📿 The Sopranos, New Socks, and Having a Cold.

Or: what Tony Soprano and I have in common.

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Wow! A pair of socks!

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Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

There was a stretch of years in the early aughts when introducing myself would generate the predictable response, “Adreanna! Like the character in The Sopranos!”

This was when the HBO series was carving out the genre of “prestige television” and anyone who had cable had it saved to their watch queue on TiVo. I did not have a TiVo (or cable TV), and so I would just shrug agreeably that yes, my dad’s side of the family is Italian American and yes, it IS pretty cool that a television character has my (not very common) name. 

Now here we are 20-odd years later, and I’ve been watching The Sopranos for the first time, which (in my opinion) holds up as iconic television, even though TiVo is long, long gone. 

→ Side bar worth sharing — Michael Imperioli, the actor who plays Chris-tuh-fah Moltisanti, is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner who hosts regular meditation classes. He will often post photos of himself from the series, in character as a New Jersey gangster, next to his meditation schedule on Instagram. This is an incongruous pairing that brings me deep joy — like when sad lyrics are set to a dance beat or clashing yellow and violet flowers emerge together in the spring. 

There’s a storyline in The Sopranos that I’ve been thinking about lately where (without any spoilers) anti-hero protagonist Tony Soprano emerges from the hospital with newfound appreciation for life. In the way that heath scares have a way of doing, all petty grievances have been descaled from his eyes and he sees his life as a miracle, each day as a gift to be cherished.

It doesn’t take long before his fresh perspective begins to erode. The daily pressures, mundane routines, compromises, deadlines, inconveniences, and wear and tear of living all chip away at the revelation he arrived at in his hospital bed. There is a scene where he’s discussing this shift with his therapist and laments:

“You know my feelings: Every day is a gift. It's just, does it have to be a pair of socks?”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because I have a cold. It feels ridiculous to compare a hospitalized health scare to the common cold, especially in the After Times of a pandemic. A cold, on the Richter scale of pain and illness, is maybe one point up from a crick in the neck and two points up from a paper cut. (Not that there is a defined hierarchy of suffering; this is just my personal experience.) 

I have noticed though, that no matter how minor, I have a renewed appreciation for my health whenever I’m sick or injured. My swollen sinuses make the memory of clear breathing seem like a gift in contrast. The absence of pressure, pain, and mucus would be life affirming right now. I find myself idealizing a night of sleep that’s uninterrupted by coughing and a morning shower that doesn’t burn the raw chafing under my nose. 

A cold may not be seismic, but it is uncomfortable enough to find me idealizing the assumption of my wellness. Feeling well in my body is something that I experience often enough that I take it completely for granted — like so many other assumed states of comfort and support that form the invisible backdrop of my life. 

And much like Tony Soprano, I have a hunch that when my cold clears I’ll even feel GREAT for a day or two as the memory of having a cold lingers. And then, I’ll move on to other, more immediate concerns. Feeling well in my body will become a background assumption. A gift, sure. Just…more like a pair of socks. 

Anticipating this loss of appreciation makes me wonder how to make it stick. I don’t want to take my health for granted — or take any aspect of my life for granted, while we’re on the subject. I have loved ones in my life. My cupboards are fully stocked. I live in a place that is not currently experiencing war or genocide. I am generally safe and my needs are met. Isn’t that wonderful?

It’s also not a given that things will always be this way. There’s a desire to drill my good fortune into my psyche, to make it stay bolted to the top of my mind. A part of me thinks that fixing my blessings to my mental dashboard will prevent me from ever feeling low again; a gripping insistence that if I make gratitude stay, it will ward off annoyance, exhaustion and anger. 

Another part of me knows that this is just grasping in disguise. There’s no guarantee that counting my blessings will always abate the blues, and it’s an unfair expectation that appreciation will stay, like a well trained dog or a trinket on a shelf. If I’m being honest, experience has shown me that this line of thinking is how a gratitude practice shrivels up and withers on the vine. Most times that I’m recycling a list of things that I know that I “should” be grateful for; it feels stale and dusty…like a trinket on a shelf. There is no real juice to my sense of appreciation when I try to lock it in place. 

Lately I’ve been thinking of appreciation, or gratitude, or the Tony Soprano gift of life (if you will) as more of just a byproduct of paying attention. Like a clear pair of nasal passages, there any number of silly little blessings that are easy to overlook in our very busy preoccupation, or because they appear insignificant. 

I know that we write A LOT about attention here at The Laundry… and that’s because attention is both the instruction for meditation practice, and one of the fruits of our efforts. I think of Anne Lamont, who also writes frequently about attention. There’s a passage in her book Help, Thanks, Wow; Three Essential Prayers that reads: 

“Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, "Well, that's pretty much what I thought I'd see," you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. [...] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”

So I guess that right now I’m just working on staying open for business — sinus pressure and all — rather than trying to make gratitude happen. Maybe the real gift here is having a cold so that I’m able to appreciate the feeling of wellness, even if I’m bound to forget it once it’s properly restored. Someday I might not be so lucky. The body is fallible and good health is not a given.

Also, let’s be honest — new socks are pretty great in their own right. Even if they don’t astonish. When they’re fresh from the dryer on a winter day and they fit cozy, toasty and snug? A real blessing, indeed.