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“Now my father’s brother,” my dad says, “he was nothing like that. He took after his mother all the way. He was nothing like his father. Nothing. That was the better way to go, that was my uncle Joseph. He was like his mother, he was kind, he was hardworking. He was in a band, I forget the name but they were big. This one guy in the band, he didn’t stay with it, he went on to be a priest, but for a while he was the number one player in the world on the, what do you call it?” He holds his hands up ambiguously. “The bass. He was the number one bass player in the world. He was dating this gal once, they went into the city on a date, they went to the Copacabana. This was back when the Copa was a real place to be seen. She said to him, do you like it here? Could you see yourself playing here? And he said yeah, of course, and she said if you marry me I’ll buy it for you. But he turned her down, if you can believe it, and he went to be a priest instead.”

My dad tells me this story while we’re sitting on the edge of the sand at the lake, back near the grass and the picnic table, clinging to a little edge of shade under a tree. There are ants everywhere and we pretend it’s not a problem. I have never heard this story before–I’m not sure, before today, I would have been able to tell you that my father had an uncle named Joseph–but it is so typically one of my dad’s stories. The only way this could be a more typical-of-my-dad story is if some celebrity entered the narrative.

Wait for it.

“But while they were big, they were a big deal. Frank Sinatra wanted to sing with them once and Joseph turned him down! Joseph said he wasn’t that good. But it was early in his career, Frank Sinatra, nobody knew who he was. I think his mother–you know my grandmother, Angelina, Joseph’s mother, I think Frank Sinatra’s mother was a friend of hers. They were in Hoboken but they came from Sicily. That’s where my grandmother came from, she was from Palermo. You’ve never seen anyone who worked as hard as my grandmother, every day of her life.”

On the card, the daughter of cups is a duckling casting a rainbow shadow. The guidebook says she represents a creative and emotional person, distressed by conflict.

Today is definitely a “daughter” day, since today’s expedition is a trip to my parents with Declan. They have a membership at a swim club with an artificial lake, and every year I suspect they’re holding on to this membership for the small handful of days each summer that Declan and I manage to go to the lake with them. My mother says that they go sometimes in the evening to eat dinner at the picnic table and enjoy the breeze–she claims the small artificial lake somehow has a lake breeze?

Dec is still at that age where his brain is focused on finding routines, and he finds both comfort and joy in situations where we do things the same way as we’ve always done it, which sometimes just means the same way we did it last time, but whatever. There’s definitely a routine to days where we go to the lake with Nana, over the last few years. As soon as he’s awake we pack up our stuff, and our first stop is bagels. I’ll eat my bagel while I’m driving, he’ll pick listlessly at his because somehow he doesn’t actually like bagels? (I am one hundred percent sure that he would love bagels if he would agree to get his toasted and buttered, but he says no, and while I will pester him about food I won’t fight or force him, so he takes his sad dry cinnamon raisin bagel and picks the raisins out of it.) We pick up bagels for my parents too; my mom says to not bring them any extras, just one bagel each, my dad says to bring half a dozen sesame. It’s a toss-up every time which parent I will disappoint.

At my parents’ house, my mother will make eggs or something for Declan, sometimes French toast, don’t worry, my child isn’t starving over the bagel issue. Then my parents will bicker extensively as we get ready to go to the lake. My mother packs a small cooler with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, juice boxes, bits of fruit wrapped up in paper towels, a little ziploc of damp paper towels to use as hand wipes. They will argue over who is taking which car (we need two cars to bring four people a distance of two miles, but my parents have four cars for a two-person household, I mean, what is even going on there) and who is running what errands on the way, why can’t my mother bring the beach chairs in her car, why does my father have boxes of cardboard in his trunk anyway, who asked you you fucking idiot, you keep your goddamn mouth shut, etc etc. It’s a whole process.

Yesterday’s expedition was the New York Botanical Garden. It was my first time at the NYBG, but as Declan reminded me several times, it wasn’t his first time–his grandparents have taken him to the train show there, and he did a school field trip in the beginning of second grade. He couldn’t remember where in the garden his field trip went, but we have a piece of graph paper tacked to our dining-room wall with his sketch of an orchid and a lily pad, so I’m assuming they were in the conservatory that has the lily pads. Anyway it was fabulous–it’s not a cheap admission, especially if you go for the “gardens and galleries” pass that has full access to the Kusama exhibition, but worth it.

I love art but lack knowledge–I hadn’t heard of Yayoi Kusama before the NYBG started advertising the heck out of this special exhibition, and having seen the exhibition I don’t have the vocabulary to explain why it’s so cool. But seriously, it’s so cool. Exuberant and creepy and beautiful, playful and thoughtful at the same time. There’s one piece (titled “Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity”) that you see in a darkened room, and a field of wild-looking spotted pumpkins start to light up, one by one, creating a mirrored infinite field of glowing pumpkins. It’s beautiful and strange and perfect.

I’ve talked before about Summer Mom versus Normal Mom; yesterday’s attempt to get lunch at the Botanical Garden perfectly demonstrated the difference, in that Normal Mom would never say that a fruit cup and some strawberry Pocky constitutes an acceptable lunch as long as you round it out with a bag of potato chips. (Cultural institutions have no particular obligation to provide kid-friendly lunches, sure, but my kid was not going to eat a fancy sandwich on a crusty baguette, or a bowl of lentil soup, or a custom-tossed salad. I tried to sell him on the expensive wood-fired personal pizzas but he wasn’t interested, so our options were down to fruit cups and chips. Next time we’ll bring our own lunch.)

Today’s tarot card is The World. The illustrations in this deck are pen-and-ink, mostly black and white, and when color is used it ends up being pretty striking. The World is drawn as a ball of light, ringed with flowers and drifting in a field of stars, with a delicate rainbow halo. It’s luminous. It’s a card that signifies wholeness, completion. Having what you need. I need to think about this one.

Summers with Declan, I try to have a Thing for us to do every day. I mean, sometimes he’s in camp, but usually only when we need camp as childcare. Sometimes he’s doing something with a friend, or family, but most of our summer time is relatively unstructured, and I’ve learned over the last few years that neither of us thrives if we have no structure at all.

Yesterday’s expedition was the Met, mostly because I hadn’t been in a long time and I missed it. Declan was great–there’s this way he acts sometimes, it feels like he’s practicing being a grown-up. He puts his hands in his pockets and says things like “this is a very beautiful painting.” But he’s also interested in the museum, and we had a few good conversations about some of what we saw. We started with modern art, because those are Declan’s favorite galleries, especially the huge abstracts, but also this one sculpture that he says looks like a giraffe had a collision with a truck. We finished with the Asian galleries, because those are my favorites, especially the rooms full of Buddhas, but also the Japanese nature paintings.

Walking into the section with the Japanese art, we came face-to-face with a giant deer. I’ve seen it before but it’s striking every time, it’s a stag made out of plastic bubbles, it’s hard to describe but it’s very cool. This time, the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it looked just like the picture on yesterday’s tarot card. So, patterns everywhere, right?

Today’s card is The Hermit. I love the illustration on this one, it’s a turtle pulled into his shell, but his shell is also a lamp, radiating light into shadows. The Hermit, as one might expect, is a card about solitude, but considers that a good thing. Disconnect from expectation, turn your focus inward, refocus and reframe.

So the tarot thing. I used to do a lot more tarot, like, twenty years ago.

(I am so old. This is a theme lately, I am so old, I am not used to that. Graduation this year (at work, I mean, not at my old high school) was recorded (and live-streamed, literally around the world since I had two kids graduating from Beijing) and I looked at the video the other day. I was looking at the video in order to show Declan the part where the kids threw their hats in the air and then they were all laughing and crying and singing the alma mater and hugging each other and there was just so much joy. Anyway, I was looking for that part, and on the way I saw a lot of myself on the video, since I was emceeing the ceremony. The point I’m getting to is that I am undeniably a dowdy middle-aged lady now. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but my internal image of myself is much cooler and more graceful, so it’s been a bit of a shock.)

Right, back in my early and mid twenties, more into tarot. I believe a lot of things that I don’t like to talk about, but I do not believe that tarot cards are channelling mystical energies and helping you see the future. I do believe that a good deck of cards is an excellent clarifying tool. The human mind is a pattern-maker, and you can learn a lot from the patterns that you see. This is what’s interesting to me about dream analysis too–your brain generates a lot of static and your mind tries to make meaning out of the noise. Mostly it’s going to be fluff, but why that fluff in particular? (Why do I have so many dreams about finding unused rooms in my home? I know the answer to that, it’s annoying.) Tarot is the same–give yourself a rich set of images and see what your mind wants you to think about.

I used to have a lot of decks, but like I said, twenty years ago. It’s only two survived the move, the straight-up Rider-Waite and the Vertigo Comics deck. I bought a new one last year, The Wild Unknown, it is apparently trendy? But I like the pictures a lot. Remember, I am now a middle-aged lady, I crochet during meetings and have strong feelings about herbal teas, I can withstand the shame of buying the trendy tarot deck.

Morning routines just kind of crop up–I stopped drinking coffee, mostly, sometime during the pandemic year. Not because I don’t like coffee, I don’t know. For a few months I was making chai, simmering some fresh ginger and spices in milk, adding loose-leaf black tea, straining it. It was good, the cinnamon stick makes it sweet, it was something to do in the very long mornings. For months at a time I was waking up at five, not even with an alarm, I just couldn’t sleep right. The chai was something to do. Then I started buying tea, and little tea strainers. We have a lot of tea-tins cluttering up the counters right now. Black tea for the mornings, herbal teas for the afternoon, these fruit teas that I’m trying as a substitute for a glass of wine after dinner.

Anyway, that’s part of the morning routine. And I do the crossword puzzle (two hundred forty-something day streak on the New York Times now) and some dumb game on my tablet, and lately I’ve been doing Duolingo too. Routines are what you make of them and I’m trying to think about how I use my time. I should be running again, or at least stretching. I should be something. I shouldn’t be scrolling twitter while my water boils. I shouldn’t be moping.

So maybe I should be writing. That would solve a few problems–I’d feel less like a lump. I’d feel less isolated, too. This is another experiment in just talking to my friends, those who are still putting up with me, everyone I love at a distance and miss with my small hermit heart. Fair warning, though–I might be using tarot cards as writing prompts. I’m happy to talk about why, if anyone cares. Anyway, hi, welcome to small notes, maybe daily, we’ll see how it goes.