Getting Published in The New Yorker
On finally making it
Welcome to the The Art of Lite Living, a newsletter about the small (and not so small) wonders of life. Poetry, art, languages, and most importantly, those simple human connections that breathe life into our days.
This Friday was my birthday. I wasn’t in a celebratory mood because it had been a difficult week. Interesting how in a moment of crisis, everything snaps into focus. Suddenly, finishing my book, getting published, and even losing not a small amount of money didn’t matter to me. I gave up on being ‘productive’ and ‘efficient.’ All that mattered to me was to be there for my daughter and fight for her well-being.
But my friends didn’t allow me to have a quiet birthday. “It’s not everyday that you turn 25,” my friend Liam reminded me and took me out for pizza. Another friend called me from Oxford to celebrate me despite my non-celebratory mood, as did my friend from Israel. Messages poured in my inbox from friends I had neglected to call, or reach out to. Again, I was reminded of one of my greatest ‘accomplishments’: the friendships I have made over the years, all across the globe. In that sense, I am a success story (although I won’t brag about it in my resume), and am beyond grateful that these extraordinary, generous human beings are part of my life.
But, unlike on previous birthdays, this Friday when I woke up feeling like a smartut (a mop, in Hebrew) I wasn’t mourning the fact that I was a year older, officially ‘middle-aged’ (even if I feel closer to 25 than 49!) and gave no thought to wrinkles and body parts I used to contemn. I felt lucky to be alive, and healthy. It may sound disingenuous, but how often do we take our health for granted and overlook the simple miracle of carrying ourselves from point A to point B without any effort, or pain in our limbs. A condition I heard someone (I can’t remember who) referred to as the bliss of having no toothache, which we rarely see as a bliss, until we get a terrible toothache.
So, having completed 49 years on this earth with little toothache in an imperfect body that has carried, and gave birth to two extraordinary (and imperfect) human beings; a body that is strong enough to get me out of bed every morning and has taken me as far as India, Thailand and New Zealand, I feel extremely, extremely grateful.
Today I remember naturalist Henry Thoreau’s famous words, and the philosophy I live by:
Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.
And luckily for me, I have always been able to recognize the beauty and abundance in the simple things, and therefore never needed to reach for those bigger and better things that society told me I needed to acquire in order to be happy.
Yesterday, as I was walking back from my birthday pizza outing with my friend Liam (who is not only my friend, but more like my soul-brother), I decided to take a break from all my poetry and fiction podcast and listen to music. The first track that came on was George Michael’s Freedom!’90 followed by The Soup Dragon’s Pleasure, and INXS’ Disappear. Soon, I was dancing my way home, feeling like a sixteen year old again. Except, through these songs I had a quick flashback to moments in my life: growing up in a kibbutz, leaving Israel for London, writing plays, travelling to India, Thailand, and New Zealand, moving to Montreal… and it suddenly dawned on me: I have packed it in, and this life, with its endless challenges and hardships, was such a rare gift. I wasn’t going to waste it.
So in that spirit, this week I am sharing with you a silly little poem I wrote on Friday morning to cheer myself up:
49
One day, it will happen: I will be published
in The New Yorker & everything will be perfect.
Confetti will fall out of the sky, no doubt
& we will be eating caviar & sipping Champagne
for breakfast, bathing in milk & honey & rose petals;
I will have expensive haircuts & fancy pedicures,
facials that would make my skin glow & all my wrinkles
will be miraculously gone; my body perfectly toned
without me having to lift a single weight & sweat through
push-ups; my closet filled with designer clothes & useless
handbags; a shoe selection that Imelda Marcos would kill
for; I will be the talk of town, a woman envied; sexy
young men will massage my feet & I will have phenomenal
orgasms—to make up for the ones I didn’t have
with my husband; My poems and books will write themselves
& become instant best-sellers; The New York Times,
The Paris Review & Granta will beg me to write a column
for them; parties with celebrities will quote perfectly
structured lines from my poems, I will be second wise
only to Buddha, no stupidity will ever escape my mouth
& I will never get sick, or old, or ugly & die in my sleep
from boredom at the age of 311.
But until the day The New Yorker discovers my genius
I will continue to string one word behind another
in my third, fourth & sixth language, wondering
if any of this weird science experiment is actually worth it
& if I am contributing to the world, or producing more
garbage & who cares really what I think, surely, the world
is absurd enough as it is; my bank account certainly agrees
as it urges me to reconsider my life & still, I insist, to live
on coffee and bird’s seeds & scrape rust from my friend’s fence
to finance my creative endeavours, listening
to The New Yorker’s Fiction & Poetry podcasts, as I apply
another coat of paint & ignore the pain shooting up my arm
because, as long as I rise up early in the morning & write
before having coffee with my girls, eating a day old pastry
from the bakery across the street & listen attentively
to all that they have to say about ants, volleyball, science etc.
I must confess: this life ain’t so bad.
And lastly, a personal note/ apology to my favourite Substackers here
, , , , , : I am slowly catching up on all your beautiful writing that I have missed during this personal crisis. Please be patient with me. I haven’t forgotten you!More on getting older, and staying young…
Getting Older, Staying Young
Last week a dear friend shared with me a beautiful poem by Hayden Saunier called The Wisdom Package. The poem is a humorous tribute to aging and a wonderful reminder that loss of sight, knee aches and forgetfulness come “absolutely free” (yay!) with the ‘wisdom package’ – that is, after al…
Happy birthday, Imola! I loved the poem; it made me smile--and, of course, Thank you so for the mention" Who by Fire is almost finished -- so do check it out. I have a bit of good news, too via Alisa Kennedy Jones, who is such a love--so go here to see it: https://alisakennedyjones.substack.com/p/the-empress-questionnaire-theres
Happy Birthday you talented and dedicated woman! Yes you have stuffed in lots of life and lots of countries and lots of words in your years. As my grandmother used to say, "Ahh, to be 49 again." It's all relevant. She was 80 at the time.
much love to you and yours.