Rust Never Sleeps

To distract myself tonight I turned on television... couldn't help checking in on this new Alec Baldwin reality show.  It's been so over-advertised-- teased, excerpted, meme'd and photo-bombed on various platforms, and yet we New Yorkers and NYC expats love seeing our city on camera, in nearly any context. Urban selfies.  

Years ago I double dated with Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin-- the first one, Kim.  We were at a long table in a trendy Tribeca restaurant with a few intimate friends.  They sat at opposite ends; it was obvious from their awkward interaction that either they'd not quite recovered from a pre-dinner argument or maybe they'd interrupted an intimate evening to come out.  Something was off.  I sat by her-- acknowledged one of the most beautiful women in cinema, at that moment.  Honestly, I couldn't stop looking at her face, with little make-up and ungroomed hair; she kept wrapping herself in a sort of shawl, as though she wanted to disappear.  He, on the other hand, was chatty and charming-- funny, using that voice actors learn to project confidence. Like a pointed tone.  

For some reason, that night, I was on the cusp of a new relationship and the tension depressed me. They were so familiar-- it was like a movie and I was somehow part of it. I couldn't shake her emotional shadow... which turned out to be sort of an omen.  I was a new mother and they were maybe not even quite married.

Seeing his aging, subdued persona tonight was surprising. His wife, obviously, was the host and star of the Baldwin show, despite the fact that her raison d'être is her famous husband. I realize he needs a PR renovation... and who wants to put the father of seven small children in prison for eighteen months? But Hilaria with her affectations and fake Spanish accent which she attempted to explain in the minutes I watched, well... I'm not a customer. Like most reality shows since the Loud Family era, it seemed scripted and planned and awkward and cringeworthy most of the time.  Yes, the kids are cute... and the looming cloud of the shooting incident which was clearly devastating was compelling... but it seemed somehow inappropriate for her to speak of it.  The family 'angle' is surely the most convincing plea for innocence... and as always, it is moot to keep on punishing for a tragic incident... but someone died.  The boundary between film and real life was crossed, and there is no happy ending here.  I felt manipulated by his terrible appearance, her perfect little stagey mother-moments. I can only wonder how the family of the deceased will view this.  I've had quite enough and it didn't sway me one way or the other.  At filming, the jury was still out.  Now that he's been found innocent, is there any relief? 

Lately I've been trying to find a way to honor my deceased father whose war record and heroism left him with lifetime psychological scars.  It was often tough simply being around him; as a father he was short-tempered and preoccupied. The more I read about Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, his difficult path through the war, the more I wonder that he functioned at all.  The killings, the bloodshed, the constant danger and massive destruction. He witnessed not just mutilation and death but stepped on it, parachuted down into it... experienced wounds and undoubtedly overwhelming, unrelenting anxiety.

Yet here is a Hollywood-handsome man-- with a wonderful supportive birth family, and a brood of his own here... maybe a difficult older daughter from the first marriage... but here he is in this perfect Hamptons paradise... accused of manslaughter... from what.. playing with real guns on a fake set? Is PTSD  the same diagnosis as psychiatrists assign lifetime war veterans who were ordered to shoot at maybe innocent people who were simply on the opposite side, and therefore merited death?  Kill or be killed is a conundrum and the very crux of war.

What is wrong with all of us, we humans who settle international vendettas with death and violence... who make statements by destroying monuments, who negotiate with mutilated flesh and the killing of children? There are people just blocks away shooting one another, threatening... angry. It might be more compelling to have us consider these consequences.  Comparatively, Alec is just a broken man.  The spinning narrative is how can we punish seven innocent children by removing their father and leaving them to bear the stigma of this tragedy?  It doesn't seem productive.  Nor does this reality show which hopefully will not annoy the family of Halyna Hutchins with its stilted portrayal of the privileged, happy life she will never have.

A weapon of destruction is not safe in any hands... it's not the manufacturers, it's the people.  It's us.  There is film-- a movie-- acting.. and then there are guns.  It seemed the 'Rust' set was more of a horrifying reality show than anything we will see from the Baldwins this season.

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

My son, as well as billions of other statistically-conscious tech subscribers, counts his daily steps.  Apparently, without arranging this,  he demonstrated how the little phone he forces on me automatically records my every move, and probably some other things, although now that I'm finding it 'parental' and invasive, I am careful to leave it home often.  My son, competitive by nature, easily exceeds 20,000 steps daily.  This includes some morning runs... but still, it's fairly impressive. 

My father was a pacer.  He paced the hallways of our home; unless he was drinking and reading the papers, he was generally fretting about something.  While he drove or commuted by train, I'd walk with him when he allowed-- on a holiday, to a funeral or service... he was impatient, and for a man who was average height, he had a huge stride.  I ran to keep up with him-- or I skipped, or side-hopped; he paid little attention to me.  I can only imagine if they'd had cellphones back then, he'd be walking, like his grandson, constantly checking market prices or news.  Bad news seemed to engage him more.  It was as though he waited for this-- he took odds against better outcomes; the consolation prize for downturns was a sort of private victory. 

Every Memorial Day since his death, I try to take some moments to honor his difficult legacy: there are the medals and citations-- the wounds which healed, and the ones that didn't. In my childhood home attic, among scrap books and memorabilia, were boxes of his various uniforms.  On top sat a pair of brown leather paratrooper boots-- the final pair he was wearing on the beaches of Normandy, and the pair he wore when they liberated the camp at Dachau.  The boots were wrinkled and scuffed; the heels were well worn, and the weight of them was considerable.  I'd put them on, as a girl, and could barely lift my feet. We never took these things downstairs. I'm not sure he ever looked at them... he rarely went up, except to adjust the huge house fan or to whack a couple of bats from the eaves.  

We barely spoke from Middle School onward.  He was a tough man, with emotional burdens beyond anything I comprehended.  He'd come from a large family of embittered immigrants.  It seemed there was no joy anywhere in his past-- not a single happy photo. In fact, there were no photos, save the official US Army portraits. I was a little unforgiving and tough myself; I had my ideas and my leanings-- my poetry and my art.  None of this interested him. He laid it out one day-- if anything should happen to my mother, my sister and I should pack our bags because it was beyond him to take care of girls.  I took it to heart.

Still, as children do, I struggled. Not just taking two or three steps for every one of his, but to extract even one tiny instant of acknowledgment. My high-school literary magazine chose to publish a drawing I did of his combat boots.  At first I didn't understand that this was my version of a portrait-- a tribute.  He said nothing about it, nor about the poetry that meant much to me. He acknowledged a writing award I won at graduation; it came with a check toward college and that seemed to satisfy him in some way.  The boots obsessed me.  My two friends and I bought old ice-skates and removed the blades with great difficulty.  They were stiff and it was hard to walk-- but we wore them to school, like soldiers.  

I'm reading Tomás Nevinson-- the final brilliant novel from Javier Marías.  One feels a kind of relief in these literary authors that not only assume a kind of common referential canon but are willing to violate it. There is an anecdote, at the beginning, after a terse discussion on the finality of death via guillotine, when he relates the miracle of St. Denis who carried his severed head over five miles to his burial site.  Apparently a woman commented-- it's not the distance, it's the first step that counted.  This becomes a theme-- taking the first step. And the corollary-- the step you didn't take-- the opportunity to assassinate Hitler before he masterminded and enabled the evil Reich nightmare which resulted in not just massive tragedy but consequently my own father's heroic military trajectory. 

My son and his friends do not enlist; nor are they drafted.  They have other wars to fight-- other competitions.  There is sports, in the service of which many kids extract some of the lessons of military training.  On this holiday, we watch endless documentaries and films; every generation has its own demons and its own horrible wars.   In the ceremonies and memorials everything is clean and uniformed and honorable. The way a soldier dies is beyond horrible.  The witnesses-- their comrades-- carry these images forever.  Maybe the most difficult steps my father took in later life were the twelve designated by AA.  While he remained sober, I don't think he saw them through, nor did he reap the benefit of relief or enlightenment.

But I realized, on Memorial Day-- opening the Marías book after going several thousand steps with my son, how much the psychology of these former spies and agents and old soldiers-- many of whom survived the horror only physically-- feels familiar.  I somehow absorbed bits of the wounds and shadows that scarred my father's capacity for joy.  Perhaps the boots were not just souvenir battlefield-testimony but a version of his emotional legacy as well. RIP, my father and all old soldiers-- forgotten, memorialized, decorated, mutilated, buried, missing, glorified, dishonored, misunderstood, and forever changed.

SMOKE

Yesterday would have been my father's 104th birthday.  He lived to nearly 97... fairly in compos mentis, surrounded by newspapers, brokerage statements, the bluish glow of Bloomberg on the television screen like a night-light... slipping in and out of consciousness toward the end, my mother in her medicated dementia watching from her recliner like a Whistler's Mother real-time tableau-- alternately panicky when he left the room, or wondering who this person on her sofa actually was-- her brother, maybe... certainly not her father who'd abandoned his family when she was very young.

My father was estranged from most of his own large family, seemed to have judged his parents as harshly as I maybe judged him.  He was never happy to see me; he couldn't pretend, and children see these things, with their heart.  My mother lit up when I came home from anywhere; even when she ignored me in my grungy jeans and motorcycle boots on Manhattan streets in the 1980's, it was a kind of wounded pride-- bourgeois disappointment.

But the month of June has always been about him-- his birthday, Father's Day since he was the true and only family patriarch... D-Day, on which he earned a slew of medals and honors.  I stopped attending family festivities at a point; I began to process his disapproval of me as unhealthy and if my absence hurt his pride in any way he would only have cursed me further.  

Having raised my son alone, we celebrated Father's and Mother's Day. Now so many of his friends have become parents, the meaning has been sort of re-branded.  This year I watched the scores of Mexican families barbecuing in the northern fields of Central Park-- joyfully kicking soccer balls around, celebrating a day off.  Most of these fathers work hard-- sometimes two jobs... the number of kitchen workers who shared the late-night uptown subway with me after gigs was impressive.  Many slept-- exhausted, grateful for the air-conditioning as I was. 

My father never seemed happy. He enjoyed certain men who visited; my parents socialized accordingly-- his tennis partners, commuting companions. Company seemed to provide relief that he didn't have to interact with his family.  He failed to appreciate the gifts we gave; even things I made for him, or a little musical we'd put on... he seemed distracted and preoccupied.  As a child, we take these things on-- we blame ourselves... we learn to judge ourselves harshly.  

I've written so many poems grappling with this... trying to excise the knot of it.  He was complicated, and I surely did not fathom his issues, his dark moods, his isolations, post-alcoholic depressions. Maddens, he once told my son, don't talk.  But I, too, am a Madden... and I do, and I will.

My best childhood friend never let go of her father issues.  To me, hers seemed comfortably flawed-- drank a little too much, crossed some lines... but he had pet-names for his sons and daughters... he was handsome and funny.  His indiscretions seemed human to me... his wife was so 'perfect'... I saw him once or twice in the city with other women... but I kept it to myself.  I saw my own father once with a beautiful young woman.  I did not tell anyone.  My sister and I invented little fictions about my mother-- that she had mysterious callers... I even brought anonymous flowers once... but she only blushed, and he barely looked up from the evening news.

We get over these things... or do we?  I learned in my life that betrayals were inevitable.  A parent failing their child is the first and worst of these.  My own son has not heard from his father for nearly 28 years?  Surely this has repercussions... and perhaps I engineered this in that perverse way psychologists point fingers at us for repeating generational pains and mistakes.  Perhaps I picked my husband because I knew somewhere there would be this 'leaving'.  It was like a prophecy-- a fulfillment.  I see so many couples where one or the other has checked out... they are there, but they are missing. Some have shifted their heart elsewhere... some have simply died, in a way... like an old plant that no longer blossoms.  

Are these punishments?  Deep-rooted desires for self-sabotage?  The meaning of family is so open to interpretation.  Gender has been opened to 'not-binary'.  But despite the extended boundaries of family-- so many of us seem stuck in this traditional and sometimes painful categorization.  There is a Father's Day and a Mother's Day.  Full stop. While I fretted over gifts and hand-made cards and cakes... I actually dreaded those Sunday mornings.  The cookout or dinner or whatever... it was stilted and non-spontaneous. There was no joy, except in the company who eventually went home and left us to our ostensibly perfect family.

Recently I randomly went on my mother's 'Legacy' web-obituary.  Mine were the only posts for some years... but suddenly there was a message from a girl who'd lived next door to us... she was older than I was.. she must be 80 now.  She recalled my mother as a sympathetic, wonderful person... her version was the young mother with perhaps a harsh tough handsome husband.  I remember this woman-- her father, too, was distant and off-putting.  She lives in Boston now... and apparently was having one of those moments-- where the past surfaces and some small component-- like seaglass on the beach-- shines through.  

We women weather life in a different way than our fathers did, all gender stereotypes aside.  Our mothers accepted things; we do divorces and separations and we move on.  Some days I look back and cherish my past love affairs as iconic and true... then sometimes I remember those brilliant guitarists and drummers and sax players... and I think... well, maybe they just wanted a gig.  

On the cusp of another July, entering a holiday weekend with mixed feelings-- Independence Day, fireworks day... I am accustomed to a little isolation-- more-so tonight with our air quality issues warning us to limit outdoor activities. I'm glad in a way to leave the month of June behind, with its paternal connotations-- baggage, people call it.  

Our Father Who Art in Heaven, I begin my prayers every night.  Not my biological father, but my Holy Father who is vague and perhaps judgmental as well. As much as it amuses me that I do this, I do it... like a kind of vow... but it comforts, it reassures, it lifts me... has been with me since I can remember-- mine... available, the words... the sentiment, a kind of vague protection? Or forgiveness.  Really the secret of life-- whether it's family or ourselves... we must let it go, but also acknowledge that (like the wildfire smoke, which is not even our doing) these things linger.