Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

Handicapped

I recently overheard my neighbor and his friends discussing their golf handicaps.  I've heard this term used re: horse racing and it always confused me.  When I was young, the phrase 'Hire the handicapped' was bantered around. There were also ranks of parking spaces designated exclusively for these so-called unfortunates with the wheelchair icon painted on pavement.  More recently the word has been designated insulting.  Even 'disabled' is used with great care. 

It's a weird word. I remember reading somewhere it came from 'cap in hand', a reference to street beggars in older times who often displayed (or faked) disabilities to collect alms in a hat.  Whatever. It's become distasteful.  It's used with a kind of irony among my friends who are suffering the indignities of illnesses and aging.  One friend not only copes daily with the devastation of a brain tumor, but has lost the use of her hand.  Another has not quite recovered from hip surgery... another wrist surgery; then there are musicians' hand issues, drummers' spinal woes, general anxiety and depression... cardiac problems. We are an aging generation... we have used and abused ourselves in various ways.  

I am sympathetic; I've been lucky to survive and recover.  Two weeks ago I had an accident-- not life-threatening but enough to limit my usual freedoms. I've become, in a temporary way, handicapped, as my friends joke... and it's jokable, not permanent, unworthy of a special parking space or license plate-- or hopefully not.  

But I've been watching a good deal more television.. football, taking in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce phenomenon which I'm sorry to say makes me less fond of the Chiefs.  I'd like to see an underdog in the Super Bowl, despite the political and social media feeding frenzy this celebrity serendipity has caused.  I mean, if she changes the election, like Oprah did in 2008, well and good.  But for me it's enough-- the money, the endless athlete's endorsements and influencing... the massive payments in addition to the fortune they are paid to play which makes the heroes of my era look like middle-class losers. 

And these endless boring game shows-- with second-rate celebrity hosts and guests and absurd criteria and rules... who is watching this stuff?  It just seems desperate and forgettable.  

I'm reading Septology-- the seven-part masterpiece of this year's Nobel-winning author, Jon Fosse.  He's quintessentially Norwegian and for the last decades I've considered Scandinavia my second home. I've left my heart there-- a couple of times, not to mention a beloved bass guitar waiting for me to tour again. Anyway, it's a wonderful winter read. The snow... the small towns of Norway-- the fjords, the boats, the childhood reminiscences. The narrator is a painter-- a loner who has suffered losses, but manages to find a kind of redemption in his work which I can almost see, somehow.  And his quiet obsession with religion, his daily coming to terms with what is God-- in his art, in his simple way of life.  It's sublime.

My temporary injury and this novel remind me of what has been lost-- and how we go on, we find our lives and our meaning day by day, reinventing our path to accommodate the normal indignities of age, the diminishing exterior 'light' of our presence as the years pass.  And still, we find some spirit-- some determination-- we befriend the present and reintroduce the past like an old boyfriend who was amazing but no longer serves.

For many of us, this reveals and highlights our so-called handicaps. Some of us become defined by this alone.  But for others, we begin to see the less inspiring narratives of our culture as the true handicapped-- the banal, silly, petty, appearance-obsessed, botox and Wegovy-dependent overpaid housewives, non-achieving but omnipresent celebrity image-makers whose contributions are well celebrated but are anything but world-changing. 

Today I pray for my distressed and disabled friends.  For me I have the blessing of choosing the option of rehabilitation-- of acceptance, of continuing to exist with some kind of muse pulling me along, coaxing and cajoling.. a deepened sense of what remains, of God in my small universe, whatever that means... of life... cap in hand not for pity but for reverence and awe. With grace I intend to recover from this small setback and shine as I can in this flawed and aging skin I've been so generously granted, God willing. 

Sowing Oates

It occurs to me today that this is the quintessentially perfect Sunday... the relentless comfort of nonending rain, like a kind of temporary seascape, because we all seem to inherently believe the blue-sky reassurance will resume-- the status quo. Weather optimism doesn't exist for me; I prefer the grey interludes, wish that they would extend.  There's a fishing port in Vestland, Norway where precipitation is near-constant; the mere thought comforts me. 

My neighbor who hates discarding things has been leaving her New Yorker issues outside my door.  While it's hard for me to turn down reading opportunities, I generally avoid magazines-- just so many books here wagging their paper fingers, reminding me of countdowns and lost hours.  So this morning I read the recent Joyce Carol Oates profile.  I can't seem to get enough of JCO biographical although I suspect she might have disliked this one-- at least the ending.  She is the single most prolific writer in a present which seems unprecedentedly chocked with distraction. 

JCO is an odd, quasi-Goth personification of the dark and odd and not pretty.  And yet, she has had a life of rarely paralleled literary productivity and not one but two enviable marriages. I'm never sure which of these accomplishments I admire more, although a statistic was mentioned-- that one needs to write two pages daily to rack up a lifetime total of 100 novels. Remarkable the time one wastes.

One tends to compare one's life to that of these exemplary people. While JCO is a sort of flawed human, I have always admired her for what I assumed was her frank self-assessment and her lack of self-pity.  So much of excessive compassion and charity is time-consuming.  I am not just guilty, but guilty of the guilt-- one of those bleeding-heart characters who cannot sleep after a global tragedy, who absorbs the suffering of others and cannot turn away from a depressed friend. It is a choice, I know, and it has affected my output, although this, too, is a human choice. I try to dispense with regret the way JCO seems to have little patience for practicing empathy, except maybe with respect to her cats.  And children-- well, not in the equation.

Of course I am not qualified to judge.  Her novels are excellent, although, admittedly, I have never granted her the status of literary genius.  She has her critics-- Truman Capote was harsh, Michiko Kakutani as well, and personally I have found myself arguing both for and against her talents.  I am also not sure whether acknowledgment helps those few who have their own standards of excellence.  We see them rarely in this polluted sea of celebrity and fame where social media followers fill virtual stadiums for performances that would otherwise remain where they belong-- inside a phone. 

I have known some famous writers... through dates, acquaintances... I even babysat for one or two.  When I moved to this apartment I was quietly stalked by one who lived on my block.  He showed interest in my work; I was flattered.  He even came to a couple of my solo gigs, wrote me literary postcards and gifted me small stacks of books and proofs for discovery.  Years later, I realize he probably just wanted to mark me off as one of his many conquests, but I felt 'considered' sitting in his library, listening to his startling confessionals, being called late at night for an opinion on an essay he was writing.  

It also occurs to me that I could have written a profile of this writer; others have done so, and the time we spent was more than any random interviewer might have received. Journalists craved his dialogue, and he seemed to shun publicity at a time when the act of doing so only solicited more curiosity. And yet while I coveted and collected our time together, I feared his disfavor more.

As happens so often with one's mentors, his 'disciples' were distinguishable by the stylistic choices on which he insisted.  The women often slept with him; one stalked him noticeably, kept a jealous eye out.  He openly spoke of his sexual encounters and the preferences and oddities of his writers.  Not wanting to become one of his anecdotes, I kept a distance.  After a while I began to tire of his editorial preferences; I could predict where his crossouts would come, how he would leave maybe three lines untouched in a long poem. 

One day I wrote a sort of nasty piece which obviously featured my writer-neighbor in an unflattering character.  He never again spoke to me.  All our intimacies, our 'back-and-forths'-- the postcards, the gifts, the phone-calls-- they stopped.  Dead.  I went on to continue writing in my own way, without the critical 'eye' of my neighbor's editorial penmarks.  It felt freeing. After a year or so, I apologized.  I still deliver copies of my books; he does not reply. 

I saw him on the street yesterday; he's old, but still commanding in a way.  He's rich and a little powerful and has plenty of help and the kind of academic reverence an old writer merits.  He doesn't like the work of Joyce Carol Oates; I know this. I'm not sure he likes his own work, at this point.  He dislikes biographical pieces and yet collects them. He has written his own-- some as literature, and they are fairly brutal and quite good. I have a shelf of them-- most inscribed to me from several years ago, when I seemed to matter in his life, and it mattered to me that I did. 

On these days when my reading matters more than any writing I produce, I conclude that an artist, in the end, is considered so when his output exceeds input in significance.  By sheer number, Joyce Carol Oates has set in stone her reputation. Whether or not she will receive her Nobel prize, or be considered worthy by her peers, might matter or not. My neighbor will be written about, I suspect. As for me,  I will never know whether it was my poetry, my bass-playing or the length of my legs that engaged him and deceived me into believing, for a time, in my own merit. And I suppose two pages a day is manageable. 

Closely Watched Trains

At 8 or 9 PM on New Year's Eve I generally try to phone one of my friends overseas where the year has begun in earnest.  It feels a little special-- as though we are bridging some time gap and violating some order-- me here in the past, getting ready to go to a gig, listening to the sounds of the future-- the singing and rowdy partygoers who have passed the finish line and have already begun to unwind and absorb the vaguely monotonous reality that 2018 or whatever year is not so different from 2017-- at least not yet.  My Norwegian friends were drunk and optimistic that we are all going to blow this one wide open.

Working as a musician on this night is a sort of brilliant copout.  I am not responsible for the success or failure of the party; there is no anticipated date, no dinner reservation or romantic disappointment-- just amps, microphones, music, dancing, alcohol and noise-making... and then I get paid and go home to my peaceful little uptown hideaway where I am relieved that the world passed another milestone without disaster, that there were no deaths in Times Square; the MTA is at least holiday-operative, and the global clock is still ticking.

The subway ride home at 4 AM January 1 is special.  Back in the 1980's public transportation was free on this night-- a gift to the city, so anyone could afford to get home somehow-- even those who had lost their wallets or spent every last dollar in bars and clubs.   I can remember being so poor as a student, we rode the train to Coney Island and back as our celebration; standing on the beach watching distant fireworks was intoxicating.  At some point full-fare was restored;  this year the extreme cold was the main topic...  it made things little extra festive-- we were all so relieved to be off the street and in a relatively warm car.  There was, of course, the prerequisite vomiter, the sleeping drunks... but mostly just revelers with their parties still in tow, stumbling in and out of train doors with paper hats and crowns and joy.

I am always relieved, these days, to go home after a gig-- relieved that there are no major disasters, no stage-pissing or broken bones, no lost chords or tuners-- and somehow this night I sensed the awkward-shaped package of 2017 tie itself off.  I felt clean-- unburdened of dread, and slightly lifted from the muddy ground of the old year which brought month after month of sad news-- death, illness and tragedy.  I was letting it go; or rather, it was releasing me.  Across the car from me was a twenty-something man with his knees drawn up,  skinny jeans down around his hips, designer underwear and bare back in full view.  Obviously he'd lost his coat-- he'd had a rough night.  The boys next to me began to try to wake him-- what should we do, they asked me, the obvious 'senior' passenger and designated mother? Let him sleep, I advised; he's safer in the warm car until he sobers up and can figure out his itinerary.... but they were adamant... he woke, the sleeper-- and in his dark wet eyes was the halo of narcotics.  He was angry-- defensive-- he was some kind of beautiful and non-gendered persona-- belligerent, wounded.  I could imagine he'd been personally traumatized-- disappointed or even abused just hours earlier; there was guilt in his attempt at defiance-- there was also resentment and old grief.  It took a few minutes until he recognized something behind my guitar case and my wraps...  a maternal presence;  on the verge of complicated tears, he at last confided his destination-- yes,  completely disoriented and traveling further and further from his Brooklyn home.  So we all put our January-1 heads together and mapped out a route with transfers and station-jumping so he could remain inside until the last exit.  A young couple took him across the platform at 42nd Street-- they hugged me as they departed the train.

There is always a great media-fuss made over the first baby of the year; inevitably in this huge city there is a birth shortly after midnight.  I realized, as I rode the rest of the way uptown, my train-mates were my newborns of 2018.  The sad, wounded coatless Brooklynite... the young couples with glitter-tattoos, the chef on his way to the morning shift at Mount Sinai, the tired bartender from Artichoke Pizza who plays upright bass and hopes for a career in music; he took his hat off as I left and let down his beautiful black hair-- with his lovely voice and hands-- I know he will be a star.

We humans begin to lose our memory as we collect time, but most of us seem to retain a special slot for 'firsts': the first day of school, the first dance, the first minute of pregnancy, first night we spent with almost every single lover-- even if it was also the last.  We can play back things-- the room, what he wore, the way he felt under the sheets... these things seem to persist somewhere, like a recurring dream.  And of course the moments with our children... even the difficult ones, when you are wracked with some fever or even labor, and your toddler is needing you to read to him.'

I played my  usual Monday gig, still in the spell of the new year, and returned home on the Q, realizing things were already dissolving into normalcy.  People were tired and cold, not many smiled or shared on the train or the platform.  Today I stopped for a coffee and finished my first book of the year, or really, the last of the past year-- a Salman Rushdie.  There was a little girl, nagging her father to read to her; he was distressed, searching his phone, pacing a bit...  she came over to me with her book, and her sad mouth, and I was nearly unable to read-- my voice cracking and nostalgic for the babies that were so grown up and the one that had not made it.  Here, I wanted to say to her father-- you have a clean slate.. what can be more urgent than this opportunity which fate can take from you any moment?  She leaned on me, this child, the way they do--with trust and affection, like a stray dog.

Tonight, January 2,  I wept in the cold-- for the already widening distance of the last year, for the missing children of my first day who are already lost in the city... for the lights, for the ghosts of the Christmas trees that lined the sidewalk on Lexington with hope and anticipation and now would be lying spent on the curb for sanitation pick-up, for the homeless men who must leave the warmth and light of the 96th Street library at 7 PM closing, for the crosstown bus driver who confessed he had no one to go home to after the night shift; for the passion and love and first nights of the past, the small family searching these buildings not so long ago for the home we discovered, for the emptiness of the future as a solitary woman who gleans from fruit vendors and thrift shops in a nondescript coat of non-recognition, trying to savor the grace of the beginning, while the world and time is thrusting us ever-forward.  We are prepared for the weather, some of us-- but not for whatever fate holds for us in the next onslaught of days and weeks and months.  I was so blindsided by 2017, trying hard to re-baptize myself into some incarnation of hope-- resolving, as we do, we perennials, to observe and honor what we are given, and to pray for another beginning when this one, too, has worn itself out.