Saturday fires.

Pictured: my mother (and me, in carriage) in 1984 on the Brooklyn Bridge, she was 31 years old.

I made the frame from burned kitchen matches, which Alice and I spent the better part of an hour outside lighting (8 at a time) and yelling more than necessary. The yelling was due in part to the whiskey-- but mostly just proximity to each other.

Puppies have work to do.

Gramps is at work with me today. Beat that, cute-overload!

Thankful

Every week I help run a mentorship program for preteen girls called SOHO, which stands for space of her own. The girls come every week for a year and eat dinner together and then spend the evening working on projects geared towards a year-end renovation of their room, a la trading spaces. Tonight we had a dinner talk about friends + what makes a good friend. We took pieces of paper and wrote words that described a good friends, which also turned out to be words that we all hoped would describe us too. Earlier in the evening I had put tape on everyone's foreheads, and after we all shared our words and then got to work sewing pillows for their rooms, I walked around and put the words on each girl's forehead.

Amidst the exhaustion and the lack of free time...The piles of unfinished things all over my house and my life, I can tell you one thing for sure. I am thankful.

What a day

I am so excited for the future!

Pretty silly...rings?

The beginnings of a new line!

A Rickety day.

As a Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn baby, Astroland wasn't an amusement park to me, but rather a daily part of life. If we went anywhere, we surely passed the park, and Saturdays were often spent on the boardwalk of Coney Island. It is strange, to be a beach-community child in the biggest, loudest city in America. It doesn't make sense, that I grew up in Brooklyn, but most times in a bathing suit, body caked in sand like a veal cutlet, feet slapping as I ran across the boardwalk's storm-worn wooden planks.

My first hot dog was a Nathan's hot dog. My grandfather, now deceased, helped to build the Parachute Jump when he was young, living in a colorful and exciting New York that makes me jealous to imagine. Whenever traveling on the Belt Parkway I see the parachute jump from the road and laugh at what a powerful mark my family seems to leave on everything it touches, on the landscape of the world itself. The good and the bad.

The Wonder Wheel, I was sure was the center of the universe. When I sat on the rickety old, colorful metal seats, soaring above the beach next to mom or as the case may be, Dad, I imagined that it was the place where my divorced family by some miracle might be able to mend itself. It was there, high above Brooklyn that I felt my world connected. Mom and Dad were both allowed on the Wonder Wheel. Goodbye, Astroland.

Excuse me miss, but it is time to get up.