Sleepers

Most of my friends complain about interrupted sleep.  As one ages it becomes less straightforward-- the biology of it, I suppose. And for those of us in New York City apartments, waking, we often hear our neighbors above-- more often now that they are aging, and sleep no doubt in separate rooms.. one walks around, whatever... we invent narratives.

When I was small I thought love meant you slept together in a bed; I'd imagine the scenario-- it was chaste and romantic. I was one of those children who tucked myself in at night with a menagerie of stuffed animals... giraffes and lions and Yogi Bears and Pinocchios-- Raggedy Anne and other squishy creatures with sad eyes.  Recently there was a piece in the Times about adults and their stuffed sleep companions. Not that I pass judgment. In fact the whole issue has become a major industry-- the way food is so complicated-- now it's customized mattresses and the science of blankets and temperatures-- sound machines and gourmet sheets.  It's a lot, as they say on television.

Many of my friends no longer sleep with their significant other. Together they toss and turn and worry; they blame their partner for insomnia.  Whenever I've had a long-term relationship, sleeping together was essential.  Break-ups meant re-acclimating to sleeping separately; this alone was difficult and occasionally the habit lingered and we'd 'cheat' and spend an occasional night together.  It was confusing and reassuring at once.  But it wasn't just sex, it was the intimacy of sleep.  Even the old one night stands... sometimes I longed to stand staring out of a hotel window, anticipating the strangeness of someone under sheets.  One night on the road I crawled in bed with one of the roadies and he told me things no one had ever told me.  It was like we enacted some scene from a play that had been written just for us; it felt significant and deeply affecting.  Neither of us discussed it afterward.  

Now that these things are mostly in my past, I rummage through them occasionally, to remember who I have been, where and with whom.  Sometimes I have these dreams, although I am generally sleeping with a book these days... and I awake listening to my neighbors who are sleeping alone in a common space, who live separate lives now, as many of us do.  My own father used to fall asleep with the television on; in those days the programming ended at a certain point.  If I were awake I'd hear the national anthem, and if I peeked in, the screen would show those horrid stripes until dawn. No one dared turn it off.

Being awake in the 21st century and checking programming in overnight hours, there are myriad reruns of old sitcoms and TV dramas.  Sex and the City repeats endlessly.  It occurs to me that this is calming for adults-- the way our kids would watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos hundreds of times... over and over. Stressed out people anesthetize themselves with familiar old shows-- memories, visions of New York when they were happier or younger.  Maybe this helps them sleep.

This afternoon, in the rain, I passed the new uptown Barnes and Noble store; the window is filled with pretty much the same childhood classics I read over and over at bedtime: The Hungry Caterpillar, Thomas the Tank Engine... there were dolls and stuffed animals of these same familiar characters-- Elmo, whose name my son pronounced with this very southern accent... the Wild Things, soft train cars with happy faces. Standing beside me was a young British woman from Manchester, with a little girl who was-- yes, holding out her arms to me.  I was surprised-- it was raining-- they were wet, as I was. English people are more accustomed to these drizzles and don't always bother with an umbrella. But children are not so friendly these days-- nor are mothers post-pandemic anxious for strangers to touch their babies.  This child-- maybe 18 months-- was smiling in the most extravagant way at me, and insisting I take her-- me with my terrible arm, I was unable to really lift her properly. She's friendly, her Mom explained, but not like this.  It was as though she recognized me-- there was this absolutely palpable connection and a kind of love I hadn't felt in so long, it brought me to tears-- this lovely little Irish face with sparkling eyes... too young to care about material things.. and there we were:  me, tearing up in the rain, feeling so connected to this child and my lost  days of baby-rearing. The mother, too-- she started to cry... maybe her Mom was overseas or had died... I thought of possibilities... and we looked in the window, and we repeated the names of the characters... as though we were family... and the child-- not quite up to speech, was just happily holding her arms out and trying hard to hug and kiss me as much as I could manage.

It was clear the baby did not want to stop this game with me... and finally I made an awkward excuse and left.  The entire window display imprinted in my visual mind, I went down toward the East River. On the way, I passed St. Monica's church which seemed to beckon; the glass doors were open and the music seeping out. It was the six o'clock mass... and I stood in the back while the priest read the daily passage and proclaimed that God is love.. and it made sense to me, having been lessoned by the little Irish girl.  This is it... the whole church singing and proclaiming, yes... Hallelujah, etc... all of us sleepers in various rooms, underneath the same celestial ceiling... receiving a kind of reprieve, a kind of love.  

You, Too…..

For the last 8 years, I take this weekly Latin hip-hop dance class.  The teacher is this dread-locked, sexy, ultra-talented dancer/percussionist/DJ who choreographs routines to great Latin and Brazilian music I wouldn't otherwise get to hear.  Lately he's been playing this version of U2's  'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' with a samba beat, and Spanish lyrics--- it's fantastic and grooving and nostalgic all at once.  The chorus is in English… as though there's no translation for this lyric.

I remember well when this song came out-- I was fortunate to be a guest on the Lou Reed/U2 tour and I saw from stage left-- at Wembley-- and other massive stadiums, night after night, Bono come out and sing these lyrics with compelling personal passion.  Backstage the band was all hanging out with various supermodels-- who knows what was going on in his head-- a young mid-life crisis-- a confession, a genuine plateau of confusion, as often happens when people encounter that kind of massive success:  questions rather than answers?  He was sweet and adorable and at some kind of peak in every way, and when he sang this song, he made himself vulnerable… it was like an anthem of self doubt.

But it wasn't until this week, doing my little steps and turns, that it suddenly occurred to me that the lyric doesn't mean just this unfinished search for some kind of answer, but maybe the writer hasn't a clue what it is he is even looking for.  Seems so simple--- but all these years, I didn't get it.

Anyone observing my dance class would undoubtedly see all kinds of 'lost' people: the tattooed and outfitted girls who are living their Beyonce and Janet Jackson fantasy--- the older Hispanic women who shake their hips with real soul and sexiness, the men who can't seem to get the rhythm in their body-- the over-50 women who bare their midriffs that no one wants to see-- one who wears a leather bustier and even manages a split.  It's a little over the top, and one wonders what drives these people… there's significant competition for the front row, and having our teacher grab one of us for a few bars is a coveted reward.  I lose myself in the music-- it's exotic and different, and I'm beginning to understand the bass rhythms.

At the end of the class, there's a cool-down to this Brazilian version of a Bryan Adams song.  Another guy who, in the late 1980's, was looking for his heaven in the arms of the British princess.  He bought himself a house and moved over there, wrote her a couple of songs-- the tabloids printed stories of their affair…who knows?  I'm sure he was devastated by her death.  I guess he didn't quite know what he was looking for-- neither did the Princess, apparently.  Or she knew what she wasn't looking for, which  made the royal family uncomfortable.

I never found what I was looking for in London, although I thought I did, briefly.  As often happens in life, the answer we find doesn't necessarily take us through the next set of questions.  Our lives don't stop-- they roll on endlessly, with our own high and low tides and storms and days of calm.  Sometimes what we most want passes us by when we're asleep or obsessing about something useless.  We fail to love the person in our path because they don't look exactly like our current version of love, and then it might be too late.

As I get older, I think I spend less time waiting.  I used to love the periods in my life when I was pining for some boy or man, crossing off days on my calendar until he came.  There was nothing like those days and nights-- they felt lit up, enchanted-- thrilling.  But these days, I am inclined to reach out and embrace whatever I find in my path.  I love going to flea markets and thrift stores-- you never find anything you want, but the random discovery is what makes these visits amazing.  It's like scraping the bottom of some strange ocean with a net and coming up with a shell or a plant or some amazing rock.  Useless but  day-changing.  You take the thing home and it becomes part of you.

I watch people drop off donation boxes to thrift stores-- the book boxes are sad and predictable--- college textbooks, marriage manuals, What to Expect When You're Expecting, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, some Steven King and Joyce Carol Oates, then fitness and diet books, retirement planning, sometimes books about healing or cancer… then self-help books, manuals on depression, dealing with death, meditation tapes-- -a Bible… and there you have it… a man who maybe found what he was looking for, at least on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf,.. and then, like all of us, realized that we have limited options at the end.

Night after night, people dig through our trash on my corner--- looking.  People buy Lotto tickets-- it's uncanny the numbers of dollars spent because they believe they are going to win-- that they will be able to have what they are looking for.  The belief factor-- is mind-blowing.  People of limited income will spend a small fortune over a lifetime… convinced that the next ticket is going to be 'it'.

My rich neighbors seem to have more money than they can count-- -some of them get into collecting.  Men buy expensive guitars which they'll never play like a young hungry musician who cannot do anything but play, because he has no choice, and his heart is already full of music.  These wealthy guitar owners will never find what he has, but they might look around-- play a little, feel something-- fantasize about a different life.  One of my friends tells me she is working at a soup kitchen some nights-- feeding the homeless.  She is looking for something, maybe… paring away at her guilt because she is extremely fortunate… and doesn't realize that this system is failing the truly oppressed and underfed… but she is not looking there, not walking through East Harlem at 3 AM and seeing the numbers of bodies looking for cans and bottles, or dreaming under boxes and blankets-- dreaming of something they may or may not have found.

I think I now know it is the looking that matters--- not really the finding.  And the richest things we find are rarely if ever the ones we are looking for, because life doesn't work that way.  The best we can do is keep postponing the ending, because the finding will go on and on, and that is a gift in itself.  It's just a matter of trying not to predict or ask-- and accept the random order of life as it is, because some things are so constant-- the light and dark, the sky, the stars and moon, the seasons, moving the clock back one hour as we will all obediently do this weekend--gaining an extra hour of looking, maybe an hour of shivering in the cold or rain, an hour of love, of music, of a hotel room you have bought for a night of love, of time spent writing a song, of pain, of pleasure, of looking, as I will see it, because it might just be the hour when I will find something I wasn't looking for at all, like a poem,  and it will be enough.