Morgan Baden lives here.

• This summer I vacationed on Pearl Street in Beach Haven, my hometown, my heart.
• I have lately taken to wearing my deceased grandmother’s ring; it’s shiny and antique and makes me think of her, which is a strange, new feeling. We weren’t close.
• One of my other grandmothers (this one) still lives in the Beach Haven house in which I grew up; it’s an historic site on the island. (Literally.)
• In 1960, the Baldwin Hotel in Beach Haven, situated on the very same Pearl Street mentioned above, burned down.
• GHOSTS.

These are swimming in my head today. That’s a picture of the Baldwin Hotel. Isn’t it just gorgeous?

Image via

As with most things in my life, I go through phases when it comes to writing Christmas letters. This year, I’m back on the horse, inspired by some beautiful cards I found at a shop in Hoboken, where three separate sales clerks asked me in a span of 75 seconds whether I needed any help (the answer all three times was no). I’ve spent the past few days choosing my list, choosing which card goes to whom, choosing my words. Choosing, at its most basic, whether I wanted to be sentimental or not; whether this was a time for saying I love you, I miss you, thanks for a great year, my life is complete because of you.

I bought a silver pen, thick and fluid, which looks amazing against the red envelopes but a bit dim on the white ones. I am sorry to those of you for whom I chose the white cards over the red. You are missing out on some gorgeous ink.

There is something about writing things down on paper that feels more risky than it used to. Several times I started a message and then went to erase it before forgetting I couldn’t. I am so used to writing on screens and deleting at will and never needing to commit to my words until I’m ready to hit the Send button that I froze; the meanings I meant to convey may have gotten muddled as a result. But the cards are stamped and sealed, and I don’t even remember what I said in them, and there’s now no way for me to check.

How did we all used to survive like this?

As I was scribbling them the other night, I told B. I wished I had been a Victorian lady so I could write letters all day, just spinning exhortations about missing friends and lovely years and taking turns around the garden, which I would surely have if I were a Victorian lady. After a beat, he burst into laughter and told me that was the most untrue statement I’ve ever made.

I think it was a compliment.

Image via

I am suddenly fond of hoods on jackets, which is lucky, because last night it spitter-spattered harder than I anticipated on my walk home, a fine mist that steadily turned into a shower before disappearing altogether. I was just tucking my hair under my hood, marveling at how quiet the streets of SoHo were — it felt like the neighborhood was all dressed up in holiday gear, with no place to go — when I passed a mother and her pre-teen daughter. Arguing.

“Adjust your attitude right now,” the mother seethed. I couldn’t help it — I laughed. That line had been a favorite of my dad’s when I was a kid.

My parents are fascinating parents. (Fascinating people, too, but that’s a different story.) Without getting into too much detail, they both come from non-traditional (for the fifties and sixties) family homes — one from a single-parent household, one from a twice-divorced household — and now, as an adult, I glom on to those bits of their childhood, their life, whenever I can, because what they experienced is so incredibly different from the childhood they gave me. I honestly don’t know if they made this decision consciously or not, but their mandate as parents has always been very clear: our children come first, and we will break the cycle; we will build a family of best friends.

It’s amazing how well they succeeded. I sat at a long makeshift table last week, lined with 25-ish people, my favorites, my flesh, my heart. One of the centerpieces caught fire, and my former-fire-marshall father just laughed. And I thought about attitude adjustments, and how I felt loved and cherished and special just by simply being a part of them, and how that’s the only attitude I really need.

Anyway, back to the angry mother-daughter pair in SoHo. Oh, darlings, I know your pain; I remember it well, the way I would pick and pick at my mother’s scabs until she would snip at me or, worse, cry. (I am not proud.) It’s funny, the way we can get so mad at the people we love most. Like loving them gives us the permission to also hate them, even for just a moment, simultaneously.

Image via

None of the women in my immediate family have middle names. (For context, the men do; my extended family does too, mostly.) It used to be a point of contention for me; I used to long for an extra word to call my own.

One car ride nearly two decades ago, probably, I declared I’d take my twin sister’s name as my middle, if she would take mine as hers. If you know K., you can probably guess that she declined the offer. (Of the two of us, she’s usually the one who tried to stray from the idea of our twinship, at least moreso than me.) I dropped the idea.

When my older sister named her children, those two munchkins who light up my life in ways I couldn’t have comprehended, so much so that I worry I may never love my own hypothetical future children as much as I love them, she gave them middle names. She gave them with thought, with weight; a history.

Somehow the subject of middle names came up last weekend — a family joke-fight (you know the kind) where my mom and my aunt bet on how their mother, my grandmother, spelled her middle name. (For the record, my aunt won. Sorry mom.) But isn’t that funny, that my grandmother’s daughters didn’t even know for sure? A call to the eldest sister in Florida, my other aunt, had to be placed. Documents were unearthed. And finally, someone just called up my mom-mom and she solved the riddle herself. (As is the family way, there’s more to the story; it turns out, she gave her middle name to her eldest daughter as a middle name too, but changed the spelling, so the confusion on all sides was justified.)

The outcome is, middle names are weird, but also beautiful in a family-history-is-neat-and-important kind of way, and now I’m considering taking her middle name as mine. Morgan Mae.

Image via

I had a rushing, swooping swell of love for New York yesterday. It just hit me as I emerged from the subway, feeling sunshine on my cheekbones for the first time in days. After a few false starts, it’s finally fall on the East Coast.

That tumbling love feeling stayed with me all day, and then all night as I shuffled myself, behind a white mask, at the McKittrick Hotel for Sleep No More.

It is hard to explain the experience. (If you want to understand what it is, read this NYT review.) (Potential spoilers ahead.)

In a silent elevator, the conductor, with his Irish lilt, blocked me from leaving on the third floor, even though K, E, and S had already spilled out. The doors closed and I stifled a giggle; no one could see my smile when the conductor leaned into me and whispered, “I think you’ll find luck tonight.”

I did. The first room I discovered when I was finally let off had a single crib centered in a shaded room; bursting up above it were about 75 headless baby dolls, frozen in a choreographed routine. I stood there alone, taking it in; an actor appeared and performed a show around the crib, just for me. She left, and I stayed.

That was my favorite floor of Sleep No More — children’s bedrooms, filled with vintage books and strewn-about bedclothes. An office, with open drawers I could rifle through, letters half-written in old Smith-Coronas. A parlor, with chaises covered in white sheets; a turntable playing old jazz, the kind of haunting music I can’t get out of my head. I went back to that floor twice, just to re-check on the bedrooms, to see if the same books were still open to the same pages; to see if the dolls had moved.

Eventually I made my way to the next floor, where I watched  a woman hanging laundry (it was actually wet — a nice touch); then a bell rang, and she paused, shrugged on a jacket, and the crowd of about 30 rushed after her. She ended up walking through a wooded maze and meeting up with another nurse; they drew on the ground with chalk and kissed. They were in a tragic sort of love.

In the psychiatric ward I stood alone, surrounded by empty beds with diagnoses nailed to the walls and blood on the sheets. I waited for an actor or a dancer to appear — there was so much potential in that room — but when none showed, I reluctantly left, wandering until I found a woman trying to leave her husband, suitcase in hand; he threw her against a wall and left. You have to find your own show in Sleep No More.

Back in the lounge, I took off my mask and listened to French ’30s music and relished my returned visibility; the mask had made me feel like a ghost, like a peeping Tom. For a second I forgot I didn’t need to be scared anymore — the game was over.