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. 

Not Vegetarian

As a needed literary palette-cleanser I picked up a Murakami novel. I'm beginning to outgrow certain books... or expecting more than I get.  Murakami is always admirable for trying... one often reads for the mystery factor... and he is literate and understands music, art... it's reassuring and good.  This time it was Kafka on the Shore... my expectations were different (the title, lol) but it was okay.

For months I've been waitlisted at NYPL for a couple of Han Kangs... The Vegetarian came last week and I devoured it in an evening. Maybe it was the still-lingering taste of Murakami, but I was underwhelmed. I felt like I'd been there, I'd known these people-- all of them, with their issues and a sort of projected character-narcissism I can't help attributing to the writer?  I am sinning here, I know... but with my limited years of life, diminishing by the moment, I feel annoyed when I am disappointed.  Murakami.. how can one compare (?); but his ambition never fails to impress even when he is less successful. And his characterizations-- well, they are so much less pretentious.  If I had bought this book, I would have felt duped. Apologies to the Nobelist.

A story in the Times today about an eccentric tough professor--  a kind of hoarder... who upon her death left sizable sums of money to selected students.  It felt meaningful, and in the context of recent relentless meditations on death, wills, afterlife... it was a kind of solution. Obviously, being memorialized with a New York Times post-mortem story had its own merit.

The river of death continues to flow past me... the mounting losses among friends, and the utter failure to honor these people who touch us so profoundly... and become a small paragraph-- a post, a broken heart meme... what can one do, without becoming a professional mourner?  Aside from the Pope and former presidents, funeral rituals have become less stringent since Covid.  One adjusted to the idea that a gathering or service would perpetrate more death, and postponed.  Reading history-- whole civilizations were characterized by the way they handled burial and afterlife philosophy.  What one leaves behind has ever-increasing longevity as opposed to the meagre years we are given here.  Not even an eye-blink in the monstrosity of time.

I was forced into a major discussion this week with a teenager who had decided he'd had enough education, and college would be meaningless.  Go ahead, I said... I mean, there are pictures of everything... does one really need to read the captions?  It's useful... and the richness of everyday existence is really measured by the resonance of experience-- how a song reminds us of something.. a piece of melody-- the way some assortment of trees calls up a Monet image or vice versa.  Art-- something not always understood... the process, the pieces.  How will you know about what came before? How will you know what there is to know? Dead writers are not often reviewed in daily media... but they are the foundation.  They are my intellectual family... my teachers. 

Once the actual experience of death is comprehended-- terrifying and unknowable-- it is the eternal obscurity that is depressing.  What we have been, what we have done-- it's just so temporary and unimportant in a culture which deifies the moment-- instant fame. No longer 15 minutes-- it's more like 15 seconds. One wonders that these monstrous people like Sean Diddy Combs are proving evil more memorable than goodness.  They receive enormous media time... and what is goodness?  Pope Francis became a kingpin... we are fascinated, but we go on sinning and wasting time and failing to rescue opportunities.

We cannot save people... The Vegetarian author knows that. I had a longtime best friend who suffered various mental illnesses and I acknowledge I grew tired of being sympathetic. It was exhausting watching her refuse food and company when she was one of the most artistically gifted people I'd ever known.  Part of it-- I was furious at losing my BFF who was better than I was at drawing and maybe singing.  And I adored her. But the option of choosing a kind of death in life seems so selfishly anti-humanitarian.  Not to mention requiring an enormous amount of medical and psychiatric attention. 

Personally I have befriended darkness and process this as a kind of shadow without which there is no light. I have disallowed mental illness but subscribe to psychological variety in the extreme.  I want to see art which explores these channels without shouting about it. Without promotion there is no exposure, I suppose. It is the paradox of this culture which prioritizes marketing above product... which monetizes just about everything... and defines success in amounts. Our heroes are in a way half baked... some of them suffer from the guilty pleasure of fame but many just continue the glam-squad lifestyle and continuous partying.  Maybe it is the new 'B-side' of creativity-- alternating phases of production and then celebration.

I keep returning to the classics-- I am obsessive and worried about my lapses... my failures to discover important things that are no longer popular or even in libraries.  The printed word-- it's so important. Currently I am reading Colm Tóibín's The Magician.. another digression before I start my next difficult 1200 page opus.  It tells the story of Thomas Mann... really just leads one to the writer himself... I wonder if he is read as widely as the Tóibín novel was in this decade.  

Daily obituaries remind... one must memorialize oneself I suppose-- this is the appeal of instagram?  That one's 'legacy' is copious and therefore significant?  And if one is undiscovered, is this worse than death?  There's a universe out there... an infinite, incomprehensible chronology... ever-expanding like the ratio of death to life. Until we have done ourselves in... all of us.  All of the art-- from cave paintings to Stonehenge to the $4 billion-dollars-worth of paintings sold at auction last week.  All of the books... the beautiful buildings-- the Sistine Chapel.  We can all sense goodness... it doesn't necessarily make us famous, but while we are living-- this tiny gift of time-- we can make something, we can leave a mark.  And we can 'not-fail' the ones who came before us, who sit patiently on library shelves, waiting... collecting dust, tottering on being remaindered in the next generation... Eek. Amen. 

.. Like a (- -) Cigarette Should...

My father, either from some residual emigré paranoia or fear of commitment, kept a packed suitcase in the  downstairs closet. So when he warned my mother sometime in the mid-60's at the family dinner table, 'Either quit smoking or I'm leaving,' she took it seriously. With wet eyes we ceremoniously flushed the last pack-- one by one. 

Nearly every childhood memory of my mother involves her graceful hands, her perfectly manicured long fingers, and a lit cigarette with old-world elegance between the first and second.  It was so much a part of her silhouette-- of her attitude and her fashion gestalt.  In photographs she is a bit like a 50's film star.  And while her health and life-stamina undoubtedly profited from giving up the habit, I never again found her image quite as seductive and appealing.  It was as though she gave up a shadow-persona or stopped dreaming and became simply a mother.

At the age of ten I used to steal a few cigarettes from the lovely silver and porcelain boxes that were laid out on nearly every end-table and surface in the den and living room.  These were a part of interior design culture-- accessorizing, the way flowers or bowls of things are casually strewn around contemporary rooms-- books and magazines.  Most of one's guests were smokers.  Ashtrays were everywhere... clean-up chores included dumping these before bed.  

But I'd steal one at night while I walked the dogs to the end of our dead-end street... I'd stand in the shadow of the streetlamp and pretend to inhale... watching my silhouette turn into a more womanly version of myself.  I felt grown-up-- and imagined myself in all kinds of mysterious scenarios. My older sister was often scolded for hiding packs of Winstons in her purse... I thought perhaps she and my mother were conspiring in secret. Neither of us really acquired the habit, although most of my boyfriends were heavy smokers. It was part of being cool and nonchalant; it made everyone seem older.

In high school kids smoked on the pavement outside... it was a sort of sign. Everyone had their personal style. As a musician, guitar players had their little tricks-- a cigarette somehow balanced in their guitar headstock, drummers with one hanging from their mouth while they played... and the whole front row a smoky backlit second stage of audience, providing atmosphere. Jazz bands with the spotlight suffused with tone looked magical.

When smoking was banned in clubs and restaurants the whole culture changed... photography changed, attitude.  We were less hidden and in clear, naked resolution.  Of course drugs were invisible... alcohol. But things were different.  I had a boyfriend who would smoke one single cigarette after dinner; this took discipline, but it was kind of a remarkable habit and I envied him his eight or ten minutes of escape into some other world. 

There was a bouncer at one club who against rules would light up after hours.  He was built like a tank and wore a solid gold pitbull around his neck. Who's gonna tell me to put this out he would ask me if I raised my eyebrow?  Ain't nobody.  And he would puff away with his whiskey.  I loved it. 

I've been reading Per Petterson the Norwegian writer.  One after another-- like pack after pack-- it became a two-week addiction. His economical sentences, the clear sense of presence and observation and his brutal self-chastising. Cigarettes are ubiquitous-- not an accessory but a device.  It occurs that what I love most about his writing is an ability to dissect a moment.  One wavers with him-- his human fallibility and hesitance... as he drives or walks-- barhops, weathers relationship failure and loneliness, as he processes grief.  

Somehow I feel I am inside his head-- through the translation, despite the unfamiliar landscape... he recruits the reader somehow. At least I found myself weeping with his disappointments and failures and sadness. And I remember the sense of smoking-- the way it is in a 60's film... the way it accompanies pauses and silences.  A cigarette allows one distance-- breath, ironically... to dissect a moment.  

I can remember putting coins into a machine for my Mom and pulling out Winstons or Kent... it felt like an important task and I knew it was like opening a book for her-- more than a habit, more than a need... more like a change of costume, or a privileged moment.  She escaped, she coped; she dreamed.  More than anything I miss this version of her.  

Often I wonder whether my own son will remember me on a stage, playing bass--- in another kind of state--slightly removed, in a smoky room... not just a mother but a person.  Music, too-- the experience, and even the memory-- allows one permission to dissect a moment... transforms one... of course there is no souvenir here-- no pack to discard or keep... no co-conspiratorial vibe, no grace of inhale... no breath.  Nothing replaces the simple ritual; it's become unhealthy, part of the now visually nostalgic normalcy of 60's movies... 

We've come so far... our 21st century wisdom so easily accelerates action, trades one vice for another, deletes romance, miscalculates the slow revelation of a simple action that was available to nearly all of us. The next generation will doubtless recall their parents differently... will doubtless not feel enchanted and moved by footage of Willy DeVille on a stool, swathed in the smoke of his stage cigarette and the spotlight, while he sings to us how heaven stood still.

Old Poets Society

Last week I binged on four novels by Per Petterson. Four. His clean, simple sentences are humbling and a little comforting in a world that feels so precariously skewed, so far from any sense of clarity. But one of the narrators observed that the past is a kind of foreign country; things are done differently there, he said. This resonated.  

I remember thinking and writing, in 2020, that the pandemic removed the future temporarily, and muddled the present.  For many of my generation, the past became a sort of refuge; it felt solid and safe.  Some of these people forgot completely about the future, and will never again trust in this.  They've become steeped in nostalgia and recollection to the extent that their present is nearly eclipsed by what came before. The issue is, our versions of the past are not as reliable as we think.  And yes, things were done differently there. Many old bets are 'off'. Still, this is not an excuse not to go on; we must do more than criticize and indulge one another with memories.

Facebook as a platform encourages this kind of behavior.  One can't open a page without being reminded of past celebrations and events-- griefs and losses. There we are -- happy and laughing-- in places that no longer exist, with friends who have sadly passed away.  

April being poetry month brings a slew of daily lines I'd posted in past years which at the time seemed more compelling, as though one needed a witness to just 'be'. And as much as one hates to admit, it is audience that affects our sense of self-worth.  I grew up copying poems into a notebook from the age of four, alternating with many of my own I never showed anyone until this 'me' era gave me a little encouragement. I was writing and performing my songs for years before I thought of sharing poems. It surprised me in the 1980's that much of the praise for my first recording was for lyrics.

When I used to take the night bus crosstown to the 3 train, on the way to work, I often met an older man named Bob.  He was a writer; he'd kept his student apartment on the west side for over fifty years so he could spend nights typing without disturbing his wife. Mostly he wrote poetry... he'd recite for me on the bus, old style, and as we got to know one another, he'd tell me amazing stories... he'd translated Neruda, and got to take him around the city on one of his very few visits here. It seemed almost incredulous.  He had incredibly chivalrous manners and always held my hand as I got off the bus.  

One day he dropped off a manila envelope of work... written in fastidious and beautiful longhand... lovely professional poems about nature, about love... about grief.  His wife had died, but he still kept his habit of crossing town to his little writing studio. I got the courage to give him a manuscript of Scars-- my first collection-- and he treated it as though it was established literature.  His praise was quiet but solid and he showed me a good deal of respect.  When the book came, he insisted on buying ten copies which he said he gave out to friends and fellow-poets. They need to know you, he would say.

I often ran into him-- walking, looking down, without a coat like an old Englishman-- no umbrella in the rain...  we exchanged work over the years and he gave me a good deal of confidence.  During the Covid quarantine one day he called me-- to see how I was, but really it was just to connect.  I felt terrible. He passed away two years ago-- his aging undoubtedly accelerated by the shock of the pandemic.  I still rode the bus often-- it was free-- and wrote verse in my head. 

A young woman in his building had somehow befriended him... put his work together in a book which was not of the quality he deserved.  In exchange I think she received much of his estate... his apartment, I'd heard... I don't know why I mistrusted her, but I do. Shame on me.

My other mentor/fellow poet was a woman named Siri... she was eighty when we met and had just published her first book, sponsored by a former laureate who taught at Columbia where she took an evening class.  Somehow we exchanged books and then work.  Her poems were interesting and serious; she had a degree in Botany from Harvard... her text was wonderfully suffused with flowers and tree names... she had also, I learned, been married to a very high-profile financier and lived well. 

For a few years Siri and I met for coffee and critiqued one another. Her respect for me was enormously helpful.  One day I heard she'd ironically tripped over one of those sidewalk tree-garden fences and hit her head.  From then on she was confused.  Soon afterward I dropped off an envelope of work and the doorman told me she'd passed away.  I still have a small pile of her 'new' work-- a poem about twin girls that haunts me still.  Her daughters are sort of celebrities and impossible to track down... but I often wonder if they ever cherished her work.

When I first moved to my neighborhood, in the 1990's, The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y was active and provided not just a platform for readings but an incomparable library of mostly donated works from important poets who had read and spoken there over seventy-five years. The library was sadly dismantled to make room for a spa, and while the organization exists as an online resource, politics and contemporary financial priorities have altered its meaning. It is no longer a 'home' for old poets.

So now in 2025 I continue to receive the Knopf Poem of the Day emailed April mornings... occasionally a gem in there, but usually, like today-- a tough Anne Sexton-- someone from the more rigorous past.  The new poets-- well, for the most part they disappoint.  Still anxious to discover something... I begin to doubt myself. I have not been taught... I have just transcribed the voice which recites inside. But I am aware that my two under-celebrated mentors have given me the courage to envision some creative future where I will try to approach the standards they shared quietly in private poetic confidence. 

Categorically Speaking

I'm back to reading Javier Marías who sadly passed away two years ago. Now that I know his body of work is static and limited, I ration the few I have not yet read.  This one, like several others, takes its title from Shakespeare... Thus Bad Begins-- ominous words for these times, maybe more so when one considers the quotation ends 'and worse remains behind.'

Not to preface a lecture on Hamlet, but an entrance to one of Marías' mystery narratives which opens with a disturbing comment that truth is categorical. While the old 'me' would balk at such a concept, the quagmire of this political soup in which we find ourselves has broken into my belief system like a thief. I am having trouble maintaining and defending the things we held as self-evident in light of what is dangerously becoming law.

It's not just politics; in this AI era one would think fact-checking was a digital shadow that kept us all honest... but it doesn't seem to be working.  We are able to replay basketball points and foul-calls in great detail, from several vantage points, but our justice system does not have this tool.  Innocent people are deemed criminal and white-collar criminals are sometimes not just exonerated but rewarded according to the manipulations of legalities.  Then again, inside our jails there is another justice system, and an all-too-common abuse of power among prison employees that further obscures the administration of human rights. 

It's like a labyrinth of morality. Our government daily shakes the dice and changes the rules.  Immigrants who came here pursuing a dream under a democratic regime now find themselves hunted by ICE agents.  It's like getting on a train going west and having the sign changed arbitrarily, finding oneself headed anywhere.  Liars and cheaters are winning.  We have less social motivation to be good and kind, except that most of us, fortunately, are made this way.  

I am lucky to have women friends of all ages-- from 16 to 99. Listening to them complain about relationships and the difficulty of finding appropriate partners is one of my constant pastimes.  Of course at 99 the options are limited. But for those who are recently divorced or separated, or still single in this city and searching, truth can be categorical.  Online profiles and apps are filled with shysters and fibbers... men who are still married or partnered... people who like your profile photo enough to temporarily masquerade as exactly what you profess to want. And then all bets are off.  One still, in this digital dating world, goes on analogue dates, develops real attachments and in a city like New York, suffers break-ups and disappointments with someone who can melt back into anonymity in mere hours. 

We are confused; we are betrayed, we are like sheep without a proper pasture.  Most scenarios, like novels, have a variety of endings; some predictable and some, like the best of mysteries, will end in a shocking twist.  I can't help wondering where all of this is going... not even a hundred days into this presidency, and institutions of kindness and generosity are being dismantled, cultural platforms stripped and charitable organizations paralyzed.  Public research will be funded according to an agenda which serves not the people but itself.  

In the background of most Marías novels is the looming history of the Spanish Franco regime-- the way it persecuted freedom and then sort of deflated and petered out, with its proponents skulking away without much ado, and its victims in a sort of heroic limbo. Like the Third Reich in Germany, there's a residual national guilt that doesn't disappear, despite generations born without memory of these times.   Is this going to be the Great American Shame, the darkest era in our young history?  Will a national catastrophe or pandemic cause this terrible government to implode? It's hard to find a safe haven; it's hard to sleep when the very foundation of American justice seems like a kind of sport where the rules are constantly being changed by the Great Orange Moderator. 

When I was small I had a doll-sized figure of Sojourner Truth my nanny gave me. She fought for Freedom, I was told.  I stood her on a special shelf with my favorite shells and rocks. This was a symbol; truth was a solid, provable thing that had to do with freedom and civil rights.  It held the world up like an invisible column-- like God.  Even science was simply a quest to find the inherent truth of things-- the atomic number, the definition.  

So maybe in this era Marías will not see, truth has become simply a category-- an option. Guilt is relative; there are only the jailed and the jailors, the rulers and the ruled, the empowered and the powerless. There is love and there is a great lonely population, I am discovering, in our city which cannot seem to find its footing in these times where its elected leadership is questionably prosecuted but not convicted. 

No wonder people are obsessed with March Madness, with television and netflix and instagram and dating apps, with ordering food and cooking competitions-- with anything, really, where there is a kind of winner and loser. We can't even get a proper diagnosis here, because the business of medicine has subjugated science to profit, and prevents physicians from treating patients equally.  

As for me I am once again entranced by the skill and astute intelligence of Marías who insisted his many accolades were due to the general dearth of quality literature in our time. While temporally and politically skeptical, he has a way of finding his truth, uncategorically. At this moment it's all the closure I may get.