Saturday's Child

Black Friday for me has the sense of mourning-- of a Bloody Sunday or post-apocalyptic temporal hangover day.  I'm certain some psychologist invented the retail version just to pry us all out of our post-prandial malaise, and gear us up for the next profit-generating holiday adventure.  God forbid we should lie around regretting things we might have said to our table-mates, or feeling sorry we ate so much or not enough. As a child I couldn't wait for the holiday to be over.  I sampled other families' traditions as an invitee in my college years and discovered they all seem to leak similar petty rivalries and bitternesses once the alcohol seeped in.  

Now that I've passed the long wonderful years of rock and roll Thursdays, Hendrix tributes, celebratory post-gig turkey sandwiches on-the-go at 3 AM, then the maternal/extravagant hostess/chef fantasy, I've whittled it down to a one-handed count.  Deleting the dysfunctionals of my immediate family, barring random overseas guests or surprises, the bare essentials are my son and Mice Elf, as Sly called it. As my son becomes more and more of an admirably ambitious man, intimate occasions are few and farther between. With my life continuing to shed its former frenzied activity layers, these evenings have become more emotionally saturated.  

While I think back on the myriads of holiday meal hits and misses... one or two fights with a boyfriend who manipulated me into foregoing family visits... a few crises... I try to minimize the nostalgia.  And while my son lives just across the river in Greenpoint, it doesn't diminish the fact that I feel terrible saying goodbye.  Maybe people shop like mad to block the sense that time like a rushing city pedestrian has passed another block and we are on our way to the Christmas finale and the interment of another year.  

This morning I tried to walk into a department store-- was greeted with some slowed-down version of Silver Bells and left with tears streaming. Pathetic, I scolded myself.  Yes, it's been a year marked by grief and loss, but these things accelerate as we age... we are supposed to expect this. My son uncharacteristically took the day off for a short trip with his current girlfriend.  Today I am thinking they are already on the way back, and she, like me, will be sad and missing him.  Life is filled with events... and they all too quickly become our past.  For those of us who are genetically dark, any comings and goings are sad. I recalled today a trip to the shore with an ex-- we were so deeply connected and yet so mismatched. Everything hung on this weekend excursion... the tension was unbearable, and the premonitory sense of an ending undeniable. Afterward he wrote a song that said 'I am in our room waiting here for you to come and change my mind'.  I could not do that, nor was I inclined to.  I could only think of the seventies song Motel Blues where Loudon Wainwright begs some young girl 'Come up to my motel room and change my life.'  It somehow seemed more passionately convincing. 

It doesn't help that I'm currently reading Niels Lyhne-- one of Rilke's very favorite books.  The language, even in translation, is rich and soulfully descriptive and the overwhelming sentiment of deep-seated nostalgic grief is palpable.  The author, Jens Jacobsen, died at 38, and struggled with the looming diagnosis of tuberculosis for twelve years.  Last week I finished Lucky Per-- another dark Danish novel of both enlightenment and despair.  In Scandinavia grief seemed a kind of status quo... the darkness is an assumption; I feel embraced in a way-- less alone.

A week ago Saturday we were all so saddened by Tatiana Schlossberg's piece in the New Yorker.  Nothing worse than the prospect of a mother losing her child.  The Kennedy family saga is emblematic of American grief-- their personal casualties are statistically and emotionally overwhelming.  And there seems no end in sight.  

Thursday morning I walked across 92nd Street where I once worked in a townhouse, selling art to the privileged.  I knew every building-- the neighbors-- the Mason-Smiths and the Paines... old American names-- a former Manhattan dynasty--  all passed now.  For a brief time we rented an extra office on the same block from a wonderful couple... Lester and Pauline Migdal. I was in my twenties and Pauline's daughter was a thirty-something brilliant architect who was dying of cancer in Switzerland.  There was some very early camera technology available so that from her high-tech Swiss office in the 1980's she was somehow visible as a shadow-- a silhouette-- to her mother. On 92nd Street I sat with Pauline drinking coffee and silently (no audio) watching her daughter slowly deteriorate. I had not yet become a mother but witnessing the longing and inevitability deepened my capacity both for maternal love and for sorrow. It is a small comfort today that Pauline has passed on, with her terrible grief.  

The loss of my baby girl whose place at the table only I can see left an indelible scar. It further opened my capacity to empathize with these mothers.  Every single human loss is wounding to someone... every one of us has had a mother... and for those in my generation, we miss ours terribly. But the sorrow of losing a child is something unbearable; their fragile suffering, unimaginably painful.  Back on 92nd Street, my future was an open kaleidoscope. Death was a very tiny numerator in the fraction of my life.  The Mason-Smiths had a colorful chef who suffered from a chronic throat ailment... he turned out to be one of the earliest victims of the AIDS crisis.  There was so much more mourning to come. As we go on, the dark memories compete with the light. We are the only animals cognizant of our own doom; some of us struggle with this deadline; others confront it head-on-- some by taking it into their own hands.

The future has an inevitability; the specifics are unknown.  We hoard moments-- we hoard things-- some of us hoard money.  Maybe it makes them feel safe. I hoard memories but am aware that the hub of my brain has sprung leaks and things have seeped out.  When I opened my copy of Niels Lyhne there was a receipt in there from 1992...  I remembered buying this at a used bookshop on the Jersey shore for $2.00 with my 2-year-old sitting on the floor looking at pictures.  I remember Tom Verlaine showing me a copy of maybe this very translation in the proofs section of the Strand the night we discussed Tranströmer. 

They come back with clarity, these lost weekend moments.  My daughter was still a possibility-- not yet conceived. That same year I cooked a goose supplied by my Scottish friend Lena whom I cannot find somewhere in the south of France. She writes me a postcard with no return address. There is a wisdom there... at some point all of us will have no return. For now I am without bargains or seasonal purchases but officially thankful; I will ride the downhill to the end of the year-- into the next which at some point seemed an impossibly distant future.  And that, too, will surely pass.

Fall-back

My son was born the first week of November... accompanied by the urban score of Election Day, the NYC Marathon... the first seasonal cold wind, the crush of dead leaves underfoot and the shocking afternoon darkness on the first Sunday of standard time setting. Each passing year I am overwhelmed by the nostalgia of parenthood. Our children cannot understand how we annually celebrate their arrival... how the indescribable agony of childbirth announced that we were splitting ourselves in two... how we sang silly songs and blew out candles but in our heart was the future soundtrack of an unwritten Roy Orbison ballad.

Even with photographs, it's difficult for our kids to understand the young, naive woman who was their mother, the novel intimacy of harboring a growing human inside a body whose power we'd maybe only recently absorbed. In my case, I was fulfilling a callow promise I'd made to my husband-- to have his child, despite serious reservations.  Our courtship had been brief but intense; 'no one will ever love you the way I do,' he repeated as he showed up in airports, intercepted my daily itinerary, flew transatlantic until he was broke, waiting for me to nod my head while he begged, on one knee, for me to become Mrs. British Journalist.  

So when my husband strayed, I tried to brush it off-- he was insecure-- he was dramatic; it would fade. I waited it out, remembering the pleading oaths he'd sworn... and then the surprise of pregnancy. I grew up quickly... held out hope, suffered. It wasn't so much the demise of the marriage as the betrayal of something in which I'd let myself believe. I talked to my growing stomach-- confessed, confided.  I'd agreed to define myself as part of a couple... and now the definition had become smeared-- obsolete... wrong. I no longer knew who I was or even where, having transported all my instruments and gear to the UK.

We urban dwellers learn to sleep through sirens... but the subdued quiet of a West-London 3 AM was more than I could bear. I returned to my city where the noise drowned out sorrow, the autumn rain camouflaged  wet eyes, and pounds of candy corn took the place of whiskey. I got up on smoky stages looking like a balloon and played my blue bass.

Who am I, I wondered, as I walked November midnight streets of Manhattan with a baby carriage? My exhaustion was overwhelming but did not translate into sleep. I felt hollow without my maternal stomach, traumatized at the act of separation and terrified of the task of raising a person when I no longer recognized the skin I was in: someone's mother... a nursing machine, one-half of a couple whose future was a puzzle, whose past was maybe just a terrible mistake-- a con job?

Thirty-six years later I woke up today after setting back my manual clock, having watched the last game of an entertaining World Series I would never have enjoyed had I not raised a sports-obsessed man. The apple fell far from this tree. I began the day with a radio interview; somewhere in the world people were hearing my music... it was shocking, in a way.  Somewhere I was still a musician-- a songwriter, despite this waking image of my life as a kind of huge parchment game-basket with thousands of lettered tiles leaking out in piles. 

Last week I watched a documentary on dying.  It was distressing-- horrifying, dismantling.  Again-- who are we, creatures who frantically train our bodies and minds-- run errands and break hearts... when we are all headed for the same unappealing and painful fate? 

Savoring my free hour after the clock resetting, I noticed Sheryl Crow was on PBS with a less-impressive Jason Isbell, conversing about her songwriting and playing samples in the grand hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exceptional sound system and a rapt sophisticated audience. Jason's accompaniment was annoying.  She is very polished-- even with her pancake make-up and false eyelashes... she can sing. I pondered her lyrics 'If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad.' Is this art? Am I bitter?  The last gig I played I went home on the subway with $60. I considered walking 5 miles to save $1.45. According to the internet, the starting range to book Sheryl Crow is between $300,000 and $499,000.   I remember meeting her, many years ago-- juggernauting along with her endorsements and rockstar hookups, following her dream on the road while I was wheeling around a baby. Not that there is a musical comparison. And after great success, Sheryl has more or less purchased motherhood.

I've noticed my son's friends are beginning to have grey hairs.  This ages me. His very boyish former science teacher greeted me in the street the other day... 'Did I recognize him,' he wanted to know, sheepish about the fact that he was now fifty-something? Are we judged by the way others see us?  I remember well, after a high-school musical performance, my mother asked 'You think you're good? This is high school!' These were my parents... maybe I over-processed their judgment which was skewed by the fear that their daughter might make the terrible choices I've since embraced.  

Tonight in the early dusk the sidewalks are littered with trampled discarded marathon signs and placards. Some of the runners were still limping along Fifth Avenue nearly twelve hours after the starting gun-- some falling short of their goal, some failing entirely.  I'm almost relieved another November milestone is over. Tuesday the mayoral elections will pass, and then it will be my son's thirty-sixth birthday.  He will celebrate with his friends; I will not share my nostalgia and current malaise... he seems to be happy with who he is at the moment-- not to question or doubt, not to empathically suffer along with ill friends and neighbors the way I do.  He will enjoy spending his money eating and drinking. He does not think about his absent father whom he barely recalls, and he certainly is little acquainted with the dark streak that marks my heart like a cross, like a wound. 

Meanwhile, hearing my own song 'Black Bells' on a radio show reminded me I am consistent if nothing else, and not ashamed of what I have produced, although I could always be better. Hard to judge oneself, and if one doesn't exploit social media, there is little access to external judgement or assurance.  Am I happy, in the Sheryl Crow sense?  Do I regret? No... maybe...  I endure these phases-- the doubt and black moods a lifetime of creativity, intermittent betrayal and suspension of belief have guaranteed. They are my 'material', for better or for worse, 'til death do me part.  If I choose, I can hear the sirens, but have learned-- Daylight Saving or Eastern Standard-- to sleep with them. 

We Can Be Mayors....

In the midst of the World Series, NBA season opening, football Sundays, I am a little obsessed with the mayoral race.  Of course my son taught me that in sports, there is a clear winner and something uniquely satisfying about clarity in this complicated world.  But in light of the recent gambling scandal, one begins to doubt.  Where politics is concerned, we have once again sunk back into petty messaging and accusations.  These pertain to the contest, I suppose... but once the voting is over, then the real game begins, and this is worrying.

I took an out-of-town break yesterday and visited the spectacular new art museum at my alma mater. The breathtaking concept of the architecture-- the way the building combined a sense of future with traditional breadth of collecting... was uplifting.  Unfortunately, even this project was stained by negative allegations against the architect; still, his design, which was already in progress, is stellar.

Cult of personality, when I was more naive, integrated one's work occasionally with who one was.  Now,  'persona' has eclipsed what they actually do. The whole lucrative business of branding bases itself on the concept that a celebrity can convince us to do/buy nearly anything. It's worrying... as though all of America has this teenage brain which is unable to separate fact and reality from fantasy and facade.

Visiting old universities and colleges, the 'scent' of academia is palpable and appealing.  I wondered what I'd be if I'd stayed with my art studies, as planned.  At this moment, I'd have probably aged out of the new curatorial generation and contented myself with restoring old paintings or regretting not having taken up the bass. Water under the bridge.  I did have some great conversations and reminisced about old days and my intimacy with the objects in the former museum building where I occasionally pored over manuscripts and painted treasures in a back room.

Sunday night I watched a Tarkovsky film-- Stalker.  It's an extraordinary piece of work with even the film texture a particular choice-- alternating from sepia-tone to rich color-- from depressing, dark reality to a kind of spiritual epiphany. Without doing a movie review, it is both terrifying and then reassuring-- from the ominous post-apocalyptic wasteland to the resilience of the human spirit.  The dialogue stands out; it's poetic, philosophical and inspiring.  One quote stayed with me 'Passion is nothing but the friction of the soul against the outside world'... something like that, which may actually have been lifted from Herman Hesse.

On the way back from Princeton it was cold and damp... leather jacket weather... but I found myself waiting on a train platform with a young student dressed in a sequined sort of bathing suit with a small skirt-- no sleeves, no jacket-- bare legs with high-heeled white boots.  Her flesh was on display;  ditto the fact that she did not shave or groom herself anywhere-- an odd combination.  She was freezing, on her way to a Sabrina Carpenter concert where she would go directly from the train to the venue.  No one really stared at her but in case she needed protection, we struck up a conversation-- about the concert, about her studies.  She worked as a valet summers and spent all her money on concert merch.  Within minutes another woman appeared -- in a pink satin mini dress-- bare arms, with gold fishnets and the same white boots.  They did not know one another.  It was extraordinary... the pink dress was studying neuro-biology and had only a bag with books.  A coat, she told me, would ruin her outfit.  She, too, was shivering. 

No judgment.  In my day we wore jeans to concerts-- there were few 'followers' or even pussy hats or costume choices, although the Zappa Halloween show was something to see.  These girls had the confidence to get on a commuter train-- alone, dressed this way... well, it is Halloween week... but this was something else. Still, I have to concede that their passion, their hero-- white pop-Disney-girlie-dress-up icon, was as valid as my Rolling Stones and Proust and Caspar David Friedrich schoolgirl obsessions.

I fail to understand the current culture of superhero movies, the custom of adults dressing up in costumes, imitating comic books.  Is life so terrifying that one needs to arm oneself against it, imagine one can bend reality with these powers and super traits? Superman reversing the spin of the world to reverse time and save his love-- was a novel idea, but the unlikely movie scenarios come one after another, at the expense of what used to be considered the 'art' of film. It seems not just juvenile but absurd. And while I understand little boys wearing sports jerseys and gear to games, I don't 'see' grown men vying for sports jerseys at auctions for millions of dollars-- or even collecting sneakers and dressing up for games. Then I think of the World Cup and there's something legitimately passionate and patriotic about the spectators. 

It all comes down to this nagging question in my head: who are we and have we changed?  I think we have.  I mean, I have to admire these two Princeton students-- not even 20, for committing to their passion...for wearing it in and out of context... like a movement for them, I suppose. The incredibly lucrative marketing of the merchandise-- the commodification of fame-- well, that's another story. In my day star athletes made a tiny fraction of what bench players now command. 

Getting back to the elections, I have a harder and harder time deciphering who the candidates are. Their opponents define them by their mistakes and failures; we the voters try to see beyond this to their leadership capabilities and their true commitment.  No one at this level is pure. Separating ambition from mission is difficult. I can't help seeing Mamdani in a mirror wearing a superhero cape; he seems too much of that generation to me, and I am also influenced by my son who met him as an aspiring rapper. It worries me.

We are no longer either what we eat, or what we say we are, in politics. Nor are we what we wear, as we learn from the athletes who switch teams and uniforms according to payout. Dressing as Sabrina Carpenter doesn't make us singers or superstars or beautiful, but it does take us a little out of our own reality... and it makes us part of something. Those two women made friends on the train... maybe lifelong friends. That matters. 

I am off to the polls at the moment; I am not thrilled with either choice and I am not defined by my vote. I think in my student days-- anticipating my first eligible Presidential election--I WAS that. Despite Watergate, I had belief and conviction... volunteered and worked for them. I was exploring my soul, trying to understand art and uncover my personal 'calling' by experiencing friction with the outside world. Fifty years later-- badly dressed, and certainly not in costume, I'll pick a candidate and tonight I'll watch the World Series, but I'll always take Tarkovsky.

What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.

To Be or Naught

When I was maybe thirteen I closed myself in my bedroom, put on my new Jimi Hendrix album, stood on the side of my bed frame and did this crazy deep breathing alternating with challenging breath-holding... it was like a prescription a girl at school had given me-- to make myself faint. I woke up to the last song on the album.. I must have blacked out for thirty minutes... and felt profoundly changed, as though I'd done some mind-altering drug, or entered another reality entirely.  It was terrifying.  My mother asked me later that night what that huge sound had been... it was me, I did not say, crashing on the floor, simulating a kind of death.  I never again played with that scenario.  

A few weeks ago I ran into a woman in my neighborhood. She is familiar... I'd see her years back coming from the 92nd St Y where she swam and exercised-- with a perfect geometric haircut and coordinated outfits.  She liked her ballet flats, her accessories and pins.  We'd smile at one another-- two independent neighborhood women who lived presumably alone.  Then there was a gap-- several years-- we had different daily paths, but recently we met in the grocery store... she seemed warm and glad to see me.  She'd been isolated since the pandemic, she said.  People were no longer kind to her.  That seems impossible, I replied, knowing exactly what she meant, but trying to pry her out of some perceptible bleak mood. You look so fantastic, I said... you're so fashion-forward and well-kept. You haven't aged, I insisted.  She complimented me on my 'style' which is aging rocker/bag lady no-longer-chic, but we had a little laugh. 

Yesterday someone told me she suicided; they described her... we don't even know her name.  All these months I've been agonizing over my friend who succumbed to her brain tumor, my two beloved neighbors who are both suffering from incurable and fatal cancers. And here is this woman-- it was said she'd fallen... but then revealed that she took her life.  I don't know why I thought about my teenage blackout... but I did. 

According to statistics nearly fifty percent of Manhattan households are individuals.  This is a city of single people-- of dreamers and workers and maybe many consummate romantics who spend decades searching for a partner. As a young woman, not even out of college, I was engaged to a man who on paper satisfied every possible criterion for the perfect husband. He was handsome, too, like Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd (my favorite movie at the time)... athletic, brilliant, funny, macho, adoring, a little crazy.  And yet from the moment he put that diamond on my hand I was panicky-- looking for some flaw or crack in the human plaster. Who does this?  Insecure, self-loathing women who feel undeserving of success?  I don't know... but since he passed all tests, I began to misbehave until it became impossible.  He even tried to repair the engagement months later but I was in another headspace.

Many of my women friends made viable partnerships.  A few have wonderful marriages which exceed the sum of their parts. It's hard for single women to really understand what this requires; at our advancing age, it seems incredible to imagine someone making us coffee in the morning when we're exhausted, or embracing us at the end of a rough day.  There is no one. Children are the best-- but they really only want to know what's for dinner. And they grow up and hopefully follow their own dreams.

Throughout my adult life I've lived with men-- for better or worse. I've had two formal engagements-- and two marriages, neither of which was preceded by an engagement, neither of which was particularly successful.  One of them produced my son.  While I've followed my heart, creatively, 'managed' my decades with more passion than prudence, I was never quite 'completed' by a relationship.  The last few nights I've been thinking about how tough I was... I think I wanted to partner with someone who was a prodigy-- an inventor. I wanted to serve someone whose genius was worthy of my sacrificing any ambition I had to his.  And yet, even when I dated someone who seemed fantastic, I ripped them apart in my head-- I exaggerated the smallest fault into a reason to separate. 

But it occurs to me that I was equally hard on myself.  Sure-- I have an Ivy League education, I excelled at things-- I read, I think, I walk, I play bass, I write poetry... but I have not changed the world.  I have not left some scientific contribution or altered literature with groundbreaking talent.  At my age Anthony Trollope had been dead for years, after managing to produce twelve children and fifty three novels.  Einstein had changed modern physics. Mozart-- at less than half my age had put us all to shame. I suppose what I expected from myself I transferred to my fictional version of a partner. The possibility of this becoming a reality, especially after decades, becomes nil. 

Of course all of us women had our suitors-- the men with whom we had sex or the ones who took us to dinner and wanted to make something more... but these begin to diminish.  They themselves become fragile and sad.  The woman who suicided confided to me-- no one had reached out to her for some time.  There is no one to comfort us or pour us a drink at the end of a hard day... or a good day. We are used to this... I suppose I painted myself into this corner and I expect nothing.  But for this woman, it apparently became overwhelming-- the absence of someone. I'm not sure.

Reading the Boggs James Baldwin biography, I remember well the character in Another Country he based on his friend who jumped from the George Washington Bridge.  It haunted James who himself attempted suicide several times. Fortunately for us he was unsuccessful. In my neighborhood, over the past few months, there have been a few jumpers.  It's shocking. We'll never be sure what was in their head, whether they wanted to change their mind at the last second, when it was too late.  Unhappy people have become radicalized and transformed into alternate strong characters.  Often these mass murderers end up killing themselves.  I read the journal of a man who had survived his bridge jump, who admitted that in the instant, he was immediately sorry.

Maybe it takes a biographer to decipher our digressions and behaviors. I am trying, sifting through the unwritten messages left for me by the people I have lost, to analyze my own behavior and understand where I might have veered off my proscribed destiny.  As I write, tonight, ironically a televised biography  playing in the background about Marilyn Monroe.  I don't think I would ever throw in the proverbial towel, and I do take responsibility. It's not always easy, this life... our fate... the choices we've made versus the hand we've been dealt. There's only one version, so far, of this life.  Despite all of the barbs and potholes, I'll take it on. While I never played teenage life-and-death-roulette again, it's ironic that the soundtrack of that incident foreshadowed Jimi's own suicide.  Or not. 

There is never enough kindness in this world.  We in the city often barely speak to or know our neighbors. There is a constant existing possibility of truth or understanding between human beings, without ulterior motives.  And for those of us who find themselves solitary-- without a witness or companion, we are a bit myopic; we lack the advantage and privilege of dialogue. While Marilyn's death is still a bit of a mystery, the fact is, she died alone.  For those of us who live this daily existence, whether by choice or circumstance, we might find a way to extend a version of kindness to ourselves.

When You Dance

Years ago I had a sexual dream about Donald O'Connor.  He was wearing that horizontal striped shirt Gene Kelly wore in Anchors Aweigh. I woke up feeling hung over and baffled: not only do I dislike stripes anywhere besides bedsheets,  but my male crush-template at the time was maybe Scott Weiland.  

Over the years I've had a few iconic, memorable actual dreams that feel epic-- cinematic-- long, complicated narratives with specific settings and locations that felt like inventions-- all featuring some Hollywood actor-- Brian Keith, in one-- who had no real association with anything or anyone.  I'd wake up feeling-- well, a little surprised... but connected. In high school I'd occasionally have a random dream about some boy I barely knew and then blush when I passed him in the hallway.  Little did he know, we'd shared some private intimacy which would remain part of my psyche. 

Of course, they say the people in our dreams are substitutes, like when we dream about a neglected dog, it's actually about our self. Regardless of where these come from, there's a literal hangover-- we replay what we recall in real time; we are affected. 'A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep...' sang Cinderella on my Disney album soundtrack. Children have nightmares... the lyric was confusing.

I just finished the superb new James Baldwin biography.  James participated in the famed March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech.  MLK had not just a dream but a vision and a moral and social platform.  On a much more personal scale, my son recently realized his 'hoop-dream' of creating an urban basketball platform.  Of course this took incredibly hard work, planning and stress... fundraising, organizing, building, turning small failures into success narratives, and a coming of age. More than a dream, it's a passion he parlayed into a career ambition.  

My father, the war hero, was a fantastic dancer. Not like Michael Jackson or Gene Kelly, but he had incredible grace.  Watching him with my Mom at family weddings and celebrations, they were like movie stars in their own world... waltzing or samba-ing with harmony and skill.  It was sort of a revelation, seeing my parents this way-- transformed.

The US Open always reminds me of my father who was also a superb tennis player.  In fact, his dancing skills were probably honed because the tennis club where he worked as a boy recruited the young single employees to dance with random single women at their evening entertainments. He had plenty of practice, and experience with women in his pre-military career.  I'm sure that helped win my Mom over.  

'Do you love me, now that I can dance?' asked Dave Clark in one of the first 45's in my little collection.  My first real romantic experience was a slow-dance at a summer-camp mixer. I went to an all-girls Catholic camp that year and they integrated us once per season with a boys' camp from across the lake.  It was well chaperoned and the lights were bright, but the DJ put on 'Surfer Girl' and a tall boy held out his arms to 10-year-old me.  I could feel his heart beating, among other things.  But I realized dancing was sort of a physical metaphor. 

'When you Dance...I can really love' Neil Young sang and reinforced this metaphor.  There's an irony-- besides entertainers like Michael Jackson, rock musicians commonly do not actually dance much. Think Dylan, Tom Petty... Clapton, even Hendrix. They move around and weave a kind of sexual veil with their performance but they don't don't do steps. I've dated a few and offstage they can be a little awkward. 

Over years I've thought long and hard about the Donald O'Connor dream... were the initials significant?  Was this a substitute for my father?  As a young girl my father taught me a few steps; this was surely one of the few 'tender' moments between us. Knowing how to partner-dance was a part of our education. I was also sent to ballet-- to tap and jazz and modern dance because it turned out I loved learning steps and the choreographic role-playing.  Not to mention the music.  But dances-- parties-- this seemed to be a much more prevalent courtship ritual in 60's and 70's culture than it is now.  A slow dance with a new crush was a devastatingly sexy experience. I'm dating myself.  My college boyfriend and I loved dancing; it's what brought us together the very first night.  I miss this.

While I can't remember my father ever watching any of my dance recitals (and he certainly boycotted band gigs, lol)... he was very attentive at those of my son's school basketball tournaments he managed.  Although he doesn't really dance, my son shares a kind of athletic grace with his grandfather.  While I never shared my literal dreams with parents, I imagine my father might have been amused by the Donald O'Connor appearance.  I know how they relished watching those musicals...  and besides the Fred Astaire kind, he loved seeing James Brown, Sammy Davis Junior, and later, Michael Jackson. 

All these years later, I recall that old dream like an actual memory. Maybe it was a reference to my father I couldn't understand at the time. I'm trying, years after his passing, to smooth out the rough patches-- not to dance on his grave but to process the legacy with a little remedial choreography and the softer echo of old dreams.

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.