Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.

Snake Shack

It seems no matter what the state of the world, one can never avoid the New York City dog-days of August.  It's a kind of spell that descends on everything-- a unique bio-chemical atmospheric effect, the set-up of which requires 4 consecutive days of maximum heat and humidity with no noticeable cool-down.  The scent of everything wafts together like an old bad song-- damp animal fur, sweaty humans, car exhaust, fragrant foliage and most of all garbage-- food, organic dog-waste and that indescribable stench that reaches for you from the back of every urban sanitation truck in the universe. Couple that with the image that every inhabitant of the city exhaled all at once.  

Pandemic-empty trains are a thing of the past.  We are crammed in once again on platforms, in cars, absorbing way too much intimate physiological information about our fellow riders. Monkeypox-- other nightmarish summer threats, like shingles and vicious itchy rashes... normal insect bites are relatively benign if you're lucky enough to score an outdoor gig where you watch the little buggers feed on your playing arm. 

Some people leapfrog from air-conditioned room to room-- home to office, bars, restaurants, supermarkets, theaters.  I am still without this luxury... and while older age brings with it lower body temperatures, these days can be brain-cooking and challenging.  My laptop radiates heat like a small furnace, and I hesitate to open windows which let in no breeze but plenty of exhaust from my neighbors' window-units.  

Snake-weather, our young and beautiful live-in housekeeper from South Carolina called it.  Retha slept in a room down the hall from us where the only summer appliance in those 1950's days was a huge attic fan that blew air from the roof down a flight of stairs to nominally cool things off at night.  The sound of the crickets outside was like a symphony... the windows had to be thrown open to maximize circulation.  Before we went to sleep, Retha would recount tales of life in the South... mostly snake-lore.  It terrified me.  They come up the sides of the house, she explained-- wrap themselves around the pipes and slide along the eaves.... they even break the windows with their head-- the ones that have a blunt nose like a hammer.  But we had screens... I protested.  They turn themselves into spaghettis, she said... slips right through and comes together on the other side. Same with the shower-- they comes right through the holes-- they love the water.  Baths only for me.

I could smell the snakes at night... I could hear them slithering around in the flower-beds, coiling themselves around the garden-hose.  When the lights went out, I could see shadows in my sister's dust ruffles, moving.  After a particularly vivid tale one night I vomited.  There were serpents in my mythology books--- I stuck pages together so I wouldn't see... some of them had snake-hair or human heads. It was too much.  

I guess I was 3 or 4-- I'd broken my leg in some spectacular playground feat that failed... so I was less mobile.  My mother had the brilliant idea of taking me to the Bronx Zoo snake house... the hair of the dog?  Anyway, in my cast, I was wheeled around helplessly from cage to cage, from glass cube to cube with these monstrous slimy slidey creatures hissing and coiling and uncoiling like one of those slinky toys.  I remember the smell... it was August, like now. No air conditioning in those days... according to Retha, that's how the snakes liked it... hot and humid-- tropical.  There was one gigantic snake with this spectacular elaborate diamond pattern-- like argyll socks in pinks and blues... pressed up against its window... I puked up my cotton candy and whatever else.  Retha had to clean me up later. My mother was highly disappointed in me and the fact that her housewife psychology had backfired.  But the bedtime stories continued-- with that fascination kids have with horror tales... and the nightmares kept on.  I was chased, I was stalked... I was surrounded, fell in a pit of writhing legless bodies... they dropped from the skies like a Biblical plague.  I woke my sister, had to save her from the under-bed reptiles.  

Still, I never ratted on Retha.  I adored her... her cosmetic rituals and hair-braiding... her incomparable black skin.  We'd go to the store and men glared at her.  She was sexy, although I knew little of that then.  Eventually she was fired.  My mother told my sister she was pregnant... I had no idea what it meant, but with her plaid suitcase in hand, she put my hand on her bump and told me she'd swallowed a damn snake.  It seemed plausible.  

What other animal has those incredible patterns on their skin?  I mean-- there are zebras and leopards and tigers-- but the exotic pictures on reptiles?  For years I never really liked tattoos.  There's a famous anecdote about some old bluesman asking Mark Wenner of the Nighthawks why he done went and made a freak of himself.  Another remarked to me backstage how he can't figure why white people like to turn themselves into snakes.  I dated a guy with a snake tattooed on his arm and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.  In the end it was sort of a dealbreaker.  And a reminder, although my mother assured me there are no snakes in New York City, there are plenty, lol. 

Today I passed a huge glass cage that had been discarded on the sidewalk, close to the river.  It was big as a room, with decorative rocks...and kind of flat.  Obviously it had housed a snake... I wondered whether it had died of natural causes or slipped out in the dog days of summer to find some hot shade in which to coil or molt. Rats don't bother me-- mice, cockroaches... I'm a city girl.  But the image of a slithery stray moonbathing on the sewer grate gave me a hot shiver.

Retha promised to write even though I could barely read.  I guess she forgot, or as I later learned, our mother censored mail.  I wonder what her baby was like, and whether without her tales of swamp horror, whether I'd have tolerated reptiles the way I still don't.  I have an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be secretly married-- for decades. Not just a lying cheater but a cheating liar.  When I called him a snake, he had no idea of the depth of revulsion it conveyed.  I guess in these air-conditionless August nights, when we play back summer scenes from a life, when dog-day feverish sleep induces nightmares, the modern urban versions have at last replaced the ones from childhood.  Not sure which are worse.  Snake-days.  

Nine (nein)

For me there has always been something about the number '9' that brings a kind of recognition.  Yes, it is my birthday 'number', but that always felt more like a synchronicity than a reason for numeral kinship.  I liked the way it looked, the way it mimicked the six, the way it embraced the perfect three threes...  To turn nine years old on the ninth was childhood-sacred (I remember when my little boy turned seven on the seventh).  I was a winter baby and my parties, in those rougher weather-years, were often cancelled because of snow, or flu or chickenpox epidemics.  My Mom made a funny tradition of celebrating my 'half-birthday' on August 9ths.  She'd give me a half-cupcake, half of a card, one bookend-- things like that.

On this day in 1962 I turned 9 1/2... it was a poignant time: the Beatles were getting ready to change pop music.... Kennedy our president.  I was away at summer camp-- a time for reflection, nostalgia, some suppressed homesickness-- and a realization that I 'needed' the city.  I was urban-anemic.   Marilyn Monroe had just suicided which touched me;  Arthur Miller was my great uncle on a side neither of us cared to own, but it made the drama 'real'.   I was already touched with pre-teen 'noir' and heard melodies in my head: Soldier Boy... Johnny Angel... She Cried.  At home, my Mom was listening to Moon River and realizing her housewife dreams were going to have to be supplemented with other things.

At camp we put on an elaborate production of the Wizard of Oz.  I had won the part of Dorothy... we spent long weeks rehearsing and my parents were allowed to visit for the performances.  They filmed everything, although the soundtrack somehow is missing.  The video footage that remains is shocking for me-- I remember being inside that person, but to look that innocent-- with the braids and the little sailor dress-- seems unlikely.  There is a shot of my sister in the front row-- weeping, as I sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  It is the last incident I can recall of my sister showing any heartfelt emotion.  For years I tried to process this as evidence of love, or at least a kind of soul.... but it sits there, like an old tin can in a puddle.

I thought about my half-birthday today--- the way time is telescoping and tumbling forward.   Despite the marks we make, like bent pages in a book, it doesn't much change things.  August was a sad month as a child-- it was full of moons and drifting rainclouds-- drawn-out sunsets and lonely nights at a lake or a beach where I didn't really belong.  I craved library bookshelves and museum walls and subway noise... I missed phantom and real boyfriends... my turntable, solitude.  My Mother died two Augusts ago with little understanding of the world, toward the end.  It is a loss I will never overcome.

The events of this week have tainted August forever for so many families.  On a day when even global warming seems to have taken a breath to let us fathom sorrow... I find it harder to process the relentless juggernaut of violent hatred that seems to breed from the selfish nature of this political climate.  It is as though every senseless act of cruelty and killing has numbed some of us rather than incited reaction.  As a human here-- an aging human-- I feel small and unimportant.  All around me, daily-- and certainly on our screens, in conjunction with these shootings-- there are acts of heroism-- human instincts that are pure and good-- and yet the screenshot remains...

There was yet another story this morning of an 'unknown' songwriter suing a rockstar for copyright infringement.  Three notes, it is, this time... as though the clichés and dumbing down of pop music is not enough,  there is competition to own this lack of originality.  I've written songs and had several of them 'pirated'.... but what is the point, really?  There will be lawyers-- money, youtube comparisons and mash-ups.  And which one is better?  Both of them seem equally derivative and weak... just one is well produced, with all the bells and whistles, the make-up and fashion and the machine of publicity and social media.  So some poor unsuccessful singer wants a small piece.  Let him eat cake, I say-- a piece of the half-cake I used to get on this day when I was small.

During the brief moments I made it outdoors today, the Somewhere Over the Rainbow melody came to me, walking along the park after a quick storm-- my August souvenir.  Like it or not, it was a song-- written for a story which I knew well from bedtime readings... but with a silhouette-- an identity.  Things had some identity then-- a core-- a reason, a unique 'shape'.  There was no cutting and pasting-- you had to stand up and sing-- live.  You had to type letters and schoolwork and page through books and run and jump rope and learn how to save people in the water.

My son's basketball team won the championship.  Yes-- in the park in Brooklyn, on the asphalt, with hoops and balls and their brave sportsmanship... they fought and won.  Aside from the on-court soundtrack of Hip Hop, and the sneakers, it could have been anytime, USA.  What I felt was their breathtaking heart, their body and soul and drive all at once, jumping and leaping and catching and passing and dunking... the '9' of them, I call it... no tricks, no twitter-- just sweat and flesh and talent-- real talent that will ultimately dissolve into the tough universe of athletic anonymity.  I see men every day-- tall men sitting out in their collapsible chairs along Lenox Ave... with their canes and their injuries.   They, too, once ruled the courts, briefly... never reaped enough to get them out of the projects... and I sense the shadow of the power of '9' in them, too-- maybe for them a 5 or an 8... but they had it.

The half year until my next number will pass as quickly as a galactic second.  What I will manage to do with this is a mystery.  I can almost guarantee I will witness violence, will lose someone dear-- something dear.  I can only promise I will try to stand on my 'core', I will try to create my own templates and support the good of others.  I will be the 'ninest' I can be; it seems so simple-- if only it were... if only we could find some common starting line-- some core, some championship...  to take our individual pulse at the half... and make the rest count.

All the rest have 31.....

The cusp of August is the cruelest of all... after all those days of long, lingering heat and humidity-- of pink sunsets and procrastinations... September is staring me in the face like a damned balance sheet.  It's been a year now that my Mom is gone;  I stood over her grave last week-- listened for her shadow... praying that old family feuds would allow my stonecutter's dream to mark her peace... I sang her little song ... If ever I would leave you...it wouldn't be in summer... but it was.

The year I was born saw the hottest streak of the century.  We toughed it out in those pre-air-conditioned days at the beach at Belle Harbor, or the city river boardwalks... I swear I remember the heat of my stuffed crib-reindeer, his wilted felt lashes fluttering in the fan-wind, the buzz of flies and mosquitoes outside the apartment screens whining to come in and sample the sweet room-babies... Perry Como on the radio...  It set a bar for high temperatures; I've never really minded the heat since then-- well, maybe one year, with a cast on my leg, I struggled through, sitting under the apple tree, distracted by my new discovery of language and books; my mother made frozen lemonade and taught me to sing Que sera, sera...

In 1969 I spent the month in Mexico where it seemed a daily rainstorm relieved baking afternoons, and neighborhood boys brought guitars and played 'Yo sin ti'  over and over.  We hitchhiked to the city where I locked myself in a record-store booth with 'Tommy' and realized how homesick I was for rock and roll.  See Me... Feel Me... it was like a shiver.

Another summer I danced at a festival-- eight grueling hours of practice and technique in hot studios and gymnasiums..  I'd lean on the sill of my tiny Connecticut room at 2 AM and hear the same loon moaning.  Weekends I rode bone-tired on the back of a vintage BMW motorcycle between New London and the city, clinging to the hot leather back of a budding rock-God, hearing the young Van Morrison in my head and watching the road for a Dairy Queen.

A few years later, I had the first taste of The Dark Side of the Moon sitting outside a hunting lodge in the hills of Northern Italy with a bunch of British hippies and piles of drugs... thinking through a fog of smoke and Valpolicella how the word august meant celebrated and auspicious from the Latin... we were high and dry and often naked and the world spread beneath us like a vineyard... the days baked on, Money was a song... it seemed the summer never ended until one day we woke up happily back in our dormitory.

Lately the summer funerals have draped the dog days with mourning.  On 103rd Street there is a new shrine to another young neighborhood casualty.  Papi, the messages spell out in tears.. rows and rows of candle-glasses and stuffed animals for Di-Quai who was just 19.  This, too, shall pass.  Already in the 104th-Street playground there is a barbecue with yellow balloons.  Someone has brought a light... the boombox blasts No Tears Left to Cry and then Diamonds by the Boatload... they are done with Aretha-- that was last week's old-school.   And Saturday's perfect cupcake-top moon... the iced vanilla round,  pearl of my heart...   is now a lemon slice in the sky to these sun-baked eyes tonight.

No matter how rough it gets, we gonna go 31 this month.  It seems unfair that they are unequal, that September 'hath' 30,  and February we all pay for an extra two days of cable we don't get.  But August... it held out its hot breath until Aretha, John McCain, Di Quai and a host of others realized they would not see the changing of the leaves.  Where do they go, I wonder... sitting by my mother's burial site with my ear to the ground, feeling the afternoon warmth in the grass, trying to fight the terrible urge to dig through the soft earth and see what is left of her-- just once more... like an Edgar Allen Poe poem.  Forgive me, Mom.  For not cremating you, for failing, for your missing epitaph.

On the way back down Madison tonight, I passed that big black hospital; outside, a few men in wheelchairs were taking in the night air, smoking forbidden cigarettes and comparing bandaged legs in various phases of amputation, whistling at the young nurses.  Where are their mothers, wives, children?  I wonder if they miss the old summer songs the way I do.  They don't seem nearly as miserable as some of my neighbors here in the building-- with their renovations and their botox and their summer hair treatments.  My Van Morrison is old and heavy,  Elvis is long gone.... my lovely Mom who mourned Perry Como and Frank Sinatra with true grief barely had a voice when she lay down for the last time.  I wonder who she dreamed of, who she took with her that last trip... I hope Di Quai had time to make a wish.  Happy Birthday, Papi... whenever it will be... 31 candles I've blown out now... I don't know what song you'd like to hear, but I'm sure someone does... For now I'll just whistle like an old train and greet the September morning with courage.

Dog Day (for my mother, who no longer reads…and perhaps never did...)

Morning is static in the untuned radio of your day...

It is reunion time, the 40^th anniversary

And you cannot find the station

Months seem out of sequence

You prefer your calendar pages white

A bird outside

Could be just some form of tinnitus

A woman’s mother will not let go until

She has her own child

The blessing is a wound

You may fear that you will not love this baby

And it is with relief that you begin to worry

We seek the missing where there is none

Cut what once was whole

Juvenate before we rejuvenate

As birth is the beginning of loss...

The child is a bandage

A stranger

The first thing my mother could not claim

Memory is shorter these days

Does not contain words like dreaming

Loose and innocence

Surely you will discard mornings, collect sunsets

Thinking it must be Always Safe to Shoot

At Things with Holes

Helping the voices to a kiss

Let the wrong one in, they say

Some days you Forget how to walk up stairs...

Some days you remember this is good

With 3 m’s

Forget the last exam

Discarded postcards

Stamps look unfamiliar

And cheap denominations are

Without meaning

Your belief needs bifocals

Just to see the windshield crack

After all, it could be your eyes

Your glasses…

You must check to feel which you are wearing

After all

A whole day can go by without speaking

Perhaps no one would listen

You slip into a room where someone reads a poem

The author used to stare

Pursue you to the door

Procure your number...

If you had a dog you might forget to walk it

Some days these things worry you

Some days you worry that they do not

Next week it might be Christmas

Holidays pile up like ex-boyfriends

Faces of men you might have slept with, might have looked at

From a desk on Parent-teacher night

The dirt is now forgivable...

Dust reassures that weeks still pass

Windows are troubling, or perhaps mirrors

The softness of your breasts surprises; no one has touched you this week and you are not one to touch yourself

Bloody but you cannot say stained

When did you cease being shocked by the grinds and  spatters of last night’s fiasco

in the afternoon light

The mail tells you

een summoned to You have been summoned to testify for solitude

Opening the envelope brings

The vague ghost of someone’s spit

Adds  to the suspicion that someone has vomited

And hidden in your downstairs

Which has spread to the bedroom

Perhaps you’ll borrow a dog to sniff out the source

But you are afraid he will dislike youtude:

Or worse, obey the unpretty version you’ve become

Despising your fear

Ignore the stench...

Not just overnight

You have become a sort of weed

Poverty seeps in like damp

You cannot wash it out

It has changed me, you apologize

To the dog who has not come

No matter how many times you whistled his name

Barked his pride and prayed for rain