Newness

A lot of times i think of my mom when I fall in love with a new shoe or hair color or pant leg length (currently coveting some vintage flea market bell bottoms for spring).  I shared all of these things with her.  I’d snap a pic and text her a new lilac Mac lip stick, my newly cut bangs, a Ralph Lauren collection dress that I’d fished out of a sample sale bin.  

So I had that thought as I ordered my avocado toast and veggie scrambled eggs in a sunlit, high ceiling, hard wood floor café in Tribeca.  My mom would have cooed with delight particularly at the avocado filled with humus in the cavity where the seed should’ve been.  It was covered in specks that looked to be either Flax of Chia.  When my mom visited her offspring in NY, it could sometimes be like seeing the city anew through her eyes.  You'd share in the experience of seeing everything new. 

As I sat down to snap a picture of my breakfast, I opened the message screen to text my mom about my newly discovered morning commute haven.  I do this a lot.  I'll begin to call her or text her.  After a year, my habits are a phantom, an invisible trick, a persisting wish.  I want to update her on all the new things in my life.  And, it is always the mundane things carry the most urgency.  It is never as much the mile stones.  It is the workout regimen (currently dance cardio & sculpt), the new Beyonce song, a new hair conditioner.  Our ritual was to try on and delight in everything new.  New doesn’t make it better than the old.  It can sometimes remind you how great the old is.

If you live in newness the way my mom did, you might dye your hair burgundy, then bleach it blond, and finally jet black.  You may be the most fashionable of all your friends and try to get them to juice and eat organically years ago, before anyone was. 

If I cultivate that newness, then she can be, instead of a bank of old memories, always new.  Which is how she always was to me, my brothers, and anyone who knew her.