Do you have a favorite Christmas story? Burnside published one of the most beautiful stories of sacrifices — and irony — I’ve ever read. The O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi,” is published with a short introduction by me.
Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
“It’s the Hoboken of DC,” my friend told me when I said I was heading to Silver Spring, Maryland. My family and I were planning a reunion, and we had needed to find an AirBnB big enough to accommodate three families. My siblings and I live on two separate continents, and we hadn’t seen each other in more than two years, when we had last met down South. While we had considered staying in a hotel with a pool in downtown DC, an AirBnB outside of the city would afford us greater organic time together. The type of time that was more like our childhood. Lazy mornings sprawled out on the couch in the living room just talking. Evenings with the tv on in the background while we ate Doritos and ice cream. And the return of the cicadas, which I have distinct memories of descending on our childhood home in New Jersey one summer. We were together again, but it wasn’t really like our childhood at all anymore. Now, there were kids and spouses and careers and conversations about retirement funds. When the cicadas return in another seventeen years, where will we be? How will we have changed? What memories will we be looking back on?
Ugh. Ain’t that the truth?
A little whimsy can transform the day.
Did you catch Nightbirde’s performance on “America’s Got Talent”? I don’t watch the show but an ad for it popped up on Instagram while I was scrolling, and in the ad the singer began sharing her song, sharing her story, sharing her heart. You can find the performance on YouTube. These words stuck out to me. These words made me cry. It’s been a long week. As I posted a few days ago, someone I know passed. Then yesterday a family member had to go to the hospital and needed surgery today. I know there’s talk these days of toxic positivity, and I do believe that we need to truly deal with our emotions and circumstances and seek help when needed. Going through a rough day, a rough week, a rough season happens. There is no shame in that. There is still room for Hope, though. Still room for a Peace that surpassed understanding. Still room for Joy. I choose to be happy. It doesn’t change reality. It doesn’t fix everything. It’s not a denial of feelings of grief, fear, and being overwhelmed. Yet I still choose to be happy. I choose to celebrate a person’s life. I choose to deepen my relationship with those I love. I choose to be there for others. I choose to use the life I’ve been given to do what I love.
I may have loved the American Museum of Natural History, but I was TERRIFIED of the blue whale. Did you know the model is 21,000 pounds and is held up by a single steel pipe? Or that it’s based on a dead whale? Find out more by reading my Byte Out of the Big Apple “A Deep Dive into the Installation of the American Museum of Natural History’s Blue Whale” over on Thomas Insights. Link in bio.
I found out yesterday that someone I know passed after contracting COVID-19. He was my age. He is the second person to pass in part of a small group I was part of about a decade ago. He leaves behind a wife and four children. I am still processing the news, the shock, the grief. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our days our numbered, and we don’t know when our number will be up, so we need to live the life we truly want to live, do what we love, use our vacation days to take life-changing trips, give generously, spend time with those we love, finish the creative projects we start, take chances even when we are afraid, dance with the whale, use the good china even for leftover lo mein on a Tuesday, invest time in growing into who we were created to be on a spiritual level, dance to bad ‘90s music in the living room, eat dessert for breakfast, live more fully.
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