Saturday's Child

Black Friday for me has the sense of mourning-- of a Bloody Sunday or post-apocalyptic temporal hangover day.  I'm certain some psychologist invented the retail version just to pry us all out of our post-prandial malaise, and gear us up for the next profit-generating holiday adventure.  God forbid we should lie around regretting things we might have said to our table-mates, or feeling sorry we ate so much or not enough. As a child I couldn't wait for the holiday to be over.  I sampled other families' traditions as an invitee in my college years and discovered they all seem to leak similar petty rivalries and bitternesses once the alcohol seeped in.  

Now that I've passed the long wonderful years of rock and roll Thursdays, Hendrix tributes, celebratory post-gig turkey sandwiches on-the-go at 3 AM, then the maternal/extravagant hostess/chef fantasy, I've whittled it down to a one-handed count.  Deleting the dysfunctionals of my immediate family, barring random overseas guests or surprises, the bare essentials are my son and Mice Elf, as Sly called it. As my son becomes more and more of an admirably ambitious man, intimate occasions are few and farther between. With my life continuing to shed its former frenzied activity layers, these evenings have become more emotionally saturated.  

While I think back on the myriads of holiday meal hits and misses... one or two fights with a boyfriend who manipulated me into foregoing family visits... a few crises... I try to minimize the nostalgia.  And while my son lives just across the river in Greenpoint, it doesn't diminish the fact that I feel terrible saying goodbye.  Maybe people shop like mad to block the sense that time like a rushing city pedestrian has passed another block and we are on our way to the Christmas finale and the interment of another year.  

This morning I tried to walk into a department store-- was greeted with some slowed-down version of Silver Bells and left with tears streaming. Pathetic, I scolded myself.  Yes, it's been a year marked by grief and loss, but these things accelerate as we age... we are supposed to expect this. My son uncharacteristically took the day off for a short trip with his current girlfriend.  Today I am thinking they are already on the way back, and she, like me, will be sad and missing him.  Life is filled with events... and they all too quickly become our past.  For those of us who are genetically dark, any comings and goings are sad. I recalled today a trip to the shore with an ex-- we were so deeply connected and yet so mismatched. Everything hung on this weekend excursion... the tension was unbearable, and the premonitory sense of an ending undeniable. Afterward he wrote a song that said 'I am in our room waiting here for you to come and change my mind'.  I could not do that, nor was I inclined to.  I could only think of the seventies song Motel Blues where Loudon Wainwright begs some young girl 'Come up to my motel room and change my life.'  It somehow seemed more passionately convincing. 

It doesn't help that I'm currently reading Niels Lyhne-- one of Rilke's very favorite books.  The language, even in translation, is rich and soulfully descriptive and the overwhelming sentiment of deep-seated nostalgic grief is palpable.  The author, Jens Jacobsen, died at 38, and struggled with the looming diagnosis of tuberculosis for twelve years.  Last week I finished Lucky Per-- another dark Danish novel of both enlightenment and despair.  In Scandinavia grief seemed a kind of status quo... the darkness is an assumption; I feel embraced in a way-- less alone.

A week ago Saturday we were all so saddened by Tatiana Schlossberg's piece in the New Yorker.  Nothing worse than the prospect of a mother losing her child.  The Kennedy family saga is emblematic of American grief-- their personal casualties are statistically and emotionally overwhelming.  And there seems no end in sight.  

Thursday morning I walked across 92nd Street where I once worked in a townhouse, selling art to the privileged.  I knew every building-- the neighbors-- the Mason-Smiths and the Paines... old American names-- a former Manhattan dynasty--  all passed now.  For a brief time we rented an extra office on the same block from a wonderful couple... Lester and Pauline Migdal. I was in my twenties and Pauline's daughter was a thirty-something brilliant architect who was dying of cancer in Switzerland.  There was some very early camera technology available so that from her high-tech Swiss office in the 1980's she was somehow visible as a shadow-- a silhouette-- to her mother. On 92nd Street I sat with Pauline drinking coffee and silently (no audio) watching her daughter slowly deteriorate. I had not yet become a mother but witnessing the longing and inevitability deepened my capacity both for maternal love and for sorrow. It is a small comfort today that Pauline has passed on, with her terrible grief.  

The loss of my baby girl whose place at the table only I can see left an indelible scar. It further opened my capacity to empathize with these mothers.  Every single human loss is wounding to someone... every one of us has had a mother... and for those in my generation, we miss ours terribly. But the sorrow of losing a child is something unbearable; their fragile suffering, unimaginably painful.  Back on 92nd Street, my future was an open kaleidoscope. Death was a very tiny numerator in the fraction of my life.  The Mason-Smiths had a colorful chef who suffered from a chronic throat ailment... he turned out to be one of the earliest victims of the AIDS crisis.  There was so much more mourning to come. As we go on, the dark memories compete with the light. We are the only animals cognizant of our own doom; some of us struggle with this deadline; others confront it head-on-- some by taking it into their own hands.

The future has an inevitability; the specifics are unknown.  We hoard moments-- we hoard things-- some of us hoard money.  Maybe it makes them feel safe. I hoard memories but am aware that the hub of my brain has sprung leaks and things have seeped out.  When I opened my copy of Niels Lyhne there was a receipt in there from 1992...  I remembered buying this at a used bookshop on the Jersey shore for $2.00 with my 2-year-old sitting on the floor looking at pictures.  I remember Tom Verlaine showing me a copy of maybe this very translation in the proofs section of the Strand the night we discussed Tranströmer. 

They come back with clarity, these lost weekend moments.  My daughter was still a possibility-- not yet conceived. That same year I cooked a goose supplied by my Scottish friend Lena whom I cannot find somewhere in the south of France. She writes me a postcard with no return address. There is a wisdom there... at some point all of us will have no return. For now I am without bargains or seasonal purchases but officially thankful; I will ride the downhill to the end of the year-- into the next which at some point seemed an impossibly distant future.  And that, too, will surely pass.

Fall-back

My son was born the first week of November... accompanied by the urban score of Election Day, the NYC Marathon... the first seasonal cold wind, the crush of dead leaves underfoot and the shocking afternoon darkness on the first Sunday of standard time setting. Each passing year I am overwhelmed by the nostalgia of parenthood. Our children cannot understand how we annually celebrate their arrival... how the indescribable agony of childbirth announced that we were splitting ourselves in two... how we sang silly songs and blew out candles but in our heart was the future soundtrack of an unwritten Roy Orbison ballad.

Even with photographs, it's difficult for our kids to understand the young, naive woman who was their mother, the novel intimacy of harboring a growing human inside a body whose power we'd maybe only recently absorbed. In my case, I was fulfilling a callow promise I'd made to my husband-- to have his child, despite serious reservations.  Our courtship had been brief but intense; 'no one will ever love you the way I do,' he repeated as he showed up in airports, intercepted my daily itinerary, flew transatlantic until he was broke, waiting for me to nod my head while he begged, on one knee, for me to become Mrs. British Journalist.  

So when my husband strayed, I tried to brush it off-- he was insecure-- he was dramatic; it would fade. I waited it out, remembering the pleading oaths he'd sworn... and then the surprise of pregnancy. I grew up quickly... held out hope, suffered. It wasn't so much the demise of the marriage as the betrayal of something in which I'd let myself believe. I talked to my growing stomach-- confessed, confided.  I'd agreed to define myself as part of a couple... and now the definition had become smeared-- obsolete... wrong. I no longer knew who I was or even where, having transported all my instruments and gear to the UK.

We urban dwellers learn to sleep through sirens... but the subdued quiet of a West-London 3 AM was more than I could bear. I returned to my city where the noise drowned out sorrow, the autumn rain camouflaged  wet eyes, and pounds of candy corn took the place of whiskey. I got up on smoky stages looking like a balloon and played my blue bass.

Who am I, I wondered, as I walked November midnight streets of Manhattan with a baby carriage? My exhaustion was overwhelming but did not translate into sleep. I felt hollow without my maternal stomach, traumatized at the act of separation and terrified of the task of raising a person when I no longer recognized the skin I was in: someone's mother... a nursing machine, one-half of a couple whose future was a puzzle, whose past was maybe just a terrible mistake-- a con job?

Thirty-six years later I woke up today after setting back my manual clock, having watched the last game of an entertaining World Series I would never have enjoyed had I not raised a sports-obsessed man. The apple fell far from this tree. I began the day with a radio interview; somewhere in the world people were hearing my music... it was shocking, in a way.  Somewhere I was still a musician-- a songwriter, despite this waking image of my life as a kind of huge parchment game-basket with thousands of lettered tiles leaking out in piles. 

Last week I watched a documentary on dying.  It was distressing-- horrifying, dismantling.  Again-- who are we, creatures who frantically train our bodies and minds-- run errands and break hearts... when we are all headed for the same unappealing and painful fate? 

Savoring my free hour after the clock resetting, I noticed Sheryl Crow was on PBS with a less-impressive Jason Isbell, conversing about her songwriting and playing samples in the grand hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exceptional sound system and a rapt sophisticated audience. Jason's accompaniment was annoying.  She is very polished-- even with her pancake make-up and false eyelashes... she can sing. I pondered her lyrics 'If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad.' Is this art? Am I bitter?  The last gig I played I went home on the subway with $60. I considered walking 5 miles to save $1.45. According to the internet, the starting range to book Sheryl Crow is between $300,000 and $499,000.   I remember meeting her, many years ago-- juggernauting along with her endorsements and rockstar hookups, following her dream on the road while I was wheeling around a baby. Not that there is a musical comparison. And after great success, Sheryl has more or less purchased motherhood.

I've noticed my son's friends are beginning to have grey hairs.  This ages me. His very boyish former science teacher greeted me in the street the other day... 'Did I recognize him,' he wanted to know, sheepish about the fact that he was now fifty-something? Are we judged by the way others see us?  I remember well, after a high-school musical performance, my mother asked 'You think you're good? This is high school!' These were my parents... maybe I over-processed their judgment which was skewed by the fear that their daughter might make the terrible choices I've since embraced.  

Tonight in the early dusk the sidewalks are littered with trampled discarded marathon signs and placards. Some of the runners were still limping along Fifth Avenue nearly twelve hours after the starting gun-- some falling short of their goal, some failing entirely.  I'm almost relieved another November milestone is over. Tuesday the mayoral elections will pass, and then it will be my son's thirty-sixth birthday.  He will celebrate with his friends; I will not share my nostalgia and current malaise... he seems to be happy with who he is at the moment-- not to question or doubt, not to empathically suffer along with ill friends and neighbors the way I do.  He will enjoy spending his money eating and drinking. He does not think about his absent father whom he barely recalls, and he certainly is little acquainted with the dark streak that marks my heart like a cross, like a wound. 

Meanwhile, hearing my own song 'Black Bells' on a radio show reminded me I am consistent if nothing else, and not ashamed of what I have produced, although I could always be better. Hard to judge oneself, and if one doesn't exploit social media, there is little access to external judgement or assurance.  Am I happy, in the Sheryl Crow sense?  Do I regret? No... maybe...  I endure these phases-- the doubt and black moods a lifetime of creativity, intermittent betrayal and suspension of belief have guaranteed. They are my 'material', for better or for worse, 'til death do me part.  If I choose, I can hear the sirens, but have learned-- Daylight Saving or Eastern Standard-- to sleep with them.