House Beautiful

Tag Archive for 'dad'

The Wisest of Words

My Dad passed this to me at the kitchen table this morning over coffee and said: “This reminds me of you”… probably because I drank a boatload of wine & ate a trough of pasta last night, and am about to go on a sprint-around-the-cornfields-until-my-thighs-don’t-rub-together-anymore run.  Or maybe because I (and I think a lot of us) hustle hard throughout the year, but REALLY let it all hang out over the holidays… for instance, I can barely button my pants, and I dare you to ask Karrie the last time she washed her hair (I guarantee she doesn’t know).  But ye know what?  It’s all gonna be allllright.  Because on any non-holly-day, I subsist on kale & rabbit food, sprinkled with Twizzlers, and get my a$$ up at 5:00am every weekday so I can go to yoga or sprint up the canyon next to my house – because making that a priority every day makes me 100 times better at everything else I do.  And Karrie has like, 900 reality shows in production and she & her brain never (ever) slow down.  The point is, that balance quote is a great reminder that working hard and being disciplined is great, but so is playing hard and taking a load off…  and it’s hard to appreciate one without the other.  It all ebbs and flows.  So if your gut fulla pecan pie is hanging over your waistband – don’t sweat it!  We’ll sweat it out together in January.

Happy Monday!!

**image source unknown

Quote of the Week

I don’t think DVF’s words could be more appropriate after what happened in Boston last week.  At the risk of sounding morbid, the marathon bombings made it profoundly clear to me that none of us *really* knows how much longer we get to be here… It could be 50 more years, or it could be 50 more seconds.  And while that is a tough pill to swallow, my GOODNESS.  When you think about it that way, doesn’t it make you want to smile at everyone you see, squeeze everyone you love, put your face towards the sun, take deeper breaths…  maybe do a little jig on the street, like this little nugget?  (That is SJP‘s daughter, Tabitha.)  BAH! This kid has it all figured out.  I’m certain of it.

Surely we all have plenty on our plates that we can choose to let consume us with worry: next week’s HUGE meeting, finances, the number on the scale, the fact that the dog just chewed the legs off the couch – whatever.  Or (!!%^&$#!), we can choose to do the absolute best we can where each of those things are concerned… (exhale), and then let ’em go.  Because in the end, they’re trivial and they don’t really matter. So, nobody asked my opinion, but here it is anyhow:  I’m with Diane.  I think we oughta all make the choice to be in a good mood, find some sublime in the every day ordinary and enjoy our lives exactly as they are.

Okay here – I’ll start.  Off the top of my head from the past week, some of mine are:

1.  Watching my golden retriever, Gus, cheerfully frolic and gallup and buck around the backyard like an absolute lunatic because we just got home.  I’m keenly aware that my little man won’t be around forever, and it makes me love the everloving bejesus out of him a little bit more every day.

2.  Sitting at the movies with Matt and hugging his cashmere-sweater-clad, (buff… rawr) arm, inhaling his cologne, and hardly being able to remember a time when I didn’t know him.

3.  Listening to my Dad chuckle a hearty, country-boy chuckle after he just made a dirty joke.

4.  How inexplicably sweet and delicious the first sip of a cocktail is at the end of the day.  Out here.

5.  The smell of coffee, the dull gurgle of it while it brews and the sound of lawnmowers humming outside on sunny Saturday mornings.

It all just doesn’t suck, kids!  I’m just sayin’.  I’m sure we all have a lot we could complain about, but today we’re all still here, and that in and of itself is outstanding. So I think we all oughta be really nice to each other and make the absolute best of what we’ve got, whatever that may be.  Hi-5’s all around.

So those were my subliminally ordinary favorite things…  what are yours??

Tabitha’s Photo Credit