Bread and Bread

I keep thinking I should post something about gratitude—‘tis the season—but where would I even start? Almost my entire existence is a big scrap bag of other people’s kindness and the good luck of living in the time and place I do. Which is why I’m not a Republican, because it seems so thoroughly self-aggrandizing to proclaim that the self has much to do with the self. Bootstraps are a mythological creature. It’s only because of kindness and luck that I’m alive to be grouchy that our adoption agency isn’t getting us a baby fast enough. It’s because of luck and kindness (and, okay, a certain amount of hard work— that is not a mythological creature) that there is our experience with the agency (financed by my dad), that there is an “our” (because AK has stuck it out through the hard times), that we are allowed to be parents (time and place and civil rights movements), that there is an “I” (Dr. Irina Jasper and her vigilance of my boobs, City of Hope taking it from there). All of...

AK and I miss the days when Plum Sykes had a regular column in Vogue. She was always writing about hanging out with Gwyneth Paltrow, or what she was going to wear to some sort of semi-royal gala, or her bold decision to bob her hair, or her new discovery of the color olive. She presented everything as a charming dilemma, and I always imagined a princess standing in front of an immense closet, hands clasped perplexedly as servants scurry about. What? Oh, just having a few friends including my bestie Gwynnie over. Once she wrote about her chronic back pain and I was like, Oh my god, Plum Sykes has a real problem! I think she solved it with a spa treatment and an intense workout routine that enabled her to wear a fabulous backless gown to the semi-royal gala of the month. Vogue has since replaced Plum Sykes with Elisabeth Von Thurn und Taxis, who I think is an actual princess from some Swiss-ish country. I don’t adore her as much as Plum, but her piece in the December issue, abou...

Kim Miller has frequently been the only entity standing between me and a full hypochondriac breakdown. She lives a few blocks away from us in Highland Park, but right now she's at a melanoma conference in Philadelphia, which is how the medical jet-set rolls. Here's how she spent a recent day there:* Kim, her daughter Bea and a chicken wearing a monocle, I think. 7:00 AM : My iPhone alarm goes off, set to Digital—the sound that most captures how I feel in the morning, disoriented and robotic.  I’m at the Philadelphia Marriott, room 1244, in town for the 2013 Society for Melanoma Research Congress. I have two scientific posters on melanoma prevention in the conference, one of only 4-prevention focused posters (and the other two are from my research team). 7:50 AM : Sonia, the 4 th year med student who I’m sharing my hotel room with, and I head downstairs for the pre-conference breakfast. We’re moving fast because breakfast ends at 8 AM . We manage to snag some fo...

I was supposed to visit Tracy in Joshua Tree this past weekend, but her mom had some health stuff (shout-out to Bev Kaply!), so we postponed. I was sad not to see Tracy, but found time is always a bit of a silver lining. Yesterday AK and I found ourselves with the kind of weekend day we used to have back before she worked an average of six and a half days a week. We slept till nine. I made blueberry walnut pancakes. We hiked Debs Park , where we watched the world’s second most energetic dog catch air and practically take flight as he chased a ball thrown by his similarly athletic person. His person had another dog, a curly mix who was content to walk the trail at a reasonable pace. AK did that dog’s voice: “Oh, you know…I just like to read.” I added on: “Brunch would be nice too.” We bought DayQuil for AK, who caught my cold this past week, and antidepressants for me and anti-aging moisturizer for both of us, because it’s time to find out if that shit works, at Targe...

“I know it’s a hard day,” Cathy said when I met her at my dad’s house for dinner Monday night. I immediately teared up. You don’t really expect your family to remember what would be your miscarried twins’ second birthday. It hadn’t been a particularly hard day, but I’d thought about them, definitely. As always, the voice of move on, move on was strong in my head. She noticed I was wearing my pea pod necklace she gave me for my thirty-fourth birthday, the one birthday I was pregnant (although I guess no one but an elephant is pregnant for two birthdays). Twin green pearls representing the little peas in my pod. I guess if an elephant did miscarry, she would never forget it. “Thanks,” I said, all choked up. I was walking around our dad’s kitchen. I opened the fridge. “Hey! Pudding!” Cathy laughed. I was still sad, but not as hard to distract as I once was. Later AK and I held onto each other and devoted a moment to them, in bed, both of us exhausted, an old John Sayle...

Friday, 11/1 1. san francisco, patron saint of animals, merchants and stowaways San Juan felt like arriving back home after our vacation-within-a-vacation. Outside our hostel, Posada San Francisco, we saw the guy from our kayak tour we’d been calling “San Francisco” (for the city in California, not the street in San Juan that our hostel was on). Posada San Francisco on Calle San Francisco. “Are you stalking me or am I stalking you?” He had a lilting Indian accent. We invited him to join us for dinner after we all got a chance to check in and change. This time our room was on the sixth floor, similarly spare but to the point of having no shelves or clothing rods in the closet. As with our previous room, there was a wooden cross above the bed. No bible in the drawer, though, because there are no drawers. One of the nice things about traveling is that you don’t necessarily learn the most textbook things about each other first. We learned that Hakim had gon...

10/31, Thursday 1. life of oh my The last part of our day in Esperanza was a kayak tour of Mosquito Bay (not to be confused with Mosquito Pier ), a shallow lagoon inhabited by microorganisms—three hundred thousand per gallon—that glowed when anything touched them. After a bumpy van ride to the water, our guides,   Carlitos and Joshua, led seven kayaks of tourists—mostly Californians—into the dark bay. We all had blue lights clipped to the front of our boats, and Carlitos had a green light in his springy pontyail (guys with would-be Afros can rock the ponytail look so much better than guys with thin, silky hair). When we dipped our paddles in the bathtub-warm water, they made bluish white trails, like glow-in-the-dark bubbles. The kayaks across from ours had thin glowing lines at the spot where yellow plastic touched water, like Hondas bound for a late-night racetrack. Zigzagging fish became bolts of lightning. When we cupped our hands, we cradled stars. I decided A...

10/30/13, Wednesday We asked a cab driver to take us to Mosquito Pier, the snorkeling spot recommended by the guy at Blackbeard, where we rented our snorkel gear (everyone had an opinion about which beach was best, but we gave his a little more weight). She dropped us off in the middle of a long needle of land with waves on one side and still water on the other.  I didn't have my camera with me that day, but luckily there is the internet, to remind you your experiences are not unique. We saw a sandy spot, but how to get to it without hacking our way through the jungle? Then a small road appeared out of nowhere, and there was the beach. Snorkeling, it turned out, was easy and fun. You could swim and breathe at the same time! And look at things! The breathing had always been the hardest part of swimming for me to figure out. We finned along a wall of rocks, taking in the tiny tropical worlds inches below the surface. Layers of coral and gray-green grass and dark plu...

10/29/13, Tuesday 1. welcome to the rainforest After a morning of thwarted laundry, we set out for El Yunque , the rainforest and national park in the center-east of the island. As soon as we saw a sign that said Welcome to the Rainforest, something in me shifted—a tension I wasn’t even aware of released, and I started to cry. So I know, now, that hypnotherapy is working, because the rainforest is my mental safe place. Don’t laugh. Que pasó, El Yunque? We explored a visitor’s center built like a tree house and sat impatiently as a bossy, faux-friendly guide narrated a map that only had one road. Then we took off up that road toward the mountainous cloud forest in the heart of El Yunque. I tried not to be the asshole who constantly talked about one rainforest expedition while on another. But: El Yunque was quite American with its well marked roads and trails, whereas Bako was wild and tricky to navigate. I remembered B staying behind at the cabin, fuming that Ryan ha...

We interrupt the Blog As You Are Project to bring you the Way Too Many Details From My Puerto Rico Trip Project! I feel very old-school, posting excerpts from my travel journal almost a week after returning. A proper modern traveler would upload pics as she went and not use much text at all. But one of the best parts of the trip was the internet detox component, which I’m doing my best to maintain now that I’m home. So far this has translated into checking Facebook five times a day instead of fifteen. It’s an uphill battle. 10/27/13, Sunday 1. just like ricky martin After a long travel day and a logistical morning, we made it out to Corozal, a hilly inland town where we had a date with Rafael to ride horses. AK found him through a confederacy of tourist activities called PR For Less. Dos Hermanos ranch was a small, square, flat-roofed house painted light green. Behind it, a stable with rusting, corrugated tin walls. Dos Hermanos, un camino. A handful of scruffy, fr...