Scrabble

This morning I came across a quote from Cervantes: 'All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will improve... for it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever and... since the bad has lasted so long the good is close at hand.'  Well... it touched me-- like a mother's hand on my face, until I realized-- these are the words of a deluded madman, are they not? I thought of Job-- then a friend lying in a hospital on a ventilator, witnessing or not witnessing the disintegration of his own brain. 

'We have all been here before' the song from 1970 was running over and over in my mind's ear like a damaged vinyl skip as I woke... and wondered, as I often do these days, if I am losing my mind or simply misplacing pieces of it.  While identifying the music in my head (often it is my own invention which takes form in a dream) from the Deja Vu album,  it occurred that we have not been here before... at least not I... and I am not sure when the good will come as I watch another friend suffer from the relentless tide of late-stage cancer and there are no highlighted days on her calendar-- not celebrations or moments of relief without drugs.  

My own mother warned me-- Pick something beautiful, she used to say... but I continued to opt for the dark and difficult.   She read to us from Bambi... my first souvenir was the word 'thicket'.. I was enchanted by the aura of words which led me into hidden passages and opened doors that seemed a little forbidden.  These days-- entering older age at an intersection of quarantine and cultural procrastination... well, it is an unforgiving sort of wilderness-- a bad mirage.  It is like stepping out and not knowing where the deep sidewalk crevasses may lie... there are no maps for this.  

And still, watching the news, accosted daily with the barrage of online activities and people--even friends-- competing for time on social media... it is as though things have not stopped accelerating. My peers are both bewildered and a little terrified... we have been simultaneously halted in our tracks and left behind.  No wonder Bruce Springsteen had a DUI.  It's not easy navigating reality and the dark gravity of what is still in our head.  He was writing a song of himself... ? Personally I have no license, no car... but I was 'there'...

Some of us have begun memoirs and autobiographies.  Some have begun to shed memories... or to find, as I often do, this 'soup' of sentimentality and nostalgia simmering on a hot stove of unfamiliar ingredients.  Compounded by the challenge of losing our taste and smell... has anyone else spent nightmarish hours wondering at the metaphorical resonance of this virus symptom?  As though we are intentionally misplaced... what if we were bloodhounds, any animals who became entirely useless and disoriented and could not find our way home?

We are at this threshold, many of us... I see even celebrities losing their minds, making bad choices-- a bit of Quixotic paranoia, a bit of desperation to be relevant-- inventing drama, putting it up on a screen for others to judge, to approve... to be watched or seen because we can't seem to find our own Deja-Vu here.   Our own mental illness has become sort of an entertainment raison d'être... it makes news, it reaches others... Personally I feel like a reverse ventriloquist-- like I must speak for those who cannot-- the ones lying in hospital beds-- the forgotten neighbors who fear leaving their apartments... and the ones who are no longer here.  They haunt my dreams.  

We are all future ghosts and corpses.  I'm sorry, Mom... it's a terrible thought but it is a life force.  I leave virtual daffodils at your sad grave every day; I have failed you simply by fulfilling my own program.  Like Bruce, maybe-- and I was uncharitable to him-- I am driven but not driving, thank goodness.  Last night I saw Demi Lovato and the Duchess or whatever she is also prostrating themselves... Yes, they are given a platform and it behooves them to take it for themselves, however dramatically they insist the opposite.  Our Governor-- can they not find someone else to crucify?  These people are maybe discarded too quickly.  You voted for them and they are human and on a platform and made mistakes.  I remember how quickly they took down Eliot Spitzer when he was trying to dismantle the frauds of Wall Street.  Where is our perspective? Heroes are all flawed... scrutiny cannot fail to reveal them.  

Yes, we women have all suffered injustices and disrespect; at this moment of my life I occasionally peruse the scrapbook of my girlhood and the incidents were plentiful and appalling.  I was busy trying to become the voice for something I have surely failed.  Rather than identify as a whiner I opted for the larger picture.   Two of my friends, coincidentally, have just begun-- out of boredom or disappointment-- jigsaw puzzles.  Comforting to know there is a solution; it will work.  The rest of the world seems to be fragmenting.  Perhaps I the aging chicken have become my own fallen egg.  All the Kings Horses, etc... 

Goodnight, Moon

The last moments of the year always seem rushed.  They should feel weighted, as though the cumulative burden of 364 days compresses in an inverted hill on some temporal grave.  We are given the post-Christmas week like a winter denouement in which to inventory or regret-- to grieve and mourn or steel ourselves for the coming challenge.  In my image-bank-- probably an illustration from some childhood advent calendar or storybook-- I imagine these days as a chain of painted skaters-- hand in hand, colored hats and scarves flying backward in a joyful procession... waving goodbye eternally as their silvery blades speed them into another chapter.

It seems someone always dies on Christmas-- or just before.  It's a kind of superstitious dread probably left over from early childhood when the death of some relative precluded a family vacation-- death in those days meaning little but a nuisance-- having to forego some pleasure to attend some service and having to whisper around my stern father.  No one bothered to explain anything like it, and except for Bambi, I had little sense of loss-- only obedience and absence.

My son happened to have been born on the brink of a decade, so for him the 2020 demarcation has a certain synchronicitous resonance.  For me, it falls oddly between two strangely marked personal years-- one a prime number which seems wrong, after all this accumulation.  Doesn't anything rhyme with my age anymore?

Nothing, I remember discovering, composing a grade-school poem, actually rhymes with Christmas.  I do remember once trying to write a limerick which began 'You can take the 'Christ' out of Christmas...' but nothing ever seemed complementary enough.  It felt like one of those songs Ezra Pound wrote at some point, and the philosophical and semantic implications were more than I wanted to take on.

I always hated holiday vacations, actually... I longed to be in my room, to linger over my gifts and inventory my toys and closets-- get ready for the coming year in which I would presumably grow and progress.  On trips there was no solitude... and I worried about pets and things which remained at home.  I remember once asking my mother on arrival at some mountain: 'How did the moon know we were here?' And she assured me that it would follow me till the end of time.  It would be there, as she would never leave me.

But she did leave me, my mother... and although I still have my wonderful son to think about, there was no one like my mom for receiving gifts.  She'd sit in an armchair by the fireplace wearing one of her succession of elegant bathrobes (they have all blurred in a vintage fashion-fantasy) and pretend to be completely delighted by whatever awkward article I'd create or buy and wrap up in elaborate boxery to prolong the moments of the opening.  It was as though I'd bestowed some royal honor on her-- she couldn't thank me enough or love it more.  It was everything.

My son just ended a relationship-- at least I think so, and despite the fact I splurged on some fashion faux-pas he craved, I could see there was no joy in his face.  It's fine, he always stoically insists-- or the ubiquitous 'no worries'-- the millennial motto.  I wanted to ask him-- Have you ever missed someone so much you sit and watch the traffic-channel for hours, on the off chance you might see their car or taxi pass in front of one of the street cameras?

But I didn't... and they have their Instagram and GPS...  their thousands of daily messages and I have only my memories and images... a few old letters and photos-- not nearly enough from the days which seem to have grown in importance.  Looking at the calendar, 2020 seems so wide-eyed and innocent... but I am no longer sure that I'll last this one out.  2021 is already winking at me and I have yet to discover its meaning... it now seems unfathomable that twenty years have passed since the millennial timestamp.

This end-of-year interlude of rain has given the moon a chance to rest behind the cover, here.  She has not aged a day since we first met-- her solo act is still the main celestial attraction for me despite what I have learned about the infinite galactic spectaculars.  I've surely tipped the balance of what remains from what has been.  And I've been lucky;  certainly there will be not so many new years ahead.  Most of what I read has been written by dead people, as my teenaged son used to remark; much of what I listen to has been recorded by dead people, and grace to technology, we can still 'see' some version of those we miss the most.

There is a book I used to keep in which I recorded my Christmas lists; besides family, a great number of the names are unfamiliar now-- the fickle trajectory of our life-acquaintances.  I no longer need to list; I am piling up those things I want to 'gift' the world under some imagined tree... it seems unbearable and inevitable that I will leave behind more than I will befriend this year... but the moon has yet to complain... and I will, in her image and the sense of rain, God-willing, walk bravely into the next year with all the rest of you.  Amen.

Sisters.net

Last night some featury not-quite-coherent bit of news surfaced on my radar, alleging staggering statistics of on-campus rapes among Columbia freshman.   So I read a little further, with my own prejudices and skepticism, and learned the alleged perps are not predatory intruders but matriculating Columbia athletes and students.

As a mother, I know freshmen don't have the best judgment.  They are prone to the excessive drinking and partying that is part of the 'independence' declaration of college life.  Suddenly kids are forced to  set curfews and boundaries and I remember occasionally wishing I could blame my mother when I lacked the courage to say no to one thing or another.  Sex?  Pretty much a passionate 2-thumbs up, but another generational can of worms back then.  It wasn't until I was a young adult, pursuing a career, that I really encountered tough boundary issues and power ploys.

My son at the age of 19 was accused on Facebook of being a 'deadbeat dad'.  This by another sophomore who had skipped a day or 2 of the pill and wanted him to pay for her over-the-counter pregnancy test.  She used to call my house at least once a week in a coke-induced panic-- her apartment was on fire, someone was trying to break in-- -anything to require his presence at 3 AM, and to spend the night.  It was like gender-reversed rape when he'd arrive, exhausted and emotionally bullied by her threats and schemes.

In no way would I ever suggest that any of these Columbia women had not been assaulted; what does confuse me, in most of the cases I read--- is where is their head, their thinking, their 'sisterhood'?  I grew   up in an era where pervy uncles and drunk friends of our parents would cross lines and make suggestions.  Pediatricians touched us inappropriately and told us 'the boys are going to love this' when you get a little older.  Our bosses and mentors in our first jobs pressed their suited groins against us and groped us under the desk.  Did we tell our mothers?  Our teachers?  We did not.  But we told each other.  Our friends, our cousins--- whomever-- we told each other-- we confided, we confessed, we exchanged  humiliations and nightmares.  And we grew collectively stronger.  Once we shared our fears, we could look at them and decide what we could do.  We developed a collective jury of our intimate female peers.

We all knew who liked rough sex, we all knew who kissed and told and who disrespected our preferences.  And we knew what to do about it.  Of course there was always a girl among us who was attacked or assaulted without warning.  But we backed her.  We went to the police if we had to; we held each other's hands for abortions, we raised money and protected each other.  We navigated the free-love era with our hearts and brains and one another.  We learned to give love and take love, to try things and not fear them, and to trust our instincts.  I'm not sure, in this Kardashian age, where my son and his girlfriends had seen the Paris Hilton tape a year or two after Bambi,  that there is the sense of a 'net' among women.

Mothers in 21st-century New York City are pretty protective.  We interview and interrogate and hover.  No one is going to touch our baby with impropriety.  Doctors are required to have a female PA present during exams.  We have discussed sex so much our kids don't want to know what we knew.  They want to do it and have it and they want to act like rappers and ho's when they feel like it.  For all the soft porn and T & A & P everywhere we look, sex and love seem just a little cheap.  Girls are desperate and often date the B list.  Women my age are lonely and court guys they wouldn't have given a light at a bar in 1985.   Most guys who take advantage of women do so because no one stops them.  No one confronts them.  Not a tribune of Columbia administrators, but the girl they dissed and her girlfriends.  In my day, that guy wouldn't have lived to tell the tale without a beating from someone…and he wouldn't have dared repeat his offense.  Not in the same geographic hub.  For all the face booking and internet gossip and instagram posting,  how the f--  is the sisterhood failing women?

I am about to do a 'women-in-rock' fundraiser for anti-violence and domestic abuse.  We conscious warriors who have often waded through catcalls and ass-pinching to play our music with pride. We swam upstream to survive the sexist prejudices in a male-dominated musical world.  We support each other, we share, we talk, we rock and we are loud.  My message to the Columbia freshman-- stop blaming the administration for failing you, and start showing up for each other.  Use your brain and instincts and avoid men who are assholes.  An ounce of prevention, etc… protect your assets and stop spreading yourselves so thin.  You are not victims-- you are smart enough to manage your life.  You have a goddam voice and you can arm yourself with a few lessons in self defense.  Be generous with your sisters and see where you are and get out while you are safe.  And don't be afraid to love the ones who love and deserve your righteous body.  That is our legacy and our just dessert.  Amen.