Delay

Sunday morning I came across an old diary; it fell out of a bookcase where I'd stashed it long ago behind stacks of calendars and discarded manuscripts.  I recognized the cover from some long-departed stationary shop where I used to browse and dream and finally take home a blank book dressed in old print fabric that in itself ignited memory. 

There I was-- at the age of these students I've been recently interviewing... me trying to find their core-- their soul and academic candor.  At eighteen one is so utterly vulnerable-- a single day is critical and life-changing. My discretion had prevailed, as though I was writing for a future self, and many of the boys and crushes and devastators... are nameless and protected.  Princeton for me revealed itself between the lines... I didn't understand the institution until much later, or absorb the significance of what I was learning, how they groomed us like living plants to become productive and resonant.

Looking around my city, gathering the critical daily news, I am overwhelmed with anxiety. It seems as though the first part of my life was a sort of consistent ascent... and now I am quite on the other side of a kind of lengthy plateau of satisfaction. Things have clearly broken... the progression of humanity toward some version of goodness and compassion has surely been interrupted; things feel uncomfortable and precarious.  What a fraud am I, I think; I am selling these optimistic young people a dream that is no longer there... they will not find what I found between the lines, because the lines have been re-drawn, digitized and replaced. I can't imagine my future in this accelerating singularity, and certainly not theirs. 

Not only have these kids grown up with a pandemic absorbing a good percentage of their adolescence, but the images of their heroes seem to have shifted. Their superstars and celebrities have little solidity. I've noticed the way television children seem staged and odd. Styled and changed and airbrushed, they are either brimming with some kind of dangerous overconfidence or they seem 'rehearsed'. On the subway, I observe school kids on their way home-- still rowdy and energized... but they seem somehow different.  I worry about them, the way I worry about my interviewees, the way I worry about the Mexican and Guatemalan children whose mothers sell candy on the trains with their babies and toddlers tied to their back with shawls and scarves... as though they are accessories, not children. I fear they are using their cultural cliches for sympathy. I have yet to witness a single sale. Please, I want to say... do not do this... I will give you a job.  But I cannot.

I can't imagine how my earlier childhood diary might read; most of those things were pre-sorted and discarded by my sister who cared not at all for sibling nostalgia. Besides some of my grammar school's Facebook posts, I have no photographs of the me I was. But this diary-- well it had the sense of me, of young-woman passion and some kind of vague ambition not to become but to 'be' and manifest my purpose. It was reassuring, in a way... as much as it was mortifyingly embarrassing. The players-- the Romeos and villains.. were not necessary to identify.  

My son tells me every day I grew up in the best time; the price of that, I say often, is my aging at this moment.  It's quite true that the second half of the last century was a spectacular revelation of culture and personal invention. The rich archive of film-- art-- music... is testimony.  I rarely run out of inspiration.  Today Ted Gioia on Substack called the new contemporary product 'Slop'. The present seems a bit of an appropriate place in history to begin to withdraw, to drop out.  I'm not sure what I'm learning.  

Of course I'm a bit behind. I watch films that were on festival programs a few years ago... they've had time to settle... rarely do I see the brand new ones. Hollywood in general seems to disappoint, as does music. Visual art... it's all sort of underbred and over-advertised.  Even streaming.. .these Netflix and Amazon award winners-- scripts often make me cringe. A random browse of cable channels brings a variety of game shows based on the most ridiculous premises... and a gamut of reality shows that seem to be designed to propel the cast into some kind of brand-stardom but instead make the adults seem petty, immature and ridiculous.  They are mean and competitive and small-minded.  They seem to be overstyled and blessed with some kind of monied success in life that is baffling and undeserved.  The digital dirty red carpet. I am embarrassed that incoming migrants watch this stuff and deduce that this is America.

It occurred to me today I'm living in a kind of delay... we all are, despite the instantaneous delivery of news. We are in a kind of aftershock from our own election... from the consequences of button pushing and premature action in moments we did not consider.  It takes a minute to translate events into history-- to assess what happened and extract the truth from the millions of accounts and AI phone video.  

In every guitar player's arsenal of effects probably the most essential is the delay pedal.  It makes amplification sound 'real'... it provides context and space. It supplies the 'room' in which we all exist. I watch films and do not pay for the privilege of being timely.  Some of them dissipate once I have distinguished the hype from the reality. It takes old people time to hear things-- we are slow to translate sounds into words sometimes. I am slow to absorb history, to figure out what happened yesterday and how I will go forward. Digital delay pedals can be set to go on forever.  With the analogue-- we create the template; it is all about the signal decay. It's a kind of prolonged audio shadow fading... a kind of death.

My personal delay settings change; yesterday it was half a century... today it might be a few hours. Love takes time, I have learned, but like history, the way we understand it takes longer.  Sometimes I hesitate to revisit memories; they disintegrate upon opening, like dried old paper, they remove themselves further and further in the delay chain. At 4 AM one can see reruns of earlier shows.  Even the news seems a little stable, unchanged. Who would know, turning it on, what is timely, what is original?  It is what we are not told that is becoming a little threatening... and the way we listen ought to take into account the space of our cosmic room... the delay length not just of the past but forward into the future: what is real, what is important; what repeats, what remains.

Rust Never Sleeps

To distract myself tonight I turned on television... couldn't help checking in on this new Alec Baldwin reality show.  It's been so over-advertised-- teased, excerpted, meme'd and photo-bombed on various platforms, and yet we New Yorkers and NYC expats love seeing our city on camera, in nearly any context. Urban selfies.  

Years ago I double dated with Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin-- the first one, Kim.  We were at a long table in a trendy Tribeca restaurant with a few intimate friends.  They sat at opposite ends; it was obvious from their awkward interaction that either they'd not quite recovered from a pre-dinner argument or maybe they'd interrupted an intimate evening to come out.  Something was off.  I sat by her-- acknowledged one of the most beautiful women in cinema, at that moment.  Honestly, I couldn't stop looking at her face, with little make-up and ungroomed hair; she kept wrapping herself in a sort of shawl, as though she wanted to disappear.  He, on the other hand, was chatty and charming-- funny, using that voice actors learn to project confidence. Like a pointed tone.  

For some reason, that night, I was on the cusp of a new relationship and the tension depressed me. They were so familiar-- it was like a movie and I was somehow part of it. I couldn't shake her emotional shadow... which turned out to be sort of an omen.  I was a new mother and they were maybe not even quite married.

Seeing his aging, subdued persona tonight was surprising. His wife, obviously, was the host and star of the Baldwin show, despite the fact that her raison d'être is her famous husband. I realize he needs a PR renovation... and who wants to put the father of seven small children in prison for eighteen months? But Hilaria with her affectations and fake Spanish accent which she attempted to explain in the minutes I watched, well... I'm not a customer. Like most reality shows since the Loud Family era, it seemed scripted and planned and awkward and cringeworthy most of the time.  Yes, the kids are cute... and the looming cloud of the shooting incident which was clearly devastating was compelling... but it seemed somehow inappropriate for her to speak of it.  The family 'angle' is surely the most convincing plea for innocence... and as always, it is moot to keep on punishing for a tragic incident... but someone died.  The boundary between film and real life was crossed, and there is no happy ending here.  I felt manipulated by his terrible appearance, her perfect little stagey mother-moments. I can only wonder how the family of the deceased will view this.  I've had quite enough and it didn't sway me one way or the other.  At filming, the jury was still out.  Now that he's been found innocent, is there any relief? 

Lately I've been trying to find a way to honor my deceased father whose war record and heroism left him with lifetime psychological scars.  It was often tough simply being around him; as a father he was short-tempered and preoccupied. The more I read about Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, his difficult path through the war, the more I wonder that he functioned at all.  The killings, the bloodshed, the constant danger and massive destruction. He witnessed not just mutilation and death but stepped on it, parachuted down into it... experienced wounds and undoubtedly overwhelming, unrelenting anxiety.

Yet here is a Hollywood-handsome man-- with a wonderful supportive birth family, and a brood of his own here... maybe a difficult older daughter from the first marriage... but here he is in this perfect Hamptons paradise... accused of manslaughter... from what.. playing with real guns on a fake set? Is PTSD  the same diagnosis as psychiatrists assign lifetime war veterans who were ordered to shoot at maybe innocent people who were simply on the opposite side, and therefore merited death?  Kill or be killed is a conundrum and the very crux of war.

What is wrong with all of us, we humans who settle international vendettas with death and violence... who make statements by destroying monuments, who negotiate with mutilated flesh and the killing of children? There are people just blocks away shooting one another, threatening... angry. It might be more compelling to have us consider these consequences.  Comparatively, Alec is just a broken man.  The spinning narrative is how can we punish seven innocent children by removing their father and leaving them to bear the stigma of this tragedy?  It doesn't seem productive.  Nor does this reality show which hopefully will not annoy the family of Halyna Hutchins with its stilted portrayal of the privileged, happy life she will never have.

A weapon of destruction is not safe in any hands... it's not the manufacturers, it's the people.  It's us.  There is film-- a movie-- acting.. and then there are guns.  It seemed the 'Rust' set was more of a horrifying reality show than anything we will see from the Baldwins this season.

With Your Eyes

On Inauguration Day, the cold air like a knife seemed to split the country in half-- those who celebrated, and those who tried to concentrate on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was like a warning or a judgment-- for those of us who were anxious and upset, the arctic air was not reassuring. 

Unable to sleep, I watched an old film called Crisis-- a documentary featuring President Kennedy and his brother Robert handling a civil rights crisis.  It was another version of America... our leaders, presented in black and white like a home movie... having breakfast with their families-- fathers, credible men... going to work to challenge unlawful segregation traditions.  They were leaders... taking the country from prejudice and injustice into some kind of better future. It felt not just right but righteous.

The confirmation of POTUS 47 felt to me like a TV show-- from what I watched, apparently a badly produced tragic comedy of errors and mistakes, but a show above all-- and the installation of a version of America that feels eerily like the death of Hope. The promises feel like threats, and the concept of justice feels like a kind of volley back and forth between oddly distorted principles.

Seeing our 1963 Attorney General at his desk, waiting for a call... there was a solidity-- the desk, the room.  It was human-scaled.  No one had make-up or airbrushing... there was sweat, there was conversation in real time.  For me it went beyond nostalgia; it underscored this new sense of defeat I have shared with close friends.  We are betrayed, we are slipping somehow. The news is everywhere and overwhelming; the media-- rather than the message-- accompanies our life and we, it.

Continuing my interviews by telephone, I miss the heavy black instrument with the rotary dial... it somehow felt like truth. I speak to these enthusiastic and slightly nervous students and occasionally feel I am selling them a dream-- I am describing things that no longer exist, explaining realities that have evaporated into digital screens. They will never know the version of a woman who misses closing herself into a phone booth in a dive bar and making a romantic call-- a confession, an intimacy.

I've been reading Cesare Pavese. His novels are surprisingly colloquial, although one feels the tensions of fascism, of the German occupation, and the scars of WWII.  I look at maps of northwest Italy... at pictures of Turin... his places, too, perhaps no longer exist. I am listening to and absorbing the author's version of his nostalgia. Pavese suicided at the age of 41, just after he was acknowledged for his writing. Among his best poems is one (translated) line 'Death will come with your eyes'.  It haunts me. His disappointment, his sorrow, his obsession in one novella with a suicidal character-- his empathy.

My friend Elizabeth died very early Monday morning, in the dark.  In her hospice room it was surely lit, as medical rooms are.  She had not been herself for several weeks now. During her illness of five years, we became friends... she called me nearly every night for a year or two... and we gossiped, we laughed, we became intimates over the telephone.  I have a landline, still; it's necessary for this kind of communication. We'd had little in common before, but we grew together.  I miss her terribly; what we created, together, is completely gone. She deteriorated, over the years, but she was brave and never tried to escape her fate.  She was incredibly sympathetic when I had my accident; she joked that I'd ruined my arm just to experience her parallel paralysis.  We laughed and talked about men. It was like an affair... and now it's done.

For months now, I pick up my 12-string at night and play a few songs... the one that comes, every night, is the Free song, Soon I Will Be Gone.  In the year before Alan's death, at one of our back-to-back solo gigs, Alan sang this.  It was withering. I wept. Do not sing this, Alan, I warned him... and he answered me... it is a prediction, with this rare dark look in his eyes that were usually laughing.  But I've taken it up-- it's become my personal anthem that I sing every night in the dark, at 4 or 5 AM. It binds me to him, maybe.  

Tonight brought a fatal plane crash. We who will be gone sooner rather than later are shaken by this kind of news.  We are heartbroken for the fire victims, for the children of Gaza, for the undocumented Mexicans in East Harlem who are afraid to pick up their pantry items because they might be arrested. One mother told me she is keeping her children home from school, from fear they will be somehow seized.

Last night I walked home from a gig in Harlem.  An insane man on 113th and Lenox grabbed me... Read the signs, he kept yelling, with his sour breath. At last he let me go.  Shaken-not-stirred, I'd heard at the bar; it became my mantra for the last 20 blocks. There are people in this city who do not go out in the sun; they are pale and many wear black. It's sort of an unspoken cult-- some are women who with vanity preserve their skin; many are writers and musicians. Some wear sunglasses at night.  When I walk home late, I imagine they are at their sills, looking out-- blessing the dark empty streets and keeping me safe, like black angels... my witnesses.

I am glad to be home. Elizabeth will no longer phone me at 3 AM and I will no longer sit on the floor in the dark trading stories until her drugs put her to sleep. But tonight I will pick up my guitar and like a sort of trance I will sing the song... the dark anthem, the funeral hymn, the Inauguration song... 

Bookends

Like a blot on our conscience, the fires burn on in California. A kind of hell ironically consuming the City of Angels, we are reminded to one degree or another that we are vulnerable-- hurt, touched, concerned, destroyed. The emotional 'noise' of human trauma seems constant, and like a warning punishment, this one is close. There is looting... the military presence... and the blame game, too-- the politicizing and weaponizing of catastrophe.  There will be recovery narratives and those who profit from them. Like Hurricane Katrina, some of the deep human damage is unseen. 

Yesterday walking through the Harlem Meer at dusk, I nearly stepped on a small stuffed animal... a little squirrelly thing, wrapped in a tiny blanket... I picked it up and ran ahead toward some strollers leaving the park... but no one claimed it.  It's a damn toy, one woman scolded me.  

When my son was a baby, his first 'cradle toy' was a stuffed sock with a kind of stitched face... with tiny felt antlers.  It was cheap and squishy and small enough for even an infant to grasp.  As he fell asleep, he waved it back and forth and watched it. Ghee-ghee, he called it. It was his first baby-word. In those days when I dragged him to work and back... loaded with baby stuff and my own, we logged so many miles the carriage manufacturer replaced our wheels at no cost.  One night in a soaking rain I had to hail a cab and in unloading everything outside our door, we must have dropped Ghee-ghee on the taxi floor.

I called every medallion company in the city... they thought I was crazy.  Ghee-ghee, my baby boy kept repeating... nothing else.  He refused to eat, cried himself to sleep. He woke many times... inconsolable, exhausted.  Next morning I began a diligent search of stores for this toy... I'd naturally memorized the label and phoned the company in South Carolina... it had been discontinued, but they were sympathetic.  Maybe fifty phone-calls later (pre-internet days), we at long last located one... and arranged a fedex shipment to their showroom here in midtown.  Our Ghee-ghee had been washed and squished so many times, it little resembled the brand new one but I wheeled him into the showroom, three days after our loss, and he happily exclaimed 'Ghee-ghee' when they offered it, with a kind of casual grab. The whole place broke out in applause.  

Seeing footage of displaced children... much more fortunate than those in Gaza who were left completely without, and sometimes physically wounded-- is maybe easier to process than the deep, catastrophic loss of life and property.  It is the small things that touch us-- the man combing through rubble for his missing wedding ring... or someone's cat that managed to survive a fire and jumped out of steaming rubble... a cup.. a small symbol of survival in the wake of massive loss. Children, we are told, are resilient.

During the pandemic I often passed a mother and her severely autistic teenage son in the park.  He walked, waving his hands and making sounds... he cannot be touched, she warned, or he would tantrum.  But he had an old stuffed bear... and a matching scarf he kept tightly around his neck. It occurred to me a fire event strips these ultra-sensitive children of their only comfort. How does one fix this?

In a drawer somewhere I have my two wedding rings... these things apparently survive fires but not so relationships.  A kind of sentimental irony: one has nearly no meaning. Underneath my bed-- an old guitar with the capacity to bring to life all those songs I wrote and played... like a magic lamp.  It would not last a minute in a fire. There was a time people wanted to hear my musical stories on a stage... we nervously debuted our hearts, took turns on stages.  I am attached like an old sentimental child to things which with any luck will outlive me-- and will surely be discarded by the next generation as empty and without value. 

This time of year my student interviews engage me. Yesterday I spoke with a boy who left Afghanistan in 2021; his family was in some danger, and his sisters would have had no educational future, had they remained. They fled, with few possessions... were moved from one encampment to another.  In the process, he lost his pen.  He used this to write stories and to study and learn English.  Worried, and finally placed in a school here, he was shocked to be given a Chromebook. So he adapted... and his English was wonderful... his gratitude and love for his sisters... his father has finally found work in a large store, despite the language difficulty; his mother works in a bakery. He thinks about his pen, he said. 

Throughout history wars and catastrophes have forced people to hurriedly pack a few possessions and leave.  Home is so much more than a shelter. Old people and children are attached to things that cannot be replaced. In the end, life prevails... survival. There was a moment on camera this week of Bruce Willis thanking the firefighters. His luxurious home is safe, but he simply has lost everything... another version of what is missing. 

I am not sure what is coming for us all now... the constant visual drone footage surveying the Los Angeles damage.  The ruined homes make the destruction live for all of us who fear what we can lose-- our things, our minds.  Maybe we are all slated for a kind of devastation;  maybe a renewal of some version of faith and compassion. Had I been able to cross personal boundaries in my official interviewing role, I would have shared with the Afghan boy the Paul Simon song from Bookends.  I was 15 when I heard it, the age at which he was violently torn from his home. From the warm safety of my teenage room, with my plastic stereo... the record... it opened and closed with the lyrics that haunted me throughout my life... a kind of prophecy... 'preserve your memories... they're all that's left you.'

Thirty-five years ago I often wheeled my baby stroller into a church... I was struggling and it gave me a little strength.  One day I approached the altar to contemplate the unfathomable Crucifixion.... my son was maybe 10 months old.  He leaned forward and looked; he loved the church, too.  He pointed his little finger up at the suffering but calm Christ figure. 'Ghee-ghee,' he pronounced, with a kind of absolute certainty.

Recognitions

My friends know I have never been really on top of technology; while I bought and messed with electronic synthesizers and keyboards when they became commercially affordable in the 1970's, I was late to get a computer, lagged far behind in digital 'joinings', and only recently, on the insistence of my son, carry a cellphone for emergencies.

Besides the standard bedside-worthy pile of books, I have an old iPad (2011?)-- for recording inspiration-- lyrics, as they typically come to me in the dark. The fact that one doesn't need to turn on a lamp is convenient.  It also delivers messages-- from the random 10 or 12 people who have access... and the way this penetrates my daily agenda is extraordinary. I can only imagine how the daily psyche of normal people is shaped by the constant barrage of texts which unlike email seem to have full access.  

Since I have lived alone I have the habit, late at night, of browsing my bookshelves. Like leafing through a photo album or web-surfing-- or the hermitic version of taking a drive, it's comforting and reassuring. I have a wealthy person's library, somehow... collected over 60 years by hoarding things I read and loved, lingering in old bookshops in the days when buying was an analogue-only activity and road trips and random travel digressions presented these opportunities.  Libraries used to pare off extra copies--- their sales were extra-serendipitous because the books were almost giveaways-- sorted and pre-filtered by institutional acquisition priorities.

Huge books have punctuated my life... I can vividly remember where I was when I was reading War and Peace or Proust or The Recognitions-- more recently, Peter Nadas, Marguerite Young (still), Thomas Mann. As a girl I fell in love with the sheer weight and reassurance that this was not just a one-night stand, but a long-term relationship.

Last night I wandered across my shelf section of Joseph McElroy... the copy of Women and Men I've had for nearly 40 years, and which has been coveted by readers who visit me.  It is unread-- pristine, my copy... for some reason I searched my iPad at dawn and found a Paris Review piece on reading this book-- meeting McElroy-- another of those quintessentially New York City writers who has shaped the urban post-war canon. Like Gaddis-- he's difficult. I shared it with one of my few friends with whom I message.

And then 'I am millimeters from the abyss', I told my friend this morning... it just texted itself... the operative word being 'from'... and I had this image of Dick Van Dyke, just recently celebrated in a video, nearly immolated in his neighborhood wildfire, then being returned to his unscathed home yesterday.  We saw the  photograph-- all of us-- on the 'entertainment' pages... it distracted from the one of Jamie Foxx with stitches, the constant litany of photos of the prep school Valedictorian-turned-murderer.  There is little refuge here from the worrying world-tensions, patriotic anxieties and catastrophic climate threat. 

Most of all I am haunted by not just recent deaths but the ebb-tide of mental skills I am forced to witness among my decreasing circle.  My mother at a point became overwhelmed by an incomprehensible sea of words which whirled around her withering brain like a terrifying tsunami.  A friend has been afflicted with a cruel and progressive form of aphasia which has left her stranded and near-mute on some non-verbal desert island.  My neighbor upstairs who shared my love of literature can no longer see. And a horrific brain tumor has devoured most of the capacity of another.  I visit her and she is beached in a bed, unable to communicate. 

The vertical/horizontal grid of bookshelves has always been stabilizing. And the books are my friends... my mentors; they are my past, my present, and many of them are inside me. It is a great comfort to scan the titles at night-- to pull one out and know it is there-- all of it-- with a kind of permanence. The diminishing number of unread ones beckon... Don't leave me, they call out at night... We have not yet become intimate.  It is a kind of future for me, at the edge of this looming unknown catastrophe before which many of us graze at this age.  

This year I have been more or less fortunate to have survived and mostly recovered from an accident which temporarily froze my daily activity.  It helped me understand and appreciate the pitfalls of human existence, and left me a little more grateful for the outcome, considering the odds and the ends of blind human faith. 

As a girl and a teenager we had a few end-of-year family rituals-- every New Year's Eve my Mom would ceremoniously wish me a blessed future;  it became a compulsory phone-call as we aged, with a little bit of superstitious 'prevention' in the mix.  When she passed away, all bets were off, so to speak. I mark her absence most of all at that end-of-year moment, she who was most responsible for my existence, for the blessings... for the strength with which I rehabbed myself over the past 10 months. She was not much of a reader herself, but she read to us as children-- Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson--- Francis Hodge Burnett and A. A. Milne-- Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis... Johanna Spyri, Lucy Ward Montgomery...on and on... it was a bedtime ritual which I carried on with my own son, but being a musician and having night-working hours I often left a cassette tape to read him to sleep. 

The perceived acceleration of time this year-- the occasional empty hours and the speed of days-- obsesses me.  I cannot seem to make things matter more, although I still write my poems and make my songs. Few care about what I do-- fewer read or witness. Whether or not 'recognition' has a sort of parental role in adult lives is something we struggle with.  Celebrity, fame... seem to equate less and less with quality of work, although that is a bit of sour grapes.  At the edge of this sense of passing, I am propping up the months with my reading lists and projects; it helps anchor one's existence in a rocking sea of the unknown. There is travel and romance for some; for me there is the opportunity to spend long hours with the creations of great minds-- to mix my thoughts with theirs, to blend my flaws and weaknesses and come out with a possibly better version.  For my dwindling friends to whom I confide dark morning thoughts, I will try... I will turn the page of another year, God willing. 

Sidelined

Last night my son texted me-- root for the Chargers, he said.  I admit I root for anyone but the Chiefs... they've had enough success... not to mention the fact that their extraordinarily well-compensated stars consume as well a lion's share of the extensive advertising space. Dandruff shampoo, artificially dyed breakfast cereal-- health insurance... medications... nothing is beneath them if the money is there... and the money continues to roll in. Not to mention the women, the attention, the endorsements and 'gifts'. 

How did I get entrapped into amateur football fandom? Me-- the Bohemian rock musican/closet literary intellectual who haunted art galleries and museums from adolescence and beyond...  dismissively refusing to even watch my high school boyfriend's soccer games which I designated as absurd and sweaty and pointless? We parents must adapt to our kids' obsessions-- to tune in, so to speak.  The funny part is my son maintains this tiny corner of childhood belief that I (even still) bring him luck. 

What fascinates me, analyzing my role as audience here... is the way all sports fans seem to harbor this childlike faith that our presence-- even on the couch-- can somehow alter the game.  We yell, we root, we cheer, we groan... but we continue to watch.  Ditto-- or moreso, when our kids played competitive sports.  We absolutely HAD to be there.  Not just for support, but for this absurd incredibility that somehow we'd change the outcome.  They wouldn't win without us-- our fervent parental praying they would make the shot... holding their lucky undershirt or the little dinosaur towel I carried in a bag from nursery school onward. These tokens.

And the uniforms.  Nothing transforms a boy like his first baseball jersey...  his first pair of serious Nikes or Jordans. The mini-helmets and shin guards... the hockey skates and shoulder pads... like a superhero.  The fantasy is palpable; talent and practice are another thing-- but here-- a little piece of imitation reality and your child is wearing it. 

Some of the parents dream along. They coach, they carpool, they enroll and hire trainers.  They drive to tryouts, they pay for all kinds of leagues and venues... they take their kids to the professional arenas, no matter what the cost.  If they win the athletic lottery, the payoff is huge. Children are the second chance for many adults. Similarly, they buy them guitars and amplifiers... they get lessons and are driven to concerts.  Some of them have talent; some of them burn out before high school. 

But the dream... it's bigger than ever.  The Taylor Swifts and Patrick Mahomes's of the world.  Yesterday a 26-year-old baseball player signed a $765 million contract for doing what he loves. His agent made more in a day than Babe Ruth made in his entire career, even after inflation adjustment.  Assad was deposed yesterday; Haitian gangs massacred 150 elderly people... but more Americans were thinking ahead toward the 2025 baseball season.  Well, as Peter Pan urged us-- happier thoughts give us just that much more power. 

And without the audience, sports would be sort of a dud.  The pandemic confirmed this.  We participate, we fantasize...we bet-- another huge industry-- and we buy tickets and watch.  Those of us at home-- we pay, too.  I have to buy ESPN channels so my son can enjoy holidays here without depriving himself of football or baseball championships. Which came first?  The game or the money?  We know which, of course... but the investments roll on, the industry and marketing explodes with exponential regularity. We are, most of us, victims somehow-- willing, excited, happy victims.  Everyone seems to have their team. Vicarious thrill, sportsmanship, fandom, bromances, reality escape.... whatever... it accelerates.  It has a season-- a beginning and an endpoint.  Infinity of journalists and analysts-- biographers, documentarists... and now the television contracts for retired players-- competitive channels and entertainment platforms.  We cannot seem to get enough despite constant commercial interruption and annoying solicitations... there will be a winner.  A trophy... a ring. 

We are all of us dreamers in a way... we imagine ourselves on some field of ultimate content... and when we grow up and become ordinary, we sometimes imagine our children garnishing the rewards we once maybe coveted.  My son, who had unusual talent as a player, is very realistic and rational about his abilities.  Yes, he harbored his passion and parlayed that into some kind of career, but he humbly declines any 'could have been' scenarios.  As for me? A  part of me believed.  I support whatever he does, but I do know that he maybe once had a dream.  I remember the way I felt watching him walk out onto his first NCAA court.  It was thrilling. Now-- 16 years later... he's very even-keeled and practical... and ambitious. He still absolutely and passionately loves the game... most games... and he will find his way... and I will root for the Chargers, or whomever he wants. 

I just discovered the 2025 Super Bowl falls on my birthday. We used to have parties, when my son was little... now life is more complicated, or less so... I've learned to watch alone, as many Americans do, although they do this in bars, via their social media, twittering and posting, gambling progressively-- but most of all, we are not just audience-- we participate. Our hearts beat faster, we jump around and coo and curse and celebrate or mope... but as the industry well knows, we are 'in'. Most of us, that is. The sports scrooges among us-- and I know quite a few-- may be missing something culturally significant.  

I'm pretty sure now my acquired or vicarious passion for sports has replaced something else-- maybe my concert attendance or gig-watching.  The same arenas are used for music; at the Super Bowl they become field-fellows... part of the spectacle. Rather than climb grandstands to watch rockstars on a screen with a phone-recording audience, I see games...  young men and women in their prime physically striving for something... I see their fans dressed up and yelling their heads off like family. Partisanship and loyalty are spread among a number of available teams-- geographic loyalties acknowledged.  It seems a little more innocent and less threatening than a political competition. Dare I use the word democratic? Maybe I'm fooling myself  but in this heartbreaking election year I think I feel a kind of Sunday 'hope'. God Bless Detroit-- Buffalo-- the overpaid underdogs since the Jets have virtually imploded.  Forgive me my naïveté... but I am feeling just that bit more 'American'. Amen. 

Memory, Pane

At the East Harlem grocery store where I often shop there's a boy working there... a high school boy. He was huge-- medically obese, it is-- but gradually, over the course of the year, he's been put on weight-loss drugs and he's been shrinking.  By summer he was at some 'Ideal' weight, ironically the name of the market.  His face-- from a bloated, swollen balloon-- had become so handsome it was hard not to stare... utterly chiseled and beautiful.  I commented... he always gives me a silent greeting... on how completely transformed and wonderful he looks. It's extraordinary-- like a Cinderella thing.  The manager moved him closer to the front glass doors, as though like a 'host' he brought business in.

But lately, reminiscent of one of those reverse spells, or that movie where the De Niro character becomes communicative and intelligent and then reverts to catatonic incoherence, he has begun to grow again.  Oh no, I want to say,  because I relish seeing his beautiful face while I check out.  But it's becoming more and more apparent-- as though he accomplished something and now he's going back to his old silhouette.  Not much I can do or say... he knows, I know.  He could still play football, although I suspect he doesn't.

Seeing my friends age in this culture, it shocks me to see the facility with which people transform themselves... most for the good, or for what they think is improvement.  I mean-- I remember that age-- post-adolescence, maybe... when suddenly you see yourself-- a photograph or a reflecting shop-window-- and you think.. oh my, how did this happen?  Like the ugly duckling/swan syndrome... only some of us actually fall in love with our own image, or the power it creates, and tip to the edge of vanity or even narcissism.  It makes growing old that much tougher-- saying goodbye to our preferred version, like a kind of death.

On the rare occasions I confront a mirror it's near-impossible now to find that innate beauty I once took for granted. It's also difficult, at certain 'edges' of age, to recognize friends and neighbors.  An article recently proclaimed that one doesn't age gradually-- that there are two critical points at which one 'turns'. Of course there are variables.  

At the nursing home where I visit my neighbor there's a woman who sits at the threshold of her room in a wheelchair. She's quite old but her hair is professionally maintained and enviably luxurious.  While completely demented, she has the mannerisms of someone glamorous and elegant. Her hands move like birds; she often holds a towel which she twists and waves like a scarf... it's fascinating. What is going through her head? Somewhere she is in her prime, preening for an event, or attending a dinner party.  She literally bats her eyes occasionally, and then she is 'gone'... lost in some reverie.

More than my physical attributes, I worry about my brain.  It is apparent to me that I 'lose' names or titles or search for words with much more frequency than some years back.  My mother had a form of dementia that reduced her world to a kind of slow 8-ball, in my analysis, where occasional phrases would appear in the small octagonal window of her brain.  Most of these made no sense when she repeated or responded to their cues.  

Christmas windows have always been the highlight of the season for me.  Across the street growing up was a building with a large paned picture-window through which I could watch the family congregate or play cards or relax. They were Italian... they had a melodious four-syllable name in contrast to our American one... and they decorated for holidays with great fervor. Their backyard was filled with devotional marble statues of saints and angels and at Christmas the nativity scene spread across the front lawn. But each child-- ditto the neighbors, like me-- was allowed one of the 'panes' to decorate-- with Glass Wax-- you could stencil or draw or put glitter and streamers... the result was both garish and fantastic.  I'd wave to them at night... and pretend the window panes were a living advent calendar.  

This year I'm wavering-- decorate or not? I'm not fooling anyone here... I entertain rarely, and although I love my tree, it's an ordeal to get it in and take it out. Still, I feel as though I've let someone down, in a way. I watch these neighbors and friends desperately alter their faces and bodies.. for what?  To live the life they want?  To be the person they were in the 1980's now at this moment?  Some of them pay therapists-- even still, at the edge of 70-- to help them. They read books and hire personal trainers and visit estheticians... and still they seem to be missing something crucial. 

At this point, I can no longer really manage to renovate my apartment; like old bodies, we replace what is broken and essential... but to imagine I am anything besides ordinary suddenly seems pretentious. It is the content-- what I have placed here, what I collected-- that matters, as the content of my aging brain seems to increase in importance as its volume no doubt diminishes.

As a girl, I'd go across the street on Christmas afternoon to sample the exotic Italian edibles-- huge cookie-like cakes in the shape of animals with eggs inside, sometimes... angels and baby-Jesuses.  But being there was not nearly as enchanting as watching through the panes. That felt magical. 

Last night I watched The Great Beauty, an absolute masterpiece from Paolo Sorrentino. While my friends talk almost exclusively about the past, the film reminded me that there is nothing inherently terrible about nostalgia... as long as it comes without dementia, which for my mother was like a boat from which she could no longer gauge the distance to any shore. 

Things have surely gone missing-- people, some memories, undoubtedly, although as an exercise I lie in bed at night and name the students in the rows of desks from my third grade class, or all of my science teachers, chronologically.  I can no longer name the fifty-three Trollope novels I read in the 1990's.  We change, we atrophy, we grow... our past has so far outweighed our future it is like an ocean surrounding the tiny rock-island we are.  Personally, I have fallen in love with this life... whatever it becomes, what it has been, the enormity of what I have not seen, will never see. I was genuinely grateful on Thanksgiving for what I received versus what I gave.  It was enough, and God willing I will continue onward into the full holiday season, tree or no tree, to embrace the new personal analytic of being more observer than observed.