What We Sew

In the current version of my life with its inefficiencies and endless unfinished book projects, home improvements on hiatus, music in my head, itineraries and symphonic lapses... it occurred to me to attend to the small of pile of 'things for mending' I keep on a bench in the bedroom.  I am surprisingly able to thread a tiny-eyed needle and one by one I attempted to manage missing buttons, small legging holes, cloth strap repairs, unravelling sweater edges, etc.  There was something not just satisfying but 'connecting' about it.  I thought, of course, of my mother, who sewed and knit with great mastery and excellence.  She taught me-- patiently and humbly, with that sense of one woman handing down generational secrets of the sex.

My mother's sewing box-- like a kind of doctor's bag filled with threads, needles, patches, ribbons and bands... pin cushions, and most memorable of all-- the darning egg on a stick which resembled a rattle or Caribbean percussion instrument.  With this she deftly repaired holes in socks; my father had several pairs hand-knitted by mothers and in-laws during the war-- argyles and striped... woolen for warmth and insulation inside his cold paratrooper boots as he marched or jumped into surf and swamp. Why, I would ask her, do new and few and pew not rhyme with 'sew'? I am not smart, she would tell me.  You will be smarter. 

Who repairs socks these days?  My son often disposes of them after sports; I used to buy them in huge packs of a dozen.  I don't have a 'darner'.  My mother was given an old Singer machine-- one of the ones with a kind of foot treadle.  She never got the hang of it, but preferred to hem, baste and hand-backstitch in what I can only recall as something approaching perfection.  Those nights by her side-- with my girls' painted wicker basket and the colored spools-- well, they felt so 19th century, in a good way.  And it is not coincidence that my recent sewing evening was close to Mother's Day. I felt her presence more strongly than usual, as though she was approving of my feminine task, and the metaphorical resonance of a needle and thread, like a kind of penance.

Recently the discontinuation of the penny was announced; like many things these days, more trouble than worth.  We had our little banks as children; mine was a kind of ceramic doll-head-- very 19th century, with the porcelain hair done up in a bun, the coin slot in the back, and the topknot itself a pin cushion.  So my bank had a duel use.  Sometime in the 70's I went to my mother's house and retrieved and dumped the bank; they were all wheat pennies... quite old... I have them still, in a box here... waiting to be devalued, I suppose.

Our lives in those days were filled with things-- things had the properties of people, in a way... we looked at them , we took them to bed, we spoke to them, we passed them around.  To make a telephone connection, one had to pick up a heavy handle, rotary dial a bunch of numbers, extend a curly cord a foot or two and sit, close to the wall jack, speaking in one end and listening with the other. 

In the 1960's and 70's, women in the city often had an answering service.  When you left your apartment, you dialed in and somehow magically the operators would receive your calls.  When you returned you'd phone in and they'd read out the messages.  You had a little relationship with your operator; mine was Grace-- a different woman at night, but Grace knew everything.  The cost of this service was small; you''d send a monthly check and they'd clip the hand-written message sheets together in your bill.  Besides her perfect cursive, I had no idea how tall Grace was-- old or young, black or white. 

One could easily go a day now without actually speaking to anyone... our lives are so enmeshed by social media and all of these time-consuming communication platforms.  I have only a few friends who make telephone calls; we still have landlines although these get little use. I work at a gallery Saturdays; it specializes in vintage mid-century French design.  People are most fascinated when the furniture is staged with period objects.. old radios and televisions... it seems that much of our nostalgia revolves around objects.  Our former lives were filled with things-- notebooks, pencils, rulers, book bags, stuffed animals-- scrapbooks and photographs, postcards and stamp collections-- souvenirs, dolls, shells, rocks.  

I worry about losing my memory; my mother lost hers, could not identify many of the photographs she loved to pour over in her album.  My sister cruelly destroyed mine, effectively wiping parts of my own memory by removing associated images.  I wonder when I will forget my grade school teachers, the seating order, the classroom numbers... my childhood dogs who haunt my dreams.  It will happen, one day.. or I will not recognize my own neighbors and friends.. I will forget song lyrics and confuse Beethoven and Mozart sonatas... 

As addled as she was in later life, my mother did not forget how to sew. I wish I had more of the skirts and dresses she hemmed with such skill, the knitted sweaters and the vests, for warmth.  She sat at the piano, at the end, surprised by the sound of the notes, and for seconds her fingers formed chords, but then it all disintegrated.

We had these handmade rag dolls-- one side was a sleeping face, and the other awake.  We'd change their bonnet in the morning, as kind of wake-up ritual, and put them to bed at night. I wonder how many children will save their obsolete pennies in a porcelain bank, will learn to sew with needle and thread and will be able to identify a darning egg.  For a couple of hours the other night, I created a 'mended' pile and felt accomplished in a way-- my stack of repaired patched leggings and tights felt like a kind of badge.  My mother might have nodded her approval.

So many things have been lost along the way-- left in other countries, missing or stolen.  I know as we age we do not log the things we forget; they simply disappear without ceremony or conscience. This terrifies me... who will remind me of what I no longer recall? My mother wore a thimble; I never mastered the art of using one.. kind of like playing the bass with a pick... I still have a thumbpick Johnny Winter gave me once... another of these tangibles that seem more meaningful as life goes on.  One watches celebrity possessions being auctioned for vast sums these days... even clothing.  It seems when human company becomes less available, things provide comfort... connection. And some of them, like the poor penny, while non-functional, do not die. 

I have no daughter to whom I can hand-down my dwindling skills.  My son will not pick up a needle and thread and remember moments. We do have some hand-made souvenirs and old photos-- paper ones. My old rag doll still sits on the bed in which he has not slept for decades. She has a clearly sewn heart beneath her old clothing; it serves. 

UNCOMMON SCENTS

The cusp of April/May in New York City is seasoned by foliage... in the parks, on the most unexpected streets where gutters are stalked by rats and vermin, garbage spillage is a constant... the breathtaking arcades of pink and white could be staging a coronation.  Central Park is at its gala-finest... And then, the pink and white rain of petals. But summer is coming... 

My country friends send me photos of their blooming lilac bushes. This seems sort of a Mother's Day reminder; while mine loved the color yellow, lilacs surrounded our house, grew in profusion without coaxing to touch the second-story and enter through open windows. Their sweetness was almost overpowering... they brought wasps and bees... the cuttings downstairs were overkill.  

I've always thought children, like dogs, have incredibly sensitive noses.  Young teenagers are beginning to discover scents-- their own, their peers', the kind that comes in a bottle.  Home memories are so often olfactory... people's houses had a characteristic scent-- our kitchen, the faintest buttery ghost of piecrust and cinnamon... it permeated the house, like perfume.  

My mother rarely wore perfume, although she had a collection of seductive bottles on her vanity-- for some reason they had to be French: Chanel, Arpège, Givenchy, Guerlain.  I've written before about playing with these... the exotic bottles in their boxes and velvet casings... the prisms from the lamp-crystals making rainbows on the ceiling.  I experimented by pouring them together, mixing them.  I was banished to my room for weeks.

My older sister who had precocious boy-experience wore Shalimar. We'd lie on the bed on spring nights like tonight, when we shared a room, and the scent of lilacs mixed with her perfume is as vivid a memory as her fascinating stories about boys-- their hair, their bodies and their faces.  Boys in middle school smelled like Old Spice and Canoe-- English Leather.  It was awful to me.  Some of them put stuff in their hair... 

In 1970 I thought I fell in love with an older boy.  I was 16; he was 23 and had been to Vietnam.  His body was ripped and tan, his hair was long and streaked with what looked like gold.  His eyes were blue and his teeth were crooked.  He was bad; he flirted with my mother and she warned me.  I was a toy, she said;  he'll chew you up and spit out the bones... but that only made it worse.  I lost sleep, I fantasized... I played Van Morrison over and over... Astral Weeks... Free... we went to concerts... he drove a Karmann Ghia that smelled of patchouli and hash. 

Patchouli.  All through the 1970's; I can almost smell it on old photographs.  My great young loves all used it like an aphrodisiac. Patchouli and leather, carseats, grassy lawns, bedsheets and sleeping bags... 

The first sign of Covid for me was the anosmia.  I had a bottle of bleach, was trying to disinfect my guitar and equipment I'd had on a crowded, infected pre-quarantine subway and realized I could stick my nose in the bottle... and smell nothing.  Even my doctor, mid-March 2020, was baffled.  It went on.. and on... for weeks and weeks.  Nothing.  Food was strange, coffee was terrible.  I thought I could taste grapes, or I imagined I could... but everything else was dull and wooden.  After several months bad smells-- rotting garbage, burned food-- began to process as this strange ginger-cookie scent.  It was weird.  I was grieving, losing friend after friend-- isolated.  I walked in the park... no lilacs, no roses, no spring rain moist-earth grassy fragrance.  Nothing.  Mother's Day was without joy.

My 12-string guitar, as if in pandemic sympathy, imploded.  In early summer I borrowed Alan's Taylor... I carried it home with the broken handle I knew so well... it was heavy, that case... it took a few days for me to have the courage to open it... and when I did, there it was... the scent of Alan-- absolute and vivid, in the room.. like a genie from a bottle.  I cried.  I took it out and played Walk Away Renée, the way he used to... in D.  After I played for a while, I put it back in the case... but the scent was on me... the sense of Alan.  

For many months I had this souvenir.  I took it out at 3 AM nearly every night; I wrote songs, I remembered, I cried sometimes... I talked to him.  At a certain time, it lost its magic.  My 12-string was repaired and I returned the Taylor which traveled to Virginia in a car. I began to recover my olfactory sense, but like my life, things were not the same.  My coffee still doesn't resonate, try as I do to sample different beans and roasts.  But I can smell my neighbor's brew at 6 AM when I am still awake playing my restored 12-string.  I'm not sure which neighbor it is but I am sure they are awake and brewing.  

As for me, I can now smell the lilacs both in the park and in my mind. Today I was in a shop and I heard 'Me and Mrs. Jones', my mother's favorite song from the 1970's, when men still flirted with her and her dreams went beyond kitchen narratives. Today I am so much older than she was at that moment in time... when I bought her the record so she could play it over and over.  I could not stop the tears.  While I have been a mother for thirty-three years, it will always be her holiday and it will always smell of lilacs.

March Sadness

I've binged on basketball this weekend to the point of exhaustion.  My alma mater has slipped into Cinderella-hood with an unexpected victory and I cried out and fist-pumped in front of the screen my son forced me to install way back when he was still competing.  It's fantastic, I must admit.  I am fully committed to the madness, the passion-- the heartbreaking disappointments and the wins-- deserved or not. And it's free.

It was March when I began this blog-- exactly sixteen years ago, with the faint hope that leaving a trail of written crumbs might entice someone to discover a persona I was not quite sure I was. At that moment my son's hoop dreams were real and like a full moon on his teenage horizon.  I was a NYC basketball mother-- no car, but I faithfully subway'ed it to every gym in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan-- to church basements and city parks-- for tournaments, games, competitions.  I yelled my head off and jumped around and embarrassed the hell out of him while he mostly ignored me or referred to me as his grandmother at Riverside Church. Uptown many of the parents were 15/16 years older than their kids... some still had hoop dreams of their own.  

These days he's more of a bettor and an analyst.  He's aged out of playing competitively and he's mature enough to realize his contribution is maybe managerial.  The business of sports has changed, too, since he was in high school.  The stakes are higher, the field is not quite so level. It's complicated, as they say.

March always had a sense of mystery for me-- our Mom read to us at night, and one of her favorites was Little Women.  It didn't occur to me that the March sisters simply had a common last name; it was more of a designation, like the March hare I knew well from repeated Alice in Wonderland narrations.  Beware the Ides of March, I recalled from some rhyme my Irish nanny recited.  We had the piano sheet music for The Funeral March of a Marionette which gave me creeps-- how can you know when a puppet is dead, I asked my sister many times?  

It seemed fitting that I was feeling under the weather this past week. Like a commemoration of the 2020 covid scourge which took my Alan but left me here forever changed.  It was exactly three years since that Ides of March when he'd had symptoms, and mine arrived on St. Patrick's day, like a virus snake.  

Tuesday is the randomly designated beginning of spring.  Today's chill reminded us not to take things for granted.  It occurred to me that my son's father was born in March-- maybe this very day.  Surely there was a time when I baked a cake and celebrated.  The first time I fell in love was March.  But I can't seem to draw it out of the funereal doldrums that ring from its very name.  There will always be an Alan-shaped hole, and terrible pandemic remembrances that sparked a chain of events I could not intercept.  

Like most of these posts, I begin with an idea and stray far enough that I cannot recall my original intent.  Basketball.  Madness.  It's a young sport.  The basket.  It's simple.  Last week in the cold rain there were boys playing in relative darkness on one of the uptown courts.  They were inspired by the tournament, maybe.  They were soaked and the wet ball on puddled pavement was hard to manage.  I stood in the streetlamp shadow and watched them like an old crow. The documentary Hoop Dreams was on some cable channel at 3 AM... I stayed awake until dawn watching.  It was depressing, yes... but also the time-- before cellphones, before the internet-- felt innocent and more real.  The uniforms were funny. The mothers-- the relentless routine of raising children-- the vicarious, deep disappointments... where are they now?

The banks are ailing, the world is in turmoil, but the games go on... Sport, before television, was the true narcotic entertainment of the people.  We go from season to season, from World Series to World Cup to Super Bowl to March Madness.  Admittedly I dread the coming of spring.  I dislike daylight savings time-- I hoard long dark mornings and early sunset... reading by candlelight and the pointy scent of winter starlight.  It occurred to me today, had I stayed in England, today would be Mother's Day.  For the Brits, it maybe sweetens a dark month.  

In the park this evening, a fat red robin stared me down.  He was bold and a little early, I thought.  His breast was the color of blood. If April is the cruelest month, I asked him silently, what can we name March?  If the year was a deck of cards, we'd surely be a black suit. Tonight I watched Gonzaga beat out a heroic TCU.  It was heartbreaking-- they played so hard, the underdogs.  We're all underdogs... there's a rare victory out there if we can find it... and there's tragedy; there's April, with its cruelty, and for another ten days, the richly unpredictable madness of March. 

Poetic Relief, Mother's Day....

NIAGARA

Some nights no matter what I do

the words come out in red.

‘I’m going in…’

something a soldier might say,

preface to a rescue …

I don’t want to hear the rest…

a child, this time,

playing a game that he will lose,

but there will be more…

there will be the fishing-out part,

more words in red.

I’d been thinking all day about

our trip to Niagara Falls…

for me a kind of apostrophe

at the end of the world…

between 2 chasms,

a dance of water

I was unprepared for.

Did they have to shine those rainbow lights

like a floor show

that makes it all ridiculous?

And how the two sides didn’t match,

but one makes the other more absurd.

And how we felt a bit sheepish,

to cross over,

forced to show our passports

just to look backward at the side we’d left,

wondering if the water was deeper, faster,

the boatride cheaper,

the humid night one hour less oppressive.

My camera lens was wet with spray,

our hair was damp and limp

and the falls were exhausting.

Nothing, nowhere, was a souvenir I could relate to.

Still,

I couldn’t tear myself away:

the scale, the noise

cheap snacks in the shape of falls, whatever that is,

endless wet rainbows and the noise,

the cameras 

photographing terror, the noise

and everywhere a certain boaty smell

of death or rot.

I didn’t fail to note the irony

of Iceland, where the falls went up.

To a soundtrack of squawking ducks,

that sulphury smell,

you asked me to marry you.

But we too were on the way up…

or at least you thought we were.

Still,

I felt like throwing up,

the way I did at Niagara after inhaling the spray

for so many hours

or maybe it was the ice cream I craved

like an antidote

which seemed to annoy you

though by then everything about me

annoyed you

except of course the sex.

And after days of driving through

tired dialogue rehearsals

and your famous car soundtracks,

restless sleep and petty disagreements

were all the foreplay

we could muster.

At Niagara we were definitely

on the way down.

It pushed us to a kind of edge—

the sight of it, the nauseous humidity,

the gradual and thick surprise of night,

the ringed moon like a prop,

the distances you had to walk

just to get away from the crowds,

the whining children, fat families eating

always eating—

and the smell of Canadian beer,

the crushed sun-heated cans,

overflowing garbage pails,

motel disgust.

I kept trying to imagine my young mother

still a virgin

between 2 continents,

on the edge of a world,

as high as she had ever been,

as far from home, as close to a future,

the rushing,

and her lover with his purple hearts.

She must have felt safer in his arms than I in yours.

The blue raincoats were a disappointment.

Bagged, and helpless and absurd in the filthy

sightseeing boat—

it was anything but romantic.

And still I couldn’t leave.

They say things have not changed

so much.  I don’t remember men

with beards and golf shirts

telling us from late-night TV sets

how much they earned

this month alone selling real estate

in spare evening moments.

In those days these hours were for love,

radio broadcasts,

front-stoop cigarettes, for sweating,

glass of lemonade or gin-and-tonic,

emergencies.

Now these hours are cheap, for TV sale.

Nothing is real—certainly not estate,

and not these over-groomed

glib strangers who find their

way into our sad bedroom

to tart up otherwise naked hours

with unbearable reminders of how

at home despite safe quilted beds

our children pay men to pierce holes

in those tender bodies

I have stayed awake so many nights

to save, to heal, to wipe away their sweat and tears,

to touch.

I pretend not to care, although there will be a toll

for this, a punishment

for other sins I will commit tonight,

permission to undo, which I refuse.

Things hurt more, the social worker said,

at this age.

I’m going in, he said,

Goodbye.

But first removed his coat,

my sweet boy,

with no description.

After all, who wasn’t once 5’2”

110 pounds?

So I have a new man now---

love doesn’t hurt

the way it did with you.

Maybe I was piercing myself

while you looked away.

I know he doesn’t open letters

like you did,

read my poor tired words

with anything but obligation.

I am sick of knowing

you define your life as happy

depending on some woman or other,

how close you are to tracking her,

that’s when you feel the best.

I gave you up for this:

a man who doesn’t fight with me

about the Falls, about car music,

about hurting,

doesn’t read over my shoulder,

cares little for my poems,

fucks with experience not desperation.

Still,

some nights no matter what I do,

the words come out in red.

Why did he pick that

one part of the river?

I’m going in, he said,

a fireman’s last words.

If it had been Niagara,

would he have jumped,

would he have as considerately

left his coat,

a legacy or proof he handed over

to his sister

so they would believe her?

At least they believed her.

And things hurt more at this age,

the man said,

although they go on piercing

and cutting

and drowning in dark rivers,

and hating you for saving them,

because I would have jumped

into the coldest waters

to hold anyone’s hurting child close

but it would not have comforted

like the sucking down.

I am an outsider,

lack the strength.

I am the Falls.

These children do not want

our pathetic passion,

our blue raincoats,

our blankets and cameras.

They need to jump

some nights, no matter

what you do, see

words come out in red.

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.

HAPPY MOTHAH'S DAY

A friend of mine needs to put his poor aging mother into an assisted living facility. It seems she’s spent her entire life caretaking—first it was her parents, then her inlaws--- kids, ailing husband. So now she’s shed her human burdens, it's finally time to kick up her heels, and hey, she’s 89 years old and can’t quite make it safely down the garden path on her own. The cruel irony of timing seems a bit like getting divorced from your jealous, smothering and non-supporting husband only to find he’s left you with a contagious and incurable STD.

And what exactly is ‘assisted’ living? The modern urban lifestyle of every single yuppie wife/mother in my building? They’ve got cooks, dogwalkers, babysitters, private yoga instructors, masseurs, piano tuners, window washers, caterers, decorators, art advisors, accountants, tutors, psychologists, nutritionists. I could go on. Hairdressers, stylists, makeup consultants. And if that’s not enough they’ve got magazine subscriptions. Oprah. One of them informed me in the elevator she has a Personal Assistant. For what? To write out the placecards for her pretentious dinner parties? To pick up her dry-cleaning? Program her Blackberry? Because she can’t seem to press the buttons in the elevator with her freshly-manicured nails. Wouldn’t it be nice, she sighed, if there was a ‘remote’?

I think I am afflicted with some kind of crippling disease. Or else I am a blue-collar control freak. Because I can’t remember getting a single grocery delivery in my life, including in my ninth month. I clean my own house. Maybe it’s not post-modern sterile like hers, but I’ve always had a certain discomfort factor sharing my sexual secrets with a woman who washes my sheets. And don’t think these housekeepers who clean up for Naomi and Paris don’t yap about their personal hygiene to their girlfriends. They do.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable passing the personal buck to some poor schmuck whose lot in life is one rung below my own poor-schmuck status. Plus I can do it myself. And I do. I nursed my own babies and changed every single diaper. I held screaming infants while I had dysentery or food poisoning because there was no one else there. I washed every load of laundry and cleaned every bathtub. I don’t even have a dishwasher. Okay. Maybe I have a martyr complex. Maybe I look ten years older than these new urban princesses whose most challenging manual chore is text-messaging.

I sound like my father who had to roll out the tennis courts and put up the net before he could play. I feel like whining ‘ Why, when I was a kid, we had to rotary-dial. We had to wait seconds for the number to engage. We had to pull vinyl disks out of 2 difficult sleeves and place them on a turntable-spindle with an arm and a needle. It took several moves. And we had to flip them over halfway in the middle. Then we listened. We actually listened to five consecutive tracks by the same artist.'

And maybe while I was lifting amplifiers and riding busses and hand-washing dishes, I was thinking about stuff. I was listening to something inside. Maybe. I feel different from these people. When I speak to them, they look at one another as though I am using a foreign language. They think I am crazy. Ready for assisted living. But not the kind their husbands provide for them. The kind my friend’s Mom will receive from the state after all those years of scrubbing floors and changing diapers and cooking for the sick and elderly.

My 17-year-old son went to his Junior Prom last night. It was an agonizing process; first clearing the academic roadblocks and detentions which were supposed to block his privileges. Then the on-again, off-again girlfriend thing, she holding the carrot like the manipulative bitch she is. Then the clothing decisions, the haircut, the shoes, the choice of belt, tie or no tie…sleepless nights, IM fighting with the girl, endless teenage agony. It was a party on a boat. $90 I could have used toward a root canal. Four weeks of groceries. At 9 PM the sky suddenly opened into a deluge. Everyone was soaked and soggy and freezing. They ended up drinking 40’s at some guy’s house downtown until 3 AM. My version, this is, because he rarely if ever speaks to me. One word. That facial shudder like even acknowledging my presence is hazardous to his health. Painful. Toxic. He actually came in exhausted and depressed. ‘It sucked’ was all I got out of him, for the $90. Mother’s Day today. For this one, I'll consider myself lucky if he simply avoids me. I'll make it easy and avoid him, too.

I don’t have the heart to tell him that a lot of life sucks. The more you look forward to something, the bigger the letdown. Sometimes. Then again, I ended up in some art gallery today and they just happened to offer me a glass of champagne with fresh strawberries and I ran into an old friend who bought me the best cup of coffee I’ve had in weeks. Even the weather was a gift. The city was sparkling and crisp and there is nothing like a New York spring Sunday. My guitar sounded great tonight even with the old strings. I worked out in my gym with women who don’t have kids, and I kind of felt sorry for them. It’s good to be a mother. Even if your kids ignore you. I’m old enough to know any prom will probably suck if you wait around for something great to happen. I didn’t get the Hallmark life. But hey, I can play music. And I can share a laugh when our local homeless guy wishes the assisted-living mothers from my building a Happy Mother’s Day, and once they are safely in their taxi, sends them off with a little hand-jive and a ‘See you Lateh Mothah-Fuckahs’.