Getting out and getting on

November snuck up on me like a toddler on the war path, grabbing me behind the knees and knocking me flat.

Where on Earth has the time gone?

Time has flown since we bid another Jewish holiday season a fond adieu. I slipped away one Sunday afternoon, leaving my husband with soccer chauffeur duty, and hopped on a bus downtown to attend my cousin's wedding. The bus ride was fascinating. We meandered through mostly unfamiliar territory, much of it charming and trendy. My heart skipped a beat as I passed a bar festooned with my beloved alma mater The University of Texas Longhorns banners, and a longhorn flag displayed proudly outside. A sign proclaimed this establishment as the official home of the "Texas Exes". I filed the information away in my mental database for future reference.

I passed a Trader Joe's, home of the best parve chocolate chips ever.

I passed many stores and pubs that sparked my imagination, and brought me in to a nostalgic reverie. Aaah, to be young, single, and carefree again! It was an odd thought to have on the way to a wedding.

This was the second wedding in several months connected to my dear Tio Julio, of blessed memory. The first was over the summer when I celebrated the wedding of my adorable little cousin to an even more adorable young woman who is crushing me in Facebook Scrabble at this very moment. It was a wedding that dispelled the pain of loss with it's beauty and joy. Julio passed away over ten years ago and didn't get to see his baby under the chuppah.

Nor did he get to see his second wife's son marry. The first wedding was fraught with emotional intricacies, a by-product of a bitter divorce. This one carried cultural complications. It was an interfaith affair, a blending of several families and cultures. The venue was industrial and chic, with exposed brick, steel, and cement. It was small and cozy and suited the mood. The wedding was lovely, but bittersweet. I was reunited with a family that had taken me in for holidays a decade ago when I was in Boston. It was hard to see the patriarch of the family, once a brilliant man, stricken down by Parkinson's disease, and the son, succumbing to an incurable cancer, surrounded and celebrating with his beautiful family. I left the wedding filled with joy and sadness. I drifted home on the bus gazing past bars and shops feeling the passage of time more acutely than ever.

I made a new friend over the past few weeks. We had met before and had a few tenuous connections through mutual friends, but we finally followed through on our promises to get together. My new friend is as right brained as it gets. She is a musician, a piano teacher, a writer and an artist. I marvel at her wealth of talent, in contrast to the dearth of my own. Our lives are so different. She is a divorcee with no children, living alone in a beautiful home, getting along in life despite a debilitating disease. She travels in the beautiful intersections of life where music, art and language meld together. I live in a small clutter of toys, books, and crayon drawings. My music is the sing-songy minuets of giggling children, the dramatic rhapsodies of full-on melt downs, and the fugues of bickering and arguments.

Yet, we have found much common ground, sharing an obsession with politics and a mutual therapeutic need to get out of the house. Last weekend she treated me to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, the Inca Trail. I was mesmerized, not by the "multi-media" screen that hung over the stage flashing photographs, art, and colorful images (it looked like a fancy screensaver to me), but by the percussion section scurrying around, playing a wide array of instruments in the background. The hall was packed with very hip, young, Latin Americans, and my ears delighted as much to the diverse genres of music, as to the Spanish language all around.

Tomorrow I'm taking my mother-in-law and the big kids to a fundraising concert for their school. Members of the CSO will be performing, and they will have a musical instrument "petting zoo" for the kids during the intermission. I am pleased to be exposing my children to classical music. My husband is pleased to have us out of his hair.

My husband will spend the day working on yet another paper. It is said that the third year of law school is the easiest, but I haven't seen any evidence of this assertion yet. All I know is that November has sneaked up on us all. The temperatures keep lifting half-heartedly, and dropping with a thud, then rising a bit more before I dig out warmer coats again. Deadlines appear for my husband like a cop parked out over a hill, sending adrenalin and stress hormones coursing through his body. It's all a blur to me. Holidays blending into simchas blending into nights out with a friend, and a day out with the kids. Soccer season begins in the hot sun, and ends in a windy chill. And I just get older and fatter.

Time keeps marching on and gravity pulls me along with it.