Hark the Herald Angels

Like my father before me, I often watch Bloomberg television in the overnight.  I'm fascinated by economics, the way they graph and predict and analyze what seems the bizarre and illogical behavior of current financial markets.  It's also a little comforting, in the thin hours where late-night dissolves into dawn, to know that across the world people are awake and bustling, when you are just home from a gig  that isn't quite what you wanted it to be, and sometimes considering life-alternatives.

Apparently, according to the financial pundits, it was a healthy Christmas.  Retail in-store sales were up, despite the anticipated online shopping dominance.   Personally I didn't really buy into the holiday spirit until I met my son in Herald Square at 5:45 PM, Christmas Eve.  Everyone should have this experience once in their life; it puts capitalism in some kind of warped perspective.  To be honest, there was less panic than I'd have predicted… and we managed to score the last pair of black Timberland nu-bucks in his size.  They were more than I could afford, more than I spend in two years on my own clothing-- but he wanted them.  He wanted the same ones in 2004, but I didn't bring that up.  It's imperative to buy something I can't afford; especially something that rappers seem to endorse universally.  Of course, he'd really like a Rolex, but he'll have to wait until he can buy it himself which is imminent, I sense. As for me, I've given up the ritual of exchanging gifts with everyone else… I can scarcely manage building employee tips and they all know they earn more than I do, but it keeps us on some kind of level ground of courtesy.  God knows the value of courtesy in this city.

My son always buys me a tree-- my only wish-list; this year he gave me a phone-- for emergencies, Mom, he explains to my idiosyncratic luddite head-shaking-- an extra line came with a huge discount in his bill, and a free phone… so I had to concede, even though I will not carry it.  He  knows me well; I have a history of wondering at the yearning of most people for what they do not have, and not often wanting what I get.   My childhood Christmases, after initial dismay that Santa did not leave me a horse, were not materially memorable.  I spent long days shopping, wrapping, and crafting things for everyone with my babysitting income.  I loved the giving.  Presents for me were generally the little-sister version of whatever my mother had selected from my sister's hefty list, which included prices and sums.  My Nana knew me best; she gave me boxes of scraps and spools of thread for making doll clothes-- rocks and old stamps for projects.  These were my treasures.

One year my Mom gave me Judy Collins' 'Wildflowers'.  It was the first record album that was designated mine and not communal like the scratched and dog-eared Beatles and Stones in the hifi bin, and it was like a coming-of-age joy-- one of those moments that let me know my Mom really 'got' me.  I loved it to death.  Sisters of Mercy.

Another year I remember tonight: I must have been 18, planning a summer trip to Europe with my boyfriend, and I begged for cash.  Christmas morning there were the usual piles of gay-looking boxes and bags, and not a thing for me.  In the toe of my stocking, something rustled: it was a $1.  Fuming, I took off-- skipped the traditional pancake breakfast and ran downtown.  The city was deserted and I was sulking and in desperation hopped a bus back to college.  It was a day like today-- frigid and unforgiving, and when I reached my empty dorm, I found there was neither electricity nor heat.  I wept in Christmas solitude and called my boyfriend in Boston from the house-phone who consoled me and directed me back to New York.   Anyway, trying to sleep that night under piles of blankets, I heard a strange noise-- found a flashlight and discovered one of my eccentric roommates in several hats and coats in her bed reading the novels of Jane Austin.  She'd stayed behind, intellectual that she was, and not buying for a second into either the holiday or home-sweet-home.  I'd never have really known her,  had I not had this little learning excursion which also taught me that I was an adult, and had to rely on myself if I wanted something-- that home was where I was, not some kind of story-book picture.  I thus weaned myself from my sweet Mom for the second time.

I've been thinking about her all this week-- my first motherless Christmas, the first time I wrapped no gift for her.  I remember how she understood me, even though she disagreed-- how she had to align herself with my Dad and refuse to sanction or even witness my artistic and romantic ambitions, but how she'd send me something like some candy bars I loved taped together, with no card-- or an old ribbon.  How she called to cry about John Lennon when he was shot that cold December day… how she tried.  I suppose death is the final weaning.

There's a Code-Blue out tonight in New York City.  It's so cold they've directed the police to round up homeless people who are at risk outdoors.  I was in Harlem at dusk; on the steps of a familiar church where a population beds down, two cops were trying to coax a sleeper to a shelter.  I don't mind the cold, he kept saying, but I mind the shelter.  After they left, I asked if he needed something.  Plastic bags for my feet, he said, and asked about my dog.  My dog has been dead for years… but he seemed to recognize me.  You gave me a sweater one night, he told me--- you were on a balcony and it was raining, and I was digging through restaurant trash… and you brought me a blue sweater.  I remember this… I did… and I remembered seeing that sweater in the trash bin the next morning, like a dis.

It's hard for me to believe this was that homeless man whose face, I confess, I don't recall… I keep thinking he is some sort of angel or apparition; his voice was soft and resonant and musical,his leathery smile so kind.  He also gave me a bag of socks to wash; I threw them into the machine at 2 AM when no one would be there to judge.  I will take them back to him tomorrow evening even though I wonder if he will be there; it is my foot--washing opportunity-- a real Christmas gift and I resisted the temptation to buy him a new pack, but executed his wish, as he presented it.   Clean socks.  I will sort and fold them in the Christmas spirit I failed to embrace this year until now.  If he is not there, I will leave the bag along with a candle for his night, and a prayer.

This is the sort of thing my Mom frowned on; after all, she was a lady, and didn't understand this is my version of rolling bandages for soldiers as she had done in her day.  In the scriptures, the woman who washes Jesus' feet with her hair, no less, was a sinner.  I've sinned plenty, as my Mom did not, and maybe you must be a sinner to want to serve the homeless.  I'd like to think it is compassion, not guilt that compels me.  But maybe some of those smug Bloomberg guys need a bag of dirty socks left under their tree with the Rolex boxes and the new-car keys.  How about putting that on your billionaire-list, Santa? For the naughty or nice, financial sinners all-- the ones who drank the Trump tax hand-out just as happily as a Christmas egg-nog.  From your warm golf-courses and holiday Caribbean hideaways, may you dream of some human foot-washing in the arctic cold as you kneel before a man who has maybe never seen the inside of a an airplane, or a decent restaurant, or a lovely warm home, but who is closer to some version of grace than all of your graphs and statistics will ever be.

Amen and Happy New Year to all.

Oh Well....

For those of us with insufficient air conditioning in Manhattan, the first summer heat wave comes with an extra sense of suffocation.  Atmospheric claustrophobia.  People who live in smallish apartments tend to share dreams of opening a closet into a barn-like studio space, or an unexpected ocean view revealing itself through a secret window---or the ceiling suddenly rising...  we've been here before.  95 degrees and above is like an inversion of this.  You close your eyes and feel the collapse.

I've been reading a Murakami novel in which the protagonist, having listened to a terrifying tale of a soldier trapped for weeks in a deep narrow well, has taken to lowering himself for prolonged periods into just such a neighborhood well, where all sorts of fears and revelations take him into a new strange dimension of existence.

I do personally wander into such holes-- some emotional, some philosophical-- for whatever dark reason, and have become recently fascinated by the concept of minimal existence.  Economically speaking, this is a way of life; but physically--- well, vampires shut themselves into coffins... and some New Yorkers, according to a certain interior design blog, reside and flourish in an actual closet space.  I suppose this is the ipod-nano version of real estate-- appealing, as is minimalism in general, but I wonder, like the million songs trapped inside a tiny plastic rectangle, whether our intellects are as compressed as the tiny nano digital music files...   life in a cheap download, zip-filed virtual space.  What is going to happen when those virtual 'goggles' become as common as iPods, and we are all able to exist in a palatial environment, in our own tiny closet-beds?  Will Manhattan property values decrease?  Will my neighbors leave me alone and credit me for starting the trend of downsizing well ahead of my time?  Will the spatially obese see the spatially anorexic with new eyes?

We may be legislated into giving up our super sized drink cups.  Does this mayor not realize some of us economically challenged parents  buy these to distribute among 4 or 5 kids?  Is this yet another indignity to distract the already-punished from peering into the monster garages and liquor cabinets of the J.P. Morgan boys who have lost more money in a week than some African countries have seen in the entire 20th century?  Why not limit the size of allowable personal bank accounts, instead of hiking subway fares for us poor schmucks?  Trim the mountains of economic fat the bankers have not just scarfed up but hoarded.  10-gallon-sized cups of liquid gold that is poisoning their hearts.  Let them all eat precious-metal cake at $1,600 an ounce because they have health insurance.  The expensive kind.

I took a walk down Fifth Avenue Sunday and the crowds of eager shoppers were like nothing I've seen before in Manhattan.  Lines to get into Abercrombie which rival the Christmas Santa lines at Macy's.  For what?  The privilege to stand on line to buy mall-quality merchandise in the most expensive real estate in the world?  I don't get it.

Then again, I still don't have a cellphone.  "How can you live?" a young man asked me the other day.  How can you live without stacks of books and art and Beethoven and Leonard Cohen records and an old leather jacket, I wanted to ask him in return, but I shrugged.

My son called last night with new romance issues.  My niece, too, was waiting for a text from a boy she likes.  Personally, I can live without immediate answers.  The guy in the well took his watch with him, but couldn't actually see the time without light.  I like this.  So..."Does he like me?" my niece wants to know, while she is texting another person and reading an incoming message.  The nano-affair in the nano-phone screen... 3 texts and it's sex... 3 texts and it's over.

I don't know if I would want to know about love anymore.  I don't really always want to answer the phone in my house... I don't want bad test results and I don't want to know if there is really salvation at the end and whether it will hurt when I die or how much money I have in my bank account.  At least I want to filter when the answer comes.  I want to open the letter slowly, by candlelight, or let it sit on the windowsill for a few days.  I want to admire the stamp and feel how fat the letter is-- -whether my lover has taken time to explain things, to confess.  I want to feel the space of time because there is little time in the space I occupy here, and the long summer days are feeling just so short and precious.  I don't want to know how hot it is or what time the sun will rise, or how many scorching days I must endure in my darkened apartment with old things in it which have seen many, many lifetimes and are patient.  'Well...'..I said ominously to both my son and my niece who have no idea I am reading Murakami in this heat with the Mogwai soundtrack in my head and cavernous dreams without walls waiting for me in my existential bed.

31 Ways To Say Rice

Something about snow makes me crave white rice. Hot, steamy...
Of course I’d prefer sushi rice or even pedestrian Chinese rice--- but mine is cheaper and maybe because measuring things seems absurd late at night--- it always comes out American and institutionally pasty anyway.

I looked out my window at 5 AM; even in the courtyard the airconditioners and sills were iced like Christmas wedding cakes. A silhouette backlit by a flat-screen was looking back at me--- unmoving, creepy. For those of us who are normally walled in by the night, it is a switch to be whitewashed, avalanched.

On the way home from my gig I couldn’t help noticing 3 wrapped and cardboarded bodies tucked in against the 3 huge doors of the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, like horizontal shrouded niobids in a tryptych. Sculptural and symmetrical, dusted by white like some kind of forgiveness for the tattered huddled corpses they are forced to inhabit, wrapped in every piece of material they could scavenge. These are the lucky ones— they got there first. Seniority. Was there a moment in time when these churches were unlocked? When it was not a sin to provide shelter and warmth for the Manhattan Untouchables? We bleeding hearts who cry for stray dogs and donate for mistreated pitbulls?

Downstairs in the 96th Street C station another human creature wrapped in newsprint, old comforters and black plastic at the end of the platform, by the dumpster. Three large rats romping around her things--- a paper cup, a few bags and salad containers. A woman-- must protect herself--- a youngish woman with braids.
"Do you need something?", I found myself hypocritically blurting out, feeling ashamed and stupid....
"No", she answered, in a quiet voice, refusing my pathetic $1-- "I don’t need nothin’...I’m fine."

Fine, she is. Doesn’t need. On the tail of the storm—- 5 AM, I consult the television God. Bloomberg has called off school. There’s no 4th term anyway, so who really cares that the weather has eroded his ratings? On the other channels--Celebrity Rehab— yet another histrionic but entertaining episode; I Used to be Fat— well, I'll pass---My Secret Addiction which documents a woman who eats chalk and another who can’t stop licking household bleach. A Medical Mystery show about people who can’t stop eating—one who has been forced by a gastric band into bulimia because her eyes are literally larger than her stomach. Another who just shovels it all in until she weeps with despair... then wakes up and starts again. Needs. The food budgets of such people. The woman in the subway can ill afford these problems. What makes them need this way, these television people?

I thought about my father when I was small-- French-door-shut into his den on a snow-day behind white chintz curtains, J&B-ing himself into blackness. Wondering which of the 30 some-odd Eskimo words for snow would be used to describe that scene. Which would be used for the Manhattan storm which came with thunder and lightning and gave us all an excuse to stay in, to drink, to sleep, to listen? The rice is quiet. Orphanage rice. Prison rice. Homeless Shelter rice.

In my email tonight a notice that a guitarist I know vaguely has suicided. He’d been depressed; I was snotty to him the last time he stuck his head in the door while I was playing. Jesus.
I can imagine it was the snow--- the relentless muting effect of this miraculous stuff which ought by rights to be gray or dirty like ash--- and instead it is un-urbanly pure, perfect, a-worldly. When you have smoked and drank everything in the house, you have no gig, your wife is across town with your kids who are learning to hate you not for what you did but for what you didn’t do... and here are the veils, the fake forgiveness, the trick blessing. Mother Nature with her finger to her lips...the painful bridal reminder for some of us who don’t ski but who sit on a cold windowseat in an old hoodie, smoking our last cigarette, making promises.... Eleanor Rigby in our head....rich enough for shelter, too poor for a view, our guitar leaning pathetically against the door like a patient lover... the rice in the pot on the stove... rice on the church steps, snow on the cemetery grass...silhouette in the window... the dark lightens, the relentless snow lets up, your last fucking thoughts are nothing but cliches--- snowblind, fade-in, whiteout...
the winter rice in the pot... spreading like white ash... all fall down...