❮❮prevnext❯❯

My favorite bit of new-to-me language use around NOLA: "it's been a minute"- a kind of rueful recognition of it actually having been a long while. I mentioned that that to our tour guide Butch yesterday, and he came back with "go to make groceries" where most other parts of the country would say "go to buy groceries"

---

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. [...] It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. [...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Cultivate an awareness of the moments you might be having even now, people! Even if our once tender hearts are a bit scarred over, and so that we fear Cunningham was right and there 'will be no other', that we won't feel as deeply as we did in our youth- or that in our middle age, after we might not have so many decades to create focal length and see how meaningful a moment that was -- I think there's still time for moments.

(I'd also take the chance in stumbling over this old Cunningham quote to plug my old 24 Hour Comics Day work Of The Moments.)

---

Took Me Eleven Minutes to do That Thing I've Been Avoiding for Three Months: A Memoir