Maundy Thursday

So it's April... for all of us fools. In two days the weather has dangled a bit of midsummer tease and barely twelve hours later punished those of us who packed away winter gear.  I went walking through Harlem, comforted by a single pair of geese in the Meer pond... they looked elderly, black-faced, leathery and thin. Fearlessly they came to greet me and took that pose geese couples seem to prefer-- one standing and one roosting. 

With my sack of cheap groceries I thought about my financial adventures... I began as a student with extra jobs and hourly tasks, found myself doing well selling art and making music. In my punk-rock phase, one of the guitarists squinted at me over his shades: You can play, yeah, but you play like you've got a day gig, he observed. Taking his dare, I quit-- I crossed over into full-time musician.  Not easy-- alternating the 'for art's sake' bands with more lucrative ones, still managing to avoid the grind of club-dates and cover-music.  I was working.. earning cash to pay bills.  In black jeans and motorcycle boots I'd never felt so 'pure': I had a purpose, a calling. I loved going home on the subway at 4 AM with cash in my pocket after sometimes two shows.  Daytime I ran around from rehearsal to studio... a bass on my back... I was connected. 

While I passed on some lucrative opportunities, there were a few highs and lows; I managed to buy an apartment, have a baby, move to London and back. As a senior musician, I have lost so many friends and bandmates to industry and life attrition, it's truly wearying. My steady gigs have imploded, many of my favorites have either left the earth or retired. The ones who remain are less reliable; there is illness, injury, arthritis and hand issues--joint replacements-- and just plain exhaustion.  As I've said hundreds of times, the pandemic aged us; it changed the culture radically. My only safety net these days is a barely-adequate social security payment. Despite a progressive city mayor, our government is deteriorating. America is like a dysfunctional family... absolutely no stability even among the questionable presidential circle.  No predictability either, Pam Bondi being the latest to bite the dust. 

It mirrors the fickle tide of instagram culture-- this turning on and off, the 'it' girl of the moment becoming a future victim of the current foundering system. The future itself is unreliable and ominous-- war and the monsters of Hollywood are looming.  Portioning out the few dollars available to me, I regrettably must pay into a failing medicare system which I once believed would protect me.  There is no protection for the poor... and the debt-burdened middle class who choose to imitate the rich-- well, no one will bail them out either. 

Circling the park, I couldn't help hearkening back to the early pandemic weeks when this was my life: the braver among us venturing outside, viewing one another with caution, hiking our urban paths with palpable dread. At least money was a little less pertinent; everyone was vulnerable and the rich were as deprived as the poor. One bright spot: our government took pity on the self-employed and reached out and supported us musicians.

On a bench close to 110th Street a man was washing his feet.  I suddenly remembered Maundy Thursday. Beside him was his friend in a wheelchair, with no legs. He waved at me... smiling a warm, gap-toothed greeting.  Running around was someone's little dog in a quilted coat and booties.  The man in the wheelchair held out his hand; for me the irony was too much. These days I'm always on the edge of tears. 

In Trump world, we're on our own. No sympathy, many devils. The inconsistency of a truly incompetent leader is unnerving. I am waiting for this to be over. We march, we protest... for a few hours we feel a sense of solidarity and comradeship.  We are democrats-- we can make decisions and preserve freedom.  But can we?  These midterm elections will be a challenge... the very system is being undermined. The stock market level baffles me when it seems all bets are off. But the rich are adding to their stockpiles.  America is going to the moon once again... March Madness generating more money than ever.  The enormous gambling/betting industry is not just a trap of illusory hope but also erodes our faith in the innocence of sports. 

Some of my struggling friends obsessively buy Lotto tickets. Others post relentlessly on Facebook soliciting viewers and promoting gigs. A few get paid to entice people into online games.  It's humiliating.   I'm still living with no frills, putting every spare dollar into yet another printed book no one will read. What matters is what we do, not the admiration or remuneration we receive.  In spite of the mess, something of this old vision must remain. 

April brings the return of pigeons to those of us who live on single-digit floors. I've said many times the only thing worse than fucking pigeons is pigeons fucking... which they do-- often, with loud lust in the courtyard outside of my bedroom window. Flying rats, my neighbor called them.  I feel mean; sometimes I cannot help admitting their iridescent beauty and other times I see them as a swarm of fat predators soiling my sills and the sidewalk. I tried this morning to remember the heroic among them-- the carriers in wartime, the John Wick Koch Bridge flock. It's hard.  Maybe they are the city welfare class of birds. They seem to stay away from the park where other breeds thrive. Sometimes I do talk to them but have learned that little tilt of their head means nothing and they don't care. 

Meanwhile we have the ubiquitous dog population-- supporting a whole canine industry of fashion and insurance and cuisine that dazzles. I love animals in general... but now I've read they are contributing massively to climate change. And for those of us who work and write in our apartments, many neighbors are unaware their dogs are vocal during the day... maybe they are agitated by the pigeon antics. In city courtyards it's near impossible to identify the source of sound-- it is like a cavern, with echoes bouncing in all directions.  And with city building ordinances, it's more than likely that one of the adjacent buildings will be repointing with its own relentless decibel assault. 

And yet we April fools love our city life-- well, most of us, anyway. The rich will take off summer weekends, return tanned and refreshed.  Me-- I'll sweat it out again. I gave up my straight gig for the life of a musician... the guitarist who dared me passed away long ago... but he changed me. The dream was real, and I loved it.  I still love it. Not sure where I belong... but it seems to have its own properties, this quandary of my own design. As one of my newer songs concludes, 'There's nowhere I belong.'

What We Think About When We Think About Snow

During one of my random online reading jags which can involve tangent after tangent, winding up in some dead-end cul-de-sac in a country whose name-change has confused me, I somehow got to Joan Didion's list of favorite books. It's been widely circulated, this list, as Joan is fairly universally admired for her clarity and seriously earnest writing. A young writer with less brilliance and direction would want insight into her formula.

I was vaguely reassured that not a single title on the list had escaped me. Remembering I had a small interview published-- years ago, during which I was forced to commit to my own 'desert island' list of novels. Novels, yes... they have always entrapped me, although I wonder now, with my mental timeline diminishing, if I would devour Proust the way I did at twenty-- or Dickens (I think I would)... or why I currently find Thomas Mann's religious novels so satisfying. On and on...

I take great comfort scanning the shelves of my library at night... maintain a fairly rigorous schedule of reading, although I digress. Nor have I been led too far off-course except for the recent discovery of a few forgotten Nobelists and some brilliant contemporary Europeans (nothing in 2025 came close to 'Solenoid' by Mircea Cărtărescu). But lately I've begun to wonder who I was when I read George Eliot or, like Joan, Ford Madox Ford. So I looked further to see when the Didion list had been compiled and for whom.

Snow... today... a sort of blessing, especially weekend snow. As a winter baby, accumulations were a gift. Also the frequency of postponed birthday celebrations... or childhood illnesses... someone always had chickenpox or measles... in those days of nominal vaccinations. How life has changed. My winter reading mostly Jack London or Sigrid Undset... cold American pioneer novels... later, Thomas Mann. And nothing like the Russian winters of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. As an older adult-- Laxness, Høeg, Fosse... on and on...

So much chatter today about where one was in the blizzard of 1978, or 1983, or 2006. A kind of weather-nostalgia and of course in New York City the snow transforms our landscape-- softens the verticals and rounds sonic edges. I distinctly remember reading Mark Twain as a girl while my father watched football in our jalousied porch room with the Venetian blinds drawn at dusk.

Like many Americans today I binged on football to distract from the disturbing confrontations around the globe. At a point, after hours of football, I get this sort of nausea-- like psychic claustrophobia. My father had his first major nervous breakdown during a blizzard weekend. The panic of being shut in with his young family-- the responsibility, the claustrophobia... the scent of whiskey in that room with the newspapers strewn around and the snowy visual noise on the TV screens in those days-- black and white, the muffled roar of the crowd from the rear console speaker... the tiny athletes like toys on a static screen.

Maybe I've inherited the football syndrome from my father... shut in here... although me, I pick up a bass and let my fingers wander, and scan walls thinking books do not just furnish a room, they have become my family. Unlike my father's daughters, they require no upkeep; they do not ask questions, they seem to understand how the narcissism of this media-obsessed culture has cornered me into a sort of cork-lined analogue stubbornness. They witnessed the process, they populated the years and the memories and will outlive my small-minded existence, will go on to furnish other rooms.

The snow will melt-- eventually, after it acquires the grey five-o'clock shadow of city soot. For now, we are a bit graced-- pardoned, dismissed...postponed. Plenty of city people sleeping off hangovers in the cold morning... regretting or rejoicing the upcoming Super Bowl contenders... dusting themselves off, absolved, a little blessed... a little taste of Arctic innocence. Forgiveness, like many things, will sadly melt away and we are left with what we inherit from our own mistakes. No Super Bowl of life, of country, of existence. In Kiev and Minneapolis and Iran there is no melting; the ICE of another composition and cleanup is not simple. God help us to figure this one out.

What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.

Holm, Sweet Holm

Despite my general aversion to travel, I spent last week in Stockholm. Arrivals in a new city are always a bit blurry and emotional; one sees shapes, rather than specific landscape... a kind of reverse deja-vu, rather than reality. Gradually one acclimates and forms attachments. I remember moving to London... it was so grey and lonely; I couldn't imagine ever having friends and hanging out. 

But this was maybe my 15th trip to Stockholm; it has a kind of familiarity for me.  It is friendly; I can manage the geography and move among the islands with confidence. The coffee is wonderful... the streets are navigable and the traffic, even in the city at rush hour, is near-non-existent. Pedestrians have priority; and yet, for an incorrigible urbanite like me, it is very much a city.

In any European city the history is immersive. Although New York is centuries old, we are hybrid and new; we are a conglomerate of 'others' who more or less chose to make their home here. Besides 9/11, we have not fought wars on Manhattan ground, we do not have millennia of history resonating in our architecture, in our lore. Over the years I have traveled and toured, there was a kind of fascination with Americans.  We were the authors of rock and roll, of rhythm and blues and be-bop. There seemed to be ubiquitous curiosity about our culture.

This time, I felt a little reserved.  Yes, I traveled during the first Trump presidency but most of the world seemed to pass that one off like the anomaly we assumed it was: this will be be temporary... like a reality show gone wrong. We had jokes, memes. This time, people looked at me with a kind of skepticism.  What could we be thinking? Major issues of war, NATO membership, EU unity preoccupied the news. America the hero had turned into America the selfish narcissist. In a country where social democracy and inclusivity are prized, the general sentiment was 'appalled'.

It was a little reassuring to watch the Belgian summit on Sky TV, to appreciate the way these countries stood up for one another; after all, they are neighbors, they share a continent.  But all of them together do not have the economic power of the US; their very existence could be threatened by the New World Order... and suddenly, the values I was taught in 20th century America were off the table.  There is an ocean between you and Russia, Zelensky reminded Trump who seemed irritated if anything by this observation. Between allies-- between democratic nations, there is no ocean but a bond, a spoken or unspoken promise. We grew up with this assurance.

So I found myself engaged in endless conversations about our politics. Rather than getting a modicum of respect for being a New Yorker, I felt helpless and ashamed. Along with my Swedish friends, I ask every day... how could this have happened? No, we are farther from the sounds of war here, but I no longer have faith in any kind of fatherland or protective constitutional assurance; right has become wrong and wrong is being distorted into status quo. 

Sleeping in strange beds in different time zones always produces a unique set of dreams.  For some reason  I woke at 5 AM the first night with a memory of my first Au Pair job, during my college years.  In exchange for room and board I cared for the two young sons of a writer-in-residence at my school.  After a week or so of acclimating myself to something besides a dormitory cot, I found my employer visiting me in my bed. He reeked of bourbon and was aggressive and romantic and begging. It was a pathetic denouement of a person I'd respected.  I'd considered myself fortunate to have this opportunity. What to do?  I could not cause a scandal; I was familiar with drunk episodes from my own family, and knew it was my 19-year-old word against his.  So I managed it... I got up, I resisted.. I paced... I adjusted.  I should have ratted him out; it was unconscionable and invasive.  But why did this come up, 50 years later, in Stockholm? Maybe I was confusing one of those Nobel prize films with my reality... the place, the betrayal, the strangeness. The betrayal.

During the week I was there I prayed for the Pope.  He doesn't need your prayers, my Catholic friend told me; we need his.  But still, I prayed.  I also watched the film Conclave on the plane. Pertinent and worrying. Will this Pope be replaced by someone with less tolerance? Will we care, we in America who seem to be giving up our rights on a daily basis, who will, like Europeans for centuries, perhaps be persecuted for our very beliefs and identifications?

In Stockholm my Swedish friends welcomed me; they publish my books and my cds.  I can find these in the libraries and in store windows. Although it is not their native language, I feel read, heard. Today my French friends told me they were cancelling the retirement trip they'd planned for years.  They do not want to come here now. Before I left I saw Swedes boycotting Starbucks, McDonald's, Tesla.  I brought home a pound of Arvid Nordquist Franskrost coffee-- with ecologically produced paper filters.  Great quality, inexpensive. No one wants US cash there. On the plane back I watched an extraordinary film called 'Bird' directed by Andrea Arnold.  It was both depressing and heartwarming. And it was better than anything I'd seen in a long time that was made in the US. I also brought home a case of food poisoning from the plane... or maybe it was just the stress of arriving in a city where I used to know every building and street, the familiar homeless men and the East Harlem bodega owners. The aggregate sounds of New York-- the sustain and crescendo-- have been the musical soundtrack to my life. I am no longer sure of my city, of our future, of our culture. It occurs to me that maybe I should turn around and return 'holm'. 

Valentine's Day Postmortem

Valentine's Day always provokes a little reminiscence-- some wisdom-seeking, since true love for me has been more of a temporary phenomenon... or an impossible quest, punctuated by death or tragedy.  And things linger... the scent of it, the absolute certainty of what evaded me-- what I gave away or abandoned. 

There were times, of course, those 'pinch-me' moments, when things seemed ultra-perfect... even during marriage, I was happy.  But I always return to a moment in London in the 1980's... where I'd moved to make my young husband equally happy... hearing him, his terrible voice singing in the shower a Smiths song... Stop Me... the lyric which paralyzed me: 'Nothing's changed...I still love you...only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.'  The 'my love' at the end of the line is the chilling blow.  I can remember I was making the bed, that wonderful bed in the Acton Lane flat, where I  had felt consummated, celebrated, wifely.  But suddenly I began to doubt. Whether the song like a curse oozed onto the windscreen of my vision, or like theatre foretold an impending disaster, it was the moment I began to squirm.  

Maybe I looked for cracks in our perfect wedding portrait and our little romantic life, but there they were... not just the seeds of some discontent, but the evidence.  'Only slightly' would perhaps have been forgivable. In the end there was full-on infidelity.  Of course, as many of these rogue lovers and husbands insist, it is you that created some insecurity-- you, your touring and your band-intimacies and gracious audiences.  It set him off to find his own solace-- with the help of alcohol, and friendly divorcees at his office who were more than happy to accommodate his insecurity, his alleged loneliness.  

No one in this world ever wants to accept 'less'.  Whether it's a smaller tip, a briefer kiss, five times a week instead of seven, it is no longer enough.  We are such fragile creatures-- we speculate, we personalize, we suspect. It is evidence we have been demoted.  To be demoted in love is unacceptable.  It is painful and one step away from rejection.

The inverse of love is not hatred, but the absence of love. Indifference.  Elie Wiesel wrote of this-- the pain of neglect, the sense of abandonment; in this culture, to be 'unseen'.  It damages children, pets... deflates egos and hurts people.  

Our culture is fickle and harsh.  Celebrity can be a flash in the pan. It's not easy to be the best selling artist or most sought-after actor... it's a height from which you can only fall... and even these perfect couples-- well, they sometimes break apart.. or one stops loving the other, or finds someone else... it's difficult to go from #1 to #2.  

I've watched my son over the years go in and out of relationships-- doubt himself when it seems things are optimal... cause things to derail, then regret and try to put them back together.  The Prodigal husband-- it's a thing.  A couple I know divorced, remarried and then divorced again.  

Occasionally I dream about my husband, the one who swore it was just a song... who'd also sworn no one would ever love me the way he did, no one had the capacity of love that he had. Similarly I dream about a dog I had years ago-- that I come home and I've neglected him-- he's unfed, emaciated... My psychiatrist friends say dogs are dream-substitutes for our own selves.  But when I dream of my husband, he's not a dog or a substitute-- he's at a bar talking to someone... or he's walking away-- it's the devastating feeling that whatever peak of emotion you both managed to scale, you are on the way down-- it is 'less'--- he is leaving you... and there is nothing quite as difficult.  I've had affairs where you sabotage-- you anticipate and you ruin things, you 'fold' before the game is played out.  It's a kind of cowardice.   I know many single men who claim to love their bachelor status.  It's hard to trust people.  Nothing makes us more vulnerable than love.  We can lose money, lose our home, our job-- but finding your partner with someone else is the deepest wound.  It is a kind of death.  

In New York City where supposedly single people outnumber couples, Valentine's Day is still a looming silliness with which we tend to measure ourselves-- our relationship health, our single-ness, the admission of envy of some of my friends who have no romantic partner and feel diminished, or the ones that discredit and malign the day.  Coming as it does just days after my birthday, it was always sort of a denouement day for me.  I've been to weddings and received heart-shaped guitar picks engraved with the names of couples who went on to despise one another.  

My ex-husband championed the band My Bloody Valentine which debuted about the same time as The Smiths.  Ironically, they broke up, got back together, etc.  Personally, I'm just relieved it's over.  I never really liked the color red...  and while I cut out paper hearts for my friends and co-workers, I'm relieved to have not slightly less but no expectations.  I love those whom I love.  Some of them are still alive.  Things seem to work out.   Or not. 

You Say You Want a Resolution

The year is one week old.  If it were a newborn, it would be home from the hospital by now, adjusting to the quiet of a room, bonding with a mother, trying out its voice and perhaps discovering its own tiny hands. As a segment of time, it has already grown familiar and we forget to light candles or say prayers and simply let the hours accommodate football and leftovers and bad habits.  Work.  We are as we were, most of us, carrying our resolutions in our pockets or wearing them like bracelets, or setting them free like balloons in the unseasonably warm January wind.

Digitally speaking, or relating to photography, resolution has to do with clarity of image-- the distinction of objects against a background.  New Year' s Day for me seems sharp... it is deceptively new and manageable and stands out.  I usually hoard alone-time, visit the same bookshop or church... I walk in the evening clarity and replay things.  It occurred to me this year that my memories are vertical-- they stack, by date or event... and while distant recalls are blurry-- I can flip through past December 31sts like a box of postcards.  The early ones-- middle school and teenage nights--- I'd tag along with my older sister to a movie... or we'd be grouped in some neighbor's home-- whoever had a live-in babysitter or nanny... while our parents went out en masse and celebrated or got drunk. But as we grew older-- this night was well-planned and meaningful. We anticipated it.  I had a dress-- an early Betsey Johnson slinky black thing-- I wore it year after year... I felt tall and grown up and sexy and photographable.  Boys wrapped me in their arms and danced... spilled champagne on it... I closed my eyes and held the moment.  

In college I often traveled during Christmas break and ended up in El Salvador watching beach-fireworks or in Stockholm with the Auroras and explosions against the freezing black Scandinavian sky. My first year in Manhattan after graduation, I partied at an apartment on the Upper West side... it belonged to some preppy drug dealer and it was fantastically crowded with all kinds of bohemians and art students and the sound of classic soul blasting through a spectacular stereo system.  Someone popped a champagne cork in their eye... after an ER visit some of us ended up at the Corso on East 86th Street, dancing to Tito Puente until past noon on the 1st.  We all vowed we would spend every New Year's Eve together--- forever. I never saw most of those people again, despite the best intentions... 

Once I became a musician there were the gigs-- many, many- -some in dive bars, some in fancy venues and hotels... Chinese restaurants, the Tribeca Grill with Hiram Bullock, a Led Zeppelin tribute set once with some society orchestra... one at Caroline's, many at BB King's... and I would wheel equipment home in the early hours, my pockets stuffed with cash which seemed all wrong, because it was I who'd had the fun.  Or I'd take a subway with wilting revelers, exhausted waitresses and bus-boys... way past all closing time, watching new couples succumbing to passion among the drunks and vomiters...  At home there would be either a sleeping child or quiet rooms to welcome me-- maybe a message from my mother, and I indulged in what I perceived as the religion of January 1-- the resolution of day from year.  It seemed sacred and fragile.

In Sweden on New Year's Day, the whole country in unison watches Walt Disney.  Huddled and hungover under blankets, you can see in every candled window the television sets in synch.  Rituals. Breakfasts-- special pastries in Italy, and fish courses.  

This year, as the last two, I missed Alan Merrill.  Not only were we bandmates and spectators at our own revelry, but we were like brother and sister... we could wink or blink and the other would understand.  I saluted him as I stacked the vertical layers of the holiday one on top of the other, and things bled out.  The 'odds', the tiny movies of our lives which escape but remain at these moments-- they come back like fairy smoke and deceive us with their narcotic aura.  Modeling, as a child in a frock on some runway in the Catskills... or wearing a narrow skirt and a tank top later in a photo session, realizing I am not a model...  I don't belong here.  The perfect romance I had once in an elevator trip in the old music building at 3 AM... the laundry room at college one magical night... these deviations or vacations from our life-narrative that we have neither integrated nor fully dismissed.  Like an 8-ball, these moments enter the glass octagon window of our vision with a kind of clarity, and then disappear.  

I read a definition of music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color."  It made sense to me... what I do needs to have some kind of idea, or emotion.  How to use 'music' in a sentence?  One cannot.  I remember when I arrived in the UK, with my pop-hooks and predictable lyrics... realizing it was all useless and meaningless.  I talked with Lou Reed, I watched young bands smash one another until they bled... I slept with punks, I tore my clothes-- I smoked and used a plectrum.  I read, I dismantled myself and examined the pieces by the neon light of a pub across from my London flat.  

Gradually I began to become who I am.  My bass playing was characterized not by the way I struck the strings but the way I released them.  Music wrapped itself around my limbs like a lover.  It bled.  

I realize I am aging but I am still becoming.  I stack the movies of my days-- the lyrics and the pictures... like vertical chapters of some continuum that relentlessly goes forward.  One week-- like a thin slice of layer cake, the rest of which will be devoured, while it sags and grows stale and the icing melts and discolors.  Memories occupy more space than my present or my future... I wander among these columns of my life... I visit scenes of passion-- of birth, of pain, of joy... most of all the tiny narratives that were discarded from the essential manuscript but seem to have special 'resolution' among the privileged moments of one's life.  As we accumulate time, we peel off as well... the irony of gaining days and losing time.  

Once again I enter the third year without Alan, the sixth without my mother, the 28th without my baby girl; the losses mount as we gather a dwindling future.  We grow old and cannot make new life; we cannot replace. Someone at this ungodly hour is composing, someone is painting, someone is inventing.  These things go on in the city-- beneath the digital webs and networks-- the texts and signals... we are human, we are wounded and vulnerable.  We weep and we love, we mourn and we pray.  I am determined to discover something this year, even if it is myself in yet a new decade, should I be so lucky. I will leave some poetry and some music as defined and hope it will resolve into a life beyond mine, that it will find resolution.  

Rain of Kings

There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend Tyrone often announces.  Categories change from day to day, from monologue to monologue.  He's a curb philosopher-- a wise-man without an address, and I'd just as soon get my instructions and remedies from Tyrone. Today-- it's all about the weather: Tyrone and I-- well, we don't dread the rain.

In younger days I often walked along the East River promenade with a baby stroller, my little boy gleefully pointing at boats on one side, me crossing myself as we passed the daunting Cornell hospital buildings on the other-- imagining patients trapped inside... how beautiful sunny weather made them feel ill and ashamed of their confinements, but the rain made them feel safe... convalescent. Today I have friends embedded in hospital rooms-- sentenced to a random but cruel diagnosis.  Who of us expects to be invalidated, incapacitated?  We dread these things, but like rain on our wedding day... well, they don't quite seem real until we are helpless and alone in a dimly-lit room with terrifying machines and digital screens which blink our fate. 

Graveside funerals are so much more poignant with umbrellas... even when I was small, I felt God was grieving from the sky. When I moved to England and married my son's father, the chronic damp sunless weather -- day after day-- embraced my young bones like a dark premonition.  I dispensed with umbrellas and took it, straight up and grey, with the clouds of our failure hovering inside and out.  There will be a royal funeral procession this week-- perhaps the weather will comply.  London rain is epic-worthy.  

Endless essays and articles about loss swimming in my current digital libraries... memorials, obituaries, confessions and prayers...  And then there are the annoying optimists-- the positive, cheerful, grateful Pollyanna's of Facebook and Instagram-- the meme-writers and quoters of happy-faced human emojis.   For the chronically and terminally sick there is little here to celebrate with pain and discomfort the only really constant companions.

I am the useless sympathetic friend.  I want to do something and I really cannot.  Grief and illness counselors have their programs, their suggestions and prescriptions-- none of it comforts the way seeing rain outside one's hospital window might, knowing perhaps you are missing sightly less.  I've been there; the fortunate among us have been there-- paid a bit of toll, put some body parts on layaway to keep the wolves at bay.  

My Irish nanny told me once that the world needed a break-- that rain meant the sky had a sort of cold-- it needed to rest the sun, to cry-- just like children.  I can't remember where in the Bible God created rain... but He certainly used it to punish mankind.  And likewise, it rewarded.  It nourished the land-- sometimes brought biblical miracles--manna... and in places like Louisiana, fish have actually fallen from the sky; frogs in the midwest.  

No miracles are expected with today's rain, although it is my most welcome soundtrack and visitor.  Somehow it connects me to my 'people'; I know they are wet or pensively looking out at the traffic and umbrella congestion-- maybe just a bit melancholy.  Things have happened in rain that would not have happened-- you have run through streets with some person... and because you are wet, you undress at his place and end up drinking from a strange cup by his window in the soft laundry-scented cotton of his clothes.  It becomes a sort of home for you.

I can't recall my mother ever looking 'wet'.  Her hair was always  'done' and she was umbrella'd from door to car and back.  My father-- yes, he was wet.  He played tennis and walked dogs in storms.  My Mom kept her head above water when she swam.  We all had rubbers and galoshes.  I don't remember hers.  I picture her grave in the rain... her coffin and the six feet of earth will have kept her dry... but despite the multitudes of deceased surrounding her, the soft mound where she lies seems desolate on these days. 

For my ill friends-- I am aware my cloying sympathetic melancholy helps not at all.  Nor do shaking my fists at the sky, begging doctors and nurses, telephoning and weeping, rosaries, novenas...  We are not remedies for one another.  Neither of my friends seems to have had a great satisfying love-- a man to lie across their bed and suffocate them with sorrow.  The parting, with romantic drama, is a little more 'post-worthy'... the mourners step into the spotlight... the widowers and wounded lovers.  But in the end we are left with a statistic... an empty bed, the imprint of weeping... a memory of pain, of regret, and then the rain.

American Tourister

When I graduated high school, my parents gave me a set of luggage.  It was a curious gift-- not anything I'd ever thought about.  Maybe it symbolized my coming-of-age Bon Voyage.  For me, I couldn't think of anything I had to put in there.  They seemed like things that adults had-- practical things, and felt like a sort of unfulfilled promise I'd made, accepting them.  In those days they hadn't invented wheels-- these cases were heavy and cumbersome. But I had no choice.  I packed one for college, and it was a pain to stow in our tiny crowded dorm rooms.

My college boyfriend gave me a puppy at school--- she grew up to be this graceful deer-like German Shepherd mix who followed us around, slept outside my classroom buildings, etc.  In those days there was a whole hippy culture of campus dogs.  Anyway, one day she was kidnapped by a hideous character who crashed parties and stalked girls.  I followed her trail of blood to the parking lot where he must have let her out, after slashing her.  We desperately tied ripped up sheets around her wound and tearfully hitchhiked to the nearest Vet who promised to cure her, but didn't.  Her violent death haunted me for years.  We collected her cold body, wrapped her in my coat, and buried her inside my blue suitcase at the Jersey Shore.  She'd loved the surf, the beach; she was so beautiful and elegant, and had used my case as a bed on many occasions-- curled up in there, with the blue satin lining.

Sometime during college I met the great love of my life--- that breed of bad angel with a jagged halo and a guitar who steals your heart clean.  It was a wrecking and passionate story… and in the end, each of us went our separate ways--me to New York, he to his childhood girlfriend who heartbreakingly stood by and suffered his indiscretions.  Once I'd seen her--- she begged me-- I couldn't bear her sorrow.  Anyway, the night before their wedding, he showed up-- drove down from Boston, with a packed suitcase in the trunk.  Let's elope, he said.  We'll get married and take the Canadian railroad to Vancouver.  The suitcase was half empty.  I was overcome.  We sat up all night in a diner, drinking hot chocolate, planning our lives… and in the morning, I said goodbye.  He was late for his church wedding, but he showed up.  All that next week I kept thinking about the suitcase; we'd always thrown our stuff into the back of the car, like gypsies… but that suitcase was so new-- so 'adult'-- I felt the same burden I'd felt  at my graduation.  And thinking about the suitcases he no doubt had left with his wife… packed with what might have become relics of the death of marriage… things she would never have been able to open… This helped me find some sort of sad closure-- and besides, I had New York to explore…

My husband was a British journalist I'd met briefly who flew over to see me on a whim with no suitcase at all -- just the suit he had on, and a couple of books.  He brought flowers and came every weekend to renew his proposal.  One of my older and wiser woman friends remarked that if her husband had ever once looked at her the way this man looked at me--well, she'd die happy.  So I gradually let him pack up my things and carry them back to London, piece by piece.  I followed, with no suitcase-- and married him, had his baby, as I promised.  My last night in London involved his tossing my packed case from the window of our perfect flat, after a typically alcohol-fueled soliloquy about my going on the road, my imagined indiscretions--- whatever.  A lorry ran it over, and I flew PanAm from Heathrow for the last time.  After a few more dramatic episodes, he exited the marital stage, final act.  My son has not heard from his father in 20 years.  I left everything in the flat, including empty suitcases.

For years I used to see this old scruffy man with a beat-up cheap guitar in the subway.  He had one of those little portable seats and a red-plaid suitcase with a zipper--- the kind you'd see in a Hayley Mills movie from the 1950's.  He had piles of cassettes, hats, scarves, papers in that suitcase which he also used to hold the coins and dollars people threw in.  He sang like a saint, with this sandpapery edge in the lower registers, and his eyes watered.  The last time I saw him,  gaffers tape was holding that suitcase together.  His eyes were cloudy and his face looked drawn and hollow.  I wished I knew where he went at night, with that suitcase and his guitar… he didn't talk much.

There is something sad for me when I see people with luggage… coming, going-- saying goodbye, leaving something or someone behind.  Traveling is happy for tourists--- but for me I can't help thinking I'll never see these streets again, these buildings, this airport… I hate packing and I hate unpacking.  I hate endings.  Maybe that's why I seem to stay up all night until the morning--- so I know the light has come, and I'm safely into tomorrow.  Today I helped this Italian girl find the room she is renting in New York City so she can pursue her dream of becoming a singer.  She was so filled with hope, with her heavy suitcases and her new shoes.  I left her in front of the YMCA; I watched while they frisked and searched her things for some long minutes before they finally showed her the elevators to her overpriced little cubicle-cell which I hope is not too depressing, where she will unpack her dreams and hopefully find her way.  She asked me for my number, to have a coffee, but somehow I couldn't bear another New York City heartbreak, another sad ending, another unfinished story on ragged old papers of memory stuffed inside a suitcase.

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.

The Letter

Priorities shift on rainy nights.  People drop money with more frequency.  They are rushing and careless and the sound of the rain masks the sound of things falling.  Fewer people show up at their gym.  They park cars carelessly, they drink more; they eat more.  It is a bad time to make a lasting decision; especially an emotional decision.

The sound of passing cars on a rainy night always reminds me of waiting.  I was glad tonight to get home early; I walked back not caring what the rain did to my hair or my shoes.  I took my time, picked up a few coins from the sidewalk, petted a few miserable neighborhood dogs who leaned sheepishly against their walkers, regretting that they asked to be taken out.  At a Madison Avenue corner, a coat and hat was draped over a mailbox.  As I got closer, I realized there was a body inside.  It moved, and I asked if I could help.  The man, who was not more than 35, waved me on-- reeked of whiskey.  Sick, maybe--- or just too drunk to walk.   Waiting, maybe.  For a text, for a car, for a bus… for someone who wasn't coming.  I stood under an awning and watched; he nearly fell into the road a couple of times, and managed to hoist himself up onto the steel curve of the box, like a human back.  The Federal Government helping someone in ways they never intended.  I couldn't leave; I was writing all versions of his sad story-- the diagnosis,  the long and unbearable last days of his terminally ill wife; maybe he'd just come from the hospital-- -the final night.  Or he'd lost his job, his girlfriend had had enough-- his kids told him he's a loser-- his boss caught him in an insider trading scheme…

When I was young and newly married in London, it rained for all 30 days of my first month.  The quiet of our flat, compared to the constant sounds of New York City, was oppressive and strange for me.  My husband was a journalist and worked late; I found myself cooking and waiting like a doll-wife in a doll-house.  I had no friends and even the telephone felt awkward in my hand.  I knew I'd never stay-- it all felt so unreal for me-- and yet I was determined to stay and learn how to play the wife.  It was both sad and happy when my husband came home; he always felt like a stranger.  I could never have married anyone more familiar because my whole concept of marriage was so outside anything that felt like 'me'.   And yet, I loved the way he looked, the way he spoke, and treated me-- like a television sitcom newlywed.  He would have a drink and tell me about his day.  We would go to bed and make love, and he would sleep while I lay awake listening to the rain and the quiet, trying to 'place' myself in the strangeness of the new city.

Of course I eventually realized we were both playing house, and despite a mutual passion, we never really 'crossed over'.  I missed my life.  I missed laughing with my New York friends.  I felt like a foreigner in the city where everyone spoke my language but no one seemed to understand me.  I missed my husband-- even though he was there, and was attentive and perfect, outside of a few drinks too many.  He felt my discomfort and began to panic-- to worry, to agonize, and then to stray.  I was relieved.  It gave me a reason to leave, even though I was already pregnant with his son.

I came back to New York with my huge stomach and the terrifying prospect of motherhood, and then I missed him even more.  I began to realize there was nowhere, ever, from that point on, where I would ever feel 'right';  that the clarity of the distant past is maybe elusive-- and maybe it was never there, although we are all sure of our first loves, and maybe even our second-- of our first heartbreak, and the pure joy of winning something.  But I still couldn't stay,  and whatever tragic consequences I've suffered-- the misgivings, the regrets, the bad dreams and the missing-- all the missing--- well, I am responsible, at least partially.

Tonight there are more sirens than usual; this is a rain-related phenomenon, too, I think.  I am tempted to go back out and see if one of these is for my mailbox man, but I stop and convince myself that a person who couldn't manage to face her own fairytale when it was there cannot possibly unravel the unhappy ending of someone else's.

I was born during hard winter.  I was always relieved that I wouldn't have to face a rainy birthday; it was either cold and sunny or snowing, which is a soft blessing, and not a disappointment.  I feel safe here at the moment; even the early morning birds are not singing, not warning me that I should have slept and I haven't.

So maybe the mailbox guy had to to vomit and needed an anchor.  Maybe he needed a short nap.  Maybe he just couldn't face his nagging wife and kids after a long day, and her resentment that he'd taken the time to have a few when she had slaved over a meal and bla bla bla.  I never stuck around long enough to get there; I feared someone looking at me the way the mailbox man looked at me when I asked if I could help-- with that screwed up crooked face asking silently who the fuck I thought I was to insert myself in his rainy night.

There's a woman on the 6th floor with a bulgy eye who is hostile and a little crazy.  She is bitter and has persecution fantasies and calls the police on her neighbors.  She doesn't pay her rent and defends herself in court and win or lose costs our building thousands.   I am kind to her but tonight in the elevator she accused me of conspiring with the members of the Coop Board.  The rain is affecting her.  I start thinking she could audition for a zombie B-film.  I want to ask her to mail a letter for me.  That makes me smile, and she turns up the volume until I get out on my floor.

Maybe the mailbox guy was one of those visiting angels who will vanish.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to see him; maybe it was a mirage-- a cartoon character who shouldn't have crossed over.  I am home now, getting messages from a booking agent who wants Blues.  Blues, he says.  Yeah, that works for me.  So we'll give him blues.  John Lee Hooker used to sing something about a letter.  He never learned to read or write.  I know I'll never look at that mailbox the same way.  It's become a symbol, the way that most things in our lives become when we just have had enough of what is real or what we want to be real, and we are tired of waiting and tired of missing, and all we have is the slithery sound of wet tires on asphalt and a pair of old boots drying like tired dogs in the dawn half-light.