Light Sings of Wear

The cost of shipping has increased.  On a personal level, the cost of mailing has become a burden.  The art of letter-writing has certainly fallen into a sort of category of eccentricities.  I have tried hand-deliveries where I can; to include a tiny memento or scrap in an envelope raises the financial bar and punishes me with a kind of fine.  Postal rules are confusing and discriminatory-- they favor neatness and conformity; I am interrogated at the counter with queries which, if you are a poet or  outside-thinker, scrape at your deeper conscience.  We are condemned to technology.

Tomorrow would have been my mother's birthday.  I know that I loved her, despite her flaws and bigotries, her failure to understand things.  She fell somehow outside technology; even to see her driving a car seemed unnatural.  I grew up loving the number 27; it was sacred and while the presence of my father on weekends could ruin my day, I only knew I could not live without my mother.  The excitement of Halloween always included plans to surprise her.  One thing I am grateful for: she appreciated my handmade gifts and actually wore some of them.  My father seemed uncomfortable even opening a box from me.

Adult Halloween is another anomaly.  Of course, when your children are young, you fuss and carve, you bake and pile, hold little hands on the sidewalk or stand guard at your front door, cooing over neighbors and schoolkids in disguise. If you are a musician, you put on a mask and witch's hat-- a cape and fangs--- then you watch other adults in fantasy-outfits winding up on a dance floor, becoming characters for a night.

Thirty years ago, I went into early labor.  I prayed I would not give birth on Halloween, knowing how children feel gypped being born on a holiday.  I lay on a hospital gurney, watching the heartbeat of my son who had clearly outgrown his womb-home; I had ghoulish bruises on my ribs from the size of that baby.  Happily, they sent me back home where I waited until Election Day... but coming back that night from the old Lenox Hill Hospital, I felt 'costumed' as a mother-- more prepared to remove than embrace it.

In the early difficult months of single motherhood, there were several deaths in my circle.  Having no budget for caretakers, my baby sat or slept through several funerals.  He even had a little outfit-- people gift you these things when they are born-- which was dark and serious.  It was sitting at the back of St. Vincent's, reciting the Lord's Prayer, that I began to feel the enormous comfort of holding an infant-- the bond, I suppose, that forms despite all of your confusion, your lack of preparation and the awkward intrusion of 'schedule' on a musician's life.  It was there-- listening to the sounds of grief, sensing the permanence of loss, that I lost my disguise and became a mother.

My son will soon turn 30; my mother would have been 95 tomorrow.  95--  one of those numbers she loved to see on my school papers; I often brought her that pleasure, as a good student, but it only created the sort of expectation that parents in those days held like a gun to our heads-- the one gun I did not fear.  I have a new book now; the last one was published just in time to place it in her long-fingered hands and see maybe a small glint of recognition at the cover photo.  Maybe not.  We hold these personal myths closer as our future grows shorter.  No one is there to 'grade' our adult work... even criticism has become something one buys into; marketing has replaced the art of reviewing and prioritizing.

Last night I read some Kafka.  The myth of the tormented genius sometimes exceeds the work.  I often think Franz in this culture might have been a gaming addict.... but surely the technology would have distracted and diluted the passion to create-- allowed people, as it does, the illusion of connection in the reality of isolation.   Here I sit at a keyboard in the dark, backlit by the strange blue light my mother (and Kafka) never knew-- the ease of publishing, of sharing, provide a certain comfort.  Still my pile of library books on the old farm-table, candlesticks and wood, lined pads and ink-- an uncarved pumpkin of possibility in my pre-Halloween solitude, with the city in my window like the massive bag of tricks it is-- the pack of dogs-- the never-ending parade.