Sonidos de Soledad

 I've been joking with friends about my lifelong penchant for solitude.  We've had a private relationship for years, I say-- flirtations, sometimes a secret affair...  but lately we've become more or less exclusive.  To be perfectly honest, I never really felt totally connected.  I loved my mother-- but the others-- well, it was like we were made of different material.  We'd get banished to our rooms for various childhood misdeeds and while my sister would tantrum and panic, it was sort of my sanctuary.  I invented stories and poems-- I read, I painted pictures, talked to my little animal collection, looked at stamps, built things.  It was the group activities that terrified me-- even a family dinner was like a tortuous ritual.  

It's not like I was a loner; I was social and participated... I took ballet and chorus and orchestra and loved the ensemble thing, but I craved solitude.   When I discovered music-- pop and rock in those magical years of the early 60's, the lyrics reached out to me.  I went as an exchange student to a remote city in Veracruz, Mexico and the language difference separated me further, but also drew me in.  The girls had names like Blanca-- Rosa-- colors... or Dolores (sorrow), and my favorite friend, Soledad (loneliness).  It was like a legendary story and I was a character.  Life was simple and basic-- no electricity or plumbing; we slept three 'sisters' to a floor-palette.  People sang and danced.  

I'd brought with me Simon & Garfunkel's 'Sounds of Silence' album.  This had been a revelation to me-- from the very first lyric 'Hello darkness my old friend'... I knew I was 'home'. Unfortunately there was no turntable and nowhere to plug one in, but Soledad daily came and studied the cover-- turning it over and over, touching the vinyl grooves as though magic would emerge.  They had a guitar; I was not good but could figure out most of the chords... So I spent the summer translating song lyrics...los Sonidos de Silencio.  My versions were clumsy and filled with mistakes and misinterpretations but I began to understand the underlayer of the Spanish language, the way we in school wake up one day to the concept of symbolism.  Names have a meaning; characters represent things.  What is the meaning of my life, I wondered, as I wrote out Yo soy piedra/yo soy isla... and Soledad looked at me from her black eyes of sympathy.

My first stop when I got to Mexico City later that season was a record store where I found The Who's 'Tommy' had been released.  I spent the afternoon in an isolation booth with headphones, savoring the re-discovery of recorded music--like an old friend.  For those of us who begin to 'live' via music, it is only this that accompanies the solitary room of existence.  Every sorrow has a theme, every grief has a soundtrack. 

Ironically, in my 2020 confinement here, I have been separated from my live musical connections.  Players need one another-- we need noise and amplification and audience and company... personal intimacy.  The absence of the alternative to solitude takes away some of its meaning.  I'm not sure Thoreau would agree-- or St. Augustine or those monks who suffered and labored for years confined and deprived.  For me, during much of the year, loss and grief have defined the boundaries of my shadows-- they have drawn the outline of my silhouette.  Some nights it has been hard to even listen to songs of my personal history that conjure old memories.  Here I have all the time and space I have ever craved, and the ghosts of music past haunt my evenings and color my auditions with a kind of pain.  

Tonight I did my lap of the park reservoir in the cold with the wind stirring up a current on the glassy water... A lone goose was calling-- shrieking, squawking.  The moon had painted a clear white broken line on the black surface but she avoided the spotlight.  I strained to understand her, to fathom her language... to no avail... but within minutes a whole flock came and surrounded her.  For a time they all shouted and sang; then they were quiet.  What was the meaning?  Was she banished or punished and then forgiven?  They all seemed so calm when I turned west-- gliding across the rippling cold water, listening to the sirens and the soft wind, unaware that the year is about to turn over.  

I realize that Soledad taught me somehow the difference between solitude and loneliness.  I wonder where she is today-- an older woman like me.  She liked to dance-- she would undoubtedly have led the happy/sad life of most beautiful women.  I am still mourning the losses of this year, but am grateful to embrace the amplitude of what I have been given.  It is as though I am in an empty room with nothing but a wand.  There is another language still to be learned; I am beginning to see this, and I look forward to a  slow melodic passage into another year where I will once again hear and translate the sounds of silence.

Sticky Fingers

 I was newly 18 when the Stones released Sticky Fingers.  Converted by the second track and totally romanced by Wild Horses, it was clear the album was going to take precedence on my little dormitory stereo in those innocent days before headphones.  Plus you could hear Brown Sugar and Bitch blasting across quadrangles everywhere.  Still, it was the cover that really obsessed me, the art student who had hung out at Max's with fake ID and visited the Warhol studio on several teenage occasions.  It was clever-- it was pop, it was tongue and cheek, and it was ultra sexy.  There were racy promo photos of Mick wearing nothing but the album placed just so across his hips.  

My Mom often used the expression 'sticky fingers' when she suspected one of us girls had raided her purse or the refrigerator.  Never me-- I was inclined otherwise... not a pilferer, nor a tattler.  In my first year of college I caught a roommate red-handed in my underwear drawer.  Confusing and a little creepy.  She cried and returned  a stash of 'borrowed' things, none of which were of much use to her.  It was her pathology, our Psych-major neighbor explained.  

After I had a baby I learned the true and literal meaning of sticky fingers.  They were everywhere... windows, appliances, stereos, bookshelves.  My little monster once 'mailed' a peanut butter sandwich in the VCR slot.  Nights were spent wiping things down-- after all, these things spread germs or grew bacteria, or whatever.  Babies put anything and everything in their mouth and then they transfer to their hands and paint the walls.  

The pandemic admonished us of the potential threat in human fingerprints; I have often thought back with nostalgia on those innocent baby-juice days as I learned to wipe off surfaces, doorknobs and other touchables.  Admittedly I'm not too fastidious.  But being alone here for extended hours and months, I've done a sort of unintentional categorical inventory of things.  I've discovered possessions, cds, albums, books-- old letters and photos-- rocks and minerals, souvenirs... things I recall with some vagueness.  Like an associative exercise, one thing leads me to another-- a Colin Blunstone album, a love-letter from a deceased drummer, a set of strings from some rockstar or other... I've never been one to actually catalogue;  I loaned so many books and albums over the years-- many never come back.  During recent months I've come upon these 'gaps' like a missing tooth... and I wonder, besides my own careless generosity, what visitor or overnight guest might have slipped something into a pocket, then let themselves quietly out while I was sleeping off an all-night gig.

My first husband felt entitled to my things in a charming sort of way.  After all, he is non-materialistic and would give anyone anything.  When I pulled out a vintage album on which he played, I found the vinyl had been lifted and a burned cd with a handwritten note left in its place.  But that was a focused appropriation.  In a way he 'owned' his work.  Here I'm missing Dylan-- Hendrix... Faulkner... Pynchon... baffling.  Sticky Fingers-- the actual zipper version-- appropriately (?)-- has been removed.  

My old neighbor used to come by every night and slip something into his pocket.  He took wine bottles from our local liquor store, too.  Sometimes he'd steal cookies and food.  When I'd question him, on the way out, he'd reply 'you don't need THAT'.  Much of his 'loot' were compact jazz box-sets he loved.  Slim and Slam.  Bud Powell.  He was a famous photographer and a great man who had entered the last stage of his life.   He was confused.  I was a little flattered that he wanted my things.  Go figure.  His fingers were literally sticky from the stolen cookies.  He left prints. 

Modern technology is clean and sterile.  No inky prints on our letters-- no rumpled paper and foodstains on manuscripts.  We are reminded, in the pandemic, that phones carry germs.  Everyone is sanitizing their hands to near-death.  When we voted, we were given our very own stylus/pen which went home with us.  God forbid anyone should exchange body fluids.  

I can't help thinking sex has suffered-- it's messy and sticky.  Obviously hook-ups and random meetings have been squelched although surely there is an underground culture of touching and physical intimacy.  For the rest of us, monogamy is favored.  I found it ironic that the Stones' 'mouth' logo which first appeared on the Sticky Fingers album is now being commonly used on a mask which inherently messages 'anti-tongue'.  We haven't seen many real smiles on the street... lipstick sales are understandably down-- cosmetic tooth procedures no longer prioritized.  

When I was about 15 I went to a concert and one of the musicians brushed my arm on the way out.  He gave me a wink, as though it was intentional.  I could swear I felt it, like a sort of warm glow, and did not wash that spot for a week until I was forced into a school swim.  Our Mom used to tell us how God touched every baby before birth just above its mouth and left that cleft mark.  There's a certain magical transference that happens when someone touches you... talks with their hands-- plays your guitar and leaves marks on it... shares some moment with you that leaves you with a physical souvenir.  

I miss my old neighbor... I miss my old sense of hospitality.  Christmas is here and very few people will see my tree which, after setting it up alone, left my hands fragrant and syrupy with its resin.  I miss my missing things... tonight I'd put Sway on my turntable if I still had it.  I can get it on youtube... not the same.  A few of my beloved decorations are not in the box-- more victims of my neighbor?  There were undoubtedly times when I'd take things down and give them away.  

We have all been a little sterilized by this pandemic.  We fear one another, we hesitate-- we wash and scrub and hold our breath.  We disguise ourselves and pretend maybe to be cleaner than we are.  Most of all I miss being 'touched' by someone-- a random meeting or conversation where you exchange and leave a sort of mark on someone.  These things do not happen with the same frequency.  I worry our culture is a little too digital and premeditated... less fleshy and flawed and mud-spattered.  White-washed and clean, smelling of disinfectant... do not forget how bloody are our beating hearts, how sticky the fingerprints of our childhood and parental memories, how fragile our souls which pass so easily through the layers of latex and surgical cloth and flesh.  

Tonight I looked again in vain for the Saturn/Jupiter conjunction.  It's up there, like most things, even though we can't see them.  Not touching, but putting on a little bi-millennial show for us--  reminding us that this too shall pass, this 2020 mess.... just about a moonlight mile on down the road.

Home Alone

 I read an article this morning about the alarming surge of suicide in Japan.  More people there took their lives in October than died of  Corona virus in ten months, the highest rates being among young women and schoolgirls.  The very word--schoolgirl-- pulls at my maternal heartstrings; there is no more poignant symbol of soft-edged vulnerability...  the magical prologue to the drama of life.  The image of Japanese girls lined up and giggling in their staid uniforms like delicate figurines-- children-- juxtaposed with the dark confessional teenage social media posts-- well, it is heart wrenching.  

As I discovered in 2017 when I went with Alan to Tokyo, masks have been standard street-wear for years... so it seemed to me the pandemic protocol would be not quite the adjustment it has been in New York City.  But loneliness-- isolation... is a difficult prescription for the adolescent psyche already afflicted with perpetual FOMO or social addictions.  Being confined to the house with one's insufferable parents is a sort of punishment... and when life is all future, quarantines are a kind of extreme deprivation.  I am not well educated in Japanese culture but found it to be a weird mix of ultra-sophistication and this cult of the child.  After our rock and roll show a young woman presented me very seriously with a lovely doll.  

Despite all the Thanksgiving messages of hope and gratitude, there is the widespread epidemic of depression and sadness.  I tried my best to be festive at my small table, but the echo of former guests' laughter hung over us like a memory cloud.  I miss the Hendrix tributes; I miss coming in from a gig to face an all-nighter of cooking-- I miss the musicians passing my guitars back and forth as the sun rises on Black Friday.  

In addition to the 'Virgin Suicides' plague, I've been reading pieces about postpartum depression-- miscarriages... the sorrows of women.  We have always carried our layers of grief, but only recently I have had to see Chrissy Teigen's Instagram photo-shoot with a shrouded fetus... not to mitigate her right to mourning, and the pain of losing a child... but in this worldwide 'weather' of death, it just seemed a little overdone.  

I've been emailing my long-standing women friends; we seem to have a need to communicate-- to bare our  loneliness and disappointment to our sisters with whom we can 'let down'.  We're used to sadnesses-- we have mourned the phases of our lives.  While I didn't have the luxury of postpartum moods, as a single mother and sole provider, there was the sense of shedding a skin-- of losing the tender 'girlness' that makes those Japanese adolescents so compelling and soft.  We are no longer the little twirling ballerina on the cake-- we are someone's mother... we are responsible ministers.  As my own mother warned-- she who disapproved of my life-style and single parenthood-- knowing how I craved my own independence and creative solitude, 'You'll never be alone again, my dear!'  Intended as a cruel prophecy, she did not live to witness just how wrong 2020 has proven her.

Now that our children are adults and we are becoming grandparents, another skin has been shed.  I wonder if moulting snakes feel pain... they seem to slither out of their coats with no regrets or hindsight... straight ahead into the next phase; not so we women.  Forward we go toward a winding-down; the current braking of culture and community leaves us leaning on our lifetime sills, looking through criss-crossed panes at future and past, sensing our own helplessness to protect our children and other women's children from falling in love with death, the ultimate solitude.  

Turning the pages of my blank calendar, I can still remember years when every single day was not just crammed with events and gigs and meetings-- but the possibility of things... the slivers of soundbites and colors-- fashion and books... hooded eyes meeting yours... flirtations and messages exchanged on papers during breaks... Today I could swear I smelled the patchouli-vanilla aura of that dread-locked guy from Dan Lynch's-- with the muscles and the smooth brown skin who left his scent on you one night,  like a taste of what you were missing.  And these moments you skipped-- stones you left unturned-- same as the ones you pocketed-- they were still there-- in the night air-- in the live-wire sea of the possible.  I can imagine these sad girls of Japan-- everywhere-- like a new race of pandemic humanity-- barefoot on the shore-- sentenced to unsampled beauty and sexuality-- wading prohibited.  

Time is a tightrope, I once wrote... love is the fall; love is a one-track mind... time is the crash.  At that moment I would have died if I was separated from my own passion.  For the sake of children-- of girls everywhere-- may this end, may we return to some normalcy of touch and taste and uncovered faces and hearts... and may the older among us accept our fate with the strength we acquired when we were young.  Not to forget... but to look back at where we have been.  Preserve your memories, Paul Simon wrote... they're all that's left you.  I was barely 15 and writing in a secret diary when I heard that lyric for the first time; I can scarcely recall why it touched me then, but some 50 years later, it is just as haunting.  

Pet Sounds

Years ago in the city-- before the animal-litter laws and formal leashing enforcements--I took in a feral dog.  No one called it that, but it was definitely not domesticated.  It couldn't bear to be touched or even approached... but was so beaten up by the elements and other wild animals, it accepted the can of meat I offered it on the sidewalk of upper Madison Avenue one afternoon.  A week later, like some spirit-animal, it found its way from the Broome Street bar where it was tied up to the townhouse gallery on 92nd Street where I worked.  It waited for me for days until I came in. 

He got used to humans, and despite the fact I lived in this cool loft with a brick wall and a balcony where the dog could pace and watch the world, he'd give me this look every once in a while, like 'is this IT?" He'd take every opportunity to escape and run wild in the park or down to the East River, just to remind me of his roots-- his canine soul.  

The dog-to-human ratio in the city has increased since the pandemic.  Everyone has a dog now and many have new dogs or newly-acquired dogs.  Shelters have never been so empty.  In my building maybe the majority have dogs.  Not a single cat that I know of, across 48 or so apartments, but barking dogs-- large dogs, small dogs, neurotic dogs, sweet grateful rescue dogs.  It's nice.  After the death of my feral pet who lived an uncannily long life, I never replaced him.  Apologies to my son who wanted a dog so badly-- and I regret this, but I was so stressed with single-parenthood and working nights, living often from a bag of yesterday's stale bagels or leftovers... I just couldn't manage having to disappoint an extra pair of begging sad eyes.

Every day it seems one friend or other calls me to check in-- or really to check themselves in, because every single one has some complaint or symptom they had never noticed.  They are bored, they hate their spouse; they hate sex; they hate food or they eat compulsively.  They drink too much or not enough.  Their back hurts...  their leg hurts; their feet hurt.  They have carpal tunnel and hand tendinitis.  They are claustrophobic and nonproductive-- addicted to exercise or slobbed out watching hours of reality TV repeats with bags of Nachos and imaginary guacamole they don't even bother to whip up.  They hate themselves and do not shower or shave.  They order clothing that doesn't fit.  They lie to their family and themselves.  The cheaters can't meet their secret lovers and the users have trouble getting their dealers to meet them.  

Personally I feel dull.  I miss the conversational/musical stimulation of a good underrehearsed gig and the edge I take on at the end of a night, criticizing my own work to my peers, assessing the audience... sharing anecdotes from the ride home where at 3 AM there's always some psycho or self-appointed orator or performance-vomiter on the subway.  I remarked tonight that I used to be a C# minor chord and now I'm more a D-flat minor diminished.  Thats it-- I'm diminished.

But it occurred to me today-- we have become our own pets.  Our little claustrophobic daily routines, our limited circumferential routes-- even our eating-- we are leashed and restrained... dual-domesticated.  Even the bi-polar among us-- our extremes are room to room, not block to block.  We are stifled and tamed. We talk the talk, but we no longer walk the walk.  We can't... we're masked and quarantined.  We're leveled.  Sit.  Lie down.  Sleep.  We pick up after ourselves-- well, some of us do.  The other day my neighbors were in the elevator and I wanted to ask 'which one of you does the barking?  But I simply smiled with my eyes.  I've learned to do that-- straight-faced underneath.  It's a new kind of disguise.

When my son was little we inherited a pet snail from his science classroom.  It lived in a plastic salad container  and required very little maintenance.  Once a week I'd put it on the kitchen counter and clean the little house out.   Instead of pulling inside its shell like a frightened turtle, it let its antennae all the way out like it was stretching.  Extending.  I sang to it... figured it can't see, but maybe it could hear.  It seemed to tilt in my direction.  It was brave-- it was exploring the world outside its container.  Back inside, it would circle several times--laps-- like a swimmer without water, spreading its slime around the way they do.  His name, bestowed with the innocent irony kids exude, was Speeder.  He, too, lived way beyond the normal expectancy of his breed, but there you go.  He had his little routine, his little life-- his outings and his feedings.  

My personal production this week oozes rather than runs.  I'm beginning to feel like that snail in my container-- all of us-- corralled and boxed and restrained-- slowed down... becoming in a way complacent and compliant with what we have, with the future sequentially postponed in blocks of time that melt and freeze like those soft Dali clock faces hanging on lines.  Even the dark of days' end is greedy and quick; we are deprived of long sunsets and poetic evenings. Trapped like leashed dogs, like fish in a bowl, like amphibians under rocks-- alone in our doll houses and little plastic cages which social media has rendered transparent, we are our own voyeurs-- performers and audience simultaneously.  Sometimes I feel as though I could be eating that plastic sushi you see in restaurant windows.  With our diminished smell and taste, we Covid survivors-- what difference would it make? We are no longer feral; we talk about our masks and wash our hands and don't touch one another.  

Last night as I ran around the reservoir in the wind, a duck was squawking.  What was it saying... maybe 'is this IT?' I envied it the freedom to change ponds, to get up and fly away.  I wondered if it could see the cartoon-colored lights of the southern skyline from the park-- the way it's changed, as though it's another city altogether-- another backdrop, another 'set' which emerges with more and more clarity as the leaves disappear.  I remember the ducks in Iceland-- how they didn't seem to mind the cold... and the night I buried Speeder by the Meer-- sadly, in the moist black dirt, noticing as I held him one last time how he smelled of the sea.

HOLLOW-E'EN

I was shocked this evening to see a bit of manifested holiday cheer on the streets, children and parents in costumes-- trick or treating, I suppose, at doorways of shops, grocery stores...  merriment in the park... adults on bicycles dressed as ghosts and Teletubbies.  I'm not sure what I'd be doing if I had young children-- does one keep up the illusion that life is going on as it did, that joy and celebration are still appropriate even during a pandemic?  We Americans-- we make the best of things, I've heard.  Some of us.  

In 1961 I wore one of my father's old suit jackets, pinned and rolled up-- a Stetson hat and a John F Kennedy rubber mask.  It was a good disguise for me, the perennial tomboy who at that moment hated makeup and princess clothes--  low-maintenance and warm.  I tried to imitate the walk of a war hero-turned political leader-- really the first President I celebrated in my young life.  He was a young, handsome father, like my Dad-- a former soldier.  We were old enough to follow the election in school and we loved him.  Again in 1964 I'd looked through my closet for ideas-- was way more enthusiastic about theatre and music and boys than trick or treating...  considered reviving the Kennedy mask, but post-mortem it seemed more tastelessly macabre and politically incorrect.  

Today I saw Trump masks-- left over from 2016?  New ones made with the irony of the very image of the mask-shunner stamped like a grotesque advertisement for the Corona virus?  Hard to decipher whether the wearers are haters or supporters.  An army of Trump faces on the street is as scary as Halloween gets.  Pumpkinheads. 

Last night I was so agitated about the upcoming election I slept not at all.  To distract myself I memorized the presidential sequence.  Incredible to me I've lived through twelve and hopefully will see thirteen in a matter of months.  As an early voter, I forgot I'd have this feeling of helplessness as the day approaches; not much we can do but encourage others.  It's politics, it's numbers... but I've still not fully recovered from the devastating mental hangover of November 9, 2016.  It can't happen again... but yes, it can.  

Out of the 45 names I litanised, there were some bad ones; we lived.  I can't blame the entire pandemic on one man... and yet he's become the symbol-- the mask, as it were, of evil-- of 'spread'... the very opposite of a Protector, a hero-- a blunderbuss opportunist who's turned America into a casino culture.  A cartoon-man whose flaws and failures have been woven into the very fabric of this country in a way that is unprecedented and more horrifying than any haunted house I can imagine.

I have this image in my mind... of a quiet parade-less Thanksgiving morning with one enormous balloon in the shape of an obese Donald Trump floating above the city, children being given old-fashioned pea-shooters or plastic darts.  Pin the tail on the Trump-donkey.  But today, after a sleepless night, I saw the boarded-up windows of Macy's-- a city on edge,  anticipating unrest-- catastrophe.  This is more than an election... this is not a democratic process but a seismic sociologic event.  

Just one year ago I was a musician.  Halloween for decades was not just a children's holiday but a gig-- revelry and dancing.  We played and shared microphones, sang our hearts out-- swapped sweat, licked strings and kissed one another.  We exchanged vampire teeth and masks, ate candy corn and hung plastic skulls from our guitar-necks.  We did Misfits covers and carved out pumpkins.  It is hard to think about being a musician when there is no live music.  What am I?  What are we?  We are diminished-- we are masked not from celebration but from fear.  

It's not just Halloween and a rare blue moon, but the one day of the year we are given an extra hour.  November is beginning on a 'loaded' night... spirits are flitting around, and the cold autumn air is fraught with socially distanced energy and urbanites jacked up on sugar and alcohol.  Kids are resilient, but even they know how much we've lost in the past seven months; the novelty has worn off.  I'm tired of thinking my future will be little more than nostalgic reminiscence-- story-telling.  Tonight I am measuring my life by presidents... ready for my thirteen.  Whatever lurks out there for us, let there be a little hope and humanity-- something more than candy wrappers and smashed pumpkins.  We have less choice than usual, but we can put our faith in a man with a mask, or throw our chips in with a human mask that camouflages a hollow man.  Once in a blue moon, we might deserve a miracle.  

Blue Ink

 Over the weekend I was touched by the obituary of a type-face designer who passed away.  His fonts and graphic 'eye' are well integrated in our every-day visuals.  The musical metaphors he offered, the way letters and printed words 'speak' to some of us... these people are part of media obsolescence.  I find myself mourning the disappearance of them as though they are family.  They are part of the soul and material of my life.  I miss them; I miss the reality to which they belonged-- the priorities and signposts. “The most beautiful thing in the world,” the Times quoted him as saying,“is a blank piece of paper.”

Credit...

My neighbor is a well-known older writer.  When we met, years ago, he exclusively worked on an odd and dated version of a dedicated word processing machine.  One night he called me-- panicky-- because it was malfunctioning and any self-respecting computer repair man declined to service this.  I offered him my 'transition' typewriter-- the kind that memorized a line at a time and then printed it out on a page via plastic ribbon.  I held onto these things as souvenirs, and for just such literary emergencies.  It distracted him, but it was wrong.  Ebay, I suggested... and sure enough he was able to find a replacement.  

Meanwhile, I remember thinking how far I'd come-- writing my first novel in Word Perfect, on a Dell PC I'd been gifted, to replace my used  8 MHz IBM PS  which prompted me to install DOS by floppy disk every time I turned the machine on.  From my first ancient Royal on which I'd typed my Princeton thesis (with carbons), to an electric Smith Corona, and onward.  My friends know I'm still using a telephone land-line; I've resisted change/technology along the way.   I am uncomfortable with these systems that seem to accelerate my process until I don't recognize myself.  I need the heartbeat and material of sentence-building, of story-telling.  

The cross-outs and inserts of manuscript writing are part and parcel of understanding a writer's process.  Songwriters, poets... their doodles and marginalia enhance value-- provide clues to the creative path, to private distractions and passions--  a bit of humor.  In the late sixties when I applied to college the applications were hand-written.   On one of them, instead of attaching the passport-sized photo requested, I asked one of my friends to draw me.  I maneuvered questions and embellished things-- gave them what they didn't ask but maybe wanted.  Today the 'common' app most universities use are just that; they leave little room for variety or humor.  My little portrait would have been missed by any computer.  

I wake during the night and scrawl lyrics on paper scraps-- have a supply of writing utensils among piles of books on my nightstand.  Far beyond recalling inspiration now, I still shun middle-of-the-night technology, as though the bright blue light threatens poetry.  Last night I thought about summer camp.  I hated being sent away and from the age of eight spent a full two months in a cabin full of girls with no privacy.  Besides my rag doll, I brought a small stack of paperback books my Mom approved, and a white pad of stationary paper with a blue ball-point pen.  It was the first time I was allowed to use ink.  I can still remember the way it glided along the paper, the sweetish candy smell of the ink, and the halo of my flashlight underneath the covers.  It was during those nights that I think I became a writer.

In this era of backlit news, texts and emails which spread or shrink across screens, I still take my coffee black and my reading material in print, bound and paged.  The way the words flow in linear formations-- the serifs and italics, dots and lines-- these are essential.  They comfort me when I am sleepless, sing to me when I am alone.  The hours and nights of this pandemic have run one into another-- my solitude provides little punctuation, but the near-endless supply of well-written sentences in my old books, the familiar patterns of verse and chorus-- have provided some comfort, like the homesick summer nights of white paper and blue ink.

Guitar Grievance

 At the age of three, my son had his very first 'away' playdate.  When I came to collect him, his friend's mother told me on arrival he'd gone from room to room opening closets, peeking under beds.  It was relentless.  She overheard her little boy ask him what he was doing and he replied 'I'm looking for your Mom's guitars.'  Apparently he assumed part of motherhood meant being a musician.  

During this pandemic I've watched more television than usual.  The quarantine has forced even our basic newscasters to provide a glimpse into their domestic environments.  Some are obviously fortunate, with rich decor and furnishings-- grand rooms behind them.  Others are more discreet, and appear in a limited space behind a desk, casually dressed, in front of a lamp-- family photographs in frames, and always the bookshelves.  Journalists have historic books-- world affairs, biographies; the entertainers and emcees have variety-- novels, popular trade books, art monographs, atlases.  Some are arranged so that they look 'provided'.  Others, like Judy Woodruff's, seem authentic and comfortably spine-worn.  

A large number of home 'sets' include a guitar.  Being the musician, I've often strained and squinted to decipher the brand or model.  Usually the instruments are background... but for some, like on Conan's show, they are prominently displayed and there are more than one.  I've actually met Conan at gigs, maybe 25 years ago... he'd always been attracted to music, played a little guitar.  We need to know this.  Apparently the presence of a guitar, like household pets, has a message-- conveys artistic bent, sensitivity? A 'player' (lol)? Coolness?  Who knows?  Like my young son, it may be just an assumption-- a household necessity-- like a blender or an iron-- something your Mom and her friends passed around at night... or the thing she took into the closet at 3 AM so she wouldn't wake the kids.  Most of the headstocks were labelled with the same initial as your name, so they felt familial-- branded.  They belonged.

Unlike many musicians, all of my guitars (and pets) have in a way 'found' me.  They are like stray dogs that somehow crossed my path, and came home to live with me.  I have fallen in love with each one-- their quirks and flaws, their unique beauty and voice.  My very first 'real' bass was initially a listing in Buylines-- the free newspaper we all used to seek out instruments in pre-internet days.  This was our Craigslist, the local 'hub' for trading equipment.  I took two trains and a bus out to some address in Jamaica where an old Fender Precision in a broken-handled case waited for me.  Its owner had long disheveled hair, arthritis... maybe a career once in local bands-- I didn't ask. The place smelled musty-- it was dark.  I'll take it, I said, without playing it, without holding it... the price was exactly what I had in my pocket-- $300.  When I got home, my rocker roommate was in a state of shock that I'd hit some pre-CBS jackpot.  That guitar served me for years; it mostly resides in a case these days; it seems pretentious to carry around a bass with its monetary value... I miss playing it.  I look at old photos and remember the way I felt.  

When my 'solo' guitar self-destructed two weeks ago, I panicked.  Here was another ill-fitting anomaly-- not 'me' at all, but somehow with its defects and flaws, I'd made it work.  It was my companion.  Yes, my 12-string weird tuning put unnecessary stress on the bridge but it had never seemed to complain.  Until it did.  Even its maker shook their head at the photos and told me to bury it.  Sell the parts.  

In a pandemic, random fated meetings are near-impossible.  I spent nights combing the internet for affordable options. Of course I have access to the wonderful collections of my friends, but I need to have my own funky instrument.  I need to be able to bond unequivocally and not worry about accidents or mishaps.  So with my tail between my legs I walked down to Guitar Center which was quieter than in former days... and lined with hundreds of the guitars we see and don't see hanging from TV walls-- primped and leaning in stands.  The first night I played a range of 12-strings-- from $4,000 down to $200... walked home and vowed I'd find a repair person brave enough to fix my old wreck.  

Five days passed-- I borrowed a guitar just to keep my fingers alive, and I got the courage to return to the store.  This time, one (a cheap one) seemed to remember me-- it had retained the tuning I tried out-- it had a small crack in the neck-finish which merited a price reduction.  It was the only one available.  I also had a gift card from judging a King of the Blues contest.  I so rarely buy things, the card was unused.  Again I went home, thought about the cracked guitar, considered the cons, the responsibility of actually buying a new instrument.  Nothing new about me these days.  Another two days passed, and I looked at internet photos. tried to crush on the guitar a little... gave myself lectures on moving on in life-- of leaving things behind, peeling away old layers.  A TCM movie synchronicitously had the guitar brandname in its title-- that perked my soul a little... I began to speculate that if someone bought that guitar I'd feel hurt.  So I went down a third time--- there it was.. it seemed to greet me... still in my tuning.  I bought it, carried it home with that feeling I had as a child when I'd take a few months' worth of allowance to the toy store on my bicycle and picked something. 

It's not 'everything' but it's something.  It's a lesson-- an adjustment.  The two of us are an odd couple.  It's loud, it's bright... it's black and so new.  It's a blank canvas, for sure... but I'm trying to make it welcome.  I'm going to sell the parts of my old one-- I won't insult it by trying to plastic-surgery it into some guitar hell, but maybe the parts will live on in some songwriter's hand.  It served me well and reminds me about life-- even inanimate things have a kind of death and we can't bury ourselves with our own past.  We have to keep going.  I feel certain one day my new guitar will gently weep for me, but hopefully I'll have done it a bit of justice by then.  

Quaranteen

The first slight chill of September is a grim reminder of not just time but his designated reaper.  This summer's diminished celebrations have highlighted the significance of our mortality... of the way things wind down, segue casually into a sequence... or, more rarely-- simply die.  That 2020 may be remembered as the year with no summer, for some of us, is for our future perfect to determine.  

Death after death has been logged, like a thick-knotted rope we blindly grope in an unfamiliar, unlit present.  We are sad-- we are repressed, we are uncharacteristically grateful for small privileges as they are gradually restored... but like a hurricane aftermath, we have not yet surveyed the damaged human landscape.  

Meanwhile we have the fires burning in the West, reminding us that nature is not done with us-- that vaccine or none, there are larger battles in store-- there is perhaps life on Venus, economic disaster for any one of a number of countries... there is still a looming and impressive death toll to digest.  No wonder people demonstrate; fear fuels anger... we are leaderless, disunited, confused and betrayed.  We are the victims of emotional recession.

Tonight I re-watched The Virgin Suicides.  With the added distance of age (the parental Lisbons are a generation younger than I am now), it all seemed both more and less poignant.  The concept of innocence-- especially for those of us who were born in the 50's-- is complex and rooted.  Whether we were raised in a protective, sheltered home or somehow damaged and violated, all women seem to have a mothery response to teenage girls.  As some of us know, they can also be evil and manipulative-- but even in the darkest Lolitas, there remains a 'band' of white.  They get a reduced sentence.  

One of the noted ironies of this film tonight was the quarantine-- which unlike our pandemic culture only served to encourage the so-called malignancy it was meant to prevent.  Teenage suicide is especially tragic because real-life seems so vast and irrelevant outside the small passionate priorities of youth.  I remember my older sister once swallowed a bottle of aspirin because she was docked from some unremarkable party.  At the hospital she confessed she'd only actually eaten seven and they were baby aspirin because she was more terrified of the stomach-pumping apparatus.  In the end it was a worthless exercise and she'd played the death card badly.

The other theme that struck me was the longing-- that hypnotic, all-consuming 'drug' we really only experience from the entry points of love-- the fantastic, elaborate, drawn out sense of endless waiting to consummate or even touch the object of our desire (which can change in a teenage heartbeat).  Halfway through the film, at the bottom of the screen a message floated by informing me, among other bits of news, that Cardi B had filed for divorce citing 'trust issues'. Well... times have certainly changed from nights of holding a telephone receiver over a turntable playing early Todd Rundgren to the instantaneous and public posts of social media.  In the current MO of relationships, those weighted endless hours of courtship have eloped; time snaps back like an elastic weapon in your face.  

I don't know what teenagers hold onto these days... romance has had its wings clipped-- or maybe the quarantine, like the Lisbon sisters, has only stirred the fires of love and creativity.  I have heard all too many stories of death these months-- painful for those of us who stand helplessly on these quiet sidelines, but also somehow comprehensible in this world of 'less-than'.  I look back on my girlhood; as a high school senior I had a brief romance with a handsome young teacher who was installed as a 'draft dodger' .  He let it be known he was interested and as inappropriate and taboo as it was, it superseded any romantic fantasies of my 17th year.  I was fortunate; he treated me with utmost respect and kindness.  We drove off in his Renault to a studio apartment on West End Avenue where he taught me things I had not known, but never violated my 'innocence'.  It was 'everything'.  He even introduced me to Dustin Hoffman.  

My high school romance became a lifelong friendship... we went our separate appropriate ways and I always considered this experience more than first love... During the pandemic I learned he'd passed away, and with it a small chunk of my past buried itself.  For those of us who do not attend funerals or post on social media or weep publicly, these things have taken a toll.  For teenagers, reading about death statistics daily, masking their young mouths and maintaining an amount of sterility-- well, it seems like some kind of deprivation--  the year with no 'teenage'.  It seemed fitting tonight that The Virgin Suicides paid a kind of tribute to the pain and loss suffered by even the 'privileged perfect'.  I remember the criticisms that it 'rhapsodized' suicide... for me it just reminded of the perfect fragility of adolescence... the sad wasted timeline of disappointment and cancellation-- the ambiguous and ambivalent value of quarantine.  But I am old and nostalgic-- empathic and sad.

On the other hand, apparently Cardi B. has just filed for custody of Kulture.  Let's hope not.  

Abandoned Ship

I was up earlier than usual for a Saturday-- took a jog uptown and saw my Boxer training by the Meer-- it's been months and we were happy to see one another-- enough to exchange smiles... his a kind of stiff grin through his mouthguard.  I love that he trains alone with the guard in.  He's serious. No mask.  No one is going to step into his 6-foot ring.  

By the public bathrooms a large man singing through a cheap karaoke kit-microphone... Stuck on You... of all things.  Last week it was Ain't No Sunshine.  He was bad.  Not Michael Jackson bad... just bad.  As I passed, like an announcer he cheered me on, through the little speaker-- yeah, Baby Girl, you do it...  Even I had to laugh... no one called me that even when I was a toddler.  I'm certainly no one's baby. 

Most of my life I have chosen the 'high road' in bad situations.  I have opted out of payment, given to charity, refused to argue when greed was the protagonist on the table, gone home with my pride a thin coating against the weather and the haters.  You and yo' damn principles, Tyrone scolded me when I refused to trade food stamps for cash.  I'll buy him lunch, but don't want his benefits.  

Me and my damn principles.  I feel like it's Act III of this Corona play; we're all in it, scriptless, rolling around like blind pinballs waiting to hit some bell or whistle-- illness, death-- job loss, eviction.  We're hunkered down here, some of us.  I've never abandoned the ship of my city before, but my building is less than half-occupied at the moment, and day by day I read Facebook announcements of emigres, deserters. What am I proving here?  I feel like a smoker on my last pack... what next?  

Uptown seems calmer than downtown; no moving trucks here, not much action on the street before dark.  People jogging, shopping... walking dogs, setting up for street barbecues and picnics-- but little anger... more like a what's next attitude and the hangover from 5 months of diminished life. We've become lazy-- flabby, unproductive.  We accept shitty television and whatever sports we can get.  We overpay for cable and internet-- it's become our new expensive bedmate. We argue less at checkout.  We drink alone and accept curfews.  

I've been getting a ton of art-related email.  Virtual exhibition tours, panels-- opinions, critiques, advice.  The 5 or 7 or 10 curators who have shaped the art market.  Over and over.  The social relevance of new art...  etc.  What does it take these days to be an art curator?  When I went to school we had to distinguish forgeries from authentic signatures-- fakes from actual.  We had to know.  Art meant something; there was a history and formal principles to be analyzed.  Like a history of classical music.  And contemporary.  Of course now that 'markets' are more important than art, all bets are off.  People are anesthetized and too lazy to look; they take the opinion of 'experts' like a medicine.  They buy what they are told.  They sell. These things don't wear well; back into the cycle.  

The way things are framed in this life seems to be important.  This is advertising-- presentation; wardrobe, make-up.  I have been shocked in my lifetime seeing celebrities totally 'naked'.  Unrecognizable.  The framing is essential.  I have seen paintings-- works of art-- sloppy and frayed, sometimes finger and foot-printed from an old studio floor... then transformed like funky ducklings into graceful wall-swans, surrounded by mounting trickery like celestial cloud-rendering. Ready for luxury customers.  

I started to think today-- how the unexpected afternoon sunshine transformed the Meer. There was even an unscripted rainbow-- or at least half a rainbow.  The water had just enough current to make a kind of quiet surf-music.  While I am pretty well-versed in naming painters and identifying artwork, I still haven't learned to recognize trees.  Nature doesn't really speak to me the way I know roads and cornerstones-- rooftop profiles and water-towers against skyscrapers... I have befriended lampposts and painted messages... they resonate in my human heart the way bookspines, cigarette packs-- have meaning.  Photographed faces in a row-- vinyl album covers-- stamp books and bootlaces-- cassettes in repurposed wine crates.  The way things hurt, when you are young... the way girls fell in love with one another at a certain age... you knew-- this face-- was going to be your best.  

Trash piles outside the projects are the same as ever... old TVs, discarded furniture, broken airconditioners-- strollers... but downtown, they are filling with things... with cast-offs and cartons of memory.  My people are deserting me.  Not for the first time I have the sense of a sinking ship... but I can find few reasons to hang in.  Maybe the 'principled' of us are on the diseased cruise ship of New York.  After the fear, the distrust, the social distancing and unrest-- the demonstrations and demands... the sorrow... Death has become at least one of the starring roles in this new play. Suicide, I have come to believe, is in all of our DNA... it is part of the human condition and the unique privilege we have.  Maybe the concept of suicide has yet to invade the collective soul of an urban animal.  Maybe we are on some verge.  

I've been thinking about the ocean-- watching hurricanes rage and recede, massive wave formations.  I've been listening, again, to Procol Harum's A Salty Dog... it's a kind of metaphor for grief, this album. It's beautiful and I miss this kind of songwriting-- these albums of our heart that seem memorialized in vinyl. My old copy is quite worn.  It asks me who will inventory my life when it is over? Who will curate, present and frame?  I'm not sure how this play ends; by then the ship may have sunk, and my moot and principled life will surely not be deemed seaworthy.  I hope someone somewhere will still treasure the lyrics of Keith Reid, or whomever...they resonate with even more truth in these times... Let him who fears his heart alone/Stand up and make a speech...

If Six was Nine

Among the thousands of stories and heroics of ER and hospital personnel we read in the news daily, there was yet another recent version of the Jimi Hendrix tragedy.  More last-minute accounts and conflicting narratives of his final night:  the number of pills he took, the one found on the floor, the testimony of Eric Burdon, bad decisions of poor Monica who was scarcely a reliable or competent 'nurse'... whether the Mafia or the CIA or his own greedy management was responsible.  We read, we go back to that moment-- What if, we wonder-- and repeat our frustration and sorrow at the cruel loss of one of our cultural icons who in a few years changed rock guitar--- opened up a door, as these people do.  It is like a record-- it goes round endlessly and really we cannot see between the vinyl lines.

Beneath the veneer of this pandemic which has become 'life' for so many of us, there are other layers of existence-- one being made up of the lonely and otherwise sick, because death does not kindly stop for a global illness.  He rages on, tormenting his victims with cancer, allowing motorcycle accidents and fires-- terrifying explosions and bullet wounds.  And then the secret dying-- the suicides and sleepers, the debtors and evicted unemployed, the ones too confused to apply for government aid-- the panhandlers who can no longer survive on what frightened people do not put in their cup... the sidewalk singers and saxophones, the crawlers and street-barkers who have lost their place.  For all of these on the underbelly of the city, things have become more difficult.  Some reach out a hand for any substance anyone will spare-- bets are off, fear is the black cloud that follows their evening dread.  I see many sitting on the park perimeter, where they can still find the rare city benches that allow a person to lie down.

Many of these people surround themselves with things--- carts and strollers-- anything with wheels that will allow them to transport their possessions a short distance-- to the public bathrooms by the Meer, to food sources which are plentiful these days, ironically; at a bus shed the other night I found three small shopping bags with wonderfully packed dinners inside-- 'Please Take'  the packages said.  I did not.   But most of the homeless still scrounge through trashcans, scavenge outside fast-food stores where lines of people often eat quickly and discard scraps.  Yesterday a girl on Park Avenue and 111th Street was sitting on the curb eating from an old KFC bucket... a Citibike lying next to her-- she was filthy-- her lovely skin streaked with street soot... how do we save these people, I thought?  She looked up at me with eyes that rolled in her head... Yo, Mama, she said...  I kept walking.

I've been going through the possessions of a friend who passed from the virus.  It's a huge daunting task and even his family cannot manage.  He is of that 'race' of people who become a kind of hoarder... we are all guilty in my generation-- we collect things-- we are sentimental-- records, cassettes, cds, photographs... old clothing.  For those who are celebrities and musicians-- fans give them things; fans make them things.  When I was 15 I had a crush on Dustin Hoffman and waited outside his stage door to give him a careful portrait I'd drawn.  I met him at one point as adults and he claimed to still have it... who knows?  People with money have storage spaces and large homes-- on the street one must carry on their back or their carts.  Who is to say what is precious and valuable?

As we go through things-- postcards and pins and guitar picks-- each one opens up a little storybook-- a memory we might otherwise have lost... and some of these things, as we age, become 'orphaned'.. we have lost their identity, that moment... which boyfriend, which pressed flower.. which country?  When people die suddenly, they leave behind a flood of information, of sentiment and even secrets...
back it flows-- out to a vast sea of lost time-- the achingly beautiful moments and the useless unworthy junk... altogether.  Writers and artists sacrifice their lives to unravel these things-- to sort them, rescue them... because we failed somehow to rescue the deceased.

I remember a friend's father who was a compelling but complicated man;  he went home one night when he was in his alleged prime and put a pistol in his mouth.  Just before, he'd been at a diner and had a grilled cheese and coffee, smoked a cigarette... tipped the waitress modestly, as he did.  She spoke to me afterward-- how she could have saved him, had she only known.  Oh, but you did, in a way, I reassured her... perhaps many times... and she did not understand.

The death of my friend's son is the current knife in my back.  He belongs to one of the underlayers of these times-- the privileged happy, with the so-called 'everything'-- and yet they take their lives.  We spend endless nights tossing and regretting and wondering-- if we only-- just to go back-- those minutes-- he was alone and did this thing-- or perhaps, as I like to think, crossed a line-- knew immediately he wanted to go back-- the way jumpers who survive often describe the moment-- and was unable.  If only... Jimi Hendrix... Kurt Cobain... the sad suiciders full of brilliance who deprive us, who cannot bear their burden.  And then,  perhaps we have the story all wrong.

My mother always used to tell me, when I brought home sick or stray animals-- You cannot save everything.  It happened with men, too-- so many worth saving but so little time-- I eventually gave up.  Still, in my evening rounds of the Meer, I meet eyes with those who are willing;  I wave at the ones who seem 'parked' semi-permanently in the dusk with their packages and odds.  The pond is becoming greenish and murky at the edges, like the pool of New Yorkers who remain stubbornly in their city.  Please, I repeat to myself at night, please do not... to all of those who may be teetering on the edge of another world that beckons.  Do not leave us here, wondering, missing... beating ourselves, the way women in ancient cultures beat themselves in mourning... I understand this ritual, now.

I have on my table here a cheap little box with a metal pick inside-- the souvenir of my friend... equal to maybe one single cell in a massive organism that was his legacy.  He died of the virus, not his own hand, although we are left with the same sense of helpless failure.  In the multitudes of minutiae and memories, I realize he was saving himself, in a way, knowing that there is really no one at the end...  who will save us, tragic as it is.  If Six was only Nine....

Ring, ring goes the bell...

When I was in elementary school they began bussing children in from other  districts to promote integration.  The new kids were black, so we all knew it was a racial not a cultural thing.  They were different-- a little less fearful of teachers; they brought attitude in-- not because it was inherent but maybe magnified because they didn't ask to ride a bus every morning and afternoon.  I loved this one girl in my class- Darcel.  She had cats-eye glasses and a big butt and strutted around like a queen.  She encouraged my bad behavior and classroom antics.  I wanted her approval; I got into trouble in Home Economics and they called in my parents.

By junior high we were pretty much integrated and adjusted.  There was a certain level of tension-- it was the 60's and civil rights issues were at the top of social studies discussions.  Radical intellectuals were questioning policy, human rights and justice.  To corral cafeteria energy, they let us dance; the black kids had a whole style and ruled at this... on the turntable they played 'Shotgun' over and over and kids went wild.  To cool off the energy, they began some program where we'd have to sit in an auditorium and eat lunch while they showed classic films-- things like Kidnapped or The Count of Monte Christo or even black and white films like Arsenic and Old Lace.  Kids threw sandwiches at the screen and the room smelled stale and 'meaty' like burped up salami.  It was not conducive to eating and for some reason the word quarantine yesterday conjured up that memory like food poisoning.

Scenes like this are beginning to blur; some of the sensations are so vivid I know they happened-- at times I can look down and see my plaid wool kilt or my blue corduroy skirt underneath my looseleaf notebook.  We didn't have backpacks; there was a bag with a drawstring for gym clothes but most kids like me piled their books and held them together with a rubber strap.  The black and white films made no sense; they weren't even funny and most of them were shown in 20-minute installments in the course of a week.  They were depressing and irrelevant the way I suppose movies like Butch Cassidy looked to my own son.

At some point I began tutoring kids in a less fortunate district where test levels were way below standard.  I was assigned a tiny girl named Doreen who was repeating First Grade for a third term.  She was so little I theorized her mother had lied about her age just to get the child-care kindergarten provided.  Things were different then; working mothers were often overwhelmed.  Doreen was extremely shy and could not seem to connect with alphabet.  I read stories to her and she was very attentive.  She'd lean up on me the way kids do and put her fingers in her mouth.  I can't read, Miss Amy, she would say matter-of-factly... they forced the kids to address me with a title.

No one had ever read to her.  No books in her house... no stories, no fairy tales... Read to me about Singerella, she'd say.  She loved Cinderella.. over and over.  I made little Cinderella flash cards-- brought in Colorforms.. but she did not connect any letters with characters... with things.  She had a block.  Still, I was determined-- and I looked forward to our sessions-- the sound of her little deep voice was hypnotic and monotonal.  Her little body leaning against me made me feel responsible and mothery.   She was clean in a way-- her hair was neatly separated and done in a multitude of tiny braids with plastic barrettes... in the straight scalp partings her Mom rubbed Vaseline, she told me.  But her scent-- it was as though she lived over a restaurant and the ghost of old food had permanently permeated her clothing and skin.

Every day I held the cards... gave little consonant hints with my mouth.. but she refused to think and just mimicked whatever I did.  Frustrating... not lollipops, nor barrettes, nor books enticed her.
One day I stayed after school for a meeting with all the tutors-- I watched her Mom pick her up and smack her as she put her in the car.  She just sat there in the seat making that face she made, like she was clucking her tongue.  Black lives matter, I thought, in different words... but I was useless for anything except getting her out of her humiliating classroom for an hour every day.  Of course I had no clue her mother had six other kids, a delinquent husband and a limited education herself.

Today on a crosstown bus a whole group of kids was on the way home from some kind of school program; they had uniforms and book bags and all of them had removed their masks and were carrying on in the back so it was hard not to laugh... they were about 10 years old...  where had they been, in this pandemic... summer school?  Was there air conditioning? Were they especially smart, especially slow?  Impossible to tell... but that aura of being released from a confining day was unmistakable.

Classroom learning for me was the model.  It was boring, repetitive, claustrophobic... incestuous and unfair... but that was the deal.  God forbid my parents would have had to home school me-- they had no patience and my Mom wasn't very smart.  Except she read to us-- Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz... she was a wonderful reader even when I was old enough to correct her pronunciations... I loved the evening chapter-installments.  There were also TV programs-- Mr. Wizard and even primitive interactive things where you'd stick a plastic screen on the set and draw with a crayon... but most learning centered on a class, facing forward, fixed desks in closely-set rows.  Tall in back, small in front.

I think about little Doreen-- she'd be about 57 now.  Jesus.  I'm sure she eventually learned to read; we'd finally mastered the letter 'D'.  In these times, I think Beyonce would play 'Singerella' in her little head... she'd have dreams and maybe even a tablet with youtube and Disney.  I can still remember her little-girl smell and the way she fidgeted on my lap-- couldn't get close enough like a sad dog.  Maybe she remembers me; I wasn't allowed to give her any gifts although I wanted to ... I wanted to take her home and keep her there and have her sit on my lap while my Mom read to us girls.  Then I graduated... met brilliant, strong black women... was taught by some of them... asked them about the Doreens and they shook their head and spoke about racism and cultural inequality.

Up in Harlem kids are bored-- playgrounds are still locked up... they are hanging out in clusters and seem relatively unafraid... but what will become of their classrooms-- the closeness and the physical
experience of people-- of lunchrooms, of sharing and trading and touching-- the covered mouths and masked noses-- singing and dancing and tasting? It's just so harsh.   My Mom used to warn us how cigarettes would stunt our growth... but all bets are off now.  People get used to things; dogs wag their tail when their owners put on a mask-- it means a walk...most seem grateful for phase 3-- it beats phase 1... and even prisoners adjust to lock-up... I guess... but we are all prisoners here... we are looking inward and outward and we are not happy; we are equally deprived and stripped of some freedom-- we are the skeletons in our own closets... facing down some kind of punishment some of us do not deserve-- a sentence without trial.  I'm not suffering; I'm old, I've had my fun, as the song goes... but for those who have not... the children... their lives matter most of all.

Red, White and Blue

On July 4th I took an uncrowded 4 train to Brooklyn to hang with my son.  Solitude and quarantine have muffled the sounds of freedom ringing; just a few short weeks ago the pre-sunset curfew was downright penetentiarial.  I craved the sight of bridges and water and the Jersey shoreline-- the sense of distance, of space that is not measured out in six-foot lengths.  I thought the trip might help stir up some holiday spirit.

Walking to the subway was like an audio land-mine... firecrackers and street-caps exploding everywhere... Roman candles and sparklers whizzing by, blasts and M-80s and rockets threatening my old damaged ears.  I was jumpy; the station, even with the heat, was like a quiet refuge.  On the train, pretty much everyone wore a mask-- except the guy by the rear door who was smoking a joint and pointed out to me several times that I was the only white person in the car.  Certainly I was the only person without earbuds-- a captive audience to his rants and raps and disgruntlements.  When he pressed me for a response, I confessed I didn't feel very white, thinking about my unbleached laundry still drying off in the permanent humidity of my bathroom.   It seemed to satisfy him-- he offered me a toke and I turned it down, touching the mask.  In the relative calm of train noise, I felt safe.

In Brooklyn my son treated me to tacos on the roof of a cool Mexican place-- seemed appropriately a-patriotic for American Independence Day.  I had my first drink of alcohol since that last horrid glass of red at Parkside -- when Alan I toasted the proverbial end of the world as the downtown music scene hit the fan.  It burned a little-- like I was somehow disloyal for drinking without him.   A few couples socially distanced at tables seemed subdued... as though they were waiting for something; a young family with a cranky toddler reminded me of how exhausting the relentless claustrophobia of family can be-- how my first quarantine was like a numerical sentence-- me, a baby, an absent husband and the thick walls of early winter dusk that closed tightly around a mother who was accustomed to barhopping and rock and roll nights.  Sometimes I tire my son-the-man with memories and reminiscence... mostly I reduce it down to a general apology for my learning-on-the-job parenting style.

I insisted we check out the view from the Brooklyn promenade-- magical on any night, but the 4th held some promise of pyrotechnics and sky-entertainment, although nothing like the dazzling light-show of 2019-- the crowds, the buzz, the noise. The Statue of Liberty seemed to have shrunk... like someone picked her off and replaced her with a facsimile-- Liberty-Barbie with the green robe and the crown... and what reason had she to stand tall anyway... sham that she became in this administration with her baited false message of welcome to immigrants, the racially charged symbol of white freedom-- in a harbor with few boats, in a city where residents must mask their face and fear their neighbors?  She, too, seemed subdued and ironic...

Where is my freedom, I wondered?  Is it here... on a promenade by a river I've known most of my life, looking at an altered landscape across a bridge I used to watch from my childhood pram-- the one that haunted my dreams for years-- even still?  On my birth certificate which identifies me as female and white-- a citizen of New York City where I find myself tethered-- despite my youthful wanderings and yearnings... ?  What has become of my city-- a scene of emotional wreckage and the slow attrition of all that I loved most?

The post-4th evenings are quiet although I read in my audio manual that the city ambient sounds have a significant decibel presence.   My dusk runs are still punctuated by heart-stopping random firework explosions.  I have become more intimate with Central Park than I ever expected...  I recognize the routine joggers and walkers-- the babies growing and the Boxers getting their mojo back... My egret has disappeared; surely she is somewhere in the city.  The ducks and geese seem to have a certain purpose... recently a few of them line up on the tiny rock island in the center of the reservoir; they have an order-- they do not seem to compete.

In the distance of dark there are few sirens now; the traffic is subdued and tame.  There is an occasional quiet roar from a pack of demonstrators but even these have become less frequent.  Fewer airlines pass above... fewer traffic helicopters.  My windows are always open; I live without air conditioning and maybe hallucinate from the heat. When I was small I believed in a country (my country) called Tizovthee-- sweet land of liberty.  I squinted horizon-clouds into purple-hazed mountains and transported myself there, land of the pilgrim's pride.  Of 'Thee' I sang-- its nickname...  halfway between heaven and Oz.   The mountains paint themselves nostalgically into the sky behind the towers of the El Dorado.  They stay with me as I type into the morning hours, as I waste time and dawdle with books and memories, go from guitar to text.

But there is another component of these nights-- it is a sort of cloud that hovers-- blankets and beckons like a scent... a few of my friends have been captivated and succumbed... I read their names
in the obituaries, on Facebook pages and Twitter posts.  It is there as the sun sets in its fiery death throes of pinks and golds, as the morning sky threatens to replace the black with its electric blue magic... deceives, taunts me into a new day-- or to the edge of sleep.  It sings to me--  of the bloodless cool of breathlessness, of the enchanting nightmare of fever, of a slipping away--a letting go-- of the girl who is lost in a lake tonight or adrift in an untraceable boat-- in a plane with a cut engine, a receding surf and a wind.  For some of us there is another kind of freedom that beckons-- that makes us safe, but offers solace when there is none.  I am learning to forgive those who cannot resist... I understand... there are bells... and as I misheard the song when I was young, without lyric sheets, perhaps the sound of freedom laughing.

Counting

I used to love the number 29.  It splices my birthday integers-- a prime number...  indivisible-- a lovely sort of odd symmetry.  I'd been dreading this day, the 3-month anniversary of Alan's death, as though it would establish some boundary-- a negotiable distance.  It would also have been my father's 101st birthday, as though we are still counting, 4 years after his death.

Since the quarantine I've begun this habit of running in the park. I head north to circle the Harlem Meer, follow the Great Hill back down to the reservoir where the El Dorado towers at sunset provide a daily anodyne.  It's become a habit-- not a chore... I miss it when I skip.   I've begun to recognize small natural landmarks-- rocks, graffiti tags on lamposts-- other runners who do not acknowledge me  but seem solemn and immersed in their ritual.  I remind myself-- most of these people have music-- phones, ear-pieces; very few run in silence as I do-- logging sirens, the progress of walking babies, the rising temperatures and lengthening days... Still, even without masks, laughter is rare.  There is solace among the Meer fisherman, the bench-sitters and bicyclists-- but little joy here.

For some odd reason-- maybe my son's obsession with 10,000 daily steps-- I count.  It's become part of the meditation, I suppose-- a distraction-- a kind of poem or verse in my head-- the numbers I can do while thinking of other things-- keeping the log of hundreds with my fingers, starting again at each 1000... Our hands are so perfectly designed to do these things-- an abacus at our fingertips.  Everything makes sense.

Although I vary my route in ways, I generally know precisely where I'l be at 2000 or 3000.   I used to meet my egret at 1000, although she has flown the proverbial coop or changed her schedule.  I miss her.  For a time she discovered a tiny rock island in the reservoir, but she's ghosted me since May.  Her absence reminds me that my world has grown smaller since the pandemic began.  This is a foreshadowing of age; one's global circumference shrinks.  Old poets begin to abandon tormenting passion and desire for ruminations on nature-- things in their garden... insect visitors and leaf-shedding.

When my son was small, we counted.  Waiting for trains, for elevators-- on lines, looking out windows and in the park.  We counted dogs on the sidewalk, our steps, cars, steam shovels... the floors of tall buildings... boats along the East River.  He was so good at counting his nursery school called me in to observe the way he added dominos with skill and speed.  He is still good at numbers-- sports statistics and odds, distance and money.  He has a fit-bit and apps on his phone which do most of the calculating; I'm sure when he runs he listens to Hip-hop music with his bluetooth.  On Father's Day, our special holiday, I visited his new apartment where I found he has no measuring device or even a ruler... I suppose one's laptop has a fixed dimension and he could flip this over... but the difference in our personal cultures seemed poignant.  Me, with the multiple tape measures and cloth ribbons-- yardsticks with long-gone hardware-store logos and school rulers-- steel quilting edges for sewing.

Tonight after my run I walked a bit; I counted homeless men on the sidewalk, glad the rain had stopped and the air had cooled into a reasonable night for sleeping.  There was a man lying on his side reading in the shaft of LED light which bleeds out at the bottom of the new Bank of America building which has replaced God knows how many retail landmarks on the corner of 86th and Lexington.  I did not disturb him to ascertain the book title; if I carried a phone, it would have made a perfect photo of American economic irony-- and perhaps the only example of urban institutional charity available after 9 PM.

I've always preferred odds to evens; it could have something to do with the 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not' sequencing... sometimes I'll stand and wait until the odd comes along, so I can go home with a sense of luck, of hopefulness.  Writing here on my computer, I rarely note that it keeps a running total for me; I generally spill out more than necessary and choose not to look.

There's a man who often rests on the library stoop; occasionally people leave books here, though the building has been shut for months.  There is an installation of three steel chairs bolted into the sidewalk where he also sits; the armrests prevent sleeping or napping (city planners are so cruel).  Anyway, he often leafs through the books... we've talked about this.  He cannot read, he told me.  He never learned.  Last night he seemed absorbed in a page, running his finger along lines.  I looked at him with curiosity.  Oh, Baby, he said-- I can't read but I'm counting the words.  I can count real good, and he grinned with a kind of pride.

One of the homeless people I counted tonight was chanting; it sounded like Nike, Echelon, Grace.  Nike, Echelon, Grace... like a kind of verbal tonic.  Lately when I lie down, missing Alan as I do in early mornings, I say the Lord's Prayer-- I count the parts, the way I count steps when I run-- like a deconstructed poem, it comforts me-- distracts me.

The last homeless man I logged-- the 'odd'--  was asleep on his back,  hands folded neatly, one finger pointing up at the sky.  It was not accusatory-- more like a gesture-- something deliberate-- as though he'd fallen asleep mid-sentence.... Oh, Lord, let me count the ways...   It occurred to me as I reached my door that I can count on one finger the people I can count on; maybe that's what he meant.

Juneteenth Fireworks

North of here tonight someone is setting off fireworks... from the rock ledge beside the Great Hill in Central Park I could hear the dull sound of small explosions like distant gunshot, with a dampened echo at sunset.  In between was that sax player... so hard to place him geographically-- on a hillside, a rooftop, in a courtyard... I can hear his progress since the beginning of the pandemic.  He is beginning to play.

New York City is becoming accustomed once again to demonstrations-- to noise in general.  The spring was deadly quiet, as though everyone held their breath between sirens.  Now there is anger, and buoyant energy-- the physical passions of the young are manifesting in the activity they repressed so long.  Boxers are working out in the park-- packs of bike and scooter-riders pass like hurricane-winds with enough velocity to blow someone's hat off.

On the streets there is chanting-- pockets of organized marchers in every neighborhood: they walk, they shout-- they sing... they let off energy and coordinate long-brewing discontent in focused choruses.  Something is happening here... the police have taken a step back and decide to pick their battles.  Illegal fireworks, until someone gets burned, is not one of them.  For people like me, with wide open windows and undated imagination, these are the sounds of a quiet war.

I watched the film Selma tonight on television; the scope of my life-- a kind of cyclical deja-vu-- became clear as I watched not the Hollywood version, but the actual vintage footage at the end.  I was young in those days, but old enough to march and protest and learn.  Growing up in New York City, we had plenty of exposure to racial (in)equality and viewed the South as a kind of anachronistic anomaly until our teachers and newsreels made these things clear.  I went to High School with the children of Whitney Young, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee... I served as class Vice President with two black fellow officers and an Asian woman as Treasurer.   I was proud.  This was the 1960's, when segregation and persecution was still the norm in some states.

It occurred to me today that I was racially 'privileged'.  As a teenager I studied Afro-American dance with a man named Rod Rodgers who I now realize treated me with incredible sensitivity and understanding; my choir director was a black man named Norman Brooks who was extraordinarily cultured and knowledgeable, who imparted to me an appreciation and a foundation of music which crossed all boundaries- all ethnicities, all colors and all centuries.  My art teacher Mr. Blackburn showed me how to look at multi-dimensions; this did not come naturally to me.  My mentors in the three passions of my life were not white, and not one of them seemed to resent or punish me for my color.

Today a poet-friend who is a black man from Brooklyn called to make sure I am okay.  He read to me one of his extraordinary poems which could have been preached from a Harlem pulpit.  It resonated; it is easy to make cliches of these things that happen-- the soundbites from the George Floyd murder and all the recent indignities which can become watered down as symbols or catchwords.  But the violence-- the damage-- the terror and the brutality-- these do not abate.

In an election year, we must be careful of the way our politicians 'spin' these things.  Watching Selma I was reminded of the image created by the Presidency at that time-- a southern man with some sophistication and respect, but nowhere near the proper mindset of a perpetrator of true equality.  He cut a deal, as politicians do.  The facts and dates of our history books do not always reflect the truth.  Today we have something of a perfect storm for our leaders-- not for a 'win' or rehashed policy, but an opportunity for progress-- for change, for a step forward.

Coming east along the Pinetum path last night was a group of young black men and women preparing for Juneteenth-- chalking names along the pathways.  Each was responsible for a list of some 40 or 50 names--- there were hundreds-- black men who died in violent crimes, killed unjustly by policemen, prison guards-- those deemed to protect us.  The litany, as I walked and read aloud, was a poem itself-- more killing and penetrating than any of Martin Luther King's memorable speeches from Selma which were long familiar to me.

Across the city in nearly every park and Plaza the asphalt and tile is marked everywhere by colorful messages and memorials and reminders.  Some are well-crafted and masterly; but for the most part, they seem childlike and basic.  Unlike graffiti, they are fragile and will disappear after the first heavy rainfall which will mercifully hold off for another day or two.  On Father's Day, we will remember those who were no longer able to be fathers.

The soft rumble of fireworks continues in these early morning hours-- the temporal 'nest' in which I find myself perched most nights, waiting to hatch-- nurturing old memories, birthing songs and ideas-- and trying to process the devastation of the last few months--- the deaths, the unprecedented paralysis of modern life-- the fear, the lost trust between one another.  Perhaps a kind of war is coming-- an upheaval and a painful sloughing off of all the hatred and misunderstanding.  The masks remind us we cannot tell much from a facade-- they separate us, as they make us look uniformed... We must look deeper; in the end we all bleed, we all march, we have the hidden capacity to heal one another, if only we knew how.

The Color of Blood

Over and over I hear myself repeat-- to no one in particular-- Forgive me, I have fallen in love with solitude.  As though I am unfaithful, ungrateful... and not unaware of the kindnesses that have graced me recently, the way a thin blanket of spring snow unexpectedly coats the world with a soft muting of color and sound...

My calendar is white; my schedule is the timetable of grief.  Relief comes occasionally with digressions into other universes... imagination, listening to music, writing.. those meaningful phonecalls from my 'family' of friends who reach out and exchange sad moments the way we musicians trade eights.

My son, as always, is so positive. This is his 'role' in the passion play of life.  He looks ahead-- fully subscribes to the promise of future and tolerates the present with a cheerful stoicism.  Mom, he says,
when I speak of my suffering friends-- these people are not your problem-- don't enlist.  I am grateful that his DNA somehow balances mine-- he is the counterpoint to my dark melody.  I am the strings-- I dream in 'cello' I remarked in a note to someone last night, who surely knows what I mean.

What I do not say to my son, who may have had his young heart broken or threatened at a sensitive time when his little soul decided pragmatism was far preferable to melancholy, is  Oh, but they are my problem.  Early this morning-- the 'end' of another of my unregimented days, I watched the painful testimony of George Floyd's brother on national news, against new footage of fires burning in Minneapolis.  For those who grew up in the 1960's, these scenes are all too familiar... the urban manifestation of anger and horror at atrocities inflicted for centuries now, in the name of racism.

It baffles me that even within a single family unit some people grow up with prejudices, hatreds, resentments-- downright meanness.  I spent years trying to unravel harsh criminal riddles... it seemed there had to be a reason for cruelty and violence-- a reaction-- like a scientific principle of physics... but this only applies to a small fraction.  This morning I found myself weeping with the CNN journalist at the frustration and sorrow of a man whose brother had virtually been executed on national television-- all justice denied, humanity at its very lowest and worst claiming a life for absolutely no reason-- the misled cruel child holding a kitten underwater, torturing animals for entertainment.

It is not only one of the most disturbing pieces of video we've seen in a long time, but deeply provocative and infuriating.  I was ashamed of what it seems to mean to be a white American, and tormented with guilt for our helplessness here.  As though we have had not had enough death and suffering, had our lives frozen in the face of a tiny biological enemy who can take the breath away from grown men; here we watched a uniformed man purporting to represent authority and law violate and render powerless a strong un-uniformed individual-- the audacity, the lack of respect and humanity-- the sick twisted miscarriage of authority and justice.  There is no greater crime than to deprive a human being of life.  What have we become?  What have we been?

I'm not sure if anger tempers sorrow somehow; at least it has a correlative action.  I know that justice is a balm but cannot compensate for life lost.  Hate crimes, for most of us, are unthinkable... what makes people behave in this way?  Our earliest literature and art caricatures and personifies human vices and sins, as though these are a 'given'.  Most of us are less familiar with the virtues.  The current America is not just sick with a global pandemic, but the pre-existing condition of epidemic greed and
economic disparity.  By far the majority of virus deaths occurred in the zip codes of the poorest communities.  My friend and musical partner who died was eulogized and celebrated internationally; not so most of the quiet victims.  The NY Times listed them, but we all saw how tiny the figure-- how brief the description.

Today I am sad for my America which when I grew up I personified as a handsome boy-- on the edge of possibility. Now I see my country as a ruined, stooped man with a cane, bleeding dollars from stuffed pockets, blind and deaf to misery and inequality, myopic and small-minded, drinking from the fountain of greed, drunk with selfish misconception.  From my heart George Floyd, I  am so sorry.  To every black man I pass in the park at dusk who waves to me, as if to reassure me-- I am 'safe'-- I apologize.  To the cashier in Harlem who no longer packs groceries with gloves because, he tells me-- they protect me but not you-- I could kiss him.

And to my first husband-- for his utter colorblindness and courage to play with white musicians when few black players were doing so... I learned so much about the world from you who had scarcely read a book when we met, but could speak bass like no one else from stage.  What a rich life you gave me in those few years-- opening my ears to things I'd not understood,  crossing boundaries and defying conventions... it is to you and the greater understanding and love of music I owe part of this debt of solitude... may you be happy and safe and steadfast in your refusal to be tainted by the ignorance of unfortunate haters and traitors.  We bleed the same color, you used to assure me... you who even then was surely more evolved and compassionate than most of us will ever be...
Amen.

Waiting (2020 version)

One of my ex-boyfriends had a song I heard him perform only once; the chorus went Wai-hay-hay-hay...way-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay- tinngggg...  It went on.. not easy to sing on key unless you're sort of a yodeler...  but somehow some version of it has been repeating in my head.   Here we are, nearly in unison, across the world-- taking one of those 'breaths' a brilliant conductor can orchestrate and control by simply holding up his baton... while the brass, the strings, the woodwinds-- they all freeze in mid-breath or mid-stroke... waiting.

We spend a good part of our lives waiting; less so in the 5g internet age where responses are immediate-- goods are located and purchased, conversations anywhere in real-time, deals made, interruptions even possible.  When I was small I waited evenings for my father to turn the corner in his business suit-- he shared a cab and walked the last block or so.  Daddy! we'd yell, joyfully... greeting him just before he'd retire to the den with the scotch-on-the-rocks he'd waited for all day.

And now, the good witch in the story says, 'we must wait'... while the batter magically becomes cake, the oats and water turn into porridge, the pasta softens and curls, coffee brews.  Trees grow and fruit ripens, nested eggs hatch with life, babies are pulled from laboring mothers and childhood begins.  We keep ourselves occupied with schooling and tasks-- with jobs and careers and games and entertainment... while nature cycles on and provides us with most of what we expect.

So what now, as the whole world is paused-- not quite in unison-- for what have we waited?  For a new order?  For a universal decree of mourning?  A mass funeral for those families who have waited many weeks without comfort?  A diminished life for those who have been sickened and not quite recovered? Those who have been wounded and disabled?  A vaccine or cure for something that scarcely existed just six months ago?  A medal of honor for those who perished, who gave their lives unknowingly for some kind of cruel science?  Rewards for the medics and attendants who cared tirelessly and often hopelessly for people who were strangers and became intimates? For society to resume its habits and ways, or to resume with slightly altered protocol?  Will people be kind to one another? Has the waiting tested their patience to the limit?

For me, aside from its homophonic twin, waiting had a certain romance to it.  The 'hardest part', Tom Petty insisted, but I disagree.  The diagnosis is worse-- the verdict, the failure to acquit, the end.  We are all here waiting for death, some have said.... life itself is the waiting.

Ironically, people have learned to stand on line with more patience.  Of course, most have phones and social 'pacifiers' with which to entertain themselves.  I bring a book; I read, look around-- enjoy the air.  Things take much time these days; I waited tonight on a long supermarket line to find the price of chicken had doubled once again.  On my way out, I remarked about it to a woman with greying dreadlocks...  But I'll buy you chicken, baby, she said... in this voice that brought on a flood of tears.  No, no, I reassured her-- I'm fine-- just cranky.  We all need a hug, baby, she said... but we gotta wait for that shit! .... and we laughed.

Like those Biblical patriarchs and Greek heroes-- we wait for love, we wait for death, we wait for God to listen and look and reply.  Most of the time, we are clueless and helpless.  Especially now-- we wait for our mayors and governors to advise us, to coordinate a plan-- to be safe.

The tent hospital in Central Park has been dismantled-- just like that, it vanished almost overnight.  Families of those who did not survive here will have no place to pass and remember their loved one.  It is a grass field, once again.  Will children play here and forget the small successes and tragedies that marked this lawn in the month of April?  

I have learned from experience that grief subsides with the passing of four seasons.  My friend whose husband passed away does not believe this.  You need to get by one birthday, one Christmas, one anniversary, one snowfall, one fireworks display, one turkey dinner... etc.  It is unimaginable but it comes-- the day when you forget for an hour or two, you sleep without a dream, you laugh deeply and uncontrollably.

Walking around the Harlem Meer at dusk tonight, I witness people with masks zig-zagging paths to avoid others.  A few men are maskless by a bench, laughing and smoking, sharing food, touching.  Will we ever trust one another enough to stand shoulder-by-shoulder in crowds?  I passed one of my son's former mentors last night and we spontaneously and courageously clasped hands.  It was so human and healing and strange.  A woman shook her head as though we'd violated some civic law.

I am willing to wait for the next version of future... but not with phone in hand, biding my time.  I am hoping to fill this with some kind of energy-- some kind of work, some kind of prayer... so when the baton lowers,  I will pledge myself forward into the next measure, knowing it is likely to be the 'hardest part'.