SMOKE

Yesterday would have been my father's 104th birthday.  He lived to nearly 97... fairly in compos mentis, surrounded by newspapers, brokerage statements, the bluish glow of Bloomberg on the television screen like a night-light... slipping in and out of consciousness toward the end, my mother in her medicated dementia watching from her recliner like a Whistler's Mother real-time tableau-- alternately panicky when he left the room, or wondering who this person on her sofa actually was-- her brother, maybe... certainly not her father who'd abandoned his family when she was very young.

My father was estranged from most of his own large family, seemed to have judged his parents as harshly as I maybe judged him.  He was never happy to see me; he couldn't pretend, and children see these things, with their heart.  My mother lit up when I came home from anywhere; even when she ignored me in my grungy jeans and motorcycle boots on Manhattan streets in the 1980's, it was a kind of wounded pride-- bourgeois disappointment.

But the month of June has always been about him-- his birthday, Father's Day since he was the true and only family patriarch... D-Day, on which he earned a slew of medals and honors.  I stopped attending family festivities at a point; I began to process his disapproval of me as unhealthy and if my absence hurt his pride in any way he would only have cursed me further.  

Having raised my son alone, we celebrated Father's and Mother's Day. Now so many of his friends have become parents, the meaning has been sort of re-branded.  This year I watched the scores of Mexican families barbecuing in the northern fields of Central Park-- joyfully kicking soccer balls around, celebrating a day off.  Most of these fathers work hard-- sometimes two jobs... the number of kitchen workers who shared the late-night uptown subway with me after gigs was impressive.  Many slept-- exhausted, grateful for the air-conditioning as I was. 

My father never seemed happy. He enjoyed certain men who visited; my parents socialized accordingly-- his tennis partners, commuting companions. Company seemed to provide relief that he didn't have to interact with his family.  He failed to appreciate the gifts we gave; even things I made for him, or a little musical we'd put on... he seemed distracted and preoccupied.  As a child, we take these things on-- we blame ourselves... we learn to judge ourselves harshly.  

I've written so many poems grappling with this... trying to excise the knot of it.  He was complicated, and I surely did not fathom his issues, his dark moods, his isolations, post-alcoholic depressions. Maddens, he once told my son, don't talk.  But I, too, am a Madden... and I do, and I will.

My best childhood friend never let go of her father issues.  To me, hers seemed comfortably flawed-- drank a little too much, crossed some lines... but he had pet-names for his sons and daughters... he was handsome and funny.  His indiscretions seemed human to me... his wife was so 'perfect'... I saw him once or twice in the city with other women... but I kept it to myself.  I saw my own father once with a beautiful young woman.  I did not tell anyone.  My sister and I invented little fictions about my mother-- that she had mysterious callers... I even brought anonymous flowers once... but she only blushed, and he barely looked up from the evening news.

We get over these things... or do we?  I learned in my life that betrayals were inevitable.  A parent failing their child is the first and worst of these.  My own son has not heard from his father for nearly 28 years?  Surely this has repercussions... and perhaps I engineered this in that perverse way psychologists point fingers at us for repeating generational pains and mistakes.  Perhaps I picked my husband because I knew somewhere there would be this 'leaving'.  It was like a prophecy-- a fulfillment.  I see so many couples where one or the other has checked out... they are there, but they are missing. Some have shifted their heart elsewhere... some have simply died, in a way... like an old plant that no longer blossoms.  

Are these punishments?  Deep-rooted desires for self-sabotage?  The meaning of family is so open to interpretation.  Gender has been opened to 'not-binary'.  But despite the extended boundaries of family-- so many of us seem stuck in this traditional and sometimes painful categorization.  There is a Father's Day and a Mother's Day.  Full stop. While I fretted over gifts and hand-made cards and cakes... I actually dreaded those Sunday mornings.  The cookout or dinner or whatever... it was stilted and non-spontaneous. There was no joy, except in the company who eventually went home and left us to our ostensibly perfect family.

Recently I randomly went on my mother's 'Legacy' web-obituary.  Mine were the only posts for some years... but suddenly there was a message from a girl who'd lived next door to us... she was older than I was.. she must be 80 now.  She recalled my mother as a sympathetic, wonderful person... her version was the young mother with perhaps a harsh tough handsome husband.  I remember this woman-- her father, too, was distant and off-putting.  She lives in Boston now... and apparently was having one of those moments-- where the past surfaces and some small component-- like seaglass on the beach-- shines through.  

We women weather life in a different way than our fathers did, all gender stereotypes aside.  Our mothers accepted things; we do divorces and separations and we move on.  Some days I look back and cherish my past love affairs as iconic and true... then sometimes I remember those brilliant guitarists and drummers and sax players... and I think... well, maybe they just wanted a gig.  

On the cusp of another July, entering a holiday weekend with mixed feelings-- Independence Day, fireworks day... I am accustomed to a little isolation-- more-so tonight with our air quality issues warning us to limit outdoor activities. I'm glad in a way to leave the month of June behind, with its paternal connotations-- baggage, people call it.  

Our Father Who Art in Heaven, I begin my prayers every night.  Not my biological father, but my Holy Father who is vague and perhaps judgmental as well. As much as it amuses me that I do this, I do it... like a kind of vow... but it comforts, it reassures, it lifts me... has been with me since I can remember-- mine... available, the words... the sentiment, a kind of vague protection? Or forgiveness.  Really the secret of life-- whether it's family or ourselves... we must let it go, but also acknowledge that (like the wildfire smoke, which is not even our doing) these things linger.  

A WORLD APART

I was recently notified that due to offensive language in one of these 406 blogposts, I was going to be suspended from this platform. Fortunately the 'offending' words (a quotation) were identified, adjusted, and I was reinstated.  There's a fine line between honesty and insult, I often caution my friends, and I have crossed it both ways like a Double-Dutch rope-jumper.  I still err broadly on the side of truth, though it has cost me friendships (temporarily, for the most part) and nearly the online archive of 406 essays posted here with nominal censorship over the past 16 years. 

My daily reading this month includes Gustaw Herling's acclaimed account of his experience in a Russian prison camp in a time and place where a slipped word or gesture resulted in years of forced labor which made death seem a kind of paradise. Nothing like prison literature or diaries to make one rejoice in the small liberties and joys of summer's cusp. But sarcasm aside, there are millions of people living under non-humane conditions-- without freedom of speech or thought, without adequate nutrition, without safety.  

While most of us fret about our summer wardrobe, our hair products and cold-brews, right here on our streets the underserved are unavoidable.  Some are here by choice, but most by circumstance. The charitable among us bring food, blankets... but most of these gestures have the effect of watering a diseased plant... we do little good.  Last week's air pollution episode reminded us how small this world is-- how close we are to other's suffering and tragedy.  For a day, the charred scent that permeated through even closed windows brought another dimension to the accidents and deaths that punctuate the media. The whole city was declared 'unsafe'.  

When I bought my apartment years ago, I'd been robbed, mugged, stalked; as a young mother, I wanted to feel safe.  I wanted to come home at night and know everything was as I'd left it.  We changed locks, installed bars on accessible windows, did what we could to protect instruments and possessions.  I am in utter awe at men who sleep face-up on the street.  Some keep dogs, some huddle together... but for the most part, they are the poster-people of vulnerability.  On June 7th when air quality rose to an all-time hazardous rating, I tried to question one about going to a shelter. Lighting up a cigarette, he squinted a watery eye and swore he didn't smell a thing.

On the way home that night I ran into a man with his hair molded into devil horns, carrying a baseball bat.  What time is it, he asked me... as I nervously showed him my watch-- it was 7:05.  It's a good thing, he remarked... I'm gonna hit someone but it won't be you.  I felt blessed. Relieved for my friends who've been burdened with more recent deaths and losses than they can bear.  

When I moved here, the building history resonated.  Below me the old apartment floor had a hole dug into the wood planks where Pablo Casals had placed his cello-pin while he practiced.  My own apartment had been inhabited in the 1930's by a Russian composer and I feel her ghost often-- welcoming me, patronizing me or taunting me to do some serious work. My neighbor, a great writer and editor, welcomed me with books by Cormac McCarthy.  I was a little stuck in earlier literature-- Faulkner, Baldwin, Dostoyevsky, Mann... but one by one I went through the McCarthy novels, beginning with Blood Meridian, then reading back.  Don't bother with the trilogy, he cautioned, and I still have not.  But somehow the 'nesting' process here was accompanied by my rapture with McCarthy's writing.

His obituary this week was somehow inevitable; The Passenger and Stella Maris seemed to give us this message, grappling with death and in a way making it feel just a little safer.  It's personally sad that his body of work has become finite... the way David Bowie's death marked a finality of oeuvre.  

I can't imagine how 'safe' he must have felt knowing he will be read and revered by generations to come, that he emerged from the Faulknerian aura of his early work to become a fully developed and internationally awarded writer.  And besides a few corny one-liners in The Passenger,  one felt safely drawn into the world of yet another character whose heroism fell beneath conventional radar... and one learned things-- important things that made one feel a part of McCarthy's understated and inquisitive world.  

So we grieve not only for our friends and family, but for these people whose product we keep on our shelves, who have taken the time to share their oeuvre with us, who have become part of our own history or intellectual architecture.  We live with their characters for a few days or weeks, and we carry a torch for some of them. I often wonder how a human brain can separate the fictional acquaintances from real ones who live somewhere buried in our pasts.  Many of the men and women living on the street are unable to separate these things.  They tell remarkable tales and see the world with a different set of parameters.  Tonight through my open window I hear one of them howling like a coyote. 

There's a man I often see uptown who brings his foraged meals into a parked Citibike basket. He sits on the bicycle seat, sometimes unsteady if he's been able to buy himself enough malt liquor, and tucks a napkin into his throat, as though he's fine-dining somewhere. So he called me over last night and asked me to bring him some strawberry Häagen Dazs.  It was an unreasonable request for the likes of me, living on foodstamps. I gave him the frayed dollar I've been carrying around for emergencies and he seemed pacified.  But tonight, on the final chapters of my Gustaw Herling, I'm thinking I missed an opportunity here.  Who am I to judge what a man on the street needs and doesn't need?  

My neighbor no longer gives me books... it was a kind of literary flirting, I think, looking back.  He and Cormac were exactly the same age; they were friends at a time and he must be personally mourning. Thinking back, the last time I had Häagen Dazs ice cream was in his immaculate kitchen, one sweltering July night in his un-airconditioned 8-room apartment on the 10th floor.  Synchronicity. And death the final punctuation, in the McCarthy world where grief was ubiquitous. Unlike me, he hated the semi-colon; but regret, he said somewhere with characteristic wisdom, is a prison. 

RIP.