Dmitri is smoking on the roof again. Today the sky is low, a flat monotone of white. At the edge of the roof, silhouetted in his dark pea coat, he looks terribly romantic, like something from a French new wave film. Later, I bring something to his office, a press release from Sotheby’s. He does not get up from his desk, and as we speak I look down into one of his pale blue eyes, over the dramatic cracked body of his nose, and into the other blue eye.

On the train today was a line of women each tender and separate, this one with a spray of freckles, this one with earnest straight hair, a pair of clogs and a battered stoop sale pre-release edition of Jonathan Safran Foer. And that one, falling asleep, head bobbing against the train window, the tension delicately cording her lovely neck. She is wearing a dorky Nordic patterned cardigan, her hair is cropped short with a sparkly barrette trying to re-capture some femininity. Her blunt fingers are pushed into the book on her lap, trying to hold her place. Seven Things That Happy Couples Do.

I am trying to dig you out of my chest but I never knew how you entered in the first place and all I have is this spoon made of silk.

More that you need to know. Everything you need to know. Then again, perhaps nothing you need to know.

ttractor, age 17, Beggs, Oklahoma.

The screaming wakes me up. It is the absolute definition of blood-curdling, and I am rigid with fear. It is the sound of profound horror, and keeps going on and on, it is not stopping. I hear the sound of the entire house waking up, feet hitting the floor with emphatic thumps, doors opening, lights flicking on. The screaming is so loud my entire head is filled with it, there is no relief from it, it is not diminishing. I hear my parents tumble into my younger sister’s room, looking for the source.

My god, the sound is not stopping, it is a long ribbon unspooling, unwinding and now I am wide awake. And my mouth is wide open. The sound is coming from me.

It was a nightmare, a nightmare I had only once, that night when I was 14. I am hiding, scrunched into a ball with my arms wrapped around my knees. I am crammed into a small space, like a cardboard box, and it is open at the left and right sides. Through the open side on my left I see the man’s legs walk past, and I think that maybe I am safe, he has not found me. The legs walk past again, and I am afraid that he is honing in on my hiding place, I have done something to give myself away, hidden stupidly, taken a harsh breath. Then the legs stop, right in front of me. Has he found me? Is he still looking? Is he standing there in front of me, knowing I am here, sensing my fear, prolonging his enjoyment by letting my dread grow? When will I see his face, horribly inverted as he bends over to shove it towards me, his arms thrusting through my hiding place to grab me, the fingernails that dig into my skin?

This has not happened yet. It is just the legs in front of me. My mother is somewhere. Can I call for help? Will she get to me in time? Can I scramble out of my space, backwards, away from the man, can I move quickly enough to get away from that grin, those cruel fingers? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t think I can. I need my mother. I take a deep breath, I start to scream.

I had that nightmare only once. But I lived it many times. I never screamed. I did as my father told me. “Suffer in silence. Pain builds character.”

Cheesecake in the oven, and I have only been at this for five hours. Sweet! I think, unfortunately, that my oven runs a little hot. The cheesecake looks like it might be a bit burnt around the edges. I'll know when I unmold in an hour whether it's a do-over or not. If it's not fit for company but still edible, then crap, I'll have a whole chocolate-hazelnut cheesecake with Fra Angelico infused crust in my refrigerator. Not sure what to do with that problem.

My friend, who I would swear was late to his own birth, was supposed to come over tonight and give me a hand. Apparently the incredibly loud music, the smoke alarm and the exhaust fan drowned the message he left me--I'm late, call me back if you still want me to come over. I was looking forward to some of that guy upper body strength to manhandle the cream cheese, but alas, I had to do it myself. Well, he'll never know that I was saving some of the extra mashed potatoes for him, and now I get to eat them. Holy crap! Did I just eat a pound of mashed potatoes? Well yes, I did.

And with that my darlings, I'm hanging it up for the night. I hope tomorrow you all have a reflective, important day. My wish is that you are well loved, that you are hopeful. If you see something beautiful tomorrow, please tell me about it.

Whoa, those carrots took a long time. Long time to cook, then I decided I would like them better pureed, and since I have only a small food processor and no ricer (hmm, note to self) it got done in small quantities. Oh yes, they are so good, simmered in orange juice and ginger. And yes, I ate all of what did not fit into a container for transport. I have towers of prepped food on my counters. I think I could make a scale replica of lower Manhattan with it all.

But I did get the green beans snapped and into their marinade and herbs chopped for sticking under the t-bird's skin. I kept looking at the left-over pound of potatoes sitting on the counter, and finally, I just gave in. They are now boiling in a pot on the stove. It remains to be seen whether I eat them myself tonight, or share them tomorrow. I have one very nice shallot to go with them, and some thyme...oh dear...

This all started with my insistance to my best friend, something like "dude! your dad is 85 years old! He has been a citizen for like, 50 years! He should eat a real Thanksgiving before he dies!" And when I am determined to give you joy, you had just better let me, or I will give you a black eye of happiness and heaven help you. It was not a simple thing of making a gift of this dinner. These people lost everything, had their world turned into ash, had their world try to kill them, during the war. To let me in, to let me into the intimacies of their lives, their kitchen, took months of negotiation.

My friend said, please, no. This is not a time for their lives to be expanding. Their lives are getting smaller, we don't enlarge it, we don't let people in.

He was so wrong, he was joyfully, amazingly wrong. The first year it was small, only four people, him, his mother, his father, me. The next year, his sometimes grumpy sister. Then, his always grumpy cousin. Then a friend. Then another friend. And now, even though the father doesn't attend the dinner anymore (we joke, we say he's gotten a lot quieter, doesn't eat as much, doesn't take up as much room--it's because he's actually dead, but he will never be dead, someone so fiercely loved) and now we are so many we may not fit around the table and I am worrying happily about not making enough food.

Now, back to my potatoes. Next up: hazelnut cheesecake!

Whiskey opened, loud Lucinda Williams, and I am hollering along in my native accent. Out of years of good kitchen training, my hair is in pigtails to make sure it is not a special added ingredient. Basically, there is a demented southern Pippi Longstocking in the kitchen, yodeling and knife-waving. Yah freakin hoo!

The sweet potatoes are cooked, mashed, sweetened up then spiked down with whiskey and dressed with pecans.

The sweet dressing is prepped--cornbread (no, I cheated and did not make it. but I could. so there), more celery, almonds, apples, apricots and figs, all cubed and bagged. They did not have dried cherries at the grocery store at the other end of my neighborhood, and I hiked all the way there almost specifically for that.

I did not mind all the hiking around this afternoon to get stuff. I grinned like a fool, even though it was spitting rain and sometimes little hailish stuff. I even grinned like a fox eating peanut butter out of a wire bristled brush at the skells hanging out at the liquor store, because, you know, I am just so happy to be here.

Next up: fabulous carrots!

I am considering live-blogging tonight's T-day prep. Because I am looking down into a pot of three pounds of mashed potatoes dreamily and thinking, "I could eat this whole thing!" So to keep focused on moving forward and not having a runner's carbo fantasy orgy with the potatoes...here's where we are...

three pounds of fantastic organic Buttercream dirty mashed potatoes with garlic, real unsalted butter and slivered portobello mushrooms. only a couple of bites short of three pounds, that is.

the savory stuffing is prepped--bread, chicken sausage, celery, more portobellos, walnuts and raw cranberries, all cubed and in their individual baggies and ready for transport.

Next up: sweet potatoes! and the cracking open of the whiskey! (this could get incoherent, raunchy or flat-out naked, very quickly)

Molly Otter was my sweethearted black lab. Smart and loyal, she just wanted to be near you. But if she got lonesome, her grief was ferocious. She once ripped an entire yellow pages into Sackie-sized chunks in 25 minutes when she thought I had abandoned her alone at home. So I was very careful to take her to the park every day before I went to work, letting her run and run, exhaust herself, so she would not have the energy to fret, to get destructive with her sadness.

I am very much like her. And so I run and run, so I will not shred phone books, I run to turn raw drive into product. And yesterday I wondered: what if I stopped running and made art instead? I immediately had a vision of art squirting out of every pore, my body too full to contain it, photographs and words ripping and tearing me apart, splattering in all directions on Grand Street.

I think perhaps it's finally time to buy a printer.

My older sister was an old-school southern belle. Men were for her amusement, and she turned them upside-down and inside-out for fun. And they loved it, there were always men and boys surrounding her, waiting for their chance to be torn apart by her attentions. Starting at age 15 or so, they were breaking their piggy banks, forgoing that killer stereo system or new head gasket for their pick up truck, to gift her, show their earnest intentions, to get her to stay. By the time she left for college, she had a jewelry box that looked like a pirate’s treasure chest.

I was disgusted by the whole thing, and yeah, jealous too. In the family cosmology there is always the pretty one and the smart one, right? She was the pretty one. My younger sister was the smart one. I was nothing. I was the rusty crow looking at the precious shiny things adorning my older sister’s hands, wishing for my turn.

The closest I ever got to some trembling boy offering me his heart in a gift wrapped box from Zale’s was in college. This incredibly sweet, smart and lovely boy I had struck a friendship with dropped by my place unannounced with a gift for me. A package of glow in the dark dinosaur stickers. I knew exactly his intention with that, the gesture revealed everything that he had been hoping for in one instant. He nailed my taste exactly, and if I had been at all interested in him *that way* I would have dissolved in sheer joy. But alas. And that was my last experience of a boy putting it out there, naked and blinking, for examination and possible rejection.

Until last night.

I am at the bar-party, and there is lots of drinking and laughter, wit and high spirits. My friends point out that there is a boy there that seems to have his sights set on me. I am aware of this, as people go outside to smoke, order another drink from the bar, rotate through the crowd, we have chatted several times. But in this crowd of friends and great talkers, he does not get any more attention than any one else. Until.

I don’t remember what brought this on. How could I remember anything in the blaze of him bringing out his personal big guns. I am not sure what I have done to deserve the full peacock tail shaking, incendiary display, but it is clear to all my friends that this is meant for me. The boy heads to an empty patch in the bar, and with no introduction or fanfare, starts in on a full-length Michael Jackson dance routine, complete with moon-walking and crotch-grabbing. The bar stops. The floor clears. My friends look at him, look at me, and dissolve into laughter. They beg me to make him stop, they are laughing so hard. I am laughing at the outrageousness, at the sweetness of his offering, at my own mortification. And I must say, he was freakin awesome. Those hours of practice alone in the bedroom mirror at age 14 have produced some serious moves. It is unbelievably strange and touching. Still, I go home alone.

Thanks to the drunken Yankees fans spilling out of the subway for hipping me to this. I thought this might go away as summer faded, but everyday at the subway station near my office, I can't help but see this.

Sometimes words and phrases just get stuck in my head, and like someone with Tourette's, I have to bark them out to dispel them. I heard a news broadcast about our president's visit to Asia, and his meeting with the Chinese president, Hu. Of course now I am hearing the Abbott and Costello routine. President Hu? Who's president? Yes, Hu! What? No, Wat is in Cambodia. Hu is Chinese...

"Frozen Cuban assets"

My friend writes something tender and gently self-mocking about vulnerability and making omelets. And now I am stuck on "As I Lay Frying."

Where did this begin? It began innocently enough. Or as innocent as it can be, as I am eavesdropping on a couple of naked strangers. I am at the Park Slope YMCA, in the locker room, and these two women look like, well, regular middle-aged women, dimpled in places, slack in places, wobbly in other places. They are exultant, they have just gone running together. I butt in on their conversation, because I tend to, because it is a friendly place, because they are clearly so happy. I ask them how far they ran.
"20 miles! We are training to run the New York Marathon!" says one.
"Holy crap! says I "I can't even imagine that!"
They look at my gear, my sneakers and they can tell I have just finished a run myself. They ask me how far.
"8 miles."
"How long did that take you?"
"An hour."
"Holy crap! That's elite class pace! You could totally do a marathon!"

And I think they are nuts. The difference between 8 miles and 26 miles is the difference between a grain of sand and an entire beach, to me. And as the bookish, knock-kneed professor's daughter, I have certainly never thought of myself as an athlete. But their comment sticks with me, pongs around in my head, and makes me start to consider...

(I know I owe more of this, because *you* have asked. And more there will be. But right now, I have something I have to do. You may recall the sport in which I originally injured my hip. You may know where I went to school. You may even know that my television is the current equivalent of a rotary dial phone. And therefore...aw hell, why be coy about it? I'm gonna go find someplace with a bigass TV and watch me some Michigan fuh'ball.)

The woman gets on the train and sits directly in front of me. She is somewhere in her thirties, dressed neither in hipster-wear or corporate drag, she is somewhere in between. Her hair is roughly pushed back, loose waves, unbrushed. Her feet turn in just a little, her stylishly unstylish shoes scuffed a bit, they are from last year. I don’t think she was ever beautiful, she might have been pretty when she was younger, now there are lines as her face gets heavier, coarser, acts as the prow of her days.

She clasps her hands on top of the bag in her lap, and her hands are unadorned with blunt finger tips, strong veins, long fingers. She is smiling, something has amused her and she is in her own world, not meeting anyone’s eyes, not looking around. I am so pleased to see her, I think, she could be me, this is a mirror. Then I watch as her face changes, what amused her fades away, her face hardens, the lines deepen, and I feel a tiny betrayal, a little panic even, as she turns out her light and folds in on herself.

A grey day, and I am playing boozy droopy blues into my ears and thinking about a dare I made to a friend, to rise to the challenge of revealing the source of her sadness. I think about how I would answer this question myself, a simple five words, or an elaborate five hundred. Frame it up starkly, use a spare devastation to speak for me, or describe it in a furious self immolation. The music unwinds like a long bridge over a wide river and it reminds me to pick up my head and I am so glad that I do.

I see him walking towards me, and he is doing what I recognize from when I am playing music that jolts me, swings me around, makes the whole world sparkle. He is walking with his head up, his headphones on, and whatever he is listening to, it is giving him a beautiful day, making him grin with a complete openness, his face so wide, so joyous, and we look each other full in the face and smile and smile and smile.

There are leaves clogging my gutters. This is a month of so many anniversaries, events, poignancies, that I can't write, I am stuffed so full.

Thanksgiving. Where do I even start with this? I love an opportunity to be grateful. I love the idea of a whole day set aside to think about this. I adore the idea of doing this with friends, with family. I love cooking for people, for making a gift of sustenance, for feeding them, almost literally, my love and affection. I love sharing meals, and the bigger and more festive, all so much the better.

I love the food of Thanksgiving. I love the interplay of sweet and savory, I love the colors that mirror the leaves of autumn, the reds, the rusts, the oranges. I love the challenge of making ten dishes at once, even though I have long ago gotten this down cold.

The menu is the same as it is every year, there is insistance on this. It is not my insistance, but I am happy to oblige. There is a turkey, of course, a small one as there are vegetarians. There is cranberry sauce made from real cranberries, the berries soft and deflated and counterpointed with rough curls of orange zest. There are potatoes, boiled and mashed by hand with milk, butter and garlic and with their skins still on, slivers of redness against creamy white. There are sweet potatoes, pureed and tarted up with bourbon and pecans, and you must act quickly because the 79 year old matriarch will eat all of it if you don't arm wrestle her for your portion. There are baby carrots, simmered in orange juice, glazed with apricot conserve to heighten their sweetness and ginger to spike your tongue.

There is corn pudding, and if you have never had it you must ask me to make it for you because you would never believe that corn and nutmeg in custard could make you swoon. There are haricot verts, blanched and brushed with worchestershire sauce and wrapped into bundles with strips of bacon and baked unless you are sadly one of the vegetarians and then you miss the crisp rill of bacon against the crunch of the bean. There are two kinds of stuffing because I cannot choose which and why should you have to choose between the savory--mushrooms, sausage, celery, walnuts, corn bread and the sweet--apricots, dried cherries, apples, almonds, sourdough bread.

There is a simple, unadorned pumpkin pie and a second one to eat for breakfast the next morning, its skin cracked from the ride home balanced in your lap. And there is the hazelnut cheesecake, drizzled with hazelnut liqueur, because hazelnuts are somehow, magically, majestically, the connection between the matriarch and the world she lost during the terrible war that propelled her to this country.

There is so much to be thankful for I am practically breathless.

I am out with a bunch of writers. And they ask each other about writing, but they don't ask me about writing, they ask me about running. I don't tell them that last night I was running, running, ecstatic until there I was bent, with the palm of my hand against a wet rough trunk, vomiting into the tree pit there next to the road. I turn my head and the light of the bodega comes into focus in the muzzy night, the man sitting out front on a milk crate watches me, taciturn.

Leaning over I can feel the lump of my celphone, pressing into my spine, zippered into the back of my shorts. I have come to a wary truce with my phone after a spate of inappropriateness, the last annoyance being merely a buzzing text message at midnight from a skinny blond writer, but this one is not beautiful or not beautiful enough to me, to get my attention, and he is young, too young, and I have had enough of boys.

One of the writers, a small plain woman with a flat chest, flat affect, flat hair, says "I don't go out. I live alone. With my cat. In Bushwick. It's not as glamorous as it sounds." I search her face for irony, for humor, but I find none and this makes me sad.

Today on the train I am doing something I rarely do. I am reading. Usually, I am looking, but this book I got on Sunday has been sitting quietly but with great gravity that has finally pulled me to it.

At the next station people get on, people get off, and there is jockeying and pushing all around. I raise my head in irritation at the disturbance and look around for the first time. Seated in front of me is a large young woman who doesn’t really merit a second glance. She looks like so many other people, with big cheap earrings, a dark hoodie, vari-colored extensions woven into her hair. But fuck me, she’s reading Virgil’s Aeneid.

I am properly chastened, and delighted, of course to have my assumptions punctured. And so I return to my reading. The words are a hard perfection revealing a tender, messy warm humanity and by page five I am gasping, wiping my eyes at the sheer hopelessness, sheer hopefulness, and I am punctured yet again.

Yes! The camphone seems to be working again! What great joy!

There were so many amazing moments at yesterday's marathon. There was hoisting my neighbor's eight year old onto my shoulders for an excellent view of the runners, feeling the weight of him, him cheering with one arm wrapped around my head, blinkering me down to just the pavement in front of me.

Getting random at-first-reluctant adults and children to make noise with the all the bells and bangy things I brought. There was the group of kids from the projects, exploring all the sounds from the various hand percussion, gamboling and playing, and one boy who particularly rocked the cowbell with great panache. We were an excitingly loud small band there on a spot on the route were spectators are always rather thin.

First thing in the morning, its cold and grey still. The streets seem so wide and empty. No one is out watching yet, I am sitting on the blue police barricade by myself, and here he comes. The lead wheelchair racer. There are four cars in front of him: a police escort, a pace car, a camera truck and an officials' car. There are a pack of bicyclist escorts, left, right and behind, to protect and pace him. You realize how much he does need this protection, even with all the gear, with no legs, he is just so small. But he is also not small at all, his arms, torso, are enormously muscled, and they power him past so quickly. It is this tender entwining of fragile and powerful, this impossible, glorious balance of stregnth and vulnerability, that makes me blink back tears, looking up to the sky beyond the projects.

I am so excited I can hardly draw a full breath. At last year's marathon one of my neighbor's kids stayed by my side all day, and together we identified all the various originating countries of the runners, calling out France! Italia! Aruba! Can I tell you what it was like to stand on the edge of the projects, at the edge of Bed-Stuy, and introduce this child to the world streaming by? And to show him how to interact with the runners, to get them to give him a low-five, without getting in their way, and then he teaches all the other kids around us, and suddenly I realize I am in the middle of a ring of kids, and they are cheering, clapping, the runners are touching their hands, and just thinking about it I need a Kleenex.

This year I am ready. I am ready to multiply joy. I have a bag filled with tamborines, claves, rattles, maracas, a cow bell! I'll be the woman with the whole percussion section of random eight years olds, the one with the huge smile on her face, the one with eyes blurry with tears of wonder. I can hardly wait.

  heaven knows, I need light in my life too. I am bending under my weight, too far inside my own head. I force myself to smile, not just a turning up of my lips, but a full out, count my teeth all the way back to my molars, blinding donkey grin at the first person I see. It's a little old lady, out for a walk. She is using a shopping cart to help her walk, too proud for a walker, not ready to succumb. She is wearing a fake leopard print fur hat, a coat with matching trim, this walk is a big event in her day. And when I lay my big smile on her, she beams right back, and now I know what I will be taking pictures of next. I think I can.

I see something beautiful, then I see something ugly.
The day starts out cold and drizzly, then the sun breaks through on reddening ivy.
A man on the subway platform yells something horrible and vulgar at me, then the woman next to me on the train is achingly beautiful.
I meet a stranger's eyes and smile and his face does not change, I meet a stranger's eyes and smile and he grins back.
The sun is going down, lemon colored through butter leaves and now I must find my way home.