Story of My Life - Social Distortion

Nineteen weeks and hungry for tacos….but that probably doesn’t have anything to do with being pregnant.

Will got the first addition to his library today thanks to his Aunt Margie in Jersey!

Little Taco Truck by Tanya Valentine and Jorge Martin is the cutest story about great food, standing up yourself and inclusion.

As soon as I got it, I cuddled up on the couch with Roxy and read aloud to Will - promising that we would eat all of the food in the book (tacos, falafel, gelato…) and that one day, we would go to New Orleans where he could share gumbo with Daddy.

I really loved reading to him and I cannot wait to make this a tradition.

Obviously, I have a whole Harry Potter Plan (book, movie, book, movie and then, for his birthday - Harry Potter World in Orlando) but I also want to read him my favorite books from childhood - Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Witches by Roald Dahl, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman by Allen Ahlberg and The Mr. Men and Little Miss series.

I want him to know mythology from all different cultures - not just Greek and Roman - and read the works of writers from all over the world whose experiences could not be more different.

I want him to understand Shakespeare in a modern context (one of the best things about coming of age in the late 90s was all of the teen movies based on the works of Shakespeare - O, Ten Things I Hate About You and of course, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet . I was obsessed with that movie).

I want him to understand that Romeo and Juliet is not a romance but rather, the story of two idiots who make a series of bad decisions, fail to communicate and end up dead.

I want my son to discover the works of great journalists and wait impatiently for his favorite columnist’s newest piece to drop the way I used to wait for Bill Simmons or now wait for Drew Magary.

I want him to fall in love with the simplicity and the sparsity of Bukowski and Raymond Chandler - “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

But above all - I want him to understand that Holden Caulfield is a sanctimonious, Puritanical pain in the ass.

Hey Will. It’s Mom.

I have always been a voracious reader. When I was growing up, your papa had this bookshelf filled with all sorts of books - sci-fi novels, an atlas that listed featured Yugoslavia, the USSR and both East and West Germany (yeah - Mommy’s old), a huge book about film, a book about animals in Africa and an entire bottom shelf dedicated to National Geographic Magazines. I used to sit on the floor between the couch and the shelf for hours, devouring whatever printed material I could.

We had a lot of people in the house growing up - my grandparents, Nanima and Papa, Sarika Masi and for a little while, we had two pairs of aunts and uncles and three of my cousins - but in my little spot, tucked away by the couch - I felt cozy and quiet and free to dream big.

There are a lot of my traits that I hope you inherit - a love of spices and live music and the indefatigable belief that you are the most charming person in the room - and my love of reading is probably one of the top ten.

Reading makes you hungry. I mean that both figuratively and literally.

Kerouac once said that he was eager for bread and love and my God, if that doesn’t just cut to the quick of who we are.

Not humanity we, but we - me and you, kid.

Have you ever read anything Anthony Bourdain wrote?

No, of course you haven’t.

You’re the size of a hot dog and don’t even have lungs just yet, but you will.

You’ll have lungs and you will read and watch Bourdain’s work:

“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies”

This is what good writing does to you - a rush of blood to the head, the heart, the limbs. The inexorable ache to do….something. To breathe life into those black words on the white page and make them tangible; dripping with sweat and salt.

It makes you want to scramble pell mell out into the world and little bird, I want that so much for you.

Read, my love.

Read every goddamn thing you can get your hands on…and if you wanna make Mommy really proud?

Write.

(But not professionally. Oh my God, please don’t be a professional writer. It’s so hard and there’s like, less than zero money in it and come on, dude. You have an Indian mom! Eye on the prize, kid - Dr. Will Elder is what we’re aiming for. Like, a real doctor. Not a Doctor of Philosophy or a hack like Dr. Oz)

Can’t wait to read and adventure with you.

See you soon.

We love you xx

P.S. - Speaking of tacos, Daddy and I got tacos from Zipitios the other night and they were amazing. I can’t wait to take you there - we can sit outside in the sunshine, share tacos and Jarritos piña.