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.