Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.