Monday, May 24, 2021

Jane of Kings

Scrolling through random TV, channel after channel is routinely showing some film or series of extreme violence... pain, human aggression-- terror... blood, injury... death.  Either some scenario or elaborate criminal plot which involves weapons and retaliation...  or war;  science fiction monstrosities with hostility and vicious hatreds. Then there are the natural disaster movies with catastrophic occurrences-- widespread destruction and damage, global tragedies... 

And then there is this unprecedented newsworthy human year: watching images of the Ganges River swollen with corpses, the 23rd psalm came to mind--- the valley of the shadow of death.  Yea though I walk there, the psalm dictates, I shall fear no evil.  

My friend Jane passed away just ten days ago... her 'moment of decease', that is, because for weeks she had been something less than living.  She'd forbidden me, knowing my inclinations to confess and reveal, from mentioning her name in my poetry or blogs.  This was difficult.  Since I was small, I have loved the name Jane as though it were a sheet of prismic glass through which to view the world.  Queen Jane, Bob Dylan wrote... and she was.  Ravaged by a cruel diagnosis, she met her fate with courage and relentless bravery, like a good Catholic.  

Nothing to declare, the hospice priest categorized her, although she tried to muster a few lightweight sins and omissions just for the process... she was true and honest, empathic and observant, smart and acerbic.  Even my son liked her... and he doesn't comment on many people.  At my behest he willingly took her home-baked care packages and always came away with some worthwhile wisdom or TV recommendation.  

The worst part about a long farewell is that the ending overshadows the rest-- at least temporarily.  While we all drudge up past memories and tendernesses, the horror of illness hangs in the air like a low ceiling.  My father died at nearly 97; my mother survived another 16 months without him.  I remember too well the  'old man' claustrophobic smell of the room where they both sat year in and out in their nineties... although they were clean and neatly dressed. When I visited my mother during her last months the air was lighter without him... but I began to realize that she was sitting there not in her own scent but the lingering scent of her husband, like a cloud or a shroud.  She'd befriended death; she was trying to find the doorway. 

While Jane and I had some fun afternoons after her diagnosis, the treatments were erosive and the day ends early for the terminally ill. It is all they can do to go through motions of living while they are being observed.  Being Jane, she fussed and worried over me-- was I eating, did I want a coat-- boots... hats?  These things became important; she lectured me on the merits of make-up and hair arranging since we no longer had our former beauty to conceal our flaws.  She dragged me to shops and stocked up on the junk food she loved despite my protests that she choose healthy options.  We even went to a senior center one day with me shaking my head... she insisted we'd each get a free pair of glasses and she chose some wild blingy glam frames.  The finished pair never materialized.  Later she playfully threatened the staff:  I'll be dead before those glasses appear... and she was.  But it was funny.  She repeated it during her last weeks.  

She was funny.  She was vain and always wore her make-up though she cared more for her birds than herself.  Her things-- her personal treasures-- were copious and carefully selected.  She surrounded herself with a kind of beauty.  But she had no partner... prohibitively selective she'd been... one of a breed of city eccentrics who live this way-- in a sort of community, in a sort of cocoon... knowing neighbors, generations of friends and neighborhood characters... and pets of all kinds, none of whom, save the pair of birds, outlived her.  

She was kind.  She understood things... we talked and laughed on the phone... we'd neglected one another for years until her illness gave us this opportunity for sisterhood.  We shared things-- youtube and films and books... she read my work and gave praise when it was due. She pushed me like a mother. I tried to be uplifting about her diagnosis; there are miracles, I insisted... no one can predict your outcome.  I began to carry her name with me-- like a song-- a prayer-- a constant mantra, as I do... all day... when I walk, when I run, when I clean house or lie awake at night.  Please God or Jesus or Mary... make her well... Jane... I coopted her name like a lyric.  

At the very end I distanced myself a little.  I didn't sit by her bed waiting for the finale.  I sat a couple of times, but I had to separate myself from this Jane-- from the dying Jane.  Then maybe, I thought, she will live.  I sat in churches-- the hospice chapel, St. Patrick's, St. Vincent's...  I talked to birds, to statues of the Virgin... to my ceiling at night... my various crucifixes.  I tried some Hail Mary's.  

And while we try to remember her now.. it's blurry.  I'm not sure to whom I speak, when I conjure her image... I try to erase the scent of death-in-hospice, the stale bedsheet smell, the disinfectant and the coldness of the nurses and aides.  I don't know what death is supposed to be-- the preferred version is that one 'dies peacefully' but I am not certain Jane did not rage a little in poetic fashion.  It is a relief when suffering ends.  I miss her more these days as I miss Alan and many others and walk truly in the shadow of death this year which has altered forever my own heart, my own trajectory.  What I realized today-- like my mother who sat in the room of my father... I walk with her... it became a habit... and while I will add another name to the litany of my private prayer-chain, and I have formally grieved and repented... lit candles, wept, recited... I am left alone with the Prayer of Jane.  

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Thursday, May 13, 2021

Forever 2021

On the way uptown today some vintage music was wafting out of a restaurant storefront, serenading the couples gathering at sidewalk tables... 'This magic moment...' I heard, and thought,.. who is listening to this now in late-pandemic 2021?  It just seemed so incongruous with the masked people looking at their phones, texting their cocktail orders... 'so different and so new... will last forever....' the song said.  

I wondered if any of these couples was having any sort of 'magic moment'-- not sure with online dating and hook-ups whether they have these 'pregnant' moments... whether they even heard the Drifters singing 'till the end of time'.  It didn't seem so.  Me-- I remembered hearing this one on the car radio on the way to primary school-- the way old rock and roll seemed like a world I could not quite penetrate.  

Years later I hung out with Doc Pomus the composer at the old Lone Star... a girthy man in a wheelchair,  he always seems in memory to be wearing the printed shirt he has on in that famous shot with Bob Dylan.  He laughed a good deal... just didn't look the part of the lonely romantic songwriter.  Obviously he did not last forever; he passed away at 65... I will remember him most for the line...'my room it has two windows and still no light shines through' or some variation of it... the heart of a bluesman who knew failure as his most constant lover.

Around the time the Drifters were on the charts, a neighbor-boy gifted me a pile of comic books-- Archie, Superman... it was kind of a romantic thing for a 2nd grader... and while the strips bored me, I was utterly fascinated by the advertisements on the back cover. Realizing some of the items might have caused a parental fit, I ordered a safe pack of 1000 postage stamps for a single dollar.  

They arrived in a plastic-windowed envelope-- fell out everywhere like tiny treasures.  I was elated.  Faces, portraits... maps, creatures... landscapes.  They were from countries I'd never heard of-- in strange languages... each one a little world.  I became something of a collector-- typically seeking out the most picturesque.. or the ones from museums and libraries... famous authors, paintings... not for value but for looking.  One of our neighbors moved to Egypt and sent letters with amazing stamps; sometimes she visited African countries and slipped in extras.  I began to find pen pals... in Mexico, France, Italy... just to greet the stamp when the post arrived; letters were secondary.

My father gave me a stitch-counter-- a kind of magnifier with a light and this opened up the little world even further; the engraving was so fine and delicate-- the coloring-- the paper they were printed on. Of course there were the new editions-- I'd go to the Post Office with my mother and pick out our Christmas and Easter stamps-- it was my job to lick and stick them on holiday cards along with a festive seal. But US stamps never had the appeal of the ones from overseas that were suffused with a kind of exotic presence.  And they'd come so far... on ships, on airplanes... from leather sacks carried by men and women who spoke strange languages.  

Once a week I'd take my little wagon to the local library-- load and unload my weekly 'read' which was impressive in those days when any escape from domestic claustrophobia was welcome.  I discovered I was eligible to borrow the enormous Scott Catalogues-- well-fingered huge volumes covered in plastic with thousands of ultra-thin pages of identifying images.  I lay on the floor and pored through these, looking for stories and details.  I fell asleep with them.  

My son inherited many boxes and books of stamps-- some in glassine envelopes, alphabetized by country-name, some of which no longer exist... we briefly had a 'moment' when he was maybe 12... until sports and girls replaced hobbies.  Some nights I take one out, and mentally roam the world a bit-- the Doc Pomus world of the Drifters... when these tiny squares and rectangles gave me global headroom... or when Doc and his peers sweated out inky lyrics on rumpled paper in smoky rooms on the Upper West Side.

It's sadly rare these days that I send actual letters; the quick appeal of my laptop is just too compelling, my handwriting is creaky and unreliable.  I visit the post office occasionally to send out books... and while there are all kinds of stamps-- with rockstars, astronauts, poets-- they are pre-glued and digitally printed; there is no magic here, no nostalgia or vintage connection.  These are coded money-units-- not for saving in scrapbooks but for currency.  Most of the first class stamps, to accommodate the quick obsolescence of postage, are now ironically marked 'forever'... not the Doc Pomus/Drifters forever-till-the-end-of-time forever but the cheap internet/ guaranteed money-back kind. 

It's also rare in 2021 that I find anything in the mailbox with a true stamp-- occasionally from France or Sweden.  In March I sent an old photograph to one of my childhood friends.  I pasted on a forever stamp I'd had since December (Christmas forever) and included a poem.  It never arrived.  So much for forever... lost in dead letter purgatory?  Who knows?  But tonight I wanted Doc Pomus to know I honor him every damn time I post a letter.

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