Summer Rooms

'If ever I would leave you,' my mother used to sing, 'it wouldn't be in summer...' but precisely 8 years ago she did just that.  Death has no rules or timeline, and is especially not going to align with poetic or lyrical predictions. Being the one sure consequence of life, it unfortunately informs all of our daily routines, and our higher thoughts. 

Last week's heatwave prompted some air-conditioned time at neighborhood museums.  The most moving pieces in the Rashid Johnson show were the ones that reminded me of death-- of killing and the indelible anxiety of blackness.  The Ben Shahn show-- a mere shadow in popularity-- was riveting for me-- his unique artistic activism which seemed to permeate all layers of injustice.  Of course as a post-mortem show, there is no platform from which he speaks... and in an era of limited media, his voice was not nearly as resonant as a super-star like Rashid in this day and age.  Artists are their own brand of entrepreneurs... the stakes are high and the rewards are massive, if one gets it right.

I also managed to stop by the Art Students League to see the retrospective of historic teachers' work.  It was soulful and quiet-- underwhelming but somehow important.  Unlike the Guggenheim, it is an old building with few upgrades.  One senses the history; it has changed little since I took a class or two in the 1970's. Purely analogue, and most if not all of the artists in this show have passed on. Unlike Rashid-- relatively young for the kind of collectability he has achieved-- their work must speak for them.  What is lost and undocumented does not affect the narrative, and most of these exhibitors will at best present as a kind of jigsaw puzzle missing a few pieces. At worst, they can be misunderstood, like an inventor/genius without a written will whose life's work ends up in a trash bin or a thrift shop.

As opposed to much of the contemporary museum fare, these paintings were 'dressed' down-- in old frames, sometimes made by the artists.  On a flea market wall they'd be hardly distinguishable to an untrained eye. While many of their makers had been in gallery shows and institutional collections, most of them ended up in middle-class homes as 'decor'. Scanning this quiet show, what is undeniable is the intention-- the day to day dedication to practice and technique without short cuts. When one mastered a certain platform, they might probe imagination and inspiration to break through to discover a new style... the organic progression of artistic genius.  These hanging works like the souvenirs of these achievements... not all brilliant but every one quietly embodying a certain skill... and a certain questioning of the basic tenets of illustration which long years of study had required.

Summer months I take in mail and water plants for my vacationing neighbors.  The younger ones generally have cleaning women who do this... but the older couples require my attention.  People my age and older have a higher tolerance for clutter than the new families with recent renovations. There are libraries-- stereo systems and record collections-- file cabinets and stacks of magazines and journals-- souvenirs from years of travel and family albums... furniture and handmade pillows-- knick-knacks-- mantel clocks, andirons, rugs... art. Their apartments tell a story... reveal their age and politics in a way that is comforting.  They are readers and former explorers... they are still, in older age, studying things-- listening. They do not text me but send an occasional email or even a postcard. 

Years ago musicians often stopped by my house-- to play me a new song, or go over arrangements and harmonies for a show.  I took this for granted.  The pandemic silenced us-- aside from that 7 PM clanging and ringing across the city, one respected that there were people who were ill and subdued.  We were solitary. As opposed to those joyful days when we'd crank up our stereo and open the windows, most people now use earbuds and stream their music. 

As a girl almost everyone had a piano-- some a grand Steinway, but most homes-- even poor ones-- had a kind of funky parlor instrument. People sat around and sang. In my house there was old sheet music that got stored in the piano bench.  When you Wish Upon a Star... with the little Jiminy Cricket cartoon on the cover... stands out in memory.  My Mom played and sang-- badly, but there it was... her favorite songs.  Everyone had a hi-fi, with a space for record albums... most families had the same Broadway classics... West Side Story, My Fair Lady...The Music Man.  We knew all the words. It was a kind of commonality.

When my son had his first 'away' playdate, I was told he wandered around the apartment looking for the boy's Mom's guitars. He assumed everyone was a musician like me.  These days guitars are a kind of accessory-- one sees them in department store windows, on the video 'set' of journalist and podcasters... there is often a guitar on a stand... in staged rooms on real estate platforms. 

My home tells a story. No longer do we use sheet music and write out our new songs on staff paper. Even I have a digital synth/piano which I play through headphones... but wandering through my older neighbors', I can almost hear my old Mom's childlike soprano shyly singing these songs to me.  I can smell the old music sheets and see the notes and chords as they were written-- as I taught myself, on the old piano... when life was black and white, when the 'practice' of music was woven into days and nights, and like a kind of religion, I believed in lyrics that promised no one would leave. 

Grey Area

I watched Liv Ullman's 2014 production of Miss Julie the other night. It was compelling in a way but also deeply flawed.  Not the play itself-- but the chemistry between the players seemed lacking.  Two very great acting talents... Jessica Chastain, one of my favorites, did as well as she could have, but Colin Farrell was awkward in and out of clothing and spoiled her performance. 

It brought me back to my high school introduction to drama; we are all spoon-fed Shakespeare in middle school in the form of Romeo and Juliet... and we are initiated via Hamlet to more serious theatre and language. But Strindberg?  I remember so well reading this play-- as well as Ibsen and Beckett and even O'Neill.  I'm not sure this is still part of the curriculum.  There is something about experiencing these tragedies when one is discovering one's sexuality but has little opportunity... that makes it all that much more 'dramatic'.

The summer season of Shakespeare in the Park has just begun. People were lining up for tickets at 3 AM yesterday.... it's super popular and for many the plays still have a kind of familiar discovery. I imagine the actors reciting these lines every night, like a kind of repetitive theatrical rite of passage.... somehow Shakespeare holds up. Not that Strindberg did not, although there is the translation issue... and Liv Ullman's cinematographic choices were very good... it was just somehow the delivery. 

Lately I've been reevaluating tastes... the novels I've loved can let me down at this age... some were perhaps innovative enough to feel dated now-- disappointing.  Last week I read an Italian late-80's novel which was raved about in the Paris Review.  While it brought back to life the terrible tragedy of the AIDS crisis, much of it seemed predictable... even the soundtrack seemed clichéd-- Morrissey, Smiths, Pet Shop Boys...One wonders if old crushes would have the same deflated appeal. The films of memory-- some are still brilliant and fun-- others cringeworthy.  

But I'm feeling a bit harsh and judgmental.  Woody Allen has been boring me.  My own massive bedside reading offers a daily struggle to finish a project that seems less worthy than weighty. Yes, I'm aging and jaded. As a kind of social experiment, over the past few months I've stopped coloring my hair.  It's given me an opportunity to see where I physiologically am in this process, and also to experience full-on the agism of our culture. In the mirror I wonder if I am simply a discerning, educated adult, or a cranky old so-and-so. Still on the fence, lol.

One thing that follows me-- color or no color, is the constant ebb and flow of grief... perhaps the universal common denominator.  I have celebrated so many birthdays, so many anniversaries... and yet I have logged a complementary accumulation of 'years since'.  Reunions are celebrated by collegians but more of my 'landmark' occasions have become memorials... observed not by ceremony but often merely the privacy of a simple notation. I had the terrible task of notifying a sector of people about a friend's recent death. Among the replies were two in-absentia emails from children, letting me know the person I contacted had passed.  This is more and more common.

And among the griefs and mortal losses which are unprocessable are the abandonments and relationship dissolutions... those whose spouses or paramours have moved on or given up, who have become unhappy with and less unhappy without, leaving their partner desolate. These narratives are fairly consistent in dramatic production... they are perhaps secondary to death but for some, equally painful.  

Looking harshly in daylight at one's face without makeup, without expression or hair color... one feels a bit more unlovable, a bit obsolete and unappealing. The reality of aging-- one of the natural progressions of life-- has a kind of purpose.  While culture spends a huge market share in its defiance, its reality makes the prospect of an exit just a little more bearable.  We have traded passion for wisdom, hopefully... and the price of a long wonderful warehouse of years is our increasing fragility-- our withering beauty and our vulnerability.  

Are we less sensitive?  We are not.  We don't cry like babies but our griefs pile up like sacks of grain and some days it takes effort to keep things from expressing themselves as tearfulness.  We are quiet, most of us... we have not suicided or overdramatized like Miss Julie but we have assimilated sorrow.  We have faded. 

I can still play rock and roll... I still feel my internal motor rev when I hear the opening chords of AC/DC.  But I am leaning toward listener more than player; I am well aware of my chronology. Will I tough it out and let the greying takes its place?  I actually looked up Liv Ullman who was 76 when she made Miss Julie.  Knowing her persona, she surely accepted her natural hair color and facial processes. She is not just beautiful but glowing with talent even now, at 87.  

My son doesn't like the natural hair; it ages him.  As I said, it's been an experiment. Some people have been kind and complimentary; my very honest girlfriend yesterday told me to run-not-walk to the nearest drugstore and buy any box dye, that she cannot bear to look at me.  Am I mirroring the harsher version of herself? I'll probably concede... for today, I'm still hanging in the grey area. 

Pity the Poor Immigrant

I walk the streets with a running monologue in my head; sometimes it's a poetic kind of voice, other times it's a soliloquy-- a kind of rant or commentary.  The barraging urban incidentals feed this, redirect and influence... sometimes it is chastising and harsh, otherwise gushing and passionate. Most of it evaporates... one cannot document or note everything, and inspirations are corrupted like a warping digital file.  It's a wrap, I think, occasionally, as I invent a short story... and then it is lost in the ever-washing tide of temporary memory. Aging brains have less capacity to compartmentalize these things.  One fails to make notes, and then there is nothing... like a dream which disintegrates as one wakes.

It occurs that as one ages, one is shaped by what one forgets, as much as what one selectively recalls. I texted a friend yesterday that my life is defined more by what I have not done than what I have-- the way I consistently avoided opportunities of success or even a kind of minor celebrity... how I felt compromised by this kind of thing, and adhered to this stringent discipline of seeking my true voice rather than an audience. It probably has not served me, I note, as frothy influencers collect more than my annual income for a shallow momentary display of 'meme-dom'.

We musicians circulate periodic youtube fragments of odd under-known geniuses-- gypsy guitarists, random Eastern European instrumentalists whose personal style has developed unaffected by trends and online platforms.  Some take one's breath away... one discovery from last week, on further research, had died several years ago; fortunately he survived into the mobile phone culture enough to have had dazzled witnesses capture a few performance moments for us. It's humbling.

Fast forward to my regular life-- the email, the constant stream of notifications and requests... it's mind boggling, the number of attachments that accumulate-- the statistical impressiveness these marketing tools provide... the spread of mediocrity like bad mayonnaise on packaged white bread which affects not just taste buds but critical faculties.  We are intellectually worn like smooth stones by the incessant traffic.  I feel like variety has suffered... for every celebrity there are easily 5-10 others who look alike.  With cosmetic procedures, each of these changes facially with every appearance.  Maybe I'm just old and losing visual acuity-- but everything seems to be leveling off. The dumbing down of America which produced the current state of affairs... the rounding of corners...the filing of edges, the general whitewashing disguised as red-white-and-bluewashing.

Since I rarely consult a cellphone, I am inclined to talk to human beings like a crazy person.  It's interesting. Many of those willing and anxious to speak are from other countries.  Their trajectory, even in a five-minute conversation-- is often adventurous, and their take on America reminds me of what I used to believe in.  The drum circle on the North end of the park is comforting somehow-- the camaraderie and the colors... the warmth.  My young Senegalese friend who took me to the hospital after my accident last year--  still struggles but his huge smile and sheer ability to find joy are contagious.  

The Philippine farm workers who come weekly to my neighborhood and sell great vegetables for less than half of the pricey city Greenmarkets... I look forward to their Sunday stand, although they speak little English.  And then in East Harlem-- a new grocer-- with piles of exotic rice sacks and slightly damaged produce that is affordable.  On my block they sell Honeydew melons for $13.99.  Not even spelled right.  But here... they were $3.  I asked a very thin Middle eastern worker to help me pick a ripe one; he offered to cut it... if it is not good, he said, you don't have to buy.  So he disappeared and returned with a knife-master's slice... it was heavenly.  Then he wrapped the two halves in plastic.  Where are you from, I asked? I am Palestinian, he replied. Images of emaciated children and clamoring crowds of hungry desperate parents.. I was overcome with tears... we pray, he assured me.  I am the lucky ones... but fear for my family here.

Outside the 96th Street Mosque a man sells fruit from cartons on the sidewalk.  A blind man with a beautiful face and pale eyes sits in a portable chair for long hours.  If one has no money, one can take something.  These small human dioramas comfort me.  The diversity often disguises a kind of goodness... the hidden geniuses in quiet rooms and the generous gifts of the poor who give not for the deduction or reward but because it is inherent.  

Now that the whole city is being sued... one wonders... where is the sanctuary? I am quick to apologize to these people that the American Dream they sought has let us all down lately.  How many amazing souls are being deported with the bathwater?  Encroaching tides from both sides-- it overwhelms.  Like the general pool, a few from desperation turn to crime as a quick fix, but we in our cracking and chipped glass houses, may we see via our hearts' vision.

Women and Men

Heat in New York City-- the extreme unrelenting kind (not to downplay the life-threatening aspect) is a palpable adventure.  For those of us toughing it out without air conditioning, it feels like a matrix-- a kind of intangible airless box.  I can't help being reminded of the 1977 July blackout, when my neighborhood was not only without power for days, but without water. Yes, there was looting and some violence, but for the young, it was a kind of party... restaurants and bars at first giving away the contents of their refrigerators and freezers, drinking and partying in the streets.  By day three, it got old; the city stank of garbage and sewage.  At one point I hopped on a city bus which had its own little air conditioning system and rode all the way uptown.  I was living with a guitar player who continued to do acoustic gigs in clubs by candlelight with people drinking warm beer and soda from cans. It stretched time. 

I'm sweating through Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.. another of those challenging post-modern difficult mammoth novels. It's so large the contemporary reprinting was structurally unsound and retracted. Supposedly there's a two-volume version, but I'm coping with the original 1980's printing.  Difficult to carry around-- larger than my Organic Chemistry textbook all those years ago--  and nearly as dense.  It's also a quintessentially New York novel, written for the most part in the 1970's.  It occurs as I make my way that I'm going to be the last reading generation who will understand the context of these characters and their behaviors.  We read Shakespeare and older authors and there is a glossary at the back to explain words and expressions, but it occurs that in a few more decades, even the geography here-- the recent vintage urban references-- will require footnotes. 

I wonder too, if people in the future will have a reading list, the way many of our pop icons had their own set of icons-- many of whom were relatively well-read and versed.  Why is it that I feel compelled to read, as though I must continue some kind of literary itinerary with its occasional roadside distractions and off-ramps, unpaved paths and mountainous obstacles? As though someone will go hungry because I overlooked some huge tome, or my destiny will not play out as pre-planned?

As recreation, I picked up a Library of America book of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  I love these volumes for their scrupulous attention to original manuscripts, for their notes and explanations-- biographical insights.  I trust them, in a world where printing errors and typos abound, translations fail authors. Admittedly, I had never heard of this Woolson who is described as perhaps the acknowledged second-best woman writer of the 19th century.  Complete oversight.  So they are chaste little tales which at first bored me, but now I am compulsively going through the entire chronology.  They are narrative and informed with setting and geography-- with characters and religion and informed with a kind of old-fashioned social and moral sense which is comforting and rewarding. Real stories... adventures... people... with air and atmosphere.  A slight wind.  Sea-storms, swamps, Italian hills... old churches and clergymen and orphaned seamstresses... mysteries.

As opposed to Women and Men which has the density and realism of a solid polyhedron.  The details and characters-- the tangents and the interwoven relationships-- the non-narrative difficulty.  It is a kind of five-dimensional novel and one must stay present with each page.  I remember reading Pynchon in the 70's; it was a revelation and a challenge. Decades later I'm not sure I'm quite up to a weighty literary task; at page 500, I'm not even halfway through... but I will keep going. 

Two nights ago I rewatched the 1970's version of The Great Gatsby.  It felt stale and dated; the dialogue was flat-- the  characters were silly and the ironies awkward.  Even the Fitzgerald text felt clichéd.  Am I jaded?  Not sure. I am much more apt to appreciate the outdated language of the Woolson stories. 

I spend hours each day scrolling through gallery exhibitions and auction lots.  One sees scads of old-world academic painters-- people who gave their entire life to the study of landscape or still life or portraits, for little reward.  They looked and observed and self-critiqued and produced; they starved. And here are these millionaire contemporary artists with their rolexes and several residences... bringing home the proverbial bacon.  Others work so hard to become financial and critical failures. To be rewarded for simply being oneself is the supreme prize.  Many of these people are locked in their perhaps non-air-conditioned rooms, struggling to give birth to yet another creation, maybe unseen.  This haunts me.. how to find these people who have no instagram or outlet... but their own brand of greatness. 

I imagine them during these oppressive nights-- the ones by candlelight in older times; the heat even in the Gatsby movie was accurately palpable.  Pre-air-conditioned summers, as the older among us recall them.  My mother took us to Belle Harbor (I thought she was a woman) to cool off in the ocean. When my father earned a little more, we went to Cape Cod or summer camp.  Meanwhile my mother read us 'cold' stories like Jack London or The Little Match Girl and ran our little wrists under cool faucets. The days were long and the nights often sleepless and longer. 

This summer will be marked by the imprint of Women and Men-- slipping back into a 1970's city I remember well.  By the time McElroy published this long novel, it was already perhaps outdated.  It was described as ambitious, difficult, perhaps brilliant... the subject does not strike me as much as the urban whole, the layered complicated synchronicitous and unfathomable, while personally a kind of nostalgia he did not intend engages me. It's a relief that none of the characters have quite seeped into my heart, which leaves space for the Woolson tales to enchant me a little more these hot nights.  

Poor Woolson, I've learned, was something of a literary spinster.  She worshipped Henry James and managed a complicated friendship with him, although James never quite acknowledged her talent. At 53 she suicided-- did not make it to the twentieth century. Perhaps I should reconsider and recall this as the summer of Constance. 

7A (You-logy)

My upstairs neighbor passed away this morning. The backstory here is deep and the echo of her absence will resonate.  She was a great, strong woman who broke ground as an editor and a fashion executive. When I moved into my apartment she was about the age I am now; I was a young single mother and as the coop Board president, she took me under her political wing.  For over twenty-seven years I felt protected.  As she aged and became a widow, we were just two women sharing stories and inspiration.  I trusted her wisdom. Last week she turned 99-- a milestone for anyone, and for those who think they want to live past 100, well... it's not easy.  Trying to process this today, it is quite a life-- begun in the 1920's, conquering the city, managing a marriage, career and family, and hardest of all-- witnessing one's own decline and deterioration into old age.  I participated in the last quarter of her life; the rest was a narrative I treasured.  

This morning the courtyard pigeons were in a state.  A woman claimed there was a white dove on the roof,  as though escorting her spirit. I'm not sure of these things. For me this day was long and rough.  We dread the absence of certain people... and it comes for all of us, no matter how we resist. We interpret signs, we pray, but we are not certain.  She herself was not religious; in the end I'm not sure what remains of one's spirit aside from the memories we carry. Most of her accomplishments were achievements, not product. There are no grandchildren to take her legacy forward-- no judgment at this moment. 

For several years she handed me down various articles of clothing-- vintage Prada, iconic expired fashion symbols.  Some of them-- the black ones-- I wore onstage until they almost disintegrated.  It occurs I have a pair of her lace-up boots that barely fit; the discomfort of wearing them this week will feel like a hair shirt, like a slightly painful reminder of mourning. She was not sentimental.  

We shared a passion for literature, and of the New York School of painting which she'd witnessed first-hand.  She knew many of the artists whose work I admire and who passed on long before I got here. Recent years robbed her of her sight, and her hearing was challenging. She tried her best to keep up with news and museum developments. The current fashion world had forgotten her nearly entirely; her generation had mostly disappeared, but in her day she was on the A-list of events like the Met Gala. 

Processing the breadth of a life like this is overwhelming. Nearly thirty years behind her, I already sense that I have entered a kind of era of obsolescence. Despite the weight of what I've seen and done and read, my existence has little present impact.  We are daily fading into the past.  Some of us have our wrinkles injected and our skin renewed, and maybe delude ourselves with a kind of narcissism that we are still relevant. Not that simple.

I've had a recurring dream... set in the long corridors of a building like the Vatican... an empty museum or a kind of mausoleum. I wander these temporal hallways--  the abandoned niches in the wall stripped of monuments and medals. I can almost smell a kind of familial dust, as though the air is thick with cremated moments. Where are the people, I am wondering?  Where are the sculpted images and painted altarpieces? The emptiness is palpable; it is like an architectural enigma.

Demonstrations yesterday were comforting in Manhattan.  They were peaceful and the solidarity and diversity of the crowd was reassuring. I felt nostalgic and safe, despite the menacing presence of armed policemen everywhere.  The thousands of handmade signs and messages were creative and passionate and human. If something happened to one or many of us-- well, our lives had a momentary meaning, a mission. I felt lifted and hopeful.  

Back uptown I ran into a woman who confessed how lonely she was; she'd never found a partner, shunned online dating apps, and just felt passed over. I tried my hardest to encourage her-- to volunteer, enlist somehow, not to sit and wait for life to disappoint her.  My aging neighbor was a graphic reminder of how precious our moments can be, how difficult the latter part of one's life.  Rage, rage, I wanted to urge her. But the news of this one sole death seemed devastating today. For each of the plane crash victims-- the Iranian, Israeli and Gaza casualties-- there is a hole in a loved one's heart.  One day soon we will all become the hole in someone's heart... or at least a brief obituary, an alumni memoriam, a Facebook post. 

My neighbor lived in her apartment for over 60 years; she was married here... her children were born and grew here.  Inevitably the place will be stripped of the medical aids and the old books and vinyl-- the furniture, the charming improvements her husband crafted.  It will be emptied and renovated and a new family will move in. I was once a young family here; I've moved up the ranks to become one of the senior tenants. Time moves on, and as I commented in a piece long ago, New York is like a Grand Hotel-- people move in and out, and we can't hold onto our personal geographical souvenirs. 

I suppose the ultimate lesson of death is the value of life.  We get a huge grace, most of us... we waste time, we squabble and complain and pine.  Some of us are gone too soon; some of us linger too long and become the burden of others.  And some of us, like the man in 11A, are granted an epiphany-- a near-miracle. How to solve these things? To live and die more or less of 'old age' is another lucky variation of the plane-crash narrative; we all end up the same.  I know my neighbor loved life enough to hang in through the challenges of aging-- the aches and pains and indignities... I, too, love this life too much.  Just to sit in the park and watch people-- to see the sunset across the reservoir... yesterday's bagel and a home-made coffee-- a library book.  To sense the passage of time and its irreversible cruelties and kindnesses-- it's more than I deserve, I think sometimes, but I'm determined to earn the privilege of staying and not quite ready to leave, God willing.

11 A

Since the weekend I've been carrying dread like an unborn child. Literally... the quasi-physical heaviness of a pregnancy, without the joy, without the future. The relentless bad news, the threats to human freedoms and everyday security. It's overwhelming.

I watched a kind of forum on human empathy-- and identified as one of those people who prioritizes others-- known popularly as a 'people pleaser' which is not really a positive thing.  We do no good either for ourselves or others, yet it's built-in-- layered-- a little like a second heart which doesn't serve or beat, but simply aches.  There is no surgery for this; I suppose a high dosage of meds would temper it, but my friends know overstrict emotional self-parenting makes me reluctant to even use aspirin.  

My Irish nanny told me at the age of four not to tell my parents but I was a natural-born Catholic.  I asked her all kinds of questions about things, and I was perpetually preoccupied with the reviving of dead insects, plants, birds... tearing up in Church at the hymns and prayers, obsessed with but unable to fully fathom the Jesus story.  I watched magicians pull rabbits and living things from boxes... the personal metaphor of my personal hat somehow implies this secret belief that something mystical is hidden there-- that life is not all objective-- music, most of all, maybe. 

So while we cannot all be heroes, we can perhaps be conjurors... we can be fixers or healers.  Watching a concert at the Central Park bandshell Tuesday evening I realized how completely altered I was with each piece-- as though I physically melted into the cosmic architecture... I could almost sense the composer and his vision.  To be a musician is such a blessed thing... how I miss the gigs of old. Even those sweaty crowded dive bars-- to be part of the crowd-shaping thing... it was a blessing. 

And the actual heroes... well, they are passing with acceleration. Rick Derringer... we all disagreed with his politics in the end, but I had ties to him through various people I worked with.  One night he came into one of those east village bars in the days when cabaret laws enforced a three-people-only-rule onstage.  We were  a well-working trio... Rick, to participate, sat on a barstool across from the bandstand, plugged in and played like a phantom genius inhabiting our amplifiers.  I tried to remember that, and to honor his passing.

There are times when politics must take a back seat.  The irony of that plane crash yesterday-- in a second we recognize tragedy... the enormity and horror of a scene like this... the human grief... the families... and yet daily we hear news of missiles and war, and equally devastating destruction-- death and hideous injuries... and we digest this. What is wrong with us?  How have we grown immune to the architecture of suffering on a large scale?  Because it doesn't affect our neighborhood?  

I read and I read.  I watch way too much television.  I have friends who tell me they don't watch news... it's too terrible.  I cannot help feeling this responsibility-- just to know, and yet I cannot help. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading books... they are both comforting and alarming... the past has taught this generation little; we seem to be repeating the same mistakes in different clothing. There is no DNA to identify a situation, but the parallels are disturbing.  The suppression of freedom-- the support of freedom to be racist and uncompassionate... what is our human responsibility? If a nation decides to attack another, it's a hideous barbaric choice. But still there are good people on both sides; and one cannot condone anti-semitism because the actions of Israel are aggressive and inhumane.  No religions teach this kind of thing. 

People like me, my psychiatrist friend tells me, get cancer.  They suffer and cannot exorcize what compels them to live inside this chronic empathic cloud. If it's not one thing, it's another.  I worry.  My son is my absolute source of light.  He, fortunately, has not inherited my emotional impairment.  He is smart and forward-thinking and extremely functional. Hats off to him, truly.

Yesterday I tried a local pharmacy-- sick of the lines and the monopoly of these huge drugstore chains and the whole profitable medical industry. It is right by a local mosque; the owner is Muslim and so kind.  When he walked from behind the counter, I saw he was a huge man, with a terrible disability... unidentifiable. I immediately invented this narrative that he'd been somehow beaten and tortured in a torn country and survived with a twisted architecture.  Painful to see him walk... and yet he was happy and smiling and grateful for my tiny business.  When I got home I realized my prescription was nearly at expiration.  I will not complain. I know this is wrong-- I'll simply wait and get a refill eventually. This is medicine; this is a business... and yet for me it is not.  I have adopted the pharmacist into my massive family of those for whom I worry.  

11A.  I hate flying... the slightest turbulence gives me terrible anxiety.  In 1988 I took Pan Am flight 103 the night before that horrific crash; I felt like a survivor in a way.  But I cannot imagine processing the miracle of walking away from a wreck like yesterday's. One man.  Defying a lethal diagnosis... dodging an executioner's bullets.  It's unfathomable... the burden of being that person, if you're someone like me-- how to process, how to return a massive 'favor'... the one home that survived the fires in a neighborhood destroyed... the one standing tree after a tornado. Nothing compares.  Inexplicable. 

Many of my friends have no religious beliefs.  They take a scientific perspective on death as a full biological stop. How does one explain the rapture of music?  I don't know. The thousands of movies that interpret and explore an afterlife-- angels and heaven and ghostly hauntings.  Like a hunting dog, I have often picked up the scent of previous lives, the déjà-vu.  I wonder if the passenger in 11A sensed these things.. how his life will change.  Already real estate brokers are asking a premium for 11A apartments.  People are booking the seat first... they could charge a premium.  

I'm hoping somehow to unburden myself of this weight.  Not hopeful because the news is cumulative;  problems outweigh solutions. Sicknesses far outnumber cures... and will continue. Death will relentlessly equate births... one cannot exist without the other, really... sort of a paradox.  We can only hope that each of us provides a little relief to someone-- sharing a sandwich, proverbially. It's contagious, kindness... really the only thing we can control-- our personal space, the way we manage it. A different kind of pandemic... maybe it's my ingrained vague version of Catholic belief... and the importance of mercy-- to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc.  And maybe the victims of the plane crash were taken to heaven... but 11A was given a mission.  We are all, those here reading-- given a daily second chance.  Trying to decipher mine, today. 

What We Sew

In the current version of my life with its inefficiencies and endless unfinished book projects, home improvements on hiatus, music in my head, itineraries and symphonic lapses... it occurred to me to attend to the small of pile of 'things for mending' I keep on a bench in the bedroom.  I am surprisingly able to thread a tiny-eyed needle and one by one I attempted to manage missing buttons, small legging holes, cloth strap repairs, unravelling sweater edges, etc.  There was something not just satisfying but 'connecting' about it.  I thought, of course, of my mother, who sewed and knit with great mastery and excellence.  She taught me-- patiently and humbly, with that sense of one woman handing down generational secrets of the sex.

My mother's sewing box-- like a kind of doctor's bag filled with threads, needles, patches, ribbons and bands... pin cushions, and most memorable of all-- the darning egg on a stick which resembled a rattle or Caribbean percussion instrument.  With this she deftly repaired holes in socks; my father had several pairs hand-knitted by mothers and in-laws during the war-- argyles and striped... woolen for warmth and insulation inside his cold paratrooper boots as he marched or jumped into surf and swamp. Why, I would ask her, do new and few and pew not rhyme with 'sew'? I am not smart, she would tell me.  You will be smarter. 

Who repairs socks these days?  My son often disposes of them after sports; I used to buy them in huge packs of a dozen.  I don't have a 'darner'.  My mother was given an old Singer machine-- one of the ones with a kind of foot treadle.  She never got the hang of it, but preferred to hem, baste and hand-backstitch in what I can only recall as something approaching perfection.  Those nights by her side-- with my girls' painted wicker basket and the colored spools-- well, they felt so 19th century, in a good way.  And it is not coincidence that my recent sewing evening was close to Mother's Day. I felt her presence more strongly than usual, as though she was approving of my feminine task, and the metaphorical resonance of a needle and thread, like a kind of penance.

Recently the discontinuation of the penny was announced; like many things these days, more trouble than worth.  We had our little banks as children; mine was a kind of ceramic doll-head-- very 19th century, with the porcelain hair done up in a bun, the coin slot in the back, and the topknot itself a pin cushion.  So my bank had a duel use.  Sometime in the 70's I went to my mother's house and retrieved and dumped the bank; they were all wheat pennies... quite old... I have them still, in a box here... waiting to be devalued, I suppose.

Our lives in those days were filled with things-- things had the properties of people, in a way... we looked at them , we took them to bed, we spoke to them, we passed them around.  To make a telephone connection, one had to pick up a heavy handle, rotary dial a bunch of numbers, extend a curly cord a foot or two and sit, close to the wall jack, speaking in one end and listening with the other. 

In the 1960's and 70's, women in the city often had an answering service.  When you left your apartment, you dialed in and somehow magically the operators would receive your calls.  When you returned you'd phone in and they'd read out the messages.  You had a little relationship with your operator; mine was Grace-- a different woman at night, but Grace knew everything.  The cost of this service was small; you''d send a monthly check and they'd clip the hand-written message sheets together in your bill.  Besides her perfect cursive, I had no idea how tall Grace was-- old or young, black or white. 

One could easily go a day now without actually speaking to anyone... our lives are so enmeshed by social media and all of these time-consuming communication platforms.  I have only a few friends who make telephone calls; we still have landlines although these get little use. I work at a gallery Saturdays; it specializes in vintage mid-century French design.  People are most fascinated when the furniture is staged with period objects.. old radios and televisions... it seems that much of our nostalgia revolves around objects.  Our former lives were filled with things-- notebooks, pencils, rulers, book bags, stuffed animals-- scrapbooks and photographs, postcards and stamp collections-- souvenirs, dolls, shells, rocks.  

I worry about losing my memory; my mother lost hers, could not identify many of the photographs she loved to pour over in her album.  My sister cruelly destroyed mine, effectively wiping parts of my own memory by removing associated images.  I wonder when I will forget my grade school teachers, the seating order, the classroom numbers... my childhood dogs who haunt my dreams.  It will happen, one day.. or I will not recognize my own neighbors and friends.. I will forget song lyrics and confuse Beethoven and Mozart sonatas... 

As addled as she was in later life, my mother did not forget how to sew. I wish I had more of the skirts and dresses she hemmed with such skill, the knitted sweaters and the vests, for warmth.  She sat at the piano, at the end, surprised by the sound of the notes, and for seconds her fingers formed chords, but then it all disintegrated.

We had these handmade rag dolls-- one side was a sleeping face, and the other awake.  We'd change their bonnet in the morning, as kind of wake-up ritual, and put them to bed at night. I wonder how many children will save their obsolete pennies in a porcelain bank, will learn to sew with needle and thread and will be able to identify a darning egg.  For a couple of hours the other night, I created a 'mended' pile and felt accomplished in a way-- my stack of repaired patched leggings and tights felt like a kind of badge.  My mother might have nodded her approval.

So many things have been lost along the way-- left in other countries, missing or stolen.  I know as we age we do not log the things we forget; they simply disappear without ceremony or conscience. This terrifies me... who will remind me of what I no longer recall? My mother wore a thimble; I never mastered the art of using one.. kind of like playing the bass with a pick... I still have a thumbpick Johnny Winter gave me once... another of these tangibles that seem more meaningful as life goes on.  One watches celebrity possessions being auctioned for vast sums these days... even clothing.  It seems when human company becomes less available, things provide comfort... connection. And some of them, like the poor penny, while non-functional, do not die. 

I have no daughter to whom I can hand-down my dwindling skills.  My son will not pick up a needle and thread and remember moments. We do have some hand-made souvenirs and old photos-- paper ones. My old rag doll still sits on the bed in which he has not slept for decades. She has a clearly sewn heart beneath her old clothing; it serves.