Delighted, I’m Sure

The Pfister lobby this afternoon is gilded, gleaming and oh-so-peaceful. I’m beginning my year as Narrator, which is so thrilling I can just feel life cracking open before me.

A few things from my “real life”, which is usually distinctly less gleaming than this moment, are conspicuously absent in this magnificent place. I have two, yes two, sets of twins. Four children under four, one set identical and one fraternal, “double-double” as they like to call themselves…however you explain them, they are adorable, exhausting, messy, sweet, and very loud.

Though of course I love my children so deeply they are in my every sinew, I’m also delighted that they aren’t here right now. Not a single person in this lobby has gulped my drink without asking or needed my help to go to the bathroom. See? Delightful!

Also delightful?

I’m not here to be a mommy; I’m here to write.

I’m here to soak in and breathe out story—true, harrowing, lovely.

I’m here to capture the Pfister and all of us who live, however briefly, inside these ornate walls, themselves thrumming with history.

I’m here to meet you and narrate your story. Already, on this first day with the year ahead still obscured like a gift, I feel so honored.

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Since beautiful things tend to come into my life in pairs, I’d like to introduce myself by way of twin bits of my own story.

Just in case you aren’t as familiar with twins as I am, and I’m well-aware that you’re likely breathing a sigh of relief about that right now, let me explain how twins are revealed.

You know, by now, that there is something your life possesses now that it didn’t just a short, already blurred, while ago. You don’t know that thing is an “A”yet, the first in a series with others trailing along behind it. To you, “A” alone is enough to flood the whole world with expectation and excitement. And then you are told, in a moment that splits life into a “before” and an “after”, that there is also a “B”. And suddenly, in shock and awe and fear and trembling, you intuitively know that A and B are so bound up with one another that in some crucial way, they are as intimate and intwined as anything in life can be. They are twins.

So, dear readers, to say “hello” and “let’s begin” and “Isn’t this so wonderful?”, I give you a small, but not inconsequential, Twin A and Twin B from the part of my story where I am a writer:

A: As a little girl, bored in the sticky summer heat, I’d often ask my mother to give me three words that didn’t fit together at all, like lobster, toenail, and skydiving. I’d while away the day (just as delighted as I am this afternoon), writing a story that featured all of the words. The fact that my delight in writing could also birth delight in my mother as she read the story was half the fun.

B: As an adult, I’m sitting at the Pfister now, fingers tapping out this satisfying flurry of words, words that have been my lifelong friends, and now I somehow get to be a writer, for and with you. Ta-Da! I want to bellow to that little girl I was, your love of story will morph all your life, and one of the destinations will be the Pfister, a glorious trove of story.

So here I am, your Narrator. Please come meet with me in the lobby or Blu or under one of those ridiculously entrancing chandeliers this place is teeming with, and let’s spin out the richness of your story.

I can’t wait.