! CAW!’  I think they wanted my fan!” she said.)  And instead of bemoaning the acute lack of Gmail, or waking me up because she was bored, she fixed me scrambled eggs and cheesy toast for breakfast and waited for me to awaken.  I repeat, my daughter fixed me breakfast and let me sleep in.

And there was the time I finally got the baby down for her nap, and Larry had taken our older daughter for a swim in the lake, and I sat for an hour on a rock in our back yard.  This in itself is what I’ve dreamed of and lusted after for years, and I could finally feel it… the slow osmosis of dirt and grass and bees and swallows, permeating and transforming my body and mind and soul.  But then, then!  A small deer, a young doe, with huge perky ears and deep brown eyes, emerged from the woods, not twenty feet from the spot I sat.  She saw me right away, and froze, her slender front legs taking turns padding the ground nervously, her intelligent-looking eyes fixed on mine.  I didn’t move.  I strived to appear gentle and kind and deeply trustworthy.  We gazed at each other, two beings from different worlds, for a couple of long lovely minutes.  Then I heard the baby waking up from her nap, plaintively calling “Mommy!  Daddy!  Moooommmmmy!”  I had to go get her; she was alone in her Pack ‘N Play in a strange new place.  I slowly got up, still looking into the deer’s eyes.  I gradually took a few steps backward; the doe pawed the ground but remained steadfast, her eyes locked on mine.  I turned to walk back to the house, and the deer suddenly made a loud snorting sound at me and tore off through the woods.

Later I told my husband about it.  ”I feel so terrible,” I said.  ”I was trying to make friends with her, and then I scared her, and she made this horrible angry sound at me and ran away; she probably won’t come back now.”

“Well,” he said, “But you saw her. You had your moment.  You can’t spend your whole life staring at a deer.”

And it’s true, you know.  I live in this century, the one with iPods and iPads and a million things to do and a certain disconnect with nature.  But I can still have my moments.  I can spot and relish my day-to-day divine moments, like spotting a lovely, shy, brave deer peering out of the forest.  I just can’t spend my whole life staring at the deer.

You may think, reading this, that I had a horrible week.  Well.  I suppose I have had better weeks.  It wasn’t exactly a party. But you know how sometimes things that you really dread, once they happen, turn out to be not nearly as bad as your fears about them?  And you realize that your fears are the thing that are really messing up your life, not the events of your life itself?  I have this experience quite often, often enough that you might think I’d learn not to be fearful.  I am getting better about it, really, a lot better than I used to be, but I must admit that fear sometimes still goes from being a bit player to a guest star in my life.

Perfect example:  I was a pretty nervous flier even before September 11th.  But after?  With my precious baby, who’d been born 3 months before that bright blue September day when everything changed, and who was in our arms as we ran around closing our windows so that the ash from the World Trade Center didn’t waft in?  I was a certifiable wreck.  Then one day a few months after that, as we were making some necessary plane trip to see family, and we were doing that part of the trip where the plane engines all rev up and you go from rolling on the nice secure ground to flying — flying!! — in the air, on nothing at all, the whole thing is clearly a terrible idea….  Anyway, the plane was lifting off, and my thoughts went exactly like this:  ”What if we crash?  What if the plane catches fire?  What if we have to make a water landing?  What if I can’t get the baby unstrapped from her car seat in time to slide down the emergency slides?”  My heart and my breathing were revving just like the plane engines till I was hyperventilating. Then suddenly I had another thought, and it seemed to come from outside my head instead of from inside it:  ”What if everything is fine?”

The revving inside me abruptly stopped.  The thought startled me; it splashed through my consciousness like cold water striking my face.  I fixated on it.  ”What if everything is fine?” I asked myself over and over, fascinated.  I honestly think it was the first time a thought of this nature had ever occurred to me.  I looked around.  The plane was miraculously rising through the clouds.  The people around me were reading their magazines.  The baby was sucking on her bottle.  Everything was… fine.

What if everything is fine?

The answer to the question (which I tend to believe came from my exasperated guardian angel) is: if everything is fine, then I have wasted much energy and time on my fears.  The change in me was strong enough that my husband asked me after that flight what had happened up there.  I hadn’t appeared about to faint or vomit, as I usually did on take-off and landing, he said, and he wanted to know what I’d done.  It was largely because I had just started receiving one of the mind/body techniques (New Decision Therapy) which I now practice on others.  This work has helped diminish the role fear plays in my life.  It was partly just that sentence, though, which seemed to come from nowhere, from the very air the plane was gliding through.  What if everything is fine?

A lot depends on your definition of the word fine.  If you expect to go through life without ever, for example, having a wisdom tooth pulled, you won’t realize that things are actually fine.  If you expect your baby to sleep through the night all the time, you may miss out on the fact that everything is still fine.  And, of course, sometimes things are not fine.  Sometimes your loved one dies, sometimes you lose your job and can’t find another one, sometimes all kinds of tragic things happen.  But as anyone who has been through tragedy can tell you, all the fear and worry in the world does not prepare you for the experience of tragedy itself.  (My friend, whose father went through a long illness before he died, said people kept saying to her mother, “At least you had time to prepare.”  Her grieving mother finally said to her, “What do people think I did?  Went into the next room while he was still alive and pretended that he was dead?”  There is no preparing.  Tragedy is beyond that.)

But you must admit, most of the time, everything is fine.  I didn’t go through the wisdom tooth extraction alone, by the way.  My mother, who I’m sure had better things to do, called a friend, who I’m absolutely positive had better things to do, and he gave her a ride all the way to New York City to be with me.  It is very nice to know that, at the age of 45, I can make one phone call (during which I apparently unconvincingly said not to come) and my mom will come running to my side because I have to go to the dentist.  I also must add that the dental surgeon himself was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met.  He talked me through the whole thing in a gently jovial manner, and he actually gave me a teddy bear to hold all during the procedure and take home afterward.  And his assistant held my hand the whole time, even though I had the bear to clutch, because I asked her to.  And the recovery process, while not pleasurable, was not nearly as bad as I’d feared.

Everything was fine.

It made me unspeakably sad, that short-weeded field with the dearth of fireflies.  I’d thought of that field and its inherent fireflies as something permanent.  It seems that, having reached middle age, I’d perhaps have learned by now that the things I thought were permanent — both my parents being alive, my hips being slender, my hopes and plans being intact — are in fact not permanent at all.  But I am stubborn that way, and still felt strongly that the field with fireflies should exist exactly as it had thirty or forty years before.  I wanted my children to wade in weeds in the gathering dusk of a warm night in a summer that rolled on endlessly, an infinite quiet ocean of warm nights ahead and behind.  I wanted them to catch the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the fireflies I used to catch.

My two daughters and I visited my mom last week, sleeping in my old room with all my old stuffed animals and dolls, eating Perry’s Panda Paws ice cream nearly every night, and nervously feeding the horses on a nearby farm apples and carrots out of our hands, palms scrupulously flat.  (Horses, up close, have very large teeth and drool much more than you might imagine.)  We picked wild daisies and walked down to the creek and did all the things I wanted to do, but I’d held out no hope for catching fireflies, because of the short-weeded, firefly-less field.

But one night I went out to take a walk after putting my two-year-old down to bed, and my ten-year-old tagged along. And lo!  The unmistakeable glint of fireflies beckoned us toward the little field.  The fireflies were back!!  The weeds were back, grown tall once again!  (The best I can figure out, a nearby school must have mowed the field for a few years to provide spectator parking for soccer games in the soccer field across the road, and then they stopped mowing.  That, or a weedy miracle occurred.)

Best of all, my ten-year-old took just as much joy as I always had in stalking and tenderly grabbing the fireflies (the only insects she and I willingly touch with our bare hands).  I’d forgotten that beguiling, impossible way fireflies appear right in front of you for one lit-up second, then disappear and appear again five feet away from you.  It’s humbling, the way the little things outwit you time after time.  My daughter noticed that when we threw a firefly up in the air after finally catching it, thinking it would fly gratefully away to its freedom, the firefly would actually fall straight down into the grass instead.  ”Look, they play dead!” she observed.  (We politely stepped around them and moved a little ways away  when they did this, so as not to step on them.)  We caught lots of fireflies, wading through waist-high weeds.  It was completely divine.

It didn’t change everything back to how it used to be, of course.  My father is still gone, an old friend from down the road is still gravely ill, my best friend from next door is someone I see maybe once a year instead of all day every day, as it used to be when we were little.  My heart is both fuller and emptier now than before.  There are places in there that throb now that I never could even feel before.  What did I think back then?  Did I think that I would continue to catch fireflies in that field on every summer night my whole life?  Did I think my best friend and I would always live next door to each other?  Did I believe my parents would live forever?

It would be easy to say I didn’t think about it at all, but I actually do remember trying to think about it.  I remember feeling intensely guilty because I would get tears in my eyes when I thought about my precious dog Ebony dying, but not when I thought about my beloved grandmother, Nana, dying.  Now I realize that is because I could vividly imagine it, my dog dying.  I had already had one dog die.  I knew what that was, to have your dog die.  But Nana?  Mom and Dad?  You can try to imagine it all you want, but you will not be able to know it, how it feels when your family member dies.  I had no place for it in my heart yet.  Now I do.

I guess what I thought when I was little was that by the time all those things happened to me — the growing up thing, the having my own children thing, the parents dying thing — by the time all that stuff happened to me, I’d be ready.  I’d know how to handle it.  I’d be a grown-up.  And now I realize that there is no ready.  There is just going forward because there is really no other direction to go.  There is just the way you tenderly hold things in your heart, the way you choose to move forward (with bitterness or forgiveness), the way you can every once in a while go back home and catch the fireflies.

Since I’ve already shared a lot about my younger daughter (who is too little to defend herself against her mother’s blogging), I’ve been thinking lately about moments from the past — my pre-mommy years. Those days were a pretty long time ago now, but I do remember them, and there were many moments when the Divine presence pierced the day-to-day fabric of my life as a single adult and struggling actress.

The very first moment I thought of was this: It was a dark and stormy night. No, wait, it was a bright and stormy day. It was mid-winter, February-ish I’m guessing, and New York City was being slaughtered by a major snowstorm. The city of New York, as you may have gathered from the news this past winter, is uncharacteristically babyish and helpless and just plain dumb about big snowstorms. This city full of tough, practical, intelligent people just breaks down willy-nilly when more than a few inches of snow hits it. To me, a country girl who grew up an hour and half outside of Buffalo, New York, this causes no end of amusement. Dealing with snowstorms is the one and only area in which I have ever felt well-prepared or superior in any way in this vast metropolis. I know from snow.

So the facts that a foot of the white stuff had just fallen, and more was continuing to fall; and okay, it was pretty windy; and there were people on skis instead of cars going down Fifth Avenue — all of that did not lead me to believe that my acting class would be canceled. A little snow, so what!? I got up and had breakfast and made my way to my acting class in mid-town, just as I did every week. I felt much happier and more at home than usual, in fact. The snow made everything sparkly and grand; New York gets cleaner and statelier when blanketed with snow. The whole city goes into a mass physical denial, as if right under the pure snow that will melt within forty-eight hours there are no cigarette butts, old newspapers, Dasani water bottles, or the occasional used condom. Even the incessant city noises are silenced by a good thick snow.

So it was all fabulous, until I finally arrived at the door of the building where my class was, frozen solid and quite wet, and buzzed and buzzed the buzzer, with no response. (I must explain to younger readers that in those days, we did not have on our person at all times handheld devices that kept us connected to every person we’d ever met. We didn’t even have email and home computers yet. We just sort of walked around and hoped we ran into someone we knew, I guess.) I was the only one there ringing the bell; maybe all the other acting students were from Miami or the Upper East Side, where everyone puts on their muffs and makes cappuccinos whenever they see a few snowflakes. Finally it sank in: my class had been canceled.

Quite suddenly, my snowy adventure turned into a huge frigid mess, because I was freezing — yes, even I, a snow veteran, a survivor of the blizzard of ’76, an upstate kid, was literally shivering. The snowdrifts were higher than my boots, so snow had snuck in and caked my socks in ice. And the class was located on a far-west block in the midtown area, where at the time there was nothing else but parking garages and bars, which at ten in the morning were not open yet. (Again, a note to the under-30’s: Starbuck’s had not yet been invented. I repeat, there was no Starbuck’s. Coffee shops in general were not so widespread. We bought our coffee in blue paper cups with fake Greek letters at the deli. And there was not even a deli near my class.)

I kept going, as my Buffalo ancestors would have wanted me to do. (Just kidding; actually both my parents grew up in South Carolina and probably would have already frozen to death by this point.) Finally I found something that was open: Port Authority Bus Terminal. Never had I been so happy to see the mammoth, filthy bus station at the heart of New York City. I entered Port Authority and sat down gratefully on a bench.

I did notice that it seemed to be just me and the homeless drug addicts at the station. All the buses had probably been canceled along with my acting class. At first I didn’t much care; I just sat there taking off my boots and my damp, frozen socks. I held my bare red feet in my hands one at a time, though it wasn’t all that comforting, as my hands were nearly as cold as my feet. Then a man, a big African-American guy who hadn’t had a shower in a while, sat down beside me.

“Miss,” he said.

Great. I glanced over at him then back at my feet. I was not in the proper frame of mind to defend myself, or give away the little money I had. I said nothing.

“Are you okay?” the man said.

I breathed out. He seemed nice. “Oh, yeah,” I answered him. “I’m fine. I’m just cold.”

“Your feet. They all red. You got to take care of your feet. Be careful. You shouldn’t have got your feet wet. Why you out in this at all?”

I became unaccountably talkative, straining to turn this awkward encounter into something approaching normal, with small talk. “Well, I thought I had my acting class, but then I guess it was canceled. Where I’m from, they don’t cancel things just because it’s snowing. But I didn’t realize, you know, how bad it was out there. And then I didn’t have anywhere to go, except here.”

“What you going to do?” the man said. He was an older guy, and he looked genuinely concerned, as if he thought maybe I was a starving waif.

“Um, I guess I’ll just get warmed up, then I’ll take the subway home.”

The man smiled a little. I still felt awkward. I was regretting saying the word “home,” and though my home at the time was a fourth-floor walk-up — a tiny 16-square-foot studio plus a bathroom, to be exact — it was my home. And I knew this man didn’t have one.

“All right, miss, you take care of yourself now. Be careful out there.”

“Thanks! You too!” I said inanely, and the feeling of relief that flooded through me as he turned and walked away almost washed away the feeling of intense cold.

I continued to rub my feet, more aware now of the unusual picture I presented, a barefooted white girl in a blizzard sitting in the middle of Port Authority looking halfway homeless. It was maybe two or three minutes later that the man sat down next to me again. “Miss.”

My heart sank. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to get away from him. I started to quickly work out how much money I had in my wallet and how many dollars I might be able to spare the man and still make it to my next paycheck.

“Miss, the thing is, you won’t be able to get your feet warm with those wet socks. You can’t let your socks get wet. Here. You take these. They brand new. I never wore them. You take them.” He held out a pair of white sweat socks.

There it is, of course, right there — the moment the Divine shone through. And not, by the way, through the very religious girl from Houghton with more than enough resources to share. God’s true nature shone brightly through the homeless man who, after carefully considering for a few minutes whether to sacrifice his own warmth and comfort, handed over his last pair of clean dry socks to a complete stranger who’d missed her acting class.

“No, sir, no, I couldn’t. Thank you so much. I’m fine. I feel warm now. I’ll just wear my boots with no socks, look.” I began jamming my bare feet back into my boots.

“They clean. You need them. I never wore them.”

I refused to take the socks. I couldn’t possibly. I was half an hour from a warm apartment with Swiss Miss cocoa and microwave popcorn. This man… I couldn’t even imagine what the rest of this man’s winter held. But I still am not totally sure I did the right thing that morning in Port Authority. Maybe it was more important to that man that he could offer another person something of value than that he had a warm pair of socks in reserve in his coat pocket. I don’t know; I still don’t know. We do the best we can. We wander through the snow and the humanity, we offer each other dry socks and memories of noticing white-hot flashes of the Divine.

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, and my hormones were raging, I used to go on these little hour-long crying jags for no apparent reason.  After a few months they became a nuisance.  I tried everything to make the crying jags stop.  Saltines and juice, highly recommended by many uninformed friends, did nothing.  Meditation and/or yoga, also highly recommended, more nothing.  TV or Internet distractions actually made the crying worse.  One day during a jag I picked up a book.  Within a few pages the tears dried up and the sobbing ceased.  I’d re-discovered the magic of books.

I’d been so busy with life; I’d stopped reading real book books in college, when textbooks replaced book books.  Now in my 30′s, I had lots of semi-textbooks lying around, very serious books about philosophy and theology and self-improvement (I was extremely into improving my self).  Whatever book I picked up worked to stop the tears.  I couldn’t quite figure out why, except for that dose of magic books have always contained between their covers.

After the baby was born and I began breastfeeding round the clock, I kept reading. I read as I held the baby for hours on end because she wouldn’t sleep unless someone was holding her; I read as I brushed my teeth, dried my hair, rode the subway.  I couldn’t maintain my concentration on the self-improvement and philosophy stuff anymore though, because of severe sleep deprivation, and that’s when I re-claimed book books:  novels.  I gave up my serious pursuit of self-improvement and the meaning of life for a while, becoming a passionate convert to rich, pure fiction. I reveled in the books of Anne Tyler and Amy Tan and Chris Bohjalian and Shirley Jackson.

I fell back in love with some books I’d already read:  I couldn’t put down Willa Cather’s My Antonia, even though I remembered exactly how it ended; ditto for Olive Ann Burns’ classic Cold Sassy Tree.  I wasn’t even embarrassed as I re-read the entire compilation of the Adventures of the Borrowers by Mary Norton, a book from my childhood about tiny people who inhabit the space between the interior and exterior walls of our houses.  (At age eight I took the book to be non-fiction and have been on the look-out for Borrowers ever since.)  I ate up Fannie Flagg’s delicious Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, and there were three books that I actually re-read a second time the moment I finished reading them the first time:  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and Memoirs of A Geisha by Arthur Golden (I swore this was a pen name for a woman till I researched it, so perfect a female voice was he).

I mention all this because it has just happened again, this serendipitous picking up of a random book and the resulting magic.  I’ve just re-read Martha Beck’s Expecting Adam, her account of the astounding events she experienced during her pregnancy with her second child, a son with Down syndrome, which metamorphosed her from a doggedly perfectionistic Harvard doctoral candidate to a woman who converses with angelic beings.

Please consider reading Expecting Adam; it will teach or remind you that at every moment of our lives we are surrounded by incredibly loving and joyful beings that we cannot usually see, yet have access to at all times, via the beauty and love that are around us in our everyday lives.  Let me give you just one quote from this incredible book that has lit up my week:  near the end of the book, Beck tells of a technique that uses a computer program that enables people who cannot talk to write their thoughts.  One teenager with Down syndrome typed out, as his first sentence ever: “I hear God’s finest whisper.”  Indeed.

If all my books were on Kindle, I wouldn’t have had that thick old hardcover of the Borrowers’ adventures, for I never would have ordered such a thing from Amazon.  I wouldn’t have inherited the delightful Daisy Fay paperback from my late mother-in-law, with her curly writing noting her thoughts next to passages she thought were especially hysterical or profound. Willa Cather’s work would have remained a distant memory from my late father’s American Lit class.  Of course, before you Kindle fans get all defensive and upset, a little while ago I couldn’t find a book I wanted, The Pain Chronicles, in either of the two bookstores near my home, yet received it instantaneously when I finally charged up my Kindle and ordered it online.

We have the best of both worlds:  e-books and real books, philosophy books and book books, the “real” world and the world beyond. We have all kinds of magic.