My life lately has seemed to go in a circle, but not in a bad way. I do not feel like I am circling the drain or anything; instead, I am reconnecting with past enjoyments, whether people or things, and placing them squarely in my present and future. While it’s always nice to see where you’re going, there’s something that can be said for being reminded of where you came from. So to this end, on a college visit with my son last weekend in Athens, I invited myself over to the house of a college friend, and over a few hours, three decades melted away. I received a surprise invitation from another college friend, soon to be in Savannah, who needs an accomplice for a variety of bookish things. My reading lately has included books that I last read in college — sometimes reading the actual book itself. In those decades-old books it is amusing to see the marks I made and the notes I took in the margin — all of which seem to reflect so much learning and so little wisdom. And perhaps as a nod to my eight year-old self, a self who practically lived for art class, I have gravitated to art lessons.

The first attempt came a few years ago with painting classes. Before taking these classes, painting had seemed so easy, the high price of paintings themselves unfathomable. And then I stood at an easel before a blank sheet facing a variety of forms in light and shadow, charcoal vine in hand, and I learned what unfathomable really meant. Each class lasted three hours on a Saturday afternoon, and I would drag home exhausted, eyes barely open. I have studiously avoided painting and drawing since then, preferring easier creative pursuits, like sewing and knitting and writing. But my daughter is an artist, and at her urging, I recently bought a sketch pad, a pack of vines. I promised to try again. She tells me to save what I make, not to destroy it, and to learn from it. She tells me to draw large, not small, and to leave my mark.

And if you read last week, you will also know that she told me to sign up both of us for metalsmithing. Virtually powerless to resist her (reasonable) demands, I did, and it has turned into a pleasure. Fittingly enough, Tuesday’s class — our third — involved crafting circles. Bangles, that is, and stamped ones at that.  Mine is unfinished, but here it is.

Looking at it, you may be struck by just how unspectacular and very ordinary it is. If you are struck by those thoughts, it is clear that you have never taken a metalsmithing class. For if you had, you would recognize the process that led to this simple bangle.

This bracelet began as part of a sheet of 18 gauge brass. Our class had a single sheet of brass wide enough for bracelets, so our teacher cleaved it off and rationed it out into one-half inch wide strips. Since I planned to stamp the brass, I first had to do some annealing — heating the metal to make it more malleable. So the strip went on its side into some aquarium rocks, and a butane torch went into my right hand, and I slowly waved the torch back and forth over the metal until it turned a dusty red. It goes into a water bath (complete with a satisfying sizzle) and then the pickle, an acid bath that remains heated in a crock pot.

(I will say right now that if I am ever invited to an art department potluck — an unlikely event, but can you ever be so careful that you cannot make crazy contingency plans?  — I will studiously avoid the offerings of the metalsmiths. Our studio crock pot holds the pickle. Lovely hand-crafted bowls hold water. And my favorite — a harmless looking, exceedingly cheerful pink and white mug — bears a Sharpie legend that includes a smiley face and the word “acid.” With this knowledge, I would look askance at any metalsmither’s food container, no matter how innocuous, no matter how inviting.)

But the metal comes out of the pickle, and the metal goes again into the water, and the now-bendable metal, a strange shade of red, makes its way to your workbench, where it stares at you, plain and full of possibilities. There it is, depending on you for direction and shape, and there you are, scratching your head, uncertain of what to do with so many options.

This pattern — my pattern — came from a piece of wire screen that I pulled out of neat diamonds into distorted, irregular openings. To transfer the screen onto the metal, I used a metal roller press — a vise-like device that looked a bit like an instrument of torture — and imprinted the screen onto the brass strip. I took it back to the bench and hammered the edges, and hammered them some more. (It had been a frustrating day at work, and on those days in particular, hammering is especially gratifying.) And then I tried to get the ends to meet.

If you ever want an exercise in frustration, I invite you to try to line up exactly the two ends of a half-inch metal strip into a circle. Go ahead. Try it! You will start with the strip roughly in the shape of a D-ring, and then you will file the two ends to try to get them perfectly straight and aligned, and then you will put tension on the metal by overlapping it, and then the ends will magically pop into place against each other, separated by no visible light.

Except it doesn’t work like that. The mythical meeting would be tantalizingly close, and suddenly farther apart after a bout of filing, and curse words would hover on my lips — until I finally did what any responsible almost 48 year-old woman would do: I whined to the teacher.  (I am not proud.)

At this point, the bangle is still shaped like a D-ring, and with the flat side down, you begin a process with flux (sort of like a sticky glue), solder (the metal that will fill the seam), and the dance of the torch. With the heat as high as it will go — or with a soldering torch in each hand — you heat the entire bangle in a circular motion. When the bangle glows (and it will!), you hit the soldered seam straight on, so that the solder flows into the seam and seals it.  After cooling and pickling the bangle, it goes onto a mandrel — a steel cylinder — and using a rubber mallet, it gets beaten into a circle. All of the heat makes the metal soft, so you have to keep hammering the bangle until it has no give.

And I did all of this, and just like magic, I had a circle.

Except it wasn’t magic. It was a lot of work, a little imagination, some help from the teacher. It was gabbing with friends in class, listening to the radio, pretending to be a bad metalsmithing gang member when “Beat It” played. It was learning new things and not getting them all right. It was making ends meet. It was looking forward to the next session, with plenty of time with a file and a buffer to smooth off the rough edges. It was being in a pickle and getting out of it. It was the pride of an ugly solder seam. It was realizing the possibilities accompanying a blank slate, grabbing some tools, and jumping in, enthusiastically and imperfectly. All to form a crazy little circle unlike any other crazy little circle made by anyone else.

ALC

My daughter and I are taking a six-week long metalsmithing course. It is excellent. It involves the use of hammers and metal snips, guillotine-like cutters, mandrels and liver of sulfur, drills, polishers, sandpaper and bright shiny sheets of copper and brass and silver. Most satisfyingly, the class allows the use of a butane soldering torch that ignites with a satisfying pop when engaged, an instrument that softens the flux and melts the solder in mesmerizing fashion.

I am hooked, although I joined the class reluctantly. I offered to take an art class with my daughter under the guise of scratching my creative itch, and I felt certain that she would choose a ceramics class or a sculpture class, which would have been my choice. I did what I could to influence her, but at the end of the day, she chose metalsmithing. So I went along. Her brother’s imminent departure has made me realize that her own departure is two short years behind, and that realization has spurred a bout of responsible and attentive parenting. It is a sprint to the finish line, to be sure, and if it is a sprint that brings the opportunity for hand-crafted jewelry, all the better.

Last night we learned how to make cuffs. The easy part was taking a sheet of 22 gauge copper, using the guillotine to cut a tidy 6 x 1.5 inch strip, and grabbing a rubber mallet to hammer it flat. The hard part was figuring out exactly what to do with that copper strip. I thought about it, and messed around on a small scrap of copper, and set to work on a hammered design that rose to masterpiece level in my imagination. Confident and excited, I started pinging the copper with various sized strikes, and I held it up to admire my work.

I hated it. It looked like a car after a hailstorm.

So I turned it over and looked at the underside. It made so much more sense, the various indentations like little dancing bubbles undulating happily just under the surface. I started striking the edges with a hammer to roughen them up, and then I realized that I wanted a word on my cuff.

Only one word came to mind, immediately and without thought: TENDERNESS.

The teacher had taught us how to strike letters on the metal, and at my insistence, she showed the class how to measure, mark, and align the letters in a perfectly straight line in the exact center of the piece. So this is what I had planned, and a few years ago, this is what I would have done: a flawless, rigid word perfectly in place.

But I looked again at the little dancing bubbles undulating happily under the surface, and I thought for a split-second about TENDERNESS, and I realized exactly why I wanted it on this bracelet. It is a song that Chris and I danced to in college, a song that I owned both on cassette tape and CD, a song that I searched out and listened to this afternoon, a song that feels like happy bubbles. So I took the letter stamps in my left hand, and a hammer in my right, and singing to myself, I pounded out TENDERNESS on my cuff. It meanders crookedly over the surface, missing the little bubbles, in a mere approximation of being centered, three stamped hearts to the left to even everything out, one of the three Es only half struck. I sanded off the rough edges, smoothed down the burrs, roughed it up, applied patina in a haphazard stream, and stuck it on my wrist. A classmate showed me her cuff — it was beautiful, a sophisticated masterpiece both imagined and executed — and looked at mine. It’s, um, very whimsical, she said carefully.

And so it is.

Its whimsy does not bother me one bit. As my life becomes easier and looser, as more things flow over me, as I feel more like that 17 year-old girl who threw her arms in the air and sang loudly along to TENDERNESS, I sometimes feel bad for all of those wasted years. I find it hard not to beat myself up for all that rigidity and those feeble attempts at perfection. I think of all the fun that I missed.

But forgiving myself has gotten easier lately, thanks to an essay that I read recently by Malcolm Gladwell. He has published a number of things in the New Yorker, a magazine that Chris subscribed to for many years — all to the end of my reading Shouts and Murmurs, anything by David Sedaris, some of the poetry, and all of the cartoons before recycling a giant heap of New Yorkers in frustration for not having read the informative and lengthy essays of writers like, and including, Malcolm Gladwell. As penance for my sins, I picked up a collection of his essays (What the Dog Saw) at a thrift store for a dollar, and when I finish other books, I read an essay to cleanse the palate. These essays will make me hell-on-wheels at any cocktail party, for I have read about the advertising woman who single-handedly made it acceptable for American women to color their hair, why there is only one acceptable flavor of ketchup yet many varieties of mustard, Ron Popeil of Ronco fame, how choking differs from panicking, and the economic and social costs of managing homelessness. (If you are interested, I will lend my copy to you, with the understanding that we will not go to the same cocktail parties.)

But the essay that really interested me was called Late Bloomers, and it talked about how society tends to think of geniuses as child prodigies. But, as Gladwell writes, some geniuses just need a little more time and a little more practice. He contrasted a young novelist who instantly came up with a book idea, wrote the book in a number of weeks, and got it published in short order with a 50 year old writer who sat at his dining room table every day for weeks on end, and after years of writing and polishing and following his interests turned out a beautifully written novel. Gladwell surmises that late bloomers are hard, requiring forbearance, blind faith, and a patron — none of which detracts from the beauty that they produce.

I am no genius, but this description resonated with me. I love the thought that some people just take a little longer to get it right. I feel like one of those people, at least when it comes to living my life. And viewing myself as a late bloomer makes letting go of the regret easier. The mistakes seem purposeful, the unkindnesses can be forgiven, the self can be developed over the time, the stream of tiny undulating bubbles under the surface can rise to the top — pop pop pop — with iridescent bursts of joy as I practice and hammer away, stamping TENDERNESS crookedly and singing aloud.

ALC

When I told people that I was going to Miami on Tuesday, they practically squealed with excitement. It was a common refrain: Miami? I LOVE Miami! And then a series of recommendations would follow, encompassing both places to eat and places to go. I told everyone (truthfully, I thought) that I had not been to Miami before, although when I walked through the Miami International Airport, I realized that yes! — yes I had been to Miami — at least two or three times before.

Which leads to this confession: Miami is not my favorite place. I realize that this admission will permanently remove me from the roster of the Will Smith Fan Club, bar me from ever naming fish “Crockett and Tubbs,” ban me from watching those last few seasons of Dexter on Netflix, and make me feel slightly guilty every single time I hear a Pitbull song, every single time Mr. 305 checks in for the remix. I also realize that this admission will lead to my discussing my true feelings about the city with only two friends — I’m looking at you, Tom and Joe — who have confided in me that they feel the same way.

I think part of it, and maybe most if not all of it, has to do with where I have to go when I am in Miami: I end up downtown. I have a sneaking suspicion that spending all of my time in downtown Miami, and judging the city solely on that basis, would be like my inviting you to my home and allowing you only a view of my linen closet. Yes, it is functional and practical, and it serves its purpose, but it lacks the coziness of the living room, the warmth of the dining room, the abundance of the back yard.

This time in Miami, I ended up on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse, a functional and practical place if ever there were one. I salute federal courthouses for their stubborn refusal to obey the floor numbering conventions of other buildings, all of whom treat the 13th floor as unlucky. No doubt you know what I mean. You walk into a hotel elevator, look at the number pad, and see that floors skip from 12 to 14. I have often thought that this is a handy convention, and one that would be beneficial in my life. There are some years that I would have liked to have skipped, say, part of 1984 to part of 1985, and part of 2013 to part of 2014. Wouldn’t be nice if our own personal key pad — the one that sails us upward on our own trajectory — allowed us to skip times of turmoil, pain, and heartbreak, all because those years were simply too unlucky to be acknowledged, too painful to be visited?

Alas, it is not so.

And it was not so at the Miami courthouse as I pressed the 13th floor button. When I stepped out the elevator and into the vestibule, I saw this through floor to ceiling windows, a view that took my breath away:

There it was, Miami imagined as a giant Lego set, blocks stacked in regular colors and repetitive patterns on an immovable grid. So I walked to the other side of the 13th floor, and I saw this through floor to ceiling windows, another view that took my breath away:

There it was, some of old Miami wedged in with new Miami. And I think this picture captures some of my discomfort in this city, for if you look carefully and blow up this photo, you will see exactly six people. It is 1 p.m. on a 65 degree day in South Florida in a congested metropolitan area.

I felt so disconnected.

When I go places I like — places like Austin and Athens, New Orleans and San Francisco, Manhattan — I invariably imagine my life there, my friends, my house, my morning walks. I browse real estate magazines over glasses of tea and think, yes, I could see myself in a 2BR, 2BA restored Craftsman bungalow in walking distance to campus, or a tiny jewel in the Garden District, interior needs work, or a two story townhouse with a view of Coit Tower, or a rare unfinished loft space in Chelsea overlooking flower vendors. It is a pleasurable diversion from my real life, a clean slate, an unwritten log. Food for thought. What I would take. What I would keep. What I would let go.

But Miami fostered none of this, the curiosity of a plan B. I even tried taking the train, a typically sure-fire way to feel like a local. Although one person at the station gave me directions, I found myself riding alone in the car to the airport. Later, as the plane lifted off, I saw this from the window, another view that took my breath away:

After the plane landed in Atlanta, I walked around the airport to kill time. It seemed that everyone other than me on Concourse C had been to the national college football championship game. I had watched the first half of it with my family the night before, sitting in front of a fire and dispensing maternal wisdom. I find myself a true fan in the midst of non-believers. My son dutifully memorizes stats and yardage, players’ names and positions, teams’ past victories and defeats. My daughter sometimes musters a little heart, feigns a little interest. My husband bothers with neither. There I was, having given up on Chris but trying to teach my children well, to inculcate them with my own belief system in the hope that they, too, would find the religion.

You may be trying to figure out which team to root for, I started. All three of them assured me that they had not. Well, I continued, here’s the general rule. Clemson is an ACC team, and Alabama is an SEC team, and in a bowl game or a championship game, SEC fans typically root for an SEC team, even if it’s a team that an SEC fan never would root for otherwise. If that’s not enough, Georgia’s new head coach is the d-coordinator at Alabama, and he deserves our loyalty. That means that I am cheering for Alabama, and while you may yell for whichever team you want, I think that you should root for Alabama, too.

One of my children pointed out that I had always referred to that school as Ala-damn-bama, but undeterred, I tried to teach them how to say “Roll Tide” in a credible manner. No one took me up on it. Spurned by my family and left to my own devices in the Atlanta airport, I started saying “ROLL TIDE!” (softly at first, then a little louder) at everyone wearing crimson or houndstooth. Although I was not their mother, they took to it far more naturally and fervently than my own children. But I piped down when I took my seat, for the plane was full of Clemson fans, a veritable dead man walking at 34,000 feet.

On the drive home — 17 hours after I left it that morning — I thought about my trip. How I reached out to Alabama fans to feel some sort of connection. How all of the pictures I took of Miami were through windows. How the trip sparked no wanderlust, no thoughts of plan B. I sat in my driveway for a moment and assessed my house. Charming, colorful, well-loved brick Colonial overlooking park in established neighborhood. Perfect family home. I entered quietly, slipped into bed, and felt Chris’ feet grow like tendrils toward my calves, his arm twine around my waist. Welcome home, he whispered. There’s no place I’d rather be, I whispered back.

ALC

This morning in the driveway beside my car, as I pondered the question that plagues me every work day — Exactly what I am forgetting? — something the size of a small cat flew perilously close to my left cheek. In the same instant I heard a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh flapping noise and felt a generated breeze and looked to see a juvenile hawk flying from the dogwood behind me to the holly in front of me. He made it inelegantly, but he made it, and I watched as he surveyed his domain and wondered if there was a nest nearby.

My urban neighborhood is lousy with hawks. I have seen them sitting on stop signs and park benches, and on one very cold morning, as I began to step out of the house to collect the newspaper,  I saw one eating a squirrel on my front porch. Until this morning, I had seen only one juvenile, trying to catch a squirrel of his own in the neighbor’s oak tree but managing only to plant his talons on a branch and swing under, lose his grip, and fall in an ungainly heap on the roof of a minivan. The squirrel scampered off.

But this particular juvenile hawk on this particular morning seemed like a harbinger for the year ahead. Never content to deal with worries as they arise, I like to plan my anxieties well in advance, and at this time last year, I had begun to dread this time this year, which would mark the last few months that my son was home before he left for college. A year ago I figured that this would be a sad and dour time, a nostalgic highlight reel of all the good times that we had had, a liberal dose of tears buffered with sympathetic pats on the back.

I needn’t have bothered.

Instead of a doomsday scenario, I have an 18 year-old chomping at the bit to get on with his life. He does not have one foot out the door. Oh, no. He has both feet, a suitcase, a steamer trunk, and a packed U-Haul out the door, and if I could wrangle early admission for him at an institution of higher learning — and trust me, I’ve tried — I would. But we are stuck with him for a few more months, and he is stuck with us, and we now have exchanges like this one in the kitchen last night:

Son: So I was watching Louie on Netflix, and he said the funniest thing.

Me: Oh yeah? What was it?

Son: He talked about being 20 years old and dealing with his mother — his first love, he called her —  and how all of a sudden she looked so old and would not stop talking, and how he loved her so much, but she made him . . . Oh. Wait. Wait.

He stopped because what he was saying, and to whom he was saying it, dawned on him, and he felt bad. He shouldn’t have. I knew exactly what he meant, and it was true. In a few short years, used to his own rules and his own schedule, I would look so old and wouldn’t be able to shut up. And I found myself explaining to him that everyone’s mother, in her own special way, made every child slightly crazy, but it was a crazy tinged with guilt by that whole “first love” thing. (Which really is a lovely way of looking at it.)

But I am so happy for him, with his whole life sprawling out before him and his enthusiasm to get on with it. We are going to look at colleges in a few weekends, just the two of us. I remember 31 years ago, when my father took me to look at colleges, and I promptly abandoned him. Well aware that what comes around, goes around, I view my roles on this trip as chauffeur and financier, logistics coordinator and procurement officer. I figure that our most meaningful time together will be in the car. I am excited, for it will be a long drive.

I am excited, too, that my own life has begun to change. Sunday afternoon brought a whiff of this, when I went to see a movie all by myself. (I am writing it again, just to convince myself that it really happened: I went to see a movie alone.) I find that I can cultivate my own hobbies and interests again, and carve out time for myself, and actually ask myself this question without fear of being overly selfish: Exactly what is it that you want to do?

I first asked myself that question a few weeks ago, and as I hemmed and hawed and thought of everything I needed to do instead of exactly what I wanted to do, I realized that its absence from my life was unsettling. Parenting had placed its slender finger on the pause button, and now it had hit play. I resolved then to ask myself that question more often, and in the last few weeks, I have. Exactly what is it that you want to do?

My answers have not surprised me, but a lack of feeling selfish has. The movie. Some writing. Knitting. Reading. A walk. The luxury of a nap. A dinner with friends. So here it is. A different yet familiar life sprawling out before me, too.

And I suppose that’s all part of it. My children are growing up, moving on. Going forward, our relationship will no longer revolve around the day-to-day happenings of the home, but around the bigger world out there. The friendships, the connections. The interests, the passions. The little disappointments, the heartbreaks. A relationship marked perhaps by more talking, less time together. A relationship where I won’t be able to shut up, at the risk of making my children crazy, about the beauty and abundance of a quiet life.

ALC