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.

Past Imperfect

It's the time of year when I start interviewing prospective Freshmen for my alma mater.  As I get older, the age gap grows.  I am aware that turning the 'page' of another year means a great deal more when you're 17.  

I just came uptown from the last 2023 gig on a crowded 6 train. There were two very young couples next to me-- at that age where kids are 'turning' from young teens to old teens-- hormones raging, and they've not quite mastered their 'personae'.  Maybe their first time out without chaperones... it made me a little more sympathetic to these eager students that try so hard to make themselves memorable in a one-hour conversation-- on the brink of so many things, these kids.

We musicians so often worked on New Year's Eves...  were paid decent money for the most part to celebrate with packed rooms of drunk customers.  We made them dance, forget their problems... and by the time we packed up and went home, the page had already turned for us.  We didn't have to plan, consider, arrange... and then suffer the disappointments and hangovers that plague so many partiers on this night. 

Tonight I miss my mother-- her well-wishes for her children, our annual ritual of the last call of the year.  And the ones I've crossed off my list-- each December we take inventory and find more names in the 'missing' column. Most of the 21st century parties were all about Alan Merrill-- the ultimate singer of classics, R&B-- a partying and soulful bandmate whose Pogues-esque version of Auld Lang Syne was incomparable and now, besides YouTube clips, a thing of memory only. 

One of the kids I interviewed told me he's writing his autobiography. At 17, I can't imagine how this will end... or if it will... and then I remember Jackson Browne's 'These Days' written at 15 or 16... and think again about judging the wisdom of a teenager.

I've seen New Year's Eve fireworks and sunrises in tropical countries-- the Northern Lights from an airplane and heard revelers from inside the walls of a hospital Emergency Room with a sick child. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to sleep over in the attic room of the Hoffmann family behind our house.  Three sisters and I blanketed in a double bed beneath a skylight where the winter starlight seemed to promise us every possible miracle.  I had a crush on a Judge's son who'd gone to Las Vegas for Christmas and brought me a matchbook signed by Frank Sinatra.  We giggled and confessed and the night air in those days smelled crisp and starry with the faintest hint of woodsmoke and hot chocolate.

Teenagers were always inclined to keep diaries-- journals-- a place to confide one's dreams and safely keep secrets.  It was useful-- especially during those difficult weepy nights when we'd page back and reassure ourselves we could survive our sorrows and failures. Lists were equally useful-- things we needed, songs we loved, boys (in descending order), books, TV shows, movies, bands. 

The internet has disturbed the quiet solace of diaries; it also affects memory.  My son often forgets his preschool teachers or friends; I remember all of this-- not just mine but his-- although there is surely coming a day when I won't. 

It occurred to me today the blessing of this night is memory-- the lists and sequences and growing pile of these through which I can leaf and uncover... the sadnesses and joys, the popping cork injuries and the mistakes-- the bad weather and the bandstands... the tuxedos and dresses, the masked balls and the sloppy punk dive bars.  The various nights that were, that weren't, that have been and should have been-- the past perfect, the pluperfect, and my favorite-- the past imperfect.  That grammatical term for me has always opened doors and windows of poetry-- like the translation of some Proustian chapter or the unclaimed title of my unwritten autobiography-- my life as a reel, as an unedited mass of tangled film... what remains, perhaps, eventually, to be forgotten.  

The Ground Beneath My Feet

For maybe seventeen years, from my 27th birthday on, my home base was a modified studio apartment in a converted factory building.  I call these my bachelorette years, despite the fact that I was married (twice), changed countries, became a mother; somehow this was where I ran, came back to roost, escaped, convalesced. When I first moved there, part of its charm was the Mobilgas  flying horse directly outside my front window.  Like a magical hovering hallucination, it witnessed and blessed my love affairs, my joys and sorrows, guested at my parties and celebrations.  At a point the horse was removed and a multi-plex theatre was built.  So there was still the rear window, where a sapling tree had grown tall enough to graze my sill and bring morning birds to sing to us in bed as we slept against the cracking interior brick wall of an old chimney. 

It was a cool old building, and because the apartments were like small lofts and recently re-purposed, it was mostly populated by young singles-- artists, several fashion models, a pair of Rockettes, a stripper, two drummers, a hair-stylist... photographers, drug dealers. My motley friends and rock musicians were comfortable hanging out there, crashing there, getting high with the English hipsters down the hall, smoking on someone's balcony or sunbathing on the roof.  It felt in a way more like a dormitory than a building.  We had the best parties that often spilled out into the hallway where neighbors were only too happy to open doors and spread the cheer.  

On Wednesday I went down to that neighborhood to preview an auction of great old rugs in what used to be a loft space but was now tarted up like a department store.  I barely realized I was in my old neighborhood-- the street was stacked with multi-storied new constructions that looked crowded and crammed and airless.  My old back window would have been hemmed in-- our little sill-sparrows, the maple tree-- would have been displaced.  I walked up to Second Avenue-- the old supermarket-- A & P, then Sloan's, I think it was, then maybe Pioneer-- and now a sprawling Chase bank.  My son's old school was sheathed in scaffolding and netting... even the movie theatre called Beekman was being demolished.  I remember there was one huge modern apartment building which stood out... now it looked a little aged and dated-- dwarfed.  Back then there were cyclical recessions; money was a little different.  Yes, there were some affluent couples... but their luck changed and at our state-sponsored pre-school we were often all in the same boat-- crumbling marriages, unfaithful husbands, Visa problems... buying each other cheap bags of chips or sharing ice cream among the kids.

I remember sitting on a stoop with an English woman who'd had two babies in rapid succession.  The children were adorable, but I was shocked to see they lived in this pricey high-rise with almost no furniture and a mess of clothing, toys, dirty plates and cups everywhere.   I remember the toddlers so well-- Harley and Alison. Almost like twins... they were unwashed and wild, tough and spirited, and their mother seemed to have aged twenty years in three.  Her husband had lost his job... one of those things... we young mothers spent long hours sitting on sandbox ledges, pushing swings, exchanging woes and intimacies.  Where are they? Who will remember them?  It has been some thirty years since I sat on the wall outside that building, astonished at the reality of what I'd imagined to be a charmed, rich life.

Forward to the rugs-- old, handmade things of great beauty.  The online catalogue was spectacular and shining.  It always touched me that the makers-- not just artisans but artists-- colorists-- took years of their life to create something that would be walked on.  The metaphor of hand-woven carpets is a kind of poetry. So I wandered through the newly-renovated space like an explorer... hung and lined with yards and yards of these patterned wool tapestries... and somehow, without the online photos-- they became what they were-- just rugs.  They were living, used... old, walked on... things of beauty but humble and quiet.  The price tags were obscene.  If they could speak, they would have been ashamed.  

At some point in college my boyfriend and I decided to make a rug-- we would design and execute a hand-knotted creation. We looked in museums, bought a book from the Cooper Hewitt.. and I spent many nights turning pages, inhaling the colors and patterns.  It was difficult; we were overwhelmed with studies and jobs and we abandoned our project.  But in my 120 year-old apartment, I have one of these rugs of similar vintage.  It was owned by others before me, and it occurs that it will go on living when I am gone.  It is a thing of great beauty and soul-- the colors, the small discrepancies and mistakes woven in intentionally by a person who lived perhaps in a colorless landscape without flowers or trees, and yet created a rich, rich tapestry of floral and chromatic mastery.  These rugs I assume were the gardens of desert cultures-- their windows and decor.  

During the pandemic, I occasionally took a photograph... and a piece of my rug would appear, like a magic vision. It is always, unlike me, photogenic; it steals the stage, even in a tiny corner.  I know all of its regions; I imagine the maker.  When I write it is here.. when I play music, when I turn out the lights... it is still here.  Unlike a garden, it asks for nothing and never fails me.  I do cringe when my son visits and occasionally spills a little whatever... but they are resilient, these old things.  Organic and uncomplaining. Voiceless, perennial... humble, rich, quiet and like a magic lamp maybe replete with more story than I can ever write, in this room we share-- my witness, my companion, my elder, urban floor-garden.

Losing My Scent

 In a moment of rare intimacy my mother told me what she'd liked most about my father was his smell.  As an older teenager at the time I remember thinking I'd so rarely been close enough to him to experience it, but I knew what she meant.  Of course, all curious children open and sniff the bottles and toiletries left on bathroom sink-tops.  Our default father-gift was aftershave; his clothing taste was difficult and specific-- many unworn ties hug in his closet which smelled of nothing I can recall-- the faint ghost of tennis ball cans which lined the top shelf.   So yes, there was Old Spice but that was generic/manly.  Even music and schoolteachers used it.  

We all discover on the most basic biological level the chemistry of smell and how it figures not just in nostalgia and romance, but attraction and attachment.  Like the Proustian Madeleines, the faintest aura of patchouli can send me into vivid moments of girl-crushes and beach-passion.  So the harbinger of Corona Virus-- total anosmia-- was not only disorienting but like some kind of emotional theft.  At the beginning of my illness, this was not a recorded symptom and the medics I spoke with shrugged me off.  I could stick my nose in a bottle of bleach and register nothing.  Not to mention the altered, distorted sense of taste; my beloved morning coffee was bitter and harsh.  Hmmm, they said.

Gradually I retrieved some of my skill; I practiced in the spring gardens of Central Park, identifying flowers and nature. Oddly, the 'nice' smells came quickly while foul odors went undetected.  I could change diapers without flinching.  Ten months since the illness, I still have trouble smelling burning food while colognes and perfumes are particularly vivid and singular.  Frankly it's as though I have someone else's smell-- not mine.  The Goldilocks sense of 'who's been sniffing in my nose?'  I am also my own doppelgänger-eater.  Most sophisticated food is now 'back' but still my coffee palate is off; things are boring.  And yet.. fruit... is amazing.  It's possible the components of taste required to appreciate grapes are untampered, whereas experiencing some subtle smoked meat dish is still scrambled.  I've drawn a parallel between the temporary ravage of the virus and the permanent-- as though we've been deconstructed here and put back together in a slightly different order.  The mechanism of these vaccines spooks me a little too... I read Watson and Crick way back-- the way the strands proofread and repair... they scared us into believing psychedelics could unhinge this process... how about these meds? Not to take a political stance... but to consider the biological aftermath of covid-- well, I feel rearranged.  

On top of the grievous human losses that resulted from a complete failure to understand a new illness, we are left with these altered realities... our societal loneliness and fear, lack of trust, isolation, and this persistent longing my friends describe for the life we had 'before',  Who are we, without our little life-dioramas and stages and interactions-- our flirtations with the bartender, random meetings on a train, nostalgic triggers that bring the artistic of us to creative brinks, to inspiration?  

At the end of her life, my mother rarely left her bedroom.  It had a certain smell, the way old people almost uniformly biologically secrete a documented identifiable chemical.  I loved my mother so much I missed even that smell, when she passed.  It eclipsed so many of the others-- except the Chanel perfume I used to inhale to bring her 'ghost' into the room when I was lonely and she was, as usual, 'out'.  I'd post myself in her closet, between dresses, and wrap them around my head.  There it was.  

While I was recovering, these months... I've thought often about my girlhood dogs-- the Retrievers whose heads smelled to me like freshly-baked bread.  Like my mother, the men in my life had their own scent-- this affected all relationships and was inextricably attached to each.  My favorite of all smelled of the sea; I've written about him-- he died long ago, and abused his body... but still, I could tell he'd come into the room by the mixed woody perfume of forest and the beach... it was like a poem, just to close my eyes and know.  

Like all creatures who die young, we never get to replace their legend with the older, less fragrant version.  My mother was quite demented at the end and I'm sure recalled my father's scent with all her being, even though he was old and mean and grouchy, shared her room with the 'cloud' of the aging, and passed away. Like all of her dementia-dreams, things were beautiful and young-- at least at the end.  Having this parosmia, as they call the scrambled sense of smell, it reminds me that I've been altered as a woman-- that I no longer have the attraction or desire I once had, or the capacity to inspire.  I can only use memory to paint, to compose, to write.  I rarely if ever take a selfie-- the physical reality seems, like my sense of smell, a little disconnected from who I am or might be... from my people who have passed, from my past, from my self... I suppose it's a matter of time until my memory fades, loses accuracy, identifies less... sheds  the present with the past, as we all walk a little more cautiously into this future.

Home Alone

 I read an article this morning about the alarming surge of suicide in Japan.  More people there took their lives in October than died of  Corona virus in ten months, the highest rates being among young women and schoolgirls.  The very word--schoolgirl-- pulls at my maternal heartstrings; there is no more poignant symbol of soft-edged vulnerability...  the magical prologue to the drama of life.  The image of Japanese girls lined up and giggling in their staid uniforms like delicate figurines-- children-- juxtaposed with the dark confessional teenage social media posts-- well, it is heart wrenching.  

As I discovered in 2017 when I went with Alan to Tokyo, masks have been standard street-wear for years... so it seemed to me the pandemic protocol would be not quite the adjustment it has been in New York City.  But loneliness-- isolation... is a difficult prescription for the adolescent psyche already afflicted with perpetual FOMO or social addictions.  Being confined to the house with one's insufferable parents is a sort of punishment... and when life is all future, quarantines are a kind of extreme deprivation.  I am not well educated in Japanese culture but found it to be a weird mix of ultra-sophistication and this cult of the child.  After our rock and roll show a young woman presented me very seriously with a lovely doll.  

Despite all the Thanksgiving messages of hope and gratitude, there is the widespread epidemic of depression and sadness.  I tried my best to be festive at my small table, but the echo of former guests' laughter hung over us like a memory cloud.  I miss the Hendrix tributes; I miss coming in from a gig to face an all-nighter of cooking-- I miss the musicians passing my guitars back and forth as the sun rises on Black Friday.  

In addition to the 'Virgin Suicides' plague, I've been reading pieces about postpartum depression-- miscarriages... the sorrows of women.  We have always carried our layers of grief, but only recently I have had to see Chrissy Teigen's Instagram photo-shoot with a shrouded fetus... not to mitigate her right to mourning, and the pain of losing a child... but in this worldwide 'weather' of death, it just seemed a little overdone.  

I've been emailing my long-standing women friends; we seem to have a need to communicate-- to bare our  loneliness and disappointment to our sisters with whom we can 'let down'.  We're used to sadnesses-- we have mourned the phases of our lives.  While I didn't have the luxury of postpartum moods, as a single mother and sole provider, there was the sense of shedding a skin-- of losing the tender 'girlness' that makes those Japanese adolescents so compelling and soft.  We are no longer the little twirling ballerina on the cake-- we are someone's mother... we are responsible ministers.  As my own mother warned-- she who disapproved of my life-style and single parenthood-- knowing how I craved my own independence and creative solitude, 'You'll never be alone again, my dear!'  Intended as a cruel prophecy, she did not live to witness just how wrong 2020 has proven her.

Now that our children are adults and we are becoming grandparents, another skin has been shed.  I wonder if moulting snakes feel pain... they seem to slither out of their coats with no regrets or hindsight... straight ahead into the next phase; not so we women.  Forward we go toward a winding-down; the current braking of culture and community leaves us leaning on our lifetime sills, looking through criss-crossed panes at future and past, sensing our own helplessness to protect our children and other women's children from falling in love with death, the ultimate solitude.  

Turning the pages of my blank calendar, I can still remember years when every single day was not just crammed with events and gigs and meetings-- but the possibility of things... the slivers of soundbites and colors-- fashion and books... hooded eyes meeting yours... flirtations and messages exchanged on papers during breaks... Today I could swear I smelled the patchouli-vanilla aura of that dread-locked guy from Dan Lynch's-- with the muscles and the smooth brown skin who left his scent on you one night,  like a taste of what you were missing.  And these moments you skipped-- stones you left unturned-- same as the ones you pocketed-- they were still there-- in the night air-- in the live-wire sea of the possible.  I can imagine these sad girls of Japan-- everywhere-- like a new race of pandemic humanity-- barefoot on the shore-- sentenced to unsampled beauty and sexuality-- wading prohibited.  

Time is a tightrope, I once wrote... love is the fall; love is a one-track mind... time is the crash.  At that moment I would have died if I was separated from my own passion.  For the sake of children-- of girls everywhere-- may this end, may we return to some normalcy of touch and taste and uncovered faces and hearts... and may the older among us accept our fate with the strength we acquired when we were young.  Not to forget... but to look back at where we have been.  Preserve your memories, Paul Simon wrote... they're all that's left you.  I was barely 15 and writing in a secret diary when I heard that lyric for the first time; I can scarcely recall why it touched me then, but some 50 years later, it is just as haunting.  

Signs of Where

I had a strange phonecall this evening... a woman's name ID'd on the screen... a writer I remember meeting some years back when we were both editing on our laptops in an air-conditioned Starbucks during a sweltering August heatwave.  She'd smiled at me, we had several non-smoking cigarette breaks on the sidewalk outside where we'd briefly thaw out in afternoon heat.  We exchanged numbers... she was working on a difficult historic novel which had required years of research and period reading.. a sort of Name of the Rose mystery.  Unlike me, she had some family money-- sold a pricey Carnegie Hill coop and downscaled to the upper west side with plenty of cash support.  She was beautiful in a pale, fragile book-worthy way.  Well spoken and intelligent-- but soft and womanly.  We were both brimming with our projects and ripe with future.  Ensconced in a literary neighborhood, we'd trade rumors about at least one of our elder urban mentors as he shuffled by with rolled newspapers or muttering to himself beneath a wide-brimmed disguise.

I remembered all of this, as one does, in a flash-- this is how our brains work-- we get a cue, and we unravel the relevant 'bank' with all its stored observations and details: a profile, like our own personal Facebook page we create for each of our friends-- facts, details, family names, images of moments we have shared or imagined from conversations and communications.  I used to pride myself on something of a 'phonographic' memory; I recall sounds-- associated music, accents and voices...  and images... the setting, geographic details-- how I stared at a painting on the wall while someone unburdened themselves of a sad story... the way the old window sashes crossed while my mother read aloud the March Hare or the Lilliputians.

It felt especially pertinent-- this associative process-- because less than a minute into today's phone call, I realized this woman had dialed a number she found on a random scrap of paper... had no idea who I was, confessed to having a terrible memory... commended me on mine... did not recognize my name, insisted after a bit that she'd met me at a meeting and we'd gone to a bar (not a chance), etc.  I asked her where she lived... she mentioned the number 104 and couldn't seem to move on from there. You're on the west side, yes, I suggested...? and she replied, Not very far west, I think.  By the end of the brief interrogation-- she began repeating questions... her focus was disintegrating.  I began to inquire, hoping to steer her into some familiar space, as I used to corral my mother in her dementia into some small fenced-in area in which she could function.  Her book-- she'd tried to write and failed...  I eventually hit a wall-- had to somehow disengage; she took my number (!) and asked if we could get together... having me carefully spell my last name.  I will be very surprised to hear from her, or perhaps she will call again tomorrow, looking somehow for some mental foothold.

On the street I felt a little distraught; after all, we are about the same age and I'd recently watched my own mother take the slow fade from bright and bitchy to a milky soup of confused and unrelated word-strings.  So I took time to listen to one of the chattier housekeepers who was often out walking her pair of lazy retrievers. She'd raised 3 children whose mother had just died of a terrible cancer;  the kids were acting out and the father was already dating.  The dogs were not healthy...  one was worse than the other; the housekeeper's accent was slightly Caribbean.  Where were they going for the summer?  I memorized her braids, her part-- the way her left eye was brighter than the right-- her lovely teeth...  Stories... I needed stories.  I stopped to listen along my 10-block way.  I spoke,  I watched... I heard sirens... followed firetrucks and ambulances until they disappeared... noticed baristas and customers inside shops.  They nourish me.  I need them.

Back home after a long evening, I retrieve my 'eye-photos'... I recall things, thoughts I've had... plots I've woven around simple facts and remarks.... nothing remarkable today-- a few confessions and bad date-stories, a friend's itinerary... some phone calls... music... my Latin Hip-Hop class where thankfully I am able to reproduce the chain of steps that constitute a routine... I know whose voice the singer reminds me of, what melody has been stolen... I've written lyrics in my head, forgotten most of them... but still I am able to retrieve, to unpack a few folders.  Of course, at my age my mental knives could use sharpening--- but they function... for today, anyway.  It is like unpacking a small basket of groceries you have gathered for a modest meal.  It is there-- your substitutions, your little economies--  your process that will become something you will make.

It has been a dark year for me and for many of my beloved friends.  I have had hardships and losses-- disappointments, cancellations, betrayals.  I have been hungry and tottered on the edge of envy.  But to speak to someone-- a complex map of neurons and synapses-- of brain power and creativity-- a talented, delicate writer-- and find her stumbling in a pool of her own confusion-- was more than upsetting.  Maybe the worst nightmare of all is the one in which you can't find your way home because you can't find you.  To lose all my orts and scraps of ideas--- to see them as indecipherable, as odd word-bits, not pieces of a puzzle only you can assemble... well, for me that is terrifying.  Not poverty, not failing at love--- even the sorrow of death-- but the concept of living death, of wandering without consolation or direction.

Months ago I asked some auction house about an old drawing which touched me-- its condition... 'Light signs of wear' was their email assessment -- but they'd typo'd and exchanged the g and n.  Light sings of wear, I read.. and my heart opened-- the charred, fragile, disintegrating version I've been carrying-- with its slow uneven beating and its careful mourning hesitations...  well, I felt its light and its tiny soul shaping into some lyrical epiphany for me.  Like an Amen... one of those tight banks of imagery unfurled into something like a miniature parade, a tiny joy.  I will carry this forward for now,
in the name of the writer, Abigail, who has quite lost her place in line.  I will continue.

Camera Obscura

When my adorable son was barely three years old, he came upon his first 'little person' on line with us at the supermarket.  After thoughtfully scrutinizing her, he cried out… 'Look, Mom! It's a girl just turning into a lady!' Of course it is difficult for young children to comprehend the phases of life-- the concept that they are going to grow up, that their own parents and Grandparents were once young-- that this is a slow, gradual, continuous process.

Now that I am entering a late phase of life,  I again find it hard to grasp the lessons of time, to accept the harsh losses and assimilate the regrets of my peers who seem oddly unprepared, despite decades of identical 24-hour daily allotments, for their senior years.  Recently I saw my Dad cross over-- cross, with all its meanings, is the appropriate word, because he wore a tough and cantankerous skin over his purple hero's heart, even in death.

My mother, on the other hand, has deteriorated slowly and with a kind of demented grace.  She sits in a chair like a soft throne, with her thinning white hair pulled up in a tight knot, her famous cheekbones still defining her profile, her skin still soft but papery.  It is her eyes that tell the story-- watery, unfocused-- occasionally expressive but progressively less and less present.  Where are you, Mom-- in some honeymoon dream with your handsome decorated lover lifting you over some threshold, standing above the falls with the deafening roar of water rushing you off into another undertow of memory? It is difficult to know whether the sadness I read into her increasingly blank stare is hers or my own.

From her chairside, I facetime my son-- her favorite grandchild, the nurse-companion assures me-- and the three generations share a moment.  He is quite a man now; time has done its work here, too.  I meet his old school friends on the street and some of them have begun to lose their hair and take on that look of premature disappointment men in their 30's and 40's often wear.  The babies I held so recently are adults now-- the young couples I knew are turning grey, losing their religion.  Witnessing these passages is the way I process my own.  I am relatively unchanged, consistent.  I have different expectations.  I gave up on my vow to own a limestone townhouse on East 70th Street; I no longer want one.  I treasure my things, my books---  thank the angels I can still play bass and write songs and poetry.   I ask for little else-- can survive on the barest minimum in this city where I feel rich without money.  Yes, I was fortunate enough to have had the foresight to invest in an apartment when they were oh-so-cheap… exchanged vacations, movies, restaurants-- for a home, 'ant' that I was, having left my 'grasshopper' husband in the UK with the rest.

When I moved into my building it felt palatial.  We'd come from a studio apartment; my son endured his kindergarten friends remarking he slept in a closet; he did.  The head of our new coop was this elegant, intelligent woman who turned out to have been the fashion editor of the New York Times at a time when this was culturally important.  Her husband was a world-renowned Swedish photographer whose fashion photos were spectacularly smart and iconic.  Since I had a Swedish boyfriend, our kinship was sealed.  They took me under their wing, so to speak.  I adored them.  We shared evenings and ideas.  They were perennial attendees at my all-night musical Thanksgivings, and were treasured and wonderful guests.  Gus, the photographer-- also shared my passion for music.  He came to my gigs-- even the difficult solo ones-- critiqued my songwriting with brutal honesty and a sharp POV… gave his opinion freely of my friends, their work, etc.  He came to school events and photographed the children.  He'd knock on my door at night when I was home and sort through cds and art books.  He brought me albums and tapes and taught me so much about jazz.  When I visited Sweden, I'd bring him small things… I even photographed his boyhood home-- the apple trees and the stream running through his memory.  He was like the father I never experienced.  His love for his own children was boundless and unconditional, and somehow he realized I'd missed out, and generously shared a paternal affection.  I was proud of him.  His choice of wife-- stellar.  More than anything-- his decisive modus operandi-- as though he knew exactly what he thought and wanted and laid it out there.  This is rare.  True honesty and a point of view to go with it.  He attended coop meetings and harshly criticized injustices.  He supported me in my crusades and shared my sorrows without pity.  As a couple, they were the emotional roof over my head upstairs.

As he got older, he was a little more cantankerous-- scolded my friends at my own table, announced he disliked people to their face… knocked on my door and demanded that I cook him Swedish meatballs, bake him cookies-- insisted on eating on my sofa where he left stains and spilled wine.  Whatever was on my stereo, he would take it off and put on either Bud Powell or Art Tatum or his very favorite, Slim Gaillard.  He liked a bit of humor with his jazz.  He loved women, beauty in all forms… and knew how to convey a message with an image.  During the last year, he began to pocket small things from my apartment.  I caught him in the act once, and he responded, without remorse,  'You don't NEED this.  You don't even notice it!'  It was as though he was aware our time was a little foreshortened, and he needed some souvenirs.  He was becoming greedy of moments as the sand ran down in his hourglass.  I, too.

Last week he passed away.  My grief is disproportionate; after all, I am not even a relative.  To their children, with whom I am not nearly as intimate, I can only express sympathy and condolences.  To his wife, who somehow understands my attachment, well.. I will cherish the future hours we can hopefully spend together, sharing ideas, like two women.  She is the maternal role model I never had; the enduring, amazing wife-now-widow.  I will listen and learn what I can, while she is here and generous with her evenings.

Recently an aging fashion designer stopped me on the street and asked for them.  They were quite the 'it' couple in their day, he always assures me, and generally accompanies this with an anecdote or two.  This time, for some reason, he graphically described the palpable chemical attraction one could sense between them in their prime.  For some of us, imagining people in their 80's and 90's as the Rihanna or Brad Pitt of their era-- well, it takes imagination… but I have learned now… such is time.  These waves crashing onshore at this moment, the surfers riding this crest, the shells and animals and fossils that we find in their shallow temporary graves at the water's edge-- will be less than memory in mere minutes.  All our selfies and photos-- well, they are just digital sand.

The images Gus left behind-- both photographic and realtime-- are etched in my memory.  The photographs are fortunately ingrained in the internet and in books; he has left a hefty legacy and will not be forgotten.  It is his persona that has left a mark on me-- the in-your-face direct line to his mind-- his affection, his humor-- his laugh, not to mention his gorgeous physical presence and unique style even into his 90's-- his personal fashion and his pride, and his compassion-- his unequivocal appreciation for whatever I had made, and the example he set as a father, a husband… and a friend.  I grieve for selfish reasons, as one does.  Last night, in tribute… I reached for my Slim Gaillard… and it had vanished.  Dearest Gus.

Exchange

I live on the edge of two neighborhoods… on the cusp, on the border.  It suits me.  I am close to the park and short blocks from grand homes and institutions.  I am also two blocks from the projects.   Across the street from me, my neighbors have an East Harlem zip-code, although I'll wager all of them have a better income than I do. Personally I spend most neighborhood-time going north and east-- past the projects-- exploring bodegas, playgrounds, small bakeries and shops, listening to languages besides English, browsing among vegetables and fruits used in Mexican recipes,  reading labels in Spanish.   Even the Christmas decorations have a different flavor.

At this point in life, I am spending more and more time alone.  I walk; I think; I soliloquize and invent… I may even talk to myself.  I wander-- down strange and familiar streets, into places; when I am alone my ear is sharper-- I hear things outside and inside my own head.  It''s as though I dare myself to become lost in my own city--- to lose myself, to become someone else, in a way-- like a character in my own story… a kind of odd controlled schizophrenia; I leave my house and turn left and suddenly I am anonymous and unknown.  I blend in and I am simply a woman.  No one greets me or looks at me… I am free, in a way-- unencumbered and clear.  It rests me… it provides my blank canvas.

I think I've always craved some kind of solitude-- even the kind you have in a group.  I like people but am reluctant to commit myself to any society that excludes me from other choices. Maybe it was my dysfunctional family (we all have them) and their failure at honesty-- but I never feel that I completely belong anywhere.  Even marriage felt odd to me-- it required my husband convincing me this would be a good thing… and besides, I'd be making someone incredibly happy and giving up nothing.  It seemed to make sense.. and I got to cross another border-- to belong to two countries, as I chose-- and that suited me… but the boundaries of marriage never felt right to me.  Maybe I was a terrible wife, but other women encroached on the walls of my own marriage-- my husband failed to protect me, and I left.  Motherhood was quite another issue-- but I was still someone's daughter, someone's lover, someone's sister… I could still live between identities, go from neighborhood to neighborhood-- play in bands and enjoy my son's basketball games with pride.

It's possible that solitude gives us clarity… in my case, the acceptance of my own penchant for straddling borders--- for being two people, in a way-- the one who walks and the one who observes--  the speaker and the listener.   At my age, I notice I am more blunt, more honest.  I say things directly; occasionally I offend people.  I see my own peers walking around clearly burdened with their pasts.  We have all experienced so much; for some, they are stooped with the weight of it, fearful that little will happen in coming years to balance or complement their life.

My son's friend asked me to help him return a ring he bought his fiancée a few years back.  It's such a beautiful thing-- it's vintage-y and unique.   He lost his Mom recently, and maybe that somehow altered him; he also knows I've returned rings and changed my own mind many times.  It doesn't bother me and I've never really regretted much in my life; it all seems to have brought me to where I am, which is not a bad place.  There's a book of poems I remember reading: Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.  I've always loved that title… as though this is the way I've lived.  Returning the ring-- dealing with the receipt and the agreement and the salespeople… it all seemed so absurd that this intimate, personal decision we make gets so 'handled' by so many people-- the processes-- the invitations, and name changes-- the paperwork and vows and all the guests and witnesses-- the home-buying and the furniture choices… and suddenly it was as though I was so close to my own relationship thresholds-- maybe in the very same store where my fiancé  had bought the lovely ring that had felt to me like a 25-pound weight.

It took my son's friend 5 years: maybe 2 to really believe he'd made the wrong choice, and 3 more to actually find this ultimate closure.  Finality.  He has a new girlfriend now.  When we get older, some loves we realize were addicting, or consuming, or manipulative-- or they looked like someone else, or they reminded you of something, or your best friend talked you into it… or whatever.  And then some affairs look absurd and like some kind of period of insanity.  And after it all, after a lifetime-- there are those moments that shine-- through time, from the half-light of this moment, back to that one… there is still this beauty-- something right and true… and we feel lucky, even though we never held on, that we felt this way.

We have so little present-- all of us.  Just this nanosecond of awareness-- the rest is just a movie-- an invention.  So few of us take the time to appreciate these tiny things we are holding at this moment only-- unless we are on the verge of loss.   We mourn at funerals, we bathe in morning light when we are aware our days are numbered-- we love those we can no longer see, and we miss what we no longer have.  Handing over the ring, I was aware someone else's moments were in my hand briefly--- even the feel of the box-- I could imagine how much it must have meant at the time, and he'd spent many multiples over what was appropriate ('in over his head', as he put it)… but there it was, becoming an item in a shop window for someone else to give their loved one, to become part of someone else's story.  I felt empathetically unburdened.  These symbols never had much credence in my lifetime, as I've said… and the truly spiritual instances of the meaning of marriage are more like star points in the dark liquid sky of my own history.  But then again, I am someone who likes to cross borders, to travel between worlds and rooms and to inhale winter evenings and mix them with older constellations and lyrics I have surely misread or mispronounced… and I emerged, on my way back toward Harlem, to the song of the melting snow, me stepping every block from past to present to future, between worlds.

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

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

It is reunion time, the 40^th anniversary

And you cannot find the station

Months seem out of sequence

You prefer your calendar pages white

A bird outside

Could be just some form of tinnitus

A woman’s mother will not let go until

She has her own child

The blessing is a wound

You may fear that you will not love this baby

And it is with relief that you begin to worry

We seek the missing where there is none

Cut what once was whole

Juvenate before we rejuvenate

As birth is the beginning of loss...

The child is a bandage

A stranger

The first thing my mother could not claim

Memory is shorter these days

Does not contain words like dreaming

Loose and innocence

Surely you will discard mornings, collect sunsets

Thinking it must be Always Safe to Shoot

At Things with Holes

Helping the voices to a kiss

Let the wrong one in, they say

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

Some days you remember this is good

With 3 m’s

Forget the last exam

Discarded postcards

Stamps look unfamiliar

And cheap denominations are

Without meaning

Your belief needs bifocals

Just to see the windshield crack

After all, it could be your eyes

Your glasses…

You must check to feel which you are wearing

After all

A whole day can go by without speaking

Perhaps no one would listen

You slip into a room where someone reads a poem

The author used to stare

Pursue you to the door

Procure your number...

If you had a dog you might forget to walk it

Some days these things worry you

Some days you worry that they do not

Next week it might be Christmas

Holidays pile up like ex-boyfriends

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

From a desk on Parent-teacher night

The dirt is now forgivable...

Dust reassures that weeks still pass

Windows are troubling, or perhaps mirrors

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

Bloody but you cannot say stained

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

in the afternoon light

The mail tells you

een summoned to You have been summoned to testify for solitude

Opening the envelope brings

The vague ghost of someone’s spit

Adds  to the suspicion that someone has vomited

And hidden in your downstairs

Which has spread to the bedroom

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

But you are afraid he will dislike youtude:

Or worse, obey the unpretty version you’ve become

Despising your fear

Ignore the stench...

Not just overnight

You have become a sort of weed

Poverty seeps in like damp

You cannot wash it out

It has changed me, you apologize

To the dog who has not come

No matter how many times you whistled his name

Barked his pride and prayed for rain

Bleeders, Repeaters...

I always dread Mother’s Day. No matter how many years pass, I wave away the wishes, as though I’ve been faking motherhood. I’ll always be a daughter first.

I keep thinking about my mother-- -the memory thing... like she hasn’t quite regressed but is in this sort of impossible labyrinth of multiple-ending thought process. No way out.

I keep testing my own brain--- going over things.

She counts the photographs in the bedroom. When I call her—she goes in there, and counts the photos like hours, like days... like some kind of time-banister she can hold as she walks steps. A kind of litany.

She doesn’t use words like brocade, ineluctable. Maybe she never did. I made assumptions. One of my flaws, she would have said. She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t want to call attention to her lapses. A kind of pride of madness—a demure madness.
Liz Taylor.. she said, the other day.. .then nothing.

I should have taken more pictures... I was always worried about wasting film. I always hated those deals you’d get from the schools--- with 16 wallet-size photos and 5 or 6 4x 5’s, and 2 8 x 10s... all identical, so your child looked ‘packaged’ and cheap.

Liz Taylor had congestive heart failure. A broken heart. Trouble of love. Purple eyes signify bleeders. They fail at things because people expect too much. Expectations of love are not love. Then again, people who exceed our expectations make us uncomfortable.

I bought some furniture on Craigslist. I was too embarassed to reject anything. I felt sorry for every single person whose apartment I entered. Apologetic...You are buying things, not people, my friend reminds me. I am the one who cries on busses...who reads the Straphangar’s Poetry with the obscene grafitti on it and then tears up... .

I miss my husband, I think. Which one, my friend asks.
Both of them. I don’t know. Life is so complicated. My portrait will have three faces. Pathetic.

What do you do to mourn? Make a flute from someone’s bone? Weave a shirt from their hair, wear teeth around your neck? You need something of theirs... you need this...But we are all something which will blow in the wind...

I had this dream... my mother was outside in some kind of windstorm, planting dead flowers.
I’ll tell you about miracles, I said to the window...
It’s all about breathing...
all in the breath...
I woke up thinking about
the way the e changes everything.

I should have taken more pictures... I shouldn’t have worried about wasting the film...
My dead baby...she is missing.
The boy on the bus--
When I was in my 20’s, a high-school senior-- -he followed me –every day, for weeks and weeks...he rode the bus and stared at me with unbearable passion. He had
a curved penis...
My dead baby... I loaned him money to get an abortion for some girl...his dead baby...the way he looked at me on the bus... every afternoon, until I couldn’t bear his longing. This kind of thing will never ever ever happen again.

I repeat the name Kemba Walker---like a mantra... he was in my son’s bunk at camp.
He had the name – a winning name...his mother is proud.

My mother has a sad name. A nostalgic, old-fashioned name. Breathe, I think. Breathe until I can tell her I love her, which I can’t do. It’s complicated.
Her caretaker, she tells me...is not her ‘type’. Neither am I.

Here you go, spill your vein onto this paper.