Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

Christmas, Bloody Christmas

Single digit countdown to Christmas. I'm listening to this Marlon Brando documentary... I forgot about the kidnapping of his son Christian, the troubling path he took... his struggles with substance, his eventual early death.  I can't help thinking of parallels with Nick Reiner. Something about sons... the way Marlon intended to keep his free from the abuse and poor handling he had experienced by his own parents. 

When we were kids my sister's boyfriend lived next to the Reiner family; I remember playing there, watching them get in the car and drive away.  We loved Christmas even though we never got anything we asked for. My father liked Macy's.  He'd pick something out that he thought suited us girls-- ice skates, some strange walkie-talkie toy that didn't work well-- a home badminton set... nothing extravagant. Every year I wished for a horse. I would keep it in the garage and ride it to school. One year my father planned a trip to a dude ranch. My cowgirl fantasies were on fire, but it was cancelled.  Someone died... or my father drank too much and had another episode.  It was a pattern-- the disappointment, the broken promises.

Families like the Reiners-- they looked happy. Carl made little jokes. My father never made jokes to the children. The prelude to Christmas was filled with activity-- Glasswax stencils on the windows-- chains and beads for decor... cookie-baking, our stockings hanging, rows of greeting cards lining the fireplace. Making things for my family-- using whatever I had to buy something and wrapping it.  My father always seemed miserable-- even Christmas morning... whatever he got, it was all meaningless although he seemed to like the holiday breakfast; we had rolled pancakes and he had coffee.

There were some good things... our housekeeper understood me-- she'd collect lengths of yarn and wind them on spools.  I loved this present, in a homemade box. I'd make lanyards and ropes; sometimes she'd give me scraps and rags and I'd make doll clothing-- tiny quilts. My aunt gave me a book.  She was a teacher and it was always a good one.

I bought my son unusual toys-- solid things like wooden trains and small building sets.  Shapes-- things from museums. I remembered wanting some stuffed toy with a rubber face-- a Yogi bear maybe. One waited for these things.  Months of longing and mostly disappointment. A doll made of a clothespin consoled me. My son had this reindeer made from a sock. It was everything... at night he sang to it in his baby language-- held it right up to his face. 

We give birth to a miracle creature-- a blank canvas. We swear we'll keep them safe and pure. I tried my hardest to be an intentional parent.  I listened, I explained, I watched. Still... at some point, somewhere, my son behaved badly.  He was angry-- he was rebellious and rude. Where does this come from?  One spends years of hours going over and over one's mistakes.

One Christmas I was breaking up with a boyfriend who put slutty underwear and one set of dishes under our tree. I could not decipher the meaning of these.  In a mood, I took my son downtown and we sat in a diner on Ninth Avenue drinking cocoa, listening to cheap Christmas loop-tapes, waiting for our musician friends to wake up in the dark afternoon and join us. A cop came out of the bar across the street.  We heard a gunshot and in seconds he was lying there in the road. It was his own gun. My son saw nothing except the slew of NYPD cars that converged with what seemed like seconds; he had a little toy police car and it was thrilling for him. At least I think so. I wrote a song called Christmas Lights. It was the epitome of a black Christmas. 

Still... I swore I'd never break a promise, and I haven't.  Not to him, anyway. There was a time when he was utterly ruthless to me. He was a teenager; he was angry at me-- at his life. We as parents would do anything.  Confronted by a drug-altered grown child brandishing a weapon,  the average loving mother is not afraid to die for her son-- a meaningless sacrifice-- but that he might ruin his own life as a murderer without parole.

The irony of the Reiner's son tragedy: all they cared about, I assume-- was that their son would not sabotage himself-- that he'd be saved-- safe.  I would have sacrificed anything-- money, my life... to set mine straight. He's good... but there is no guarantee.  There are good times and bad times. Once we wreck ourselves the scars open up and bleed at times. Here these struggling parents-- and as they say one is only as happy as one's least happy child-- gave their very lives-- everything they had-- and their son is ruined. Drugs ruin people.. so do bad experiences and the reasons people begin to anesthetize themselves.  I dated a few addicts; watching me wrap gifts way back my stepmother commented: 'Give him a carton of vodka-- that's all he wants.' The substance is not what they really want, but what they need.  It replaces the issue, it disguises the wound. Who knows what bothers these boys? Who knows what bothered my son? I was frantic some nights waiting for a phonecall and that only made it worse. The news that he had been arrested felt like good news. At least he was alive.

Christmas morning marks the birth of the baby Jesus who was marked for tragedy. There is no parallel here except the suffering of parents. The Reiners are no longer here to grieve for their son's tragic life. Marlon, with all that talent and crazy love for his first-born, was unable to prevent the spiraling. Me-- my son seems to thrive although I will surely disappoint him at Christmas.  I can't possibly fathom what it is he really needs, although I am pretty sure I gave him the essentials, that he outgrew his teenage angst and attraction to the bad-boy narrative-- that he is a solid man and has a moral backbone. It's a twisted Christmas story and we're all a little battered and torn this year. There is no closure, nor happy ending. The world goes on... Christmas will be over... I will remember good and bad ones.  We usually can't get what we want but try to remember the many who do not get what they need. There will be deaths, births, flashing lights and choirs of angels... and there will be next year, for those of us who remain to mourn the ones that do not.  Amen.