Bread and Bread

1. just imagine the horizontal plane as facebook Margot, my church therapist (not to be confused with my regular therapist, couples therapist, physical therapist or radiation therapist), was talking about the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. The former is the everyday stuff, the latter is the sublime. They intersect and form a cross, she said, unless cross imagery makes you uncomfortable. People at All Saints are always apologizing for sounding too Christian. Fabulous jewelry doesn't make me uncomfortable. The good thing about Shitty Life Events, she said, is that they break you open and allow you to access the vertical plane, where God and Jesus and Buddha and the best book you ever read live. I mean, she said, the horizontal plane is still valid and important. Some people live their whole lives there. (And when I studied Margot’s amazing preppy angora cardigan, I believed that she had an investment in the horizontal plane.) But they’re missing out. ...

Even the most bad-ass dinosaurs have a dapper side. Once upon a time my friend Rhonda and I admitted to each other how much we hated that bumper sticker that says: Well-behaved women rarely make history. We sighed. Looks like we’ll never make history . She called me in tears the other night. She’d taken three hundred kids on a field trip to the Natural History Museum. She didn’t have as many chaperones as the museum’s guidelines stipulated, but the administration at her school assured her they never check those things. And her kids were well-behaved, mostly eighteen, and really wanted to see a T-rex or two. Nothing went wrong in any serious way, but some kids wandered too far off grounds for lunch, and others laughed at an elementary school kid who dropped his lunch box, and a girl with mental health issues strayed from the group. Next thing you know the cops have an APB out for the girl, and Rhonda’s school is getting kicked out of the museum. “I try to follow the rules...

Zelda Kennedy is one of my favorite people at All Saints because her sermons frequently quote plays and musicals, and because she hugs parishioners like she means it. This morning she quoted a line from The Velveteen Rabbit, which made me cry when I was six and believed my stuffed animals had souls (I still kind of do) and again today. Something along the lines of: “If you become real, you will get worn down and used up, but you will never be ugly to anyone who understands what it means to be real.” Someone could probably put together one of those photo comparisons a la Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War for me in 2011. Which is not to say that my recent howls of thwarted entitlement* are the same as the Civil War, just that, well, it’s been real, and I think I have some fine lines to show for it. I’ve had a very nice week-plus off. Last night AK and I rang in the new year with Pedro, Stephen, Maria and Calvin at Onyx , after a potluck dinner at the boys’ place around the ...