Will (Not) Tell On You

One of the first tasks required of all entering Princeton freshman is the signing of the Honor Code. In my day, it stated something like 'I will not cheat (or a euphemism)' on exams'.  The second part-- the corollary-- was, simply stated, 'and I will report anyone who does'. Being the philosophical and slightly rebellious student that I was, I questioned the necessity of the corollary, assuming everyone adhered to the 'not cheating' oath.  Otherwise, what good is a signature? 

So I had to have a conversation with the Dean of Academic Affairs... it wasn't like me to ruffle the waters, but maybe like me to think about what I signed up for.  I took things seriously. It was hard to believe no one had had issues with this before; presumably they were so glad to be embarking on their Ivy League privileged journey that they just agreed.  In the end, I crossed out the second part and swore to the first.  I had never and have never cheated academically.  I have always tried to be original and not to lie; it's an unspoken covenant with some higher power, or a terrific sense of guilt instilled by my strict father.

Cheating, as it's commonly known in our culture, seems to refer primarily to relationship violations. There's a reality TV show dedicated to this, and in fact, the highest-rated episodes of most reality shows deal with this subject.  People are shamed, smeared, maligned, interviewed... everyone seems to know the score.  But this is greatly exaggerated.  Unfortunately, infidelity is more common than its opposite.  I noticed it as a child--- before I was fully aware of the meaning-- I saw people's fathers with women, people's mothers flirting with the gardener or their tennis instructor.  

We all know, biologically, humans are not monogamous the way penguins are.  We don't mate for life; we're adaptable. Reproductive biology is biological; love is something else.  There are even cheaters in the Bible, multiple wives (Jacob, for one-- Thomas Mann elaborates on this); it is part of the Genesis narrative. The damn President of the United States has historically had lovers... Monica Lewinsky made a career out of Clinton's indiscretion; Hillary maybe gained greater political access because of her loyalty.  Former President Trump fabricated an entire political brand based on cheating, lying, infidelities, disrespect, narcissism... his romantic infidelities don't seem nearly as heinous as the rest.  Except maybe for Melania, but she's not stupid... she made a marital contract.

Still, even when I married a rock musician, knowing the occupational hazards, I had a certain belief in the institution of marriage.  Our hip little wedding was in a church; we took vows and and exchanged rings; it mattered.  And then things wear... the bonds after multiple washings become threadbare... you try not to look, not to digest toxic rumors. But at a certain point, you weaken.  You question-- is it your own insecurity that caused this?  His insecurity about you? There seems to be no emotional answer.  And it hurts.  It wrecks you... it implodes the oath, the sanctity of this thing in which you believed.  So you make a choice-- either you weather the instability... or you leave.  More pain.  Or, as many couples do,  you cheat.  Yes, you... you mimic the same behavior as your spouse-- you even the score.  

I came of sexual age in the 70's.  Fidelity was not generally on the menu, lol. But we chose marriage-- the whole covenant, the tradition.  I loved my ring. I knew my husband had cheated; I tried to look away, but after a time, I grew apart-- and the first time I actually 'cheated'... well, the marriage was close to dissolution.  But I also slept with someone whose marriage had similarly disintegrated; we felt a commonality... it was like one step further away, because we were both victims of an unhappy arrangement.  For me it was a temporary narcotic... I felt better, I felt amazingly adored... and I felt like I'd taken a step back.  It slowed the emotional hemorrhage to a very slight drip.

But the fact is... the reality of discovering a cheater is jolting.  It's painful-- rejection, abandonment... and the scenario of one's paramour being intimate with a stranger is disturbing.  It exposes part of us, too; we are involved.  Cheaters don't always consider this-- the way we are forced into an intimacy with a third person we might hate... with someone who has disrespected us and weaponized our emotions. 

Do we heal from this?  I don't know.  I do know one can't unsee what one has seen.  And in this culture-- is digital cheating, or emailing or meeting up without actual sex... is this cheating?  Is it not 'your cheatin' heart' in the words of Hank Williams, that really kills us? 

My second husband seemed to fall madly in love with me.. .and while I'd sworn off marriage, I gave in.  It turned out he'd been living with someone else... so we started off on the wrong beat.  Were we doomed?  I'm not sure.  We even went to counseling where I was told that minor infidelities were super common in newly engaged couples... it was sort of a growing pain.  But I realized-- we all have a different tolerance for this stuff.  Some people keep their relationships going with extra partners, or fantasies... they watch porn, they act out little dramas.  

I seem to be the same idealistic person who refused to sign the flawed honor code.  I've been equally disillusioned, academically, by reading about plagiarisms, data crunching, scholarly truth-stretching even among venerated professors.  I'm also realistic about the person I am.  I love my son unconditionally.  His biological father abandoned him as a baby; today we celebrate me, the sole cross-gendered parent.  But me as a wife?  I've been jaded and spoiled... I don't know what's expected of me, or even what I expect.  There are times in my life I've had two lovers, or many... or times when I disconnected from someone who maybe truly loved me. The bottom line is-- people fall out of love.  For some, there is enough 'residue' to sustain a family. For others, they crave passion, and you can't, as Bonnie Raitt sang, make someone love you. I think in our hearts we sense this... and it's painful... it's also human... but it's breaking.

So for me Father's Day has a few meanings.  It's about my father who was unhappily faithful to his family... but who knows where his emotional meanderings took him?  It's about other people's fathers who were and weren't role models.  My son's father no longer exists except as a broken romance memory, and a set of divorce and custody papers from long ago.  And for me-- I toughened up, as a parent, and took up the reins.   Having some sympathy for people in unhappy situations, do I judge?  Children suffer and I tried to prioritize mine over my attraction to passionate entanglements. And like most of us, I made a ton of wrong choices.  But did I lie?  I did not. I adhered to my own honor code.  And one thing I do know... no matter who wins this election, no matter how the court swings, no matter how great or lousy America may be, cheating is here to stay. Amen. 

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. 

Co(vid)-dependence

Part of my winter ritual includes interviewing prospective freshmen for my alma mater which becomes more and more beloved to me as I gradually become a little too old to be informationally useful to these young hopefuls.   It's incredible to me that it's been more than fifty years since I entered those academic rooms, with trepidation.  Some of us are brought up by parents who praise and bolster our visions and ambitions, but many of my generation were born into families that had narrowly escaped some form of hardship, and banked their future heavily on children.  So while my grades and tests were okay, the passions of my heart-- music and art-- were very little valued.  I entered college feeling sub-par, a bit useless and untalented.  

Face-to-face interviews were always standard, but the pandemic has prohibited meetings.  Personally I choose now to interview 'blind', by telephone without images.  God forbid these students (most of whom are scholarship applicants) should feel pressured to create a zoom 'set' for the likes of me.  Audio-only just seems more democratic and elicits a different set of responses.  Many of the names are difficult to pronounce; their origins and ethnicity, in the current climate, have become part of their currency, and predictably it takes very little time for them to reveal their affiliations and sources of pride.  I notice the Afro-American students are very Black-Lives-Matter confident.  They are involved and active-- they display healthy awareness and explain readily how they are going to integrate academics and community.  

But this year I have maybe selfishly tried to have a real dialogue about the challenges of the last two years.    I generally speak with many Asian students and once they begin to relax, they reveal things. Many of them use the word 'introvert' to describe themselves.  Their families are close-knit and often crowded into small apartments with multi-generations and new fears about the elder's vulnerabilities. But they spoke also about the hate-crimes perpetrated in their neighborhoods; their families were more protective and less permissive; one of them had a relative who was shot.  

So here are urban teenagers who two years ago were the most sophisticated-- now living a sort of claustrophobic, a-social existence. Many had been sophomores when the quarantine began-- just beginning to sprout wings and relationships... two years later they have been deprived of normal teenage rituals, and the natural intimacy of classroom camaraderie.  No one brushes their hand as they pass on the stairwell, slips a paper note.  There is no one to imitate-- dress, behaviour-- to envy, to dislike, to crush on.  I remember when my son was a teenager the operative word was 'random'... everything was 'random'. In my life, so many of my encounters and epiphanies were these privileged random moments and meetings-- this is why we live in a city of millions of intersections and concurrences.  Today-- this year and last-- nothing is random. While former life glided by on a metaphorical ice-rink, now we are slugging along in weighted deep mud. Two of my interviewees actually used the word 'depressed'.  Yes, we are having a major mental health moment here... and children are the most fragile of all because the present is everything for them.  They spoke in the third person but this is a crucial point. 

My son is so positive.  He never complains or worries me.  He's tough and goes forward, no matter what.  I am so impressed, especially coming from my single parenting as an open-hearted but honest human with flaws on display and worries.  Paralleling the not-always-accurate rapid tests, there is an epidemic of this sort of false positivity.  No worries, these people say.  Even the late-night hosts... they joke about roombas and their grooming lapses, etc... but they don't see the home of one of the girls I interviewed who wakes up in a one-bedroom apartment that houses 7 people... and tries to find a place to set up her iPad... no privacy, but also no companionship. The dignity with which she simply described, without a hint of complaint. 

Today I saw that Princeton has cancelled communal dining for now; meals are grab-and-go.  I could feel the anxiety of a first-year student who is shy and often a little isolated.  They don't always communicate insecurities because they are in a challenging environment and they are pressured to keep up.  I know my own first semester I often lingered over lunch and dinner, enjoying the company of others.  It is where I met my future roommates and boyfriends.  I felt connected.  It's probably part of the explanation for the well-documented weight-gain of new students.  Meals are their sanctioned down-time and they prolong it-- rationalized procrastination.    

Children are incredibly resilient.  They adjust to moving, to new siblings, family upheavals and even illness with amazing flexibility and courage.  Snow days, cancellations- for some these are new and fun.  They have time with family, time with social media.  But for others, it is like a punishment-- a sentence to be confined in a non-nurturing household.  Some of them are fragile and alone. Personally I would have gone crazy.  

Even now, among my adult circle, there are many who have adjusted with that positive facade to solitude. They post and write and play and sing.  Others are more shadowed.  Some have confessed their depression and sadness to me.  I share mine... the sort of crippling effect of 'less'.  For older people social interaction is harder.   I see friends who have become a little too comfortable with the curtain of quarantine, like a kind of life-mask they may never want to remove. For most of us musicians, we miss so terribly the casual real-time conversation of our instruments.  What I see on Facebook and on television for the most part is diminished... uninspired.. the tributes and re-makes... I am disappointed, mutually uninspired.  It's an unfortunate downward cycle from which I hope we will recover... but I have lost confidence. I am not like my son, and wear my broken heart often on my raveled sleeve.   

For these newly-labeled adults, I hope their worlds are not permanently set back by this strange vaccinated world order. I hope the institutions realize there is more discrepancy than ever in the lives of young students.  It's harder than ever to evaluate the potential of people who have been thwarted in their very sensitive growth years.  I pray for them... I feel their pain, even when they conceal it.  For my friends,  I am here-- a little useless with my open heart and my inadequate output, but still here, thanking God for the ones that remain.

Blue Ink

 Over the weekend I was touched by the obituary of a type-face designer who passed away.  His fonts and graphic 'eye' are well integrated in our every-day visuals.  The musical metaphors he offered, the way letters and printed words 'speak' to some of us... these people are part of media obsolescence.  I find myself mourning the disappearance of them as though they are family.  They are part of the soul and material of my life.  I miss them; I miss the reality to which they belonged-- the priorities and signposts. “The most beautiful thing in the world,” the Times quoted him as saying,“is a blank piece of paper.”

Credit...

My neighbor is a well-known older writer.  When we met, years ago, he exclusively worked on an odd and dated version of a dedicated word processing machine.  One night he called me-- panicky-- because it was malfunctioning and any self-respecting computer repair man declined to service this.  I offered him my 'transition' typewriter-- the kind that memorized a line at a time and then printed it out on a page via plastic ribbon.  I held onto these things as souvenirs, and for just such literary emergencies.  It distracted him, but it was wrong.  Ebay, I suggested... and sure enough he was able to find a replacement.  

Meanwhile, I remember thinking how far I'd come-- writing my first novel in Word Perfect, on a Dell PC I'd been gifted, to replace my used  8 MHz IBM PS  which prompted me to install DOS by floppy disk every time I turned the machine on.  From my first ancient Royal on which I'd typed my Princeton thesis (with carbons), to an electric Smith Corona, and onward.  My friends know I'm still using a telephone land-line; I've resisted change/technology along the way.   I am uncomfortable with these systems that seem to accelerate my process until I don't recognize myself.  I need the heartbeat and material of sentence-building, of story-telling.  

The cross-outs and inserts of manuscript writing are part and parcel of understanding a writer's process.  Songwriters, poets... their doodles and marginalia enhance value-- provide clues to the creative path, to private distractions and passions--  a bit of humor.  In the late sixties when I applied to college the applications were hand-written.   On one of them, instead of attaching the passport-sized photo requested, I asked one of my friends to draw me.  I maneuvered questions and embellished things-- gave them what they didn't ask but maybe wanted.  Today the 'common' app most universities use are just that; they leave little room for variety or humor.  My little portrait would have been missed by any computer.  

I wake during the night and scrawl lyrics on paper scraps-- have a supply of writing utensils among piles of books on my nightstand.  Far beyond recalling inspiration now, I still shun middle-of-the-night technology, as though the bright blue light threatens poetry.  Last night I thought about summer camp.  I hated being sent away and from the age of eight spent a full two months in a cabin full of girls with no privacy.  Besides my rag doll, I brought a small stack of paperback books my Mom approved, and a white pad of stationary paper with a blue ball-point pen.  It was the first time I was allowed to use ink.  I can still remember the way it glided along the paper, the sweetish candy smell of the ink, and the halo of my flashlight underneath the covers.  It was during those nights that I think I became a writer.

In this era of backlit news, texts and emails which spread or shrink across screens, I still take my coffee black and my reading material in print, bound and paged.  The way the words flow in linear formations-- the serifs and italics, dots and lines-- these are essential.  They comfort me when I am sleepless, sing to me when I am alone.  The hours and nights of this pandemic have run one into another-- my solitude provides little punctuation, but the near-endless supply of well-written sentences in my old books, the familiar patterns of verse and chorus-- have provided some comfort, like the homesick summer nights of white paper and blue ink.

What's in a Name

Pathmark 125th Street has long joined the ranks of  discarded NYC institutions now--the site under transformation into an enormous residential and retail development.  For me, embracing designated economic poverty as an older adult, it was a reality-experience.  The simple enormity of the space at this location, unlike the crowded Manhattan supermarkets with narrow aisles and limited wares, was spectacular for someone like me who,  excepting road-trip stops,  was under-exposed to mall-shopping.  I visited Pathmark for the sales, the availability, the simple 'gift' of space... the late-night hours, proximity to subway.  Where else could I score a decent fresh turkey for 69 cents a pound?  The scams, the schemes of visiting regulars-- the simple neighborhood habits of those who brought folding chairs and sat basking in the generous 'lobby' air conditioning in summer-- the recycling, the socializing and innocent panhandling...  all part of the past 'innocence' of New York.

Finding bargains these days and living on food stamps is a challenge.  Last week I was in one of my current preferred grocery destinations in Harlem, and I heard a woman yelling... 'Princeton!' with more and more conviction.  So I turned-- yes, there those old days when some random boyfriend or bandmate would refer to me sarcastically by my alma-mater and like 'Mom' which never fails to prick my ears anywhere, I respond.   A small toddler had been leaning against my cart with that dreamy fearless curiosity 2-year-olds can display even in a crowd... eventually the woman came over, grabbed him, gave him a little smack... 'don't you wander, Princeton!'  I couldn't resist... yes, this was his given birth name.  Princeton. In the 'hood.  I had a little conversation with them both, assured the child he was going to be smart and important... and then a little inner monologue with myself on the way home about names.

I have a simple, basic three-letter name.  Actually my mother gave me the French 5-letter version, so the meaning of it would be understood as 'beloved' and not mistaken for the other derivative spelling-- 'friend'.  But the ratio of four-to-one/ vowels-to-consonants is a hard-spell for a child not to mention pretentious in the milieu of the 60's.  Compared to today's 'Beyonce' and Destiny-- the tag-names of the 21st century-- it is minimal.

My elementary school was part of the 1960's bussing experience.  Besides the physical introduction of diversity, there were the names.  We were all basically Tom, Dick and Harrys-- Kathy, Robin and Susans, in those days-- but these kids-- they were named after kings and presidents.  Their names were hyphenated and ornate-- colorful.  The girls were Velma and Darcelle; this elevated and embellished our morning role-call.  I went home and asked my Mom for a better name.  She did not grace this with a reply--  she who had given me one only, insisting when I got married my surname would fall into middle-status.

Many of my fellow students, as the 60's wore on, re-appropriated their African names.  Some of the Jewish kids I met in the city became radicalized and used Hebrew.  Rockers re-christened often--became single-names or branded themselves somehow, while it was fairly common for actors and public performers to round the edges of their ethnicities and smooth out family names into generic and non-specific identities.  My own father's family, like many immigrants desperately seeking 'Americanization'  had done this.   Go figure.

Lately it is rare that, in my local Starbucks where I am currently interviewing kids for my alma-mater (yes, little Princeton, I mention your name often) I rarely see a staff name-tag that looks familiar to me.  The variety of these is like the constantly expanding nomenclature for coffees and drinks-- exotic, conversation-provoking, ethnically transparent or confusing-- non-gender-identifying.  There are kids with names of countries, of seas, of flowers... of foods, of liquor brands and corporations.  Rappers acquire 3-part sentence names or words.  Common-- that one always sticks to me.  My name, in this expanded overpopulated internet world of infinite repeats-- is-- well, common.  Like most everything else.

I have googled my own name to find a whole column's worth of 'me'... I have even received mail and messages for my namesakes.  Three of us know one another-- in this city.  One friended me on Facebook.  Yesterday I asked a girl in the supermarket about her name tag... her Mom couldn't spell, she told me, but now she likes it.  It's different.  Desnity.  Spellcheck did a double-take, too.

While our traditional old-school vocabulary seems to decrease in usage, new languages and acronyms have become part of our work-arsenal.  People actually speak less to one another these days-- they text, they have their bluetooth and earbuds in... they engage less eye-to-eye.  They do listen... and they wear names.  It is hard to find a single human on a subway without a label or-- more often, several.  Wearing someone else's name was always strange to me.

At the end of her life, for some time, my mother could barely speak.  Her caretaker called her 'Queenie' which seemed wrong to me.  Queenie did not protest much of anything at the end.  Inside she'd regressed beyond even recognizing herself as 'Mom'.  But somehow, even at the very end, when I called her name,  I could see a small light.  Gift of God, the meaning.  No matter how we change, alter, edit, revise... no matter what our intimates and lovers call us in the dark, there is something in our original naming that imprints.  I thought about this, reading the obituary of Kirk Douglas... his adopted name meaning 'church', but his original name, 'Issur' meaning 'he who wrestles with God'... surely defined him.   Anyway, I think somehow he might have agreed, in the end.

Being Poor (part 1: Mr. Brightside)

My alma mater is a highly endowed institution; the weekly alumni publication manages to find us no matter where we go, whether we subscribe or not.  We are all potential endowment contributors.  I personally gave as I could.  These days my level of contribution  is $10-20 at best, and even that is a stretch... I have several times joked with classmates, many of whom have illustrious careers and paths of success, that I single-handedly lower their average income by double-percentage points... so I was a little taken aback when my alumni magazine cover article was titled 'Being Poor'.  Of course they were not referring to 'us', but to 'them'.

I am considered by many of my friends to be eccentric; my life choices are difficult and not conventional.  I live by my art.  I am somewhat proud of this, and fierce about my refusal to give in.  I am a hold-out-- a relic of the old New York bohemian cliché.  I do not live in subsidized housing-- have managed to make my own way, somehow.  The frequent 'number-crunching' sessions which challenge me at 3 AM are not about growth and retirement issues, profit and loss, value and cost... but basic bottom-line life issues.  How to eat, maintain my 'roof' (i.e. apartment), and manage to pay basic telephone/internet/Con Ed.  Beyond this, I buy virtually nothing--- a few subway rides to gigs... taxis are not on my expense sheets-- nor are clothes or movies, cellphones, take-out, a slice of pizza.  Over the past years I learned to forego my old craving for New York City street pretzels.  They do not accept foodstamps which, now that I have stopped resisting this benefit, provide a much more generous nutritional budget than I ever allowed myself.

Certainly I am not complaining.  I used to remind my son, growing up, when he whined about being the only player on his team without Jordans...  we are RICH-- we just do not have money.   I believe this, somehow.  I also distinctly remember the irony of what I would tell my mother, when she asked what I would become when I grew up-- that I want to be POOR-- a slap in the face to her fierce bourgeois values and the covert shadow of bitterness she hid so well when my Dad's personal psychology warranted an economic downturn in our household.

Unlike my mother, I have pretty much always had control of my life.  I had the best education money can (cannot?) buy without spending much... all the opportunities anyone can want-- a chance at the Golden Ring, a taste of self-made wealth... and then the haunting ironies of the dream of music and art.  As  a single Mom who traded everything for sole custody, I found myself back in the city with nothing-- my hands, my brain, a newborn who needed little I could not biologically provide-- a 'roof'... and a daily challenge to somehow manage foraging enough to keep us going.  There were days I played in the subway, did bars for the bucket-- got just enough gigs to get by, many days, on a bag of yesterday's donuts.  I learned the meaning of 'no':  no luxuries, no restaurants, no non-essentials, etc.  I had feet... my main means of transport... I was young enough that people wanted to give us things.  There is a sort of barter system here-- even in the city.  You discover these things-- free clinics, donated food-- the things people no longer need-- one man's garbage, etc.  You become resourceful and make things out of nothing-- the beauty of music. Yes, I had a guitar... and then you create out of your dreams... you paint with words-- you become, in the motto of my neighbor who chalked this everywhere he could-- on sidewalks and trees and discarded appliances-- your dream.

My friends know my personal economics are beyond any normal concept of thrift. Since I haunt the bargain-corps of Harlem and uptown-- I know the price of everything, to a penny-- I walk among the poor, and I am pretty much accepted into their society.  It is a different kind of culture-- and admittedly there are those who abuse the system, rely on being given what they need, have a certain reverse-entitlement.  But there are also the 'finders', like me, who navigate and calculate.  I will walk a good mile to save cents on potatoes or vegetables.  Occasionally I look into a cafe-- see people enjoying a coffee and a bagel-- anything-- sushi-- and I envy... I mean, I could splurge just once-- but something else must suffer.  And what I do 'score' ... is processed like an unexpected floral delivery.  It's all a gift-- it's the B-side of 'nothing'... which is everything, in a way.

Not that I don't worry obsessively and wake in the middle of the night (or day-- because my nights are when I 'make' them-- when I have finished my poems or my gigs or my puttering around with books) regretting that I didn't marry that nice man with the Hamptons estate and the baseball team... panicking I will lose my head or my mobility and be taken from my home into the worst city-run nursing facility with no reading material and bad TV.

But yesterday I found a quarter on the curb... 11 cents further uptown, shining like a diamond on the sidewalk.  The Turkish man who sells slightly damaged vegetables cheap gifted me a lemon and some ginger.  I will manage my bargain turkey I carried all the way from Target and will eat with a few friends-- my son... all the trimmings, thanks to foodstamps which no longer make me feel guilty but rewarded, in a way... and I can share this bounty.  I find I have everything I have ever wanted-- and a little more-- I am spoiled, and privileged, and I am damned grateful for this life of mine.  My classmates often accuse me of conducting some kind of socio-personal experiment, of feeling morally superior because I don't need money.  Oh but I do get paid for things... and I work hard, I do.  We musicians can make $100 for a night's work and with a little mercy and smart-economics, I can parlay this into a little joy, which is more than I can say for a good sector of this city population who have organic meals and grain-fed turkey, salon-hair, silver service, football tickets, Amazon Prime, Apple stock and i-Phone-Xs, balcony-views of the parade... healthy children... and fail to look out of their own windows as they mouth their grace.

(to be continued)

As you were to see me that night...

To be loved by a musician, when you are young, is something special.  You sit at his feet in a club, and his performance is infused with his need for you; you are his muse, and his playing lifts when he thinks about you.  He depends on you for inspiration, for motivation.  If he is a songwriter, every night is like a public valentine.  Even the songs he wrote before you existed--well, they are all yours now.  It is better than a Times Square billboard proposal.  You are the girl of his dreams, encased in a crystal ball of music and poetry.  Nothing else is ever quite like this.  In a way, you are ruined.

When I was much older-- already a mother and a grown woman, I met another songwriter.  I could feel him singing to me-- he had a song that went 'Frog in the shower saw me/As you were to see me that night'… it was so demurely sexy and Dylanesque… and yes, we ended up naked and inseparable for many months of passionate nights.  But the songs-- well, after a year or so, they lost their shine.  They were not magical or Dylanesque but labored and derivative.  The love and passion were still there… but for me, this was not enough.

I've always been loved more than I love.  It's not intentional-- it just works out that way.  Maybe I was just too lazy or preoccupied to go out and seek my dream-man, but there were so many things I always needed to do-- and there were children to love unconditionally-- so I too-often opened my heart to the most persistent suitors.  Some of them wrote and sang and played; some just reminded me of what is like to be loved and for a while that was enough.

Lately I have fallen in love with solitude, with the illusion that I can create whatever I need, at any time.  The love I remember seems so much better than what is on the table-- the Princeton man who wants a Bohemian wife after 2 unsuccessful marriages to Junior League alumnae-- the scientist who runs a hedge fund and touches me inappropriately in public-- the adorable sexy alcoholic guitar player who asks me to marry him in a whiskey stupor every few days and undoubtedly has me confused with someone else.  My girlfriends keep asking me---what is my 'type'?… I really have no clue.  I can only seem to look backward, or inward, toward some kind of lyrical person who inhabits my poetry.  Old loves have passed on, and hang around me like ghost-passion.  It is as though the best of me is buried in a double-coffin with whatever was, and I can only sing.

There are still a few remnants of my old menagerie in the shower, where I end most of my nights at 4-5 AM.   Kids like to be surrounded in the bath-- it distracts them from their sense of vulnerability.   The rubber duckies are gone, and so are the kids-- but there is still a porcelain bunny and the little frog the songwriter left me when he went back home to his country--  to watch over me in the bath despite the fact that I am beyond the age where tandem showers are sexy.  I sing in the shower-- sometimes without sound, because at 5 AM there are these tiny birds that serenade me as the dawn breaks and I close out my version of a 'day'.

I have a neighbor who has left her husband for a man who looks conspicuously like Brad Pitt.  Never mind that he is stupid and oafish and has no job; he has the eyes, and the hair, and he has convinced her to lighten her hair and get a weave and a little bit of extra lip filler.  It's like a perpetual Halloween trick… but it seems to work for them.

Two nights ago there was a  film on Sundance-- with Annette Benning as a widow who met a painter who so closely resembled her ex-husband, she was able to  enact this perverse pathological sort of charade until it all imploded.  In a way, many of us are guilty of this-- of turning one person into another, of closing our eyes and seeing a past love, of turning out the lights and changing one man into another-- of believing our songwriter lover is the next Bob Dylan when he is just a man in love.

On the way back from my gig the other night, there was a man sitting on the street, mutilating his leg with a pen-knife.  He wasn't asking for money, or food.  He was resting on a box, performing this horrific surgery and no one had the stomach to look.  It was beyond a nightmare-vision, and beyond anything I could process. It was like a symbol-- a Fellini-esque sort of sign of something grotesque that was placed in the path of my musical night… of some reality of pain and flesh and disease… that made me question everything.

Moments later I was nearly mugged by a violent woman with a cane who was screaming for cigarette money.  A young black girl was waiting for the bus.  She asked me if I was afraid.  She told me I wasn't safe and the cigarette woman was violent and dangerous.  Somehow I am no longer afraid.  I feel fear in my own nightmares, and on the street these people bend my emotions, but I do not fear them.  I took the bus home, answered a call from the beautiful drunk guitarist who maybe had phoned several women that night and repeated the same words of love.  I no longer believe in future love.

In the shower I turned the little frog around, not wanting to be watched.  I needed to wash off the image of the man's mutilated flesh and the perverse mystery of his occupation which I sensed was going to haunt me for a few days.  I tried to get my doctor friend to find him, but he'd moved on,  with his milk-crate seat and his knife-- to some other corner.  Maybe he'd been forced into an ambulance.  For people like him it's like being put into a dog-pound.  I wondered if he'd ever had someone watch him in the shower.  Maybe that's all he wanted.  The water felt like rain.  My little birds were hopping around on the sill and chirping out their little morning-song.  Maybe I was outgrowing my frog--  maybe I'd toss him into a bag of things for the thrift shop.  It's really a bit silly, my bathroom menagerie.  I dried him off..  but he takes up so little room, and he might get lost in the bag… after all, he is 'home'.  I put him back on the sill, next to his friend the porcelain rabbit.  He has the most perfect smile.

Small Change

When I was in college there was this eccentric professor who walked up and down Nassau Street hunched over in an ancient trench coat, scanning the sidewalks for loose change.  Not the 'Beautiful Mind' mathematician-- this man taught 19th century European painting-- although in the 1970's there were all kinds of characters who lurked in university towns.  Anyway, it was rumored that he picked up an additional $4,000 a year from his activity.

The other night on the uptown A, a middle aged woman was nodding out, leaning forward-- small coins falling out of her pockets.  I made an effort to collect some of them, and put them on the seat.  Once or twice she startled, and brushed them off her coat like live bugs.  I couldn't help remembering the old blind beggar on our corner when my son was small… with his bucket and his German Shepherd, swaying back and forth like Stevie at the piano.  My son would collect pennies in a jar and bring them by on his little wagon.  The blind guy would feel around and ask him 'there ain't no quarters or nothin'? and my son would solemnly swear they were all pennies (he had no clue about value-- he loved Abraham Lincoln) and toddle off.

Last Saturday on my way to Chelsea, an unsmiling girl in a long dress was working the train-- a child in her arms, one on the way.  She had a sign explaining she'd lost her job, she had 2 kids, etc.  She stopped in front of every passenger and stared, brazenly.  So many people just looked through her, busy and rude with their earbuds or their phones.  I was down to a post-Thanksgiving $3 and change; I gave her the coins and she glared at me.  I glared back.  Something about using her kids as props-- it turns me off.  How many people pass us, every single day, and ask for something?  I usually give some recycled coins, even if this infuriates the ones that expect at the very least a dollar.

Plenty of nights after I had a baby I wondered where I'd get the day's food, how I'd split a banana 4 ways, how I never, ever got that child support check--- not even $100.  Ever.  How I could never fathom that somewhere in London an alcoholic journalist was obliterating the image of those tiny trusting newborn eyes that look for the first time.  That picture that no one ever gets-- because it is the supreme unphotographable intimacy.  Not just love and a permanent daily Valentine, but a contract.  I couldn't ask; I couldn't yell or whine or even write.  That little wrinkled brand-new serious face that has nothing in its experience but this dialogue of eyes.  It is yours-- maybe the only thing that ever really belonged to you-- your living poem, your perfect pearl that came from all the sandy edgy torment of this love, this marriage which you knew would be hard, but then came this, the final unfathomable riddle.

Money in the street… I was fierce and unrelenting.  There were days this got us through.  Tiny liquid assets-- lost and found change.

Before my friend Jeanne died, she told me every time I saw a dime on the street, it was her angel, giving me a wink.   Some weeks I need Jeanne.  I miss her wild beauty and her reckless behavior.  No one in my life is a 'bad influence' anymore.  But I keep my eyes peeled for coins in the street.  They are a sign-- luck-- a gift.

I woke up in the night, last night, as I often do-- with a song in my head, a poem on my tongue… and for a brief instant, as I reached for the pen and pad, I time-tripped and took a second or two to orient myself in the present:  post-Thanksgiving, kids back home in their own apartment-- my parental work done, more or less… and a line surfaced from Ann Lauterbach…something about remembering the hour but not the passage (sic).  And suddenly I felt this sense of mourning for all the lost poets, for their final hours when they realized that this was the final poem--- that all of the time they spent fretting over language, shopping, going for walks, pining for a great love-- regretting, drinking, eating and hanging out, smoking… making love…. oh, the hours and days and weeks and untiring months we spend with our hearts filled to capacity and entering a body which will have no relevance at the final moment of dying…all of this will not buy us the time to write another poem-- or even just one more line.

My friend called to tell me he is sleeping with a woman 25 years too young.  For her this will be an episode; for him it could be an epic sorrow, a small coin of life he will imbue with huge value, because he is older and the moments we have spent are tonnage against the dwindling number we have left.  And really, I tell him--- he is not just expecting but looking for the heart wreck because most of us have learned that we don't really feel our hearts until they are broken, the way we take our legs and hands for granted until we have an accident.  So a heartbreak is a reminder--- and the minutes that pass in sorrow are the long ones, and children would rather have 100 shiny pennies than one crumpled ugly old dollar.

On the street tonight I had my eyes peeled; I needed the angel to come, even though it is really only a dime, and it is we the poets and believers who light up the moments, who give these crumbs of life magic, these coins in the gutter sewage which under the night lamps sparkle like diamonds even though they might be nothing but a circle of spit.

..Die He Must...

My father never really loved me. Maybe at some point he had some pride in my adolescent achievement; after all, I graduated with high honors from a top ivy college, turned down a scholarship to Harvard-- -stuff parents can 'bank'.  But person to person?  He couldn't look me in the eye, we both cringed if a goodbye hug was required, and I used to sigh with great relief if he worked late and couldn't make a school play or performance.

Teachers would always comment on how handsome he was; that was useless for me.  In fact I used to wish he'd never come home so my mother could marry someone who wouldn't ask me if I was a moron when I had a question about something.  I didn't feel hurt or sorry; for years I thought that's what fathers did.  I learned to use books.  They were reliable, available, kind and patient.

Maybe I grew up and rejected men who doted on me; it didn't feel right.  Of course at some point I realized that shame and alcohol had a lot to do with our family dynamics and my penchant for truth seeking was an unintentional finger pointing at him.  He's 95 now.  I can feel him squirm if he picks up the phone when I call my demented Mom, old cranky fuck that he is.  Once or twice he actually blurted out 'if you wanna give me a present, don't ever call me.'  The honesty is a relief… then every once in a while he says something almost 'paternal'.  He actually likes my son.  He's a boy.  He's not an unmarried poet who plays bass guitar in downtown clubs.

Wednesday is my day to get groceries in Harlem; something always on special at Pathmark and I get to absorb some uptown culture.  Pathmark in summer is my version of Coney Island.  It's massive, it's crowded, it's filled with colorful displays and distractions, most of which I'd rather observe than partake of.  There's tons of exposed skin and strange fashion statements… and at any given moment, a good percentage of the crowd is not intending to buy or participate.  Some are taking in the moderately cool air, some are consuming anything they did not intend to purchase… gaping, butt-watching, hand slapping and commentating.  There is plenty of narrative, family drama, the PA 'barker' beckoning the shoppers to sample the specials and bargains, old ladies shuffling and squeezing things, muttering, judging and spitting.  In front of me on the huge snaking line, a young family with 2 giant carts loaded with frozen entrees and french fries, boxed pies and cakes, gallons of juice and punch, pounds of hotdogs, pancake mix, canned icing---  the usual… and a virtual team of kids--- the girls packing and helping-- the 8 year old boy in glasses asking his Mom constantly -- how do you make ice cream cones, what's a ingredient… can you put a motor on the cart… until she whacked him…'No more fuckin questions, you hear me?'  The kid didn't seem hurt; he just leaned on the window sill and looked out at 125th street and fidgeted and talked to himself a little.

Of course the white liberal over-educated humanist wanted to pick him up and take him to a library-- I mean, I'm not predicting he's going to grow up and become an angry gangsta or a nerd who gets the shit kicked out of him at Promise Academy.  Maybe he'll be a teacher.  My own mother wisely bought-- from her housekeeper's handsome strapping football-playing son--- a set of Collier's Encyclopedia.  I could look everything up.  Jerusalem.  Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  Penis.  I no longer needed to fear my father's impatient wrath.  I was saved.

Back in Carnegie Hill this evening, one of the investment banker fathers walking behind his little girl… barely 3, in her little Jacadi frock and the Bonpoint shoes, with her pink my-little-pony and her neat pigtails…Are you sure?, he is saying to her?  Are you SURE?  And she is saying… mmh hmMM! with the little upswing… and just as I pass them, he actually says… 'and WHAT IF SHE ISN'T?…. '

What if she isn't?  What kind of twisted manipulative question is this to ask a 3-year old-- to plant doubt and fear and anxiety and all shades of grey in a tiny mind where everything is not only black and white but pink and blue… Is this what his boss asked him today when he put in a huge margin call betting that the market is going to drop tomorrow….And what if it doesn't?  Your Stepford wife will leave you for a richer man and your tiny daughter will imprison you weekends until she is old enough for boarding school?

We are born with eyes and ears and a mouth, the lucky among us.  We trust the people who hold us and swaddle us and feed us.  We smile at them and helplessly let them pick us up and put us in vehicles and cribs and baskets.  And some people pick us up and scold us when no one is looking--- they take our toys and touch us inappropriately and show us things we don't want to see and tell us things that give us lifetime nightmares.  Some of these people are even our parents or relatives.  And like random soldiers in a brutal war, some go home unscathed,  and some are blown up.  Some lose limbs and some become emotional amputees.  What happens to the Robin Williamses and the Heath Ledgers and the Philip Seymour Hoffmans that opens up a tiny fissure of doubt or fear which compels them to laugh and entertain and compensate and develop extraordinary talents that do little to cover the gaping wound that no one sees?

I know parents who, while bragging about their children, I can see in a nano-second when there is no love here.  I have seen these kids overdose, binge drink, do rehab and jail time.  And some of them become presidents and rockstars.  Actors.  Or men like my Dad who are heroes and wonderful human beings to someone but are emotionally cruel to some of the women in his family… yes, these people had their own wounds and damages… I try to understand.   And I pray none of my eccentricities ever hurt my own kids in some cavalier and branding way.

We read and watch footage of our beloved Robin Williams on every network… the great irony of the brilliant comedian--- the sad clown.  We have read this story before.  And knowing in this toxic media world that no secret would be kept sacred, that no detail would be spared… and still, he couldn't find the will to NOT go through with this…. well, we are chilled to the bone in the August summer.  Some of us feel the undertow every day of our lives.  We hold our ears against the screams of the Sirens and we struggle to make it to another day because even though the darkness beckons, we hesitate to leave this legacy of wreckage for the few that actually might love us.

Personally I thank my father for giving me an inroad to these souls, to the dark side.  And as much as we feel the shiver of this passing, we feel a tiny bit of relief…he is free,  we have a little vicarious 'what if' moment… and we mourn and go on. .. with our talents and our sadness and our curse of compassion and our gaping hearts…and we ask questions that are not answerable in any Encyclopedia or bottle or needle or warm bed.

Death Without Interruptions

I am trying to make friends with Death.  He has been flirting with way too many of my friends and his recent moves to consummate a few of these relationships have forced me to rethink my strategy.  While we are generally reassured that these incidents come in threes, there was yet a fourth last week.   Admittedly, my 'stepmother' the artist did take her own life.  She cheated Death, in her way, and he did not like that.  He expects to beat you at his game, not have you put yourself in checkmate and deprive him of his victory rush.  So he pulled another trick?  The fact is, he lost count, long ago.  He has way too many fingers.

If you've been reading my essays, you know that I've seen him in Chelsea.  Summer heat doesn't phase Death; under wraps his cold breath gives him away.  He likes the galleries; he's rather vain and is sure to see himself in a painting or two on any given day.  Andy liked to include him-- a shadow, a symbol or a doppelgänger; maybe it pissed him off.  He's in all the trendy fashion houses, in one form or another, and as we all know--- he has great taste in music.  He is a patient lover: he can be violent and cruel, or he can be gentle and invisible.  But he will eventually come to all of us, whether we embrace him or fear him, whether we court him or evade him; he will come.

Personally he fucks with my head.  I feel responsible; I feel guilty and inadequate.  He reminds me of my father who try as I might, does not love me as a daughter.  Okay… my cousin was old--- he was ill and had come to a boundary; his passing was a blessing.  My stepmother?  She feared her end.  She was an artist and she wanted an audience, she wanted recognition; she wanted a guaranteed choir of mourners.  Death taunted her-- held a cruel mirror before her vanity.  She'd once painted for her lovers and now she'd outlived every single one.  I was a lone voice for her; my love and admiration was not enough.  She was cranky and bitter in her last weeks, and the truth is, I was avoiding her.  She scolded me; I reminded her of failure.  Even at the end, she left a small pile of envelopes, and I waited in vain for mine.  No sentimentality; her only request, as always, is for me to disperse her art-- to find collectors, to enhance her legacy.  I am the designated 'sweeper' of her leavings.  Nothing more.  I could have pimped for her. Maybe she would have stuck it out.  Sometimes Death makes you a star; sometimes you don't even make the New York Times obituaries unless you pay.

My lovely drummer who passed…. he used to bring me small trinkets from his trips-- purses, tiny elephants from Thailand, cloth fans and memorabilia.  At some point last year I cleaned my closet and donated bags of these things.  So now I feel guilty.  I searched my closet for a souvenir--- nothing.  I somehow brought this on, with my callow attitude toward his sweetness and sentimentality.  After all, he was young-- who could anticipate I would outlive him?  I am guilty.

And that woman in Chelsea--- it was serendipitous that we had met through a mutual friend.  Who could have conceived that she would chase her dog into the arms of Death in the form of a garbage truck? Her dog?  I forgot to ask.  I doubt he feels guilty.  But I do.  I wish we'd never met.

At my cousin's funeral his children remembered poignant moments.  They were loved, had wonderful lives with and without him.  It was perfect.  I wept.  I thought of my own father-- -the one who can't bear the sound of my voice, the mention of my name-- -for Death knows what reason.  I can't think of a single tender moment.  My sister methodically stole my packet of M & Ms every day for years.  I willingly gave up my toys, my allowance-- I took the blame for every bit of family mischief.  She has the birthright-- whether it is fair or unfair, I am glad to stay out of the family spotlight.  My father owes me an apology.  Besides marrying rock musicians and turning down a Harvard Law scholarship… what did I do to him?  I offended his legacy.  I failed to enhance his family with suitable accomplishments.  I work in bars.  I was a single mother.  This is the 21st century.  But he is ashamed.  I did what I could; I paid him back.  I gave them the art I'd lovingly collected through my friends.  I paid my sister and her husband and put her kids through college while I took an oath of poverty and devotion to music.  I am a Goth nun.  You'd think I blackmailed them.  They have weddings and parties and exchange gifts.  My son got a check for $100 for his combined 21st birthday, Christmas and college graduation.  We have many nights gone hungry  Not even a card.  A folded check in a small envelope.

I have dedicated songs to my father; I post his military accolades on my Facebook page.  I honor him in the only way that I can.  None of this matters.  He will take his hatred to the grave and I will not have a seat at his funeral.  Whatever he thinks I did, I did not do.  Death-- tell him.  Whisper.  I go to funerals, I take care of my friends.  I'm guilty.  I give money to homeless people and split my last-dollar hotdog today with a hungry man in the street.  I never stole from him or lied to him or cheated.  I won all those awards.  I even bought him a computer once with money I won and he complained.  So I give up.  Death, compared to my father, is just.  He spared me a few times-- he's whispered in my ear and sat on my bed through a couple of nights…and mysteriously as he entered, in the morning he was gone.

I finally got the nerve to visit my stepmother's apartment; the very room where she put a plastic bag over her head and inhaled lethal quantities of helium several days ago.  Kind of a stagey exit, but painless and effective.  It looked exactly the same; the bed was made, the Saramago I loaned her on the nightstand, the smell of helium was nowhere.  Death had vanished-- no wagging fingers, no morbid reminders.  Just the art, like an albatross--- like guilt mirrors around the room.  But I'll rise to the challenge.  Death has no wish to participate.  It's too late for dying young, he coolly whispered to me as I lay awake the other night… and then, dressed like the 1961 Elvis, he left the room.

Loaded

Okay.  I went to my gynecologist yesterday---hadn’t been to see him way longer than the recommended interval, but there it is.  I’ve had the same doctor since high school.  Until last year, he literally had barely spoken to me-- the way I like it.  You want the person who’s clinically intimate to be non-intrusive.  He’s also appropriately non-judgmental,  matter-of-factly used to rattle off potential hazards when I needed such information,  dismantled anxiety by his unusual calm and slightly bored delivery.  Everything is perceived as 'normal’ even if it isn’t--- even if it is an emergency or a sorrow, or you need an abortion in menopause, or you have a miscarried twin, or an accident or a fear.  Routine. 

There was a time in my life when I had kind of a crush on my gynecologist.  In the exam room, fantasy helps you.  I think I'd seen him on the street-- he was a ‘guy’…tall and kind of handsome, had a good marriage from all reports, 4 okay kids…  and I have to admit--- he has this great ‘touch’…like few doctors do, and most of these are women—like he understands me. 

But yesterday, he breaks character and asks me if I’d be part of a study he was doing--- a new drug—no side effects—to effectively ‘rejuvenate’ my sexuality, above and below the waist.  I hate medicine of any sort.  He knows this.  But, he claims… I would feel more like having sex.  I would feel 25 again.  So of course, I respond…’What makes you think I want to feel 25 again?’  And he laughs,  says—I’d feel better about myself.  My sex drive.  And I ask him if he thinks a little plastic surgery and a haircut by someone besides my guitar player with a straightedge might make me feel better about myself?  I mean, do I look like someone who obsesses about personal cosmetics?  I don’t even know how to put on makeup.  He has a little laugh.

So this morning, I get a phone call from him… immediately I recognize his leveled, monotonal voice—old-school, to let me know everything is status quo, and have I thought over his proposal?  I need some smart women to help me, he almost cajoles… You mean sarcastic and verbal and sharp-tongued?  That, too, he admits.  So is this a medical version of Sex and the City or an actual drug study?  Well, he concedes… a little of both.

So... I give him a piece of my Princeton mind.  Yes, I struggle for a little non-sexed respect in the sexed/sexist world of music, and reaching a certain age is like reassurance that you never again have to deal with the image-forward thing… unless you’re Dolly Parton, of course, or holding up the back-end of a cosmetically weighted contract.  I do find sublimating my long-honed sexuality in my writing and performance all the rejuvenation I require in this moment, and I’m not sure I want to spend my mature years pining and lusting and obsessing and inflicting the kind of psychic pain on my self and others for which I spent many years repenting.

Well, he offers… after a gynecological pause … how about your friends?

My friends? I’m going to furnish him with a pre-fabricated cast for his version of the over-50 Sex-in-the-City?  And what is he offering in return?  Vaginal rejuvenation?  I just met a Seventh-day Adventist in the subway, and even he had a better deal. He laughs.  Some women, he says, are willing to sacrifice for this.  You mean, I say… their first-born, and their second-born, etc…?  He laughs again.  Gives me his cell-phone, in case I change my mind.   I don’t change my mind, I retort.  Some nights I don’t even change my clothes. 

But am I supposed to hang up and think about this?  Like on the train last night…when some muscle-guy with demonic tattoos and a ripped vintage Metallica shirt leers at me?  Am I supposed to consider this?  My days of elevator encounters and one-night filmscripts definitely 'inform'  my private vocabulary, but I am still someone’s mother, and someone’s lover, and someone’s confidante--- even though they don’t need me in the desperate way they used to, nor I them.  I am just a little more attached to my self and my obsession to produce something artistically as worthwhile as a baby.  Maybe my heart is buried in my poetic head and my passion is in my fingers, but whatever bullet I want to load in my creative gun is not going to be over or under-the-counter or in my (or someone else’s) anatomical pants.    

Yeah.