Is beauty named Zenyatta?

~picture does not belong to me. whoops.~

Zenyatta wants to run, and she will again. After spectacular Breeders’ Cup Classic victory, owners will bring back the unbeaten mare to race as a 5-year-old.

If the marvelous mare Zenyatta were Michael Jordan, she would have sauntered onto the track at Santa Anita wearing a sign that read: “I’M BACK!”

In horse racing, it’s that big. On Saturday, a star was reborn. The announcement that Zenyatta would race again, as a 6-year-old, was much less ostentatious than that…

“When she won the Breeders’ Cup Classic,” Jerry Moss said, “the retirement scenario seemed obvious. If you were writing a movie, that is how you’d end it.” The murmurs of this reversal had begun just weeks after Zenyatta had beaten the male horses in the $5-million Classic at Santa Anita on Nov. 7. She ran her usual hang-around-at-the-back-of-the-pack race and exploded down the stretch to win. It was a performance that both stunned and thrilled racing fans.

It had been so Seabiscuit, so Silky Sullivan, that people who didn’t know a horse race from a dog sled were still talking about it around the water cooler the next week. Mainstream sports fans saw and were conquered, at least for the moment…

“I couldn’t just jog her anymore,” he said. “She wanted to run.”

There’s a mouse that runs around my floor at night. It likes to spend 2am to 4am beneath my bedside table, chattering, chewing and cha-cha-ing with my phone charger.

But there’s also a dog that sleeps on my bed above the floor and eats greenies and gum alike. But she never notices a peep.

She never notices the loud scratches of the mouse’s teeth against wood or its swooshing back and forth across the floor.

There’s also a cat upstairs, where there are also more mice. But he’s too busy sleeping on his back next to my mother on the bed above the floor and never notices a peep either.

There’s this peeping mouse who likes to keep me company after midnight, and so I think it’s more a pet than the dog or cat because it is, at least, attentive. It notices when I throw something at it at 3:47 in the morning, and it runs over the floor under the bed where the dog and I are lying, and it likes what I put in the trash, and, for some reason, it always comes back for more.

I hope it likes the floor though. There’s not enough bed left for a mouse.

My New Year’s Eve, and every single one of years past save one,  can be made from three simple things.

Oyster stew (much less complicated than it sounds)

Fire, by candlelight or logs.

A dog.

This year we are having oyster stew. I will cut wood and build a fire, and my dog will resentfully sleep on her couch instead of at my feet (absurd, right?). Now I have a new approach: I am resolving to grow some balls, open up the liquor cabinet and get drunk. The obstacle is that I don’t like being drunk in front of my parents, specifically my mother and step-father. Neither of them make very good drunks, in fact they are terrible at the hint of liquor, so it’d only be fair of me to share my inebriated shortcomings (namely tolerance). But it’s just too depressing to think we all get worse with alcohol.

I will sit and stare for awhile, at the fire, at the old Christmas tree, at my cat who keeps me warm. I will think. I’m not sure I’ll have any choice but to think, because nearly each and every New Year’s Eve that I can remember has been in the decade that’s about to close.

Or whatever. If it technically closes this year or next, in this case it is literally the thought that counts. So.

I’m not about to discuss the things that have happened in the early 2000s. I am happy to entrust that to the New York Times and John Stewart.

But I still can’t get over the feeling I have when I consider the last ten years as a unit— they become an entity, and I have this feeling of complete shock mingled with terror.

I recently found the notes I took in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. They sound like me, I remember writing them. I remember the NYPD and FDNY baseball hats I bought in NYC the week after it all fell down. I just found those in my closet too.

That’s a thread. It’s a huge huge thread, starting for me in the woods of upstate New York, going through to my small brass bed in my new home, through to a white-dress graduation, to rocky years in Xanadu, through the beauty of the Quad, and through to the black-robe graduation where some lady told us that if we’re black, abused and female, we can be great.

I’m not sure what will occur to me. I guess generally blogs are meant for after something occurs to you. But in this instance, I’m not sure it is. Those things that occur are not decisions but touchstones. They are fragile and not meant to be taken apart. They are a separate beast from Resolutions, like discovering how to sing or studying virology or learning the Viola or baking French-Cambodian bread, or like the less discrete Resolutions like expanding patience with parents, or reminding yourself to be more demanding, or just trying to be more like someone you adore. But Resolutions are adaptable. What has happened is not adaptable and only perverted by dictum and beer.

So. Maybe no drunky. Maybe just more thinking.

I loved some part of the 2000s. Maybe it’s the French self-immolation trend inside me talking, but there was terror and true sadness, real joy and wonderful excitement in those years. For me, and I assume for our generation, these years are me. I want to keep living and changing, but I’d like to put these years in my best jewelry box, alongside my grandmother’s pocket-watch, my lock of my horse’s mane and extra bits of a precious ocean jade rock, and look at their stories for whatever they have to give.

If you recall, from the start of all this, there was one New Year’s that doesn’t follow this recipe. It happens to give me hope. It involves a man, a hotel, and a very particular view of New York City. This one, for all its stillness and vibrancy, will always make me feel decadent and intensely, wonderfully, joyously happy. It was a first among firsts in the 2000s, and I could be happy to have at least one of its kind in every decade after.

Though, according to my New Year’s resolutions, I shouldn’t settle for just that. Maybe every other year can be a unique one for the decade.

Thanks Donald O’Connor and Singing in the Rain.

Did you know Yo-Yo Ma once played the impossible but never got beyond first round at auditions?

According to my mother’s musical elves, there was once a non-composer student at Juilliard who was assigned a composition for cello as part of a class. He didn’t know the first thing about string instruments, from fingering to key changes to breaks. He wrote a piece and showed it to an adviser who said that, amongst several other problems, one of the chords was impossible— literally, finger-breakingly impossible— to play; he said go fix it and then vet it with someone else (the teacher was too busy for such silliness). This student goes, makes the changes but forgets to change the impossible chord, and shows it to his cellist friend, Yo-Yo. Half way through the piece, the student realizes his mistake but is stopped from saying anything as he realizes Yo-Yo’s well passed the problem section and happily yawing away. It took the vast depths of Yo-Yo’s finger power to stretch and contort for the chord, but with his agility and natural enthusiasm, the impossible chord wasn’t much of anything at all.

Yo-Yo couldn’t make it as a traditional musician. He was and is a prodigy; impossible becomes merely improbable when he is playing. But as a musician, he didn’t take tradition as seriously as many would’ve wanted him too. Thus his inability to blend well with others. Thus his amazing solo performances and unparalleled artistry.

How many stories like this have you heard? How many have you told? How many of its subjects have you met??  Yet we are— all— still surprised when individuality struggles to shine more brightly than expected talents. No one’s surprised when it wins out, but the struggle itself is seen as a testing ground for real individuality. Why does it have to be tested?

Not always crystal clear.

Come back from San Francisco.
It can’t be all that pretty,
when all of New York City misses you.
Should pretty boys in discos distract you from your novel,
remember I’m awful in love with you.

You need me like the wind needs the trees to blow in.
Like the moon needs poetry, you need me.

Come back from San Francisco and kiss me; I’ve quit smoking.
I miss doing the wild thing with you.
Will you stay? I don’t think so,
but all I do is worry, pack bags, call cabs, and hurry home to me.


When you betray me, betray me with a kiss.
Damn you. I’ve never stayed up as late as this.

~ The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs.  Courtesy A. Meyerson