Turning the page

Aside from the various Christmas gifs and Charlie Brown vignettes and musical e-cards, I can divide this season's personal email wishes fairly neatly into two categories.  The first: a terse but cheery message heavy with jpeg attachments-- large families in warm living rooms- -dogs, kids... the chaos of wrapping paper and ribbon littering the floor around the decorated tree-- Grandmas around hearths, grandbabies crawling, children of children, festive sweaters and laughter.  Or seated around large tables laden with dishes and bottles... everyone toasting the camera with laughter and joy... view after view as though we are looking through some social keyhole onto the version of normal American holiday cheer we have come to recognize as a kind of status quo.  Many of these.  Here am I-- scrolling through-- reminded of Christmases past when my biggest challenge was the piled up dishes and flatware-- the confectioners sugar fingerprints on sofas-- the broken wine glasses, trips to the recycling with empties... no camera.  

And the other half... text-heavy messages without photos or emojis or gifs... long sad paragraphs that conjure the old 'America's Neediest Cases' feature in newspapers.  I grew up relishing these-- sometimes weeping and learning to disburse my petty childhood disappointments against the magnitude of real human tragedy.  Please, I would beg my perfectly manicured mother, can't we bring them some presents?  She had little sympathy for much of anything outside our family circle.   'Volunteering' was the mysterious thing women did without their husbands... but essentially it was as though charity and pity were not part of being a 1950's housewife.  

The 2021 version of Neediest Cases, personally delivered in my Facebook and email inbox, was sobering-- the predominant theme being isolation.  My generation was generally comfortable with alternative living arrangements--- serial monogamy, uncoupling and individualism.  In times of sickness, tragedy-- what felt like independence can dissolve into acute loneliness... depression, anxiety... lassitude and hopelessness.  Those of us accustomed to freedom were compelled to give up our wandering, eccentric socializing and submit to enforced alone-ness.  For some it was transforming and meditative.  For others it was unbearable.  Not to mention the claustrophobia of quarantine fomenting break-ups and bad drama-- relapsing bad behaviors and paranoias.  But these are my friends... like my mother I found myself a little overwhelmed and, while sympathetic, unable to do much besides listen.

And then there are the deaths and losses-- some timely and expected, some shocking and devastating.  The crying and 'care' emojis have surpassed all others. Our shaky foundations and podiums are damaged.  Layer upon layer of hardship came last week via email-- some coping with enormous courage and strength, some confessing their weakness with another kind of unacknowledged bravery. When the tears subsided and my vision cleared, I saw as well the emigrés of my beloved city-- the ones who gave up-- abandoned ship-- for safer shores that failed to quell their terrible homesickness. A few in particular had seemed part of the very fabric here-- the foundation.  Indigenous musicians who had once beckoned like gods to the likes of me, who put down roots and discovered the secret landmarks of an artistic world that once was New York City.   

Yes, the past 19 months have been hard.  We received tiny grants and gig-assistance and rent rollbacks-- food stamps and free covid care... but it was not enough to break up the monotony of waiting that became our daily lives.  Of course, as I've explained many times-- this has been a process.  The attrition of artistic institutions in the city-- the small, human ones-- is an old story.  But the overwhelming current disparity between the small artists and the corporate behemoths-- well, it has been crushing.  And the larger they grow, the harder it is for them to see the small treasures that used to form the bohemian personality of our city.  No one seems to realize that so many of the grant-worthy creators are not visible.  It used to be woven into the very definition of an artist that they were incapable of self-promotion.  

Taylor Swift has posted huge sales... Bruce Springsteen sold his catalogue for a fortune.  Meanwhile the tiny, fragile talents have slipped into cracks-- even suicides... maybe given up and taken a job delivering Amazon packages, stomping out the sparks and feathers of imagination.  I remember so well the joy of my first apartment-- classes, jobs, art galleries... sneaking into clubs and movie theaters... talking and smoking into early morning hours with others... drinking ketchup soup, crashing at places that smelled of paint, while guitars and amps were dragged up long flights of tenement stairs.  To have been thwarted with a nightmarish year-long hiatus would have been more than devastating-- Broadway and the LES the new boulevards of broken dreams.  It's surely the more fragile genius that is crushed first... and I grieve the missed opportunities and invention that have been few and far between enough before all of this.  

You are old, said the youth to Father William, or me...  and maybe young musicians no longer crave artistic Nirvana but instagram fame. Maybe I am wasting my sympathy on what I consider the tragedy of our city, while dire social, civic and racial issues rage on, beneath the pall of this pandemic.  At least I have some sympathy-- and useless as it seems, I will forge onward into yet another 365-part quandary, god willing.  For those fortunate enough to have celebrated, I wish you well.  To the senders of the sad emails, holidays are almost over... you've weathered another masked and trying season with some naked grace. And despite falling on deaf ears, or none at all, I vow I will not be silent as I walk into evening.