Christmas, Bloody Christmas

Single digit countdown to Christmas. I'm listening to this Marlon Brando documentary... I forgot about the kidnapping of his son Christian, the troubling path he took... his struggles with substance, his eventual early death.  I can't help thinking of parallels with Nick Reiner. Something about sons... the way Marlon intended to keep his free from the abuse and poor handling he had experienced by his own parents. 

When we were kids my sister's boyfriend lived next to the Reiner family; I remember playing there, watching them get in the car and drive away.  We loved Christmas even though we never got anything we asked for. My father liked Macy's.  He'd pick something out that he thought suited us girls-- ice skates, some strange walkie-talkie toy that didn't work well-- a home badminton set... nothing extravagant. Every year I wished for a horse. I would keep it in the garage and ride it to school. One year my father planned a trip to a dude ranch. My cowgirl fantasies were on fire, but it was cancelled.  Someone died... or my father drank too much and had another episode.  It was a pattern-- the disappointment, the broken promises.

Families like the Reiners-- they looked happy. Carl made little jokes. My father never made jokes to the children. The prelude to Christmas was filled with activity-- Glasswax stencils on the windows-- chains and beads for decor... cookie-baking, our stockings hanging, rows of greeting cards lining the fireplace. Making things for my family-- using whatever I had to buy something and wrapping it.  My father always seemed miserable-- even Christmas morning... whatever he got, it was all meaningless although he seemed to like the holiday breakfast; we had rolled pancakes and he had coffee.

There were some good things... our housekeeper understood me-- she'd collect lengths of yarn and wind them on spools.  I loved this present, in a homemade box. I'd make lanyards and ropes; sometimes she'd give me scraps and rags and I'd make doll clothing-- tiny quilts. My aunt gave me a book.  She was a teacher and it was always a good one.

I bought my son unusual toys-- solid things like wooden trains and small building sets.  Shapes-- things from museums. I remembered wanting some stuffed toy with a rubber face-- a Yogi bear maybe. One waited for these things.  Months of longing and mostly disappointment. A doll made of a clothespin consoled me. My son had this reindeer made from a sock. It was everything... at night he sang to it in his baby language-- held it right up to his face. 

We give birth to a miracle creature-- a blank canvas. We swear we'll keep them safe and pure. I tried my hardest to be an intentional parent.  I listened, I explained, I watched. Still... at some point, somewhere, my son behaved badly.  He was angry-- he was rebellious and rude. Where does this come from?  One spends years of hours going over and over one's mistakes.

One Christmas I was breaking up with a boyfriend who put slutty underwear and one set of dishes under our tree. I could not decipher the meaning of these.  In a mood, I took my son downtown and we sat in a diner on Ninth Avenue drinking cocoa, listening to cheap Christmas loop-tapes, waiting for our musician friends to wake up in the dark afternoon and join us. A cop came out of the bar across the street.  We heard a gunshot and in seconds he was lying there in the road. It was his own gun. My son saw nothing except the slew of NYPD cars that converged with what seemed like seconds; he had a little toy police car and it was thrilling for him. At least I think so. I wrote a song called Christmas Lights. It was the epitome of a black Christmas. 

Still... I swore I'd never break a promise, and I haven't.  Not to him, anyway. There was a time when he was utterly ruthless to me. He was a teenager; he was angry at me-- at his life. We as parents would do anything.  Confronted by a drug-altered grown child brandishing a weapon,  the average loving mother is not afraid to die for her son-- a meaningless sacrifice-- but that he might ruin his own life as a murderer without parole.

The irony of the Reiner's son tragedy: all they cared about, I assume-- was that their son would not sabotage himself-- that he'd be saved-- safe.  I would have sacrificed anything-- money, my life... to set mine straight. He's good... but there is no guarantee.  There are good times and bad times. Once we wreck ourselves the scars open up and bleed at times. Here these struggling parents-- and as they say one is only as happy as one's least happy child-- gave their very lives-- everything they had-- and their son is ruined. Drugs ruin people.. so do bad experiences and the reasons people begin to anesthetize themselves.  I dated a few addicts; watching me wrap gifts way back my stepmother commented: 'Give him a carton of vodka-- that's all he wants.' The substance is not what they really want, but what they need.  It replaces the issue, it disguises the wound. Who knows what bothers these boys? Who knows what bothered my son? I was frantic some nights waiting for a phonecall and that only made it worse. The news that he had been arrested felt like good news. At least he was alive.

Christmas morning marks the birth of the baby Jesus who was marked for tragedy. There is no parallel here except the suffering of parents. The Reiners are no longer here to grieve for their son's tragic life. Marlon, with all that talent and crazy love for his first-born, was unable to prevent the spiraling. Me-- my son seems to thrive although I will surely disappoint him at Christmas.  I can't possibly fathom what it is he really needs, although I am pretty sure I gave him the essentials, that he outgrew his teenage angst and attraction to the bad-boy narrative-- that he is a solid man and has a moral backbone. It's a twisted Christmas story and we're all a little battered and torn this year. There is no closure, nor happy ending. The world goes on... Christmas will be over... I will remember good and bad ones.  We usually can't get what we want but try to remember the many who do not get what they need. There will be deaths, births, flashing lights and choirs of angels... and there will be next year, for those of us who remain to mourn the ones that do not.  Amen.

To Be or Naught

When I was maybe thirteen I closed myself in my bedroom, put on my new Jimi Hendrix album, stood on the side of my bed frame and did this crazy deep breathing alternating with challenging breath-holding... it was like a prescription a girl at school had given me-- to make myself faint. I woke up to the last song on the album.. I must have blacked out for thirty minutes... and felt profoundly changed, as though I'd done some mind-altering drug, or entered another reality entirely.  It was terrifying.  My mother asked me later that night what that huge sound had been... it was me, I did not say, crashing on the floor, simulating a kind of death.  I never again played with that scenario.  

A few weeks ago I ran into a woman in my neighborhood. She is familiar... I'd see her years back coming from the 92nd St Y where she swam and exercised-- with a perfect geometric haircut and coordinated outfits.  She liked her ballet flats, her accessories and pins.  We'd smile at one another-- two independent neighborhood women who lived presumably alone.  Then there was a gap-- several years-- we had different daily paths, but recently we met in the grocery store... she seemed warm and glad to see me.  She'd been isolated since the pandemic, she said.  People were no longer kind to her.  That seems impossible, I replied, knowing exactly what she meant, but trying to pry her out of some perceptible bleak mood. You look so fantastic, I said... you're so fashion-forward and well-kept. You haven't aged, I insisted.  She complimented me on my 'style' which is aging rocker/bag lady no-longer-chic, but we had a little laugh. 

Yesterday someone told me she suicided; they described her... we don't even know her name.  All these months I've been agonizing over my friend who succumbed to her brain tumor, my two beloved neighbors who are both suffering from incurable and fatal cancers. And here is this woman-- it was said she'd fallen... but then revealed that she took her life.  I don't know why I thought about my teenage blackout... but I did. 

According to statistics nearly fifty percent of Manhattan households are individuals.  This is a city of single people-- of dreamers and workers and maybe many consummate romantics who spend decades searching for a partner. As a young woman, not even out of college, I was engaged to a man who on paper satisfied every possible criterion for the perfect husband. He was handsome, too, like Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd (my favorite movie at the time)... athletic, brilliant, funny, macho, adoring, a little crazy.  And yet from the moment he put that diamond on my hand I was panicky-- looking for some flaw or crack in the human plaster. Who does this?  Insecure, self-loathing women who feel undeserving of success?  I don't know... but since he passed all tests, I began to misbehave until it became impossible.  He even tried to repair the engagement months later but I was in another headspace.

Many of my women friends made viable partnerships.  A few have wonderful marriages which exceed the sum of their parts. It's hard for single women to really understand what this requires; at our advancing age, it seems incredible to imagine someone making us coffee in the morning when we're exhausted, or embracing us at the end of a rough day.  There is no one. Children are the best-- but they really only want to know what's for dinner. And they grow up and hopefully follow their own dreams.

Throughout my adult life I've lived with men-- for better or worse. I've had two formal engagements-- and two marriages, neither of which was preceded by an engagement, neither of which was particularly successful.  One of them produced my son.  While I've followed my heart, creatively, 'managed' my decades with more passion than prudence, I was never quite 'completed' by a relationship.  The last few nights I've been thinking about how tough I was... I think I wanted to partner with someone who was a prodigy-- an inventor. I wanted to serve someone whose genius was worthy of my sacrificing any ambition I had to his.  And yet, even when I dated someone who seemed fantastic, I ripped them apart in my head-- I exaggerated the smallest fault into a reason to separate. 

But it occurs to me that I was equally hard on myself.  Sure-- I have an Ivy League education, I excelled at things-- I read, I think, I walk, I play bass, I write poetry... but I have not changed the world.  I have not left some scientific contribution or altered literature with groundbreaking talent.  At my age Anthony Trollope had been dead for years, after managing to produce twelve children and fifty three novels.  Einstein had changed modern physics. Mozart-- at less than half my age had put us all to shame. I suppose what I expected from myself I transferred to my fictional version of a partner. The possibility of this becoming a reality, especially after decades, becomes nil. 

Of course all of us women had our suitors-- the men with whom we had sex or the ones who took us to dinner and wanted to make something more... but these begin to diminish.  They themselves become fragile and sad.  The woman who suicided confided to me-- no one had reached out to her for some time.  There is no one to comfort us or pour us a drink at the end of a hard day... or a good day. We are used to this... I suppose I painted myself into this corner and I expect nothing.  But for this woman, it apparently became overwhelming-- the absence of someone. I'm not sure.

Reading the Boggs James Baldwin biography, I remember well the character in Another Country he based on his friend who jumped from the George Washington Bridge.  It haunted James who himself attempted suicide several times. Fortunately for us he was unsuccessful. In my neighborhood, over the past few months, there have been a few jumpers.  It's shocking. We'll never be sure what was in their head, whether they wanted to change their mind at the last second, when it was too late.  Unhappy people have become radicalized and transformed into alternate strong characters.  Often these mass murderers end up killing themselves.  I read the journal of a man who had survived his bridge jump, who admitted that in the instant, he was immediately sorry.

Maybe it takes a biographer to decipher our digressions and behaviors. I am trying, sifting through the unwritten messages left for me by the people I have lost, to analyze my own behavior and understand where I might have veered off my proscribed destiny.  As I write, tonight, ironically a televised biography  playing in the background about Marilyn Monroe.  I don't think I would ever throw in the proverbial towel, and I do take responsibility. It's not always easy, this life... our fate... the choices we've made versus the hand we've been dealt. There's only one version, so far, of this life.  Despite all of the barbs and potholes, I'll take it on. While I never played teenage life-and-death-roulette again, it's ironic that the soundtrack of that incident foreshadowed Jimi's own suicide.  Or not. 

There is never enough kindness in this world.  We in the city often barely speak to or know our neighbors. There is a constant existing possibility of truth or understanding between human beings, without ulterior motives.  And for those of us who find themselves solitary-- without a witness or companion, we are a bit myopic; we lack the advantage and privilege of dialogue. While Marilyn's death is still a bit of a mystery, the fact is, she died alone.  For those of us who live this daily existence, whether by choice or circumstance, we might find a way to extend a version of kindness to ourselves.

Women and Men

Heat in New York City-- the extreme unrelenting kind (not to downplay the life-threatening aspect) is a palpable adventure.  For those of us toughing it out without air conditioning, it feels like a matrix-- a kind of intangible airless box.  I can't help being reminded of the 1977 July blackout, when my neighborhood was not only without power for days, but without water. Yes, there was looting and some violence, but for the young, it was a kind of party... restaurants and bars at first giving away the contents of their refrigerators and freezers, drinking and partying in the streets.  By day three, it got old; the city stank of garbage and sewage.  At one point I hopped on a city bus which had its own little air conditioning system and rode all the way uptown.  I was living with a guitar player who continued to do acoustic gigs in clubs by candlelight with people drinking warm beer and soda from cans. It stretched time. 

I'm sweating through Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.. another of those challenging post-modern difficult mammoth novels. It's so large the contemporary reprinting was structurally unsound and retracted. Supposedly there's a two-volume version, but I'm coping with the original 1980's printing.  Difficult to carry around-- larger than my Organic Chemistry textbook all those years ago--  and nearly as dense.  It's also a quintessentially New York novel, written for the most part in the 1970's.  It occurs as I make my way that I'm going to be the last reading generation who will understand the context of these characters and their behaviors.  We read Shakespeare and older authors and there is a glossary at the back to explain words and expressions, but it occurs that in a few more decades, even the geography here-- the recent vintage urban references-- will require footnotes. 

I wonder too, if people in the future will have a reading list, the way many of our pop icons had their own set of icons-- many of whom were relatively well-read and versed.  Why is it that I feel compelled to read, as though I must continue some kind of literary itinerary with its occasional roadside distractions and off-ramps, unpaved paths and mountainous obstacles? As though someone will go hungry because I overlooked some huge tome, or my destiny will not play out as pre-planned?

As recreation, I picked up a Library of America book of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  I love these volumes for their scrupulous attention to original manuscripts, for their notes and explanations-- biographical insights.  I trust them, in a world where printing errors and typos abound, translations fail authors. Admittedly, I had never heard of this Woolson who is described as perhaps the acknowledged second-best woman writer of the 19th century.  Complete oversight.  So they are chaste little tales which at first bored me, but now I am compulsively going through the entire chronology.  They are narrative and informed with setting and geography-- with characters and religion and informed with a kind of old-fashioned social and moral sense which is comforting and rewarding. Real stories... adventures... people... with air and atmosphere.  A slight wind.  Sea-storms, swamps, Italian hills... old churches and clergymen and orphaned seamstresses... mysteries.

As opposed to Women and Men which has the density and realism of a solid polyhedron.  The details and characters-- the tangents and the interwoven relationships-- the non-narrative difficulty.  It is a kind of five-dimensional novel and one must stay present with each page.  I remember reading Pynchon in the 70's; it was a revelation and a challenge. Decades later I'm not sure I'm quite up to a weighty literary task; at page 500, I'm not even halfway through... but I will keep going. 

Two nights ago I rewatched the 1970's version of The Great Gatsby.  It felt stale and dated; the dialogue was flat-- the  characters were silly and the ironies awkward.  Even the Fitzgerald text felt clichéd.  Am I jaded?  Not sure. I am much more apt to appreciate the outdated language of the Woolson stories. 

I spend hours each day scrolling through gallery exhibitions and auction lots.  One sees scads of old-world academic painters-- people who gave their entire life to the study of landscape or still life or portraits, for little reward.  They looked and observed and self-critiqued and produced; they starved. And here are these millionaire contemporary artists with their rolexes and several residences... bringing home the proverbial bacon.  Others work so hard to become financial and critical failures. To be rewarded for simply being oneself is the supreme prize.  Many of these people are locked in their perhaps non-air-conditioned rooms, struggling to give birth to yet another creation, maybe unseen.  This haunts me.. how to find these people who have no instagram or outlet... but their own brand of greatness. 

I imagine them during these oppressive nights-- the ones by candlelight in older times; the heat even in the Gatsby movie was accurately palpable.  Pre-air-conditioned summers, as the older among us recall them.  My mother took us to Belle Harbor (I thought she was a woman) to cool off in the ocean. When my father earned a little more, we went to Cape Cod or summer camp.  Meanwhile my mother read us 'cold' stories like Jack London or The Little Match Girl and ran our little wrists under cool faucets. The days were long and the nights often sleepless and longer. 

This summer will be marked by the imprint of Women and Men-- slipping back into a 1970's city I remember well.  By the time McElroy published this long novel, it was already perhaps outdated.  It was described as ambitious, difficult, perhaps brilliant... the subject does not strike me as much as the urban whole, the layered complicated synchronicitous and unfathomable, while personally a kind of nostalgia he did not intend engages me. It's a relief that none of the characters have quite seeped into my heart, which leaves space for the Woolson tales to enchant me a little more these hot nights.  

Poor Woolson, I've learned, was something of a literary spinster.  She worshipped Henry James and managed a complicated friendship with him, although James never quite acknowledged her talent. At 53 she suicided-- did not make it to the twentieth century. Perhaps I should reconsider and recall this as the summer of Constance. 

With Your Eyes

On Inauguration Day, the cold air like a knife seemed to split the country in half-- those who celebrated, and those who tried to concentrate on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was like a warning or a judgment-- for those of us who were anxious and upset, the arctic air was not reassuring. 

Unable to sleep, I watched an old film called Crisis-- a documentary featuring President Kennedy and his brother Robert handling a civil rights crisis.  It was another version of America... our leaders, presented in black and white like a home movie... having breakfast with their families-- fathers, credible men... going to work to challenge unlawful segregation traditions.  They were leaders... taking the country from prejudice and injustice into some kind of better future. It felt not just right but righteous.

The confirmation of POTUS 47 felt to me like a TV show-- from what I watched, apparently a badly produced tragic comedy of errors and mistakes, but a show above all-- and the installation of a version of America that feels eerily like the death of Hope. The promises feel like threats, and the concept of justice feels like a kind of volley back and forth between oddly distorted principles.

Seeing our 1963 Attorney General at his desk, waiting for a call... there was a solidity-- the desk, the room.  It was human-scaled.  No one had make-up or airbrushing... there was sweat, there was conversation in real time.  For me it went beyond nostalgia; it underscored this new sense of defeat I have shared with close friends.  We are betrayed, we are slipping somehow. The news is everywhere and overwhelming; the media-- rather than the message-- accompanies our life and we, it.

Continuing my interviews by telephone, I miss the heavy black instrument with the rotary dial... it somehow felt like truth. I speak to these enthusiastic and slightly nervous students and occasionally feel I am selling them a dream-- I am describing things that no longer exist, explaining realities that have evaporated into digital screens. They will never know the version of a woman who misses closing herself into a phone booth in a dive bar and making a romantic call-- a confession, an intimacy.

I've been reading Cesare Pavese. His novels are surprisingly colloquial, although one feels the tensions of fascism, of the German occupation, and the scars of WWII.  I look at maps of northwest Italy... at pictures of Turin... his places, too, perhaps no longer exist. I am listening to and absorbing the author's version of his nostalgia. Pavese suicided at the age of 41, just after he was acknowledged for his writing. Among his best poems is one (translated) line 'Death will come with your eyes'.  It haunts me. His disappointment, his sorrow, his obsession in one novella with a suicidal character-- his empathy.

My friend Elizabeth died very early Monday morning, in the dark.  In her hospice room it was surely lit, as medical rooms are.  She had not been herself for several weeks now. During her illness of five years, we became friends... she called me nearly every night for a year or two... and we gossiped, we laughed, we became intimates over the telephone.  I have a landline, still; it's necessary for this kind of communication. We'd had little in common before, but we grew together.  I miss her terribly; what we created, together, is completely gone. She deteriorated, over the years, but she was brave and never tried to escape her fate.  She was incredibly sympathetic when I had my accident; she joked that I'd ruined my arm just to experience her parallel paralysis.  We laughed and talked about men. It was like an affair... and now it's done.

For months now, I pick up my 12-string at night and play a few songs... the one that comes, every night, is the Free song, Soon I Will Be Gone.  In the year before Alan's death, at one of our back-to-back solo gigs, Alan sang this.  It was withering. I wept. Do not sing this, Alan, I warned him... and he answered me... it is a prediction, with this rare dark look in his eyes that were usually laughing.  But I've taken it up-- it's become my personal anthem that I sing every night in the dark, at 4 or 5 AM. It binds me to him, maybe.  

Tonight brought a fatal plane crash. We who will be gone sooner rather than later are shaken by this kind of news.  We are heartbroken for the fire victims, for the children of Gaza, for the undocumented Mexicans in East Harlem who are afraid to pick up their pantry items because they might be arrested. One mother told me she is keeping her children home from school, from fear they will be somehow seized.

Last night I walked home from a gig in Harlem.  An insane man on 113th and Lenox grabbed me... Read the signs, he kept yelling, with his sour breath. At last he let me go.  Shaken-not-stirred, I'd heard at the bar; it became my mantra for the last 20 blocks. There are people in this city who do not go out in the sun; they are pale and many wear black. It's sort of an unspoken cult-- some are women who with vanity preserve their skin; many are writers and musicians. Some wear sunglasses at night.  When I walk home late, I imagine they are at their sills, looking out-- blessing the dark empty streets and keeping me safe, like black angels... my witnesses.

I am glad to be home. Elizabeth will no longer phone me at 3 AM and I will no longer sit on the floor in the dark trading stories until her drugs put her to sleep. But tonight I will pick up my guitar and like a sort of trance I will sing the song... the dark anthem, the funeral hymn, the Inauguration song... 

Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

Infinite Jest

The last few days I've spent in a sort of limbo haze.  While the weather has been deceptively summer-nostalgic, the news is terrifying and coldly discouraging.  Halloween is a mere hours away-- the costumed celebrators on the street seem oddly misplaced, and subdued.  As usual, it's everyone's opportunity to either hide inside a disguise or become the incarnation one has always craved.  Or feared.  

Down the block two of my neighbors were dressed today as a priest and a nun.  For some reason it was not amusing.  I'm too much of a Sunday sucker to cancel the urge to slightly kneel or cross myself in the presence of a holy robe.  I need this more than ever. The Jews may have had a September Day of Atonement, but Christians still have their weekly opportunity to clear their hearts.  The hourly bells remind me of my responsibility.  In the city, the sound of traffic and the sirens muffle their quiet melody.

In Manhattan most of us blend together.  Few wear their beliefs as a daily costume, and it's difficult without signs or flags to distinguish Palestinian sympathizers from Zionist demonstrators.  And all of us mourn the missing-- the dead and wounded-- the innocent.  In the preface to Election Day a palpable pall hangs over us all-- a kind of looming judgement.  We are both obliged and we are helpless.  While we freely protest and profess our allegiances, the fabric of our country is threadbare and shopworn. 

As a kind of preparation for the Oppenheimer film I'm still reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.  It's a little terrifying to consider the options and political climate of a sort of 'winning' America at the end of World War II.  Not for me to judge the harsh decisions of 1945, but to better understand the roots of the Cold War that defined my childhood, and mushrooms into the difficult narratives that face our world today.  With all our technology and science, I have less faith in the capacity of this world to find some kind of balance.  Boundaries, threats, political greed and bullying blur the lessons of globalism and humanity.  We are once again at some brink-- several brinks. It interrupts our sleep.

Personally, I've had a week of long conversations-- phone calls from close friends, ex husbands... family.  They feel confessional and intimate... some necessary issues to face-- illness, deaths, decisions... but some simply a kind of need to unburden ourselves and share a personal moment.  At my age I'm so aware of the significance of time-- it both slows and quickens, and I suffer over hours lost, or a day without any output. There's so much to read, and to learn... and then there is football-- the World Series.  I have nothing against Taylor Swift but I prefer her on the entertainment pages, as an option-- not a newsworthy topic.

I can't help resenting the time-wasting 'panning' for information nuggets the media has required of us-- the massive sea of self-serving posts that blind and distract us like Halloween costumes on a subway. It's hard to know not just what is real, and harder to see what is right.  This takes a toll.  Even the pandemic which has shrunk to a lower priority level, still insists on some kind of daily media real estate. 

In the midst of yet another utterly senseless mass killing, the pressing migrant issues which the city is visibly wearing, a young teenage boy drowned in the East River; a man tried to jump from a bridge.  On the West Coast tonight, the actor Matthew Perry ended his life in a tub of water.   

While I never watched Friends, I am aware of the actor's long and public struggle with substances-- with emotional and mental challenges- -with happiness and disappointment and things that most of us don't get to think about, because we are busy surviving-- providing for children, riding a bus to freedom and opportunity, or fighting for our lives.  And still, this news shakes our human core-- the very celebrity largesse of it-- the way we all sigh and gasp and feel sad. 

The utter horror of the first nuclear bombings is beyond human comprehension of terror-- beyond the bloody, gratuitously cruel and violent Halloween movies, a genre of which I could never really fathom a purpose.  The aftermath and the historic future which followed seems to be rife with parallel issues, a world which is so uber-informed and so widely ignorant.

I read an article this morning written by one of David Foster Wallace's ex-girlfriends.  He was wracked with emotional issues, depressions, suicidal behaviors.  Some of them manifested in his work.  Many of us relate to these cultural heroes to whom we refer in solitary moments, like a dark room.

The church of Sunday, for those like me who are fortunate enough to be out of harms way, is a blessing in itself.  I file away the confessions of others, alongside those of my own, realizing I have become, as was suggested of David Foster Wallace, a lesser curator of loneliness.  I wander the rooms of other thinkers who were more clever and deeper than I, with a kind of universal prayer that somehow their lessons and failures will rise to the surface of our daily fare of global disappointments, that they will penetrate and become a window onto the blacker rooms of this moment.

I Want the Angel

This season, as in so many previous, the operative human engine seems to be an evolving kind of empathy.  Zelensky's congressional address, like the star on our dysfunctional American political 'tree', seemed to mobilize some kind of national emotion.  Reading World's End, as I am, steeped in the harsh realities of WWI, it had extra resonance.  His small Napoleonic persona, in his sweats, also referred to the Battle of the Bulge; my father earned a Croix d'Honneur that day, and took home the wounds and scars of things we no longer see here in America.  We are much mired in Twitter controversies, the debt ceiling, the crypto implosion... and some of us-- well, only our social media and shopping.  We needed a televised reminder, another reason to care.  

The World Cup for many of us provided a happy reason to wake up-- the games were thrilling and the global celebrations and disappointments were compelling; we forgot about the needless deaths and prevailing bigotries of Qatar culture. We marveled at the modern stadiums and held our breath as country fought country on the field. The stellar final left a hole; for the depressed among Americans, and statistically there are millions, they are back to wondering what now? Football for six weeks. Some of my friends search television for inspiration, like religion; they embrace old Law and Orders, Sex and the City episodes... anything to remind them of their heyday, their moment in the sun-- the way things were, even when they were shitty. 

Personally I will watch any Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini... anything with Benicio del Toro... seasonally the versions of Kings of Kings-- Jeffrey Hunter, Max von Sydow... and especially the DeMille silent one, where He emerges to doves and lilies... and prompted me to ask my Catholic nanny so long ago who washed his robe? Our housekeeper once told us, so we would shut up during her programs, that the people on television could see us.  Like Jesus, I used to ask? Something like that, she answered.  But I felt known.  I behaved-- for Jesus, Santa Claus, the actors on Days of Our Lives and the Man From Uncle.  I felt responsible... 

Reading World's End, discovering the big-business machines which drove wars-- the economic windfalls amidst the devastation and killing... I can't help but draw parallels with Putin's war.  It's worrying.  And while there are geographic boundaries and definitions, we are all involved somehow. We post on Facebook, we raise money, we carry flags-- we worry.  It's a distraction from the usual narcissism and voyeurism of social media which occupied maybe the most massive portion of our attention during the pandemic isolation.  

Sometimes I think rather than just friendships, commonalities... we seek our double on Facebook.  We want to find someone with an equally cruel father or abusive husband-- a cancer patient with exactly our diagnosis...  someone else who has lost all their belongings in a fire and is now laughing in a bar. Or someone who loves cats, or who hates cats and loathes anyone who likes them... some of these pet-haters have admitted this to me and also confessed that they spend hours on YouTube watching videos of ravaged animals being lifted from sewage-soaked gutters, placed in a filthy blanket in someone's car-trunk and nursed back to some version of poverty-life.  It exercises their capacity to feel-- to empathize.  

Anyone who takes the subway especially in early morning or late-night has witnessed the relentless parade of beggars and story-tellers-- addicts, sad-sacks, mentally deranged... and some simply out-of-everything.  The percentage of people who even engage or give is shameful.  I, too, am guilty... I go to pantry, try to distribute food, try to convince the homeless to at least get a daily hot meal from a shelter rather than the garbage.  I do see kind people leave things in bus shelters... on benches... are they safe?  I don't know. They don't know that I am safe, for that matter-- with my sad face and surfeit of empathy-- who returns to a warm home feeling guilty and disturbed, primed to distract myself with a classic noir movie.  

There are other iniquities... among the pet-lovers and animal empathizers among us... a pair of homeless men-- identical twins like an old Arbus photo I often see in front of the HRA on 14th street-- both in need of medication... they talk at one another; last week someone had shaved their heads-- maybe lice or scabies... they are either underdressed or bundled in layers, generally in the warm months.  They do not ask, they do not beg.  They are not appealing. Also on 14th Street I have seen an exasperated father screaming abuses at his mentally-challenged son who grasps onto him and talks without cease, hits himself in the head... makes noises.  Surely this would try any parent or caregiver but the maternal in me feels wounded.  I do no good with my endless private sorrows and foodstamp economizing.  

I have friends who give massive amounts... run organizations and charities.  We follow the billionaire narratives--- we know their loves and their homes, and their likes and dislikes.  I have spoken often about the 'generosity ratio'.... there is plenty left... does this make them less good?  I don't know.  Then we have the monstrous financial fairy-tales like the Sam Bank-Man Fried (as in the past participle) story.  I can still hear his pretentious interviews on Bloomberg, waving his crypto-wand, summoning investments from an audience who maybe admired or envied him? How do these people function, who could have lifted many of the world's poverty-veils with the massive wealth they swindled?  And even post-conviction.. his quality of life will be considerably better than the average flood-displaced Pakistani.

Empathy hurts, for some of us.  Playing music-- or the better part of it, is empathic; we listen and feel one another.  For audience it is often a kind of narcotic.  A sad song can take us into a nostalgic reverie that feels like pain.... or lift our heart.  A great lover is empathic... the way they give, the way they understand what their partner needs.  And yet many of us when we are most happy get up and break the heart of the person who lies beside us... as though we are drawn to the ending, do not trust bliss, feel the tourniquet of guilt.  

World's End reminds me how the earth absorbs blood.. how the theater of this war was cleared and rebuilt.  My friend discovered years later there had been a brutal murder in his apartment... the renovation left no trace of the victim.  And here we are-- the shootings, the hit-and-runs... the bloody sidewalks of New York City. Perhaps hardly a square yard that has not seen some violence or injury... 

Fortunately or unfortunately this empathy, this stray animal or shadow-- will follow us into the new year.  Our best celebrations will be dampened by sad news-- by illnesses and this terrible war... pandemics and crises world over-- the hungry and displaced... the waves of immigrants coming into a freezing city in T-shirts, being handed a blanket.  How do we process this? Where are we? Commercials for anti-depressants, for Jesus, for suicide prevention. Look in on your neighbor, they urge-- and still, for the parents among us... the ones that ask do you know where your children are?  they still stab.  

I am wrestling with these issues... like Jacob's angel... or believing the Jesus on television can see me... yes, some days I am joyful... watching the sun set across the Central Park reservoir, feeling the golden light on my face.  Other nights I absorb my friends' sorrows and discomfort and am a hare's breath from a deep pit of suicidal horror. I write a poem... or a song... and it's sometimes like throwing the coals on a freezing evening fire... sometimes.

Last night at the end of my subway platform there was a man kneeling... close to the edge.  I walked over-- with my bass and my protective mask and my helpless empathy; perhaps he was praying... perhaps he needed a scarf or gloves.  As I got closer I realized he was quietly vomiting into his hat.  A Christmas tableau.  I did nothing. Prayed... went home.  In my head I heard Jim Carroll's haunting lyrics...'I want the angel/whose darkness doubles/absorbs the brilliance of all my troubles.'  Empathy.  It might have killed him. Music. Sometimes it saves us. Amen.  

A Mind of Her Own

I'm finding it hard to sleep.  World catastrophes distort my thought processes; an impending hurricane, the threat of war... they impinge, loom like living shadows.  What is the worst outcome, I ask myself? Death? I have been surrounded by its aftermath; I learned its scent in my parents' bedroom, witnessing their denouement, marveling at the absence of comfort even a lifetime partner provided at the end.  He did not wait for her, nor did anyone honor her simple final requests.  

Suicide has become a devastating unintentional weapon.  When I was a teenager it seemed so innocent and near-poetic.  There was Sylvia Plath and Nick Drake... their deaths seemed to wind the threads of creativity into an organized narrative, with a kind of apotheosis at the end.  

The immigrants haunt my dreams somehow... trying helplessly to find a home in a hostile universe.  The tiny kindnesses of my week are so often offered by those who speak little English but understand the language of human need.  The mathematics of population are broken; there are so many here, and then so many more... where will they sleep, who will feed them? The Turkish fruit vendor who stuffs my bag with things... Happy, he says to me. Happy, as my eyes water. Crossing through Carver Houses on the way home last night, a pair of rats stumbled into the curb-- recently poisoned, they were panicky and deranged. A huddle of teenagers recorded their awkward dance moves on their phones, hysterical; a few of them threw rocks at them.  It was prime entertainment... and they were suffering.. God, what is wrong with me that I can't even bear the discomfort of sewer rats? That I take these things home with me like images burned on my head-screen? A kind of omen?

I woke up with lyrics on my tongue:  'She had a mind of her own and she used it well...' It took a senior minute for me to identify the Stones song which honestly I hadn't heard in years, but the message... kept on playing over and over.  According to my mother I never used it well, nor did I wear it well, in her fashion-critical opinion.  I believed in things... I believed in fate.  I waited for one of the myriad endings of one of my stories to unravel in realtime, with pen dipped in ink, poised-- waiting for the ordained, the handwriting, the lunar device... I rode the train and skipped his stop deliberately... 

Who of us is really using it well?  There are some... but the majority of slide-shows that scroll away-- they are re-runs, or remakes, or tributes... could we possibly have run out of ideas?  Film makers used to cut and cut to fit their dream onto a few reels of image; now there is infinite space and the content not quite as worthy.  I'm tired of biopics and contemporary versions of history and celebrity.  People used to look a certain way; they were iconic and unique.  There is make-up and dress-up and there are roles to play.. but there is also surgery and body shaping and face-contouring and it blurs the edges. The other night I realized I can scarcely tell the difference between Julia Roberts and Kira Sedgwick.  Doctor, my eyes? 

I'm not sure if it's a combination of chronic tinnitus and the subtle motors of technology, but I hear a sort of perpetual soundtrack-- a swelling and then a decrescendo... of music-- chords, harmony... some celestial sort of instrument.  I pick up a guitar and it doesn't synch.  It is either the sound of New York, or my own personal madness.  The inside of my head-- riddled with the kind of messages that undermined the confidence of that star gymnast in the Olympics... the emotional cancel-culture that afflicts the more sensitive among us.  

When we were young we overestimated our power.  I'm not sure if it was the era-- after all, we changed history with our demonstrations and music-- but we walked tightropes with confidence.  I used to obsessively watch my son's basketball games-- as though my presence could change their outcome.  We all do this-- we witness sports; we yell and root.  Recently I spent 5 hours watching a damn tennis game. Afterward I thought of this block of precious time, and I wondered at the end, lying on one's final bed, if one doesn't demand a refund.  

We do the best we can with the diminishing value of the contemporary, the desperate audiences searching while all around our structures are crumbling, our political world sways and we are threatened with daily horror.  I remember when love to me meant the patient impatience between lying-downs.  Then you have a baby and passion is whispered and things are spoken in beds... discovery and adventure are shelved and you find intimacy between sheets of a Memory Motel of your own invention.  Personally I miss not just the bedmates but the sounds-- the subtle music of foreign cities.  To write this into a song obsesses me, and I am failing.

For those of us with a mind of our own,  we cope with some unavoidable bitternesses; we fold our clothes and prepare our version of a coffin.  We assess the sad world-- count the suicides, the murders, the disappointments and failures-- pile them beside the things we have created... our children, our books and music... and we finally choose to believe, in a world where nothing is good enough, that we were just that. 

 

Can I Get a Witness

I've been thinking lately about truth... how I once believed there was a singular version of things-- as they occurred-- and it was sacred. Simple. Not biblical, because there are versions-- interpretations, translations... but sacred.  Today I can't even get two identical thermometer readings-- there's the air temperature, the ground, the heat index. There's exaggeration, and there's the margin of error of human memory.  With all the technology and recording of moments, there is photo-shop and there are erasures, corrections... these change history.  The Rashomon-reminiscent January 6th hearings... will they lead to justice, conviction, or just a massive national shrug?

In the small-print news items, there has been a spate of suicides. Jumpers. This always shakes me to my core.  Looking further into a couple of the incidents that happened just blocks from me, there are local postings-- discussions, comments.  Yappers and criticizers observing the selfish nature of this kind of drama-- the clean-up, the damage, the risk to innocent human life passing on sidewalks below. Someone's car windshield was smashed.  Jumpers are not always considerate; they do not warn.  Or do they? And how do we know at the last instant-- they could have been pushed... tripped on the brink of some decision? I remember watching that documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge-- how the few survivors of a leap spoke about regret when it was too late.  

Some days I feel as though I'm in the middle of some Murakami novel. I'm not quite sure what is real. I observe, I even record, sometimes-- write things down... but I am too often missing a witness. Occasionally I lie awake worrying about being misunderstood.  The indignity of having your final gesture misinterpreted-- the poor suicide being not just victimized enough to end his life, but to be posthumously chastised--- well, it was a little overkill.  Who really knows his last thoughts-- his intention? Even Ivana last week-- what happened? I'd rather, in the end, not rely on a Coroner's report.  

Over the years I've done a bit of support work-- for medical patients, cancer sufferers.  Mostly this requires listening.  In the end, these people need not just care and pain-relief-- but they need a witness. Even Sunday confessions-- it's not absolution as much as the release of information-- sharing, letting go... to be heard, if not seen.  Their own truth, or their guilt as they process it.  Once it's witnessed, well.. it becomes perhaps bearable.  Psychologically, a large percentage of therapy is just talk-- having a 'paid friend', one of my acquaintances used to describe his shrink sessions-- but for me, it's the designated witness that somehow shifts the burden of guilt.

My friend reminded me this morning about the importance of sunscreen.  I suddenly had this memory of a distant summer in the city where I sat out on my rooftop in a white bikini day after day, at peak afternoon heat, maybe trying to turn myself into a different race.  Coincidentally I was married at the time to a West Indian who was often on the road.  In my neighborhood there were tons of musicians; many of them knew I'd be lying around on the rooftop, and they joined me there.  It became, more than anything, a kind of therapy... people would tell me their problems... I was a captive sunbathing audience, absorbing not just rays but extraordinary tales of infidelities, band-infighting, bad relationships. Unpaid witness that I was, exposing myself to not just future skin cancer risk but the toxic unraveling of people some of whom became celebrity fair-game. Today the memory gave me a laugh.  Nowadays of course I'd have to go to their instagram or whatever and see their secrets and minutia exposed for the world.  A little cheap.  Would I sell my experiences?  I would not.

The whole Facebook/instagram culture attests more than anything to some human craving to be 'seen', for those of us with no lifetime heroics to display ourselves in all our petty daily activities as though we were being paparazzi'd to death.  Then there are the endless autobiographies and blogs (guilty as charged) for everything that a photograph cannot convey.  

I recently read a disturbing but important history of Eastern Europe under the Hitler and Stalin regimes. The author reiterated the fact that the horrors of concentration camps and cruelties as described by survivors cannot even compare with the atrocities that passed without description, with no witnesses besides the silent perpetrators who were unlikely to retrospectively record their wickedness.   While we sift through the endless mountains of media product, the competitive surfeit of daily information, there are still the unsung, the unobserved-- the lost and perhaps longest-suffering unseen and unheard.  For all the history books, there are perhaps just as many unknown narratives.  

Last week I ventured out to sit on a park bench at sunset, with a book.  There seemed to be an endless stream of older neighborhood people looking to talk, to share... asking me if I'd listen, or speak... they'd been so solitary during the long months of pandemic quarantine... they'd lost loved ones and friends, jobs... homes.  It was a bit reminiscent of my bikini roof-top days.  I got no reading done but felt a certain communal sadness realizing with all the outlets and connections, we have very few valid witnesses of our own deeper realities and truths.  On every level, it's a little tragic.

Bedeviled

Ever since the pandemic began, I've confessed several times to a television habit-- difficult as it is to follow the war in Ukraine these nights; the footage is beyond upsetting, the awareness of sitting in a safe room processing the horror provokes a kind of shame.  This weekend, with the NCAA games as distraction, I nearly overdosed.  I swore I'd avoid the Academy Awards but found myself tuning in just in time to see a few choice moments-- including the Will Smith debacle. 

I'm sure every blogger, journalist, critic, and mouthpiece has had a go at this today.  For me, I knew little of the marriage back-story; I'm old enough that a 20-something year achievement seems unimpressive, although I'm aware that Hollywood years are like dog-ages to the rest of us.  Still, what I did gather is that Will Smith seemed unhinged.  Not just upset or motivated or protective-- literally unhinged.  More than met the camera-eye. 

Of course I'm sort of a Hollywood-hater.  I haven't fallen in love with a movie for some time, now.  Nothing seems inventive or world-beating.  The glam and prep for these events far exceeds the content.  Such is life these days.  And with the world situation as it is, although these superstars and celebrities sympathized and supported the Ukrainian cause, these productions just seem-- well, faithless.  

The whole weekend was kind of a wash-- a storm of bad news and dismay and death.  Taylor Hawkins-- for anyone that plays rock and roll-- is a dream drummer.  He's animated and showmanly, and he plays his ass off-- sings, too.  It's a shock. Of course 50 is nearly twice the proverbial age of tragic loss, but it seems young to me.  I watched over and over footage of their more recent concerts; you try to find something-- some reason, some 'key'... He often took the microphone and sang before an audience.  It takes rock and roll balls to do this, to an arena-crowd.  He had that extra-energy-- the kind that comes often from the drug of performance, but also the kind that comes from a glassine envelope.  Something was not right.  And then it was all wrong.

Saturday evening on the way home I stopped at the Affordable Art Fair.  Granted, I'm tired of my own art-snobbery and disappointment... but honestly there was nothing I wanted to afford. The people exhibiting were so nice and courteous and the gallery staff just enthusiastic and generous-- but I felt sorry for them.  This has nothing to do with art.  It was desperate and meaningless and tarted-up with visual quotes of celebrity images and familiar art memes.  I ran into a friend who was buying a photograph (one of an edition) that reminded him of another photographer whose work reminds me of a Warholian car crash.  I wanted to say to him... look at this-- look at this painting.. there is something obviously missing here... but he doesn't see... maybe even the maker doesn't see-- or doesn't care. When in any reality does a sculpted hamburger take the place of something cooked?  Somewhere there is a line.  Things begin with a line.

Last night at 4 AM I was awakened by a gunshot.  One single shot.  It is unmistakable, this sound, and in a culture and time where suicide has become trendy and topical, it is worrying.  Or violence.  22 shots, they counted in Young Dolph's body...  21 more than he needed.  99 problems...  I am trying hard to get my broken friends to stop nursing their weaknesses, counting pains and issues.  We step out, I tell them.  We pull ourselves up into some kind of presentable walking creature.  We do this.  We are strong; we walk out onstage, like Taylor Hawkins did night after night... we lift weights and carry things. 

King Richard.  Like so many of the Shakespearean royals unhinged by just the pressures of responsibility and the pangs of remorse-- fear of failure, craving for heroic adulation.  Hollywood actors crawl on bloody knees for the success so few of them achieve.  Many hate themselves, despite all the press and hype and good deeds.  It's an unsustainable situation... and it's short-lived.  I remember well cheering my son at games which are equally forgettable and forgotten, but many of them punctuated with a trophy or a symbol; a brief championship.  These show up in thrift shop shelves... or at those memorabilia auctions.  One doesn't know who will be collectible in the end.  Life intervenes and dilutes. 

What I do know is the message of violence is heinous and immature. It's a punch in the face we'd all like to deliver somewhere, but here we are condemning Putin for his war-tantrum and behavior like an upset child with the power to threaten the world.  Nothing worse than a boy with a loaded gun. Not all of us have an audience-- or even a global live audience.  Those NCAA basketball players-- some of them threw their balls up in the air and failed to see them land squarely.  They pushed and shoved a little too hard-- they are boys, and defeat is tough to handle--especially when it is so fleeting and decisive.  They foul out, they receive a technical slap on their hand. In the NBA they are fined.  

It wasn't just the violence with no rebuttal... it was the disturbing acceptance speech, as well... the selfish/unselfish rhetoric of a privileged human-- talented, no question.  But unhinged, the way many of us feel.  The tears were not right.  We were a captive not a captivated audience.  There he was with a stage and a forum to deliver something. We squirmed in disbelief as we watched a man self-destructing.   I wonder what my friend the psychiatrist would say-- the one who calls me out consistently for my inconsistencies and vapid confessions.

I am singing for Ukraine, a girl announced onstage the other night.  I am painting for Ukraine, an artist tweeted... look at me, look at me. At your highest point, Denzel (the other King) quipped, the devil will come for you.   Not to mention your lowest point-- your final swan-song, your night of carousing, your career zenith which may haunt you forever because it is the ledge from which you fell, from which you are measured.  At 53 with a massive career of accomplishments, this was not simply an act of passion-- a bad decision.  

We are not enough, we humans. We have lost the thread of humanity; we have lost the content-- the purity-- the meaning of art.  The soul. It's not enough.  It's not good enough or tough enough or funny enough and it's not going to matter, in the long run.  Most award winners are doomed to become jeopardy questions and record-book entries.  The devil is winning, my friend said to me the other night. He is everywhere, maybe... certainly in the White House at the end of 2020... but one thing is for sure; even he is unreliable.  As David Grohl well knows... in the end, all alone is all we are (repeat ad infinitum...).

Home Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quaranteen

The first slight chill of September is a grim reminder of not just time but his designated reaper.  This summer's diminished celebrations have highlighted the significance of our mortality... of the way things wind down, segue casually into a sequence... or, more rarely-- simply die.  That 2020 may be remembered as the year with no summer, for some of us, is for our future perfect to determine.  

Death after death has been logged, like a thick-knotted rope we blindly grope in an unfamiliar, unlit present.  We are sad-- we are repressed, we are uncharacteristically grateful for small privileges as they are gradually restored... but like a hurricane aftermath, we have not yet surveyed the damaged human landscape.  

Meanwhile we have the fires burning in the West, reminding us that nature is not done with us-- that vaccine or none, there are larger battles in store-- there is perhaps life on Venus, economic disaster for any one of a number of countries... there is still a looming and impressive death toll to digest.  No wonder people demonstrate; fear fuels anger... we are leaderless, disunited, confused and betrayed.  We are the victims of emotional recession.

Tonight I re-watched The Virgin Suicides.  With the added distance of age (the parental Lisbons are a generation younger than I am now), it all seemed both more and less poignant.  The concept of innocence-- especially for those of us who were born in the 50's-- is complex and rooted.  Whether we were raised in a protective, sheltered home or somehow damaged and violated, all women seem to have a mothery response to teenage girls.  As some of us know, they can also be evil and manipulative-- but even in the darkest Lolitas, there remains a 'band' of white.  They get a reduced sentence.  

One of the noted ironies of this film tonight was the quarantine-- which unlike our pandemic culture only served to encourage the so-called malignancy it was meant to prevent.  Teenage suicide is especially tragic because real-life seems so vast and irrelevant outside the small passionate priorities of youth.  I remember my older sister once swallowed a bottle of aspirin because she was docked from some unremarkable party.  At the hospital she confessed she'd only actually eaten seven and they were baby aspirin because she was more terrified of the stomach-pumping apparatus.  In the end it was a worthless exercise and she'd played the death card badly.

The other theme that struck me was the longing-- that hypnotic, all-consuming 'drug' we really only experience from the entry points of love-- the fantastic, elaborate, drawn out sense of endless waiting to consummate or even touch the object of our desire (which can change in a teenage heartbeat).  Halfway through the film, at the bottom of the screen a message floated by informing me, among other bits of news, that Cardi B had filed for divorce citing 'trust issues'. Well... times have certainly changed from nights of holding a telephone receiver over a turntable playing early Todd Rundgren to the instantaneous and public posts of social media.  In the current MO of relationships, those weighted endless hours of courtship have eloped; time snaps back like an elastic weapon in your face.  

I don't know what teenagers hold onto these days... romance has had its wings clipped-- or maybe the quarantine, like the Lisbon sisters, has only stirred the fires of love and creativity.  I have heard all too many stories of death these months-- painful for those of us who stand helplessly on these quiet sidelines, but also somehow comprehensible in this world of 'less-than'.  I look back on my girlhood; as a high school senior I had a brief romance with a handsome young teacher who was installed as a 'draft dodger' .  He let it be known he was interested and as inappropriate and taboo as it was, it superseded any romantic fantasies of my 17th year.  I was fortunate; he treated me with utmost respect and kindness.  We drove off in his Renault to a studio apartment on West End Avenue where he taught me things I had not known, but never violated my 'innocence'.  It was 'everything'.  He even introduced me to Dustin Hoffman.  

My high school romance became a lifelong friendship... we went our separate appropriate ways and I always considered this experience more than first love... During the pandemic I learned he'd passed away, and with it a small chunk of my past buried itself.  For those of us who do not attend funerals or post on social media or weep publicly, these things have taken a toll.  For teenagers, reading about death statistics daily, masking their young mouths and maintaining an amount of sterility-- well, it seems like some kind of deprivation--  the year with no 'teenage'.  It seemed fitting tonight that The Virgin Suicides paid a kind of tribute to the pain and loss suffered by even the 'privileged perfect'.  I remember the criticisms that it 'rhapsodized' suicide... for me it just reminded of the perfect fragility of adolescence... the sad wasted timeline of disappointment and cancellation-- the ambiguous and ambivalent value of quarantine.  But I am old and nostalgic-- empathic and sad.

On the other hand, apparently Cardi B. has just filed for custody of Kulture.  Let's hope not.  

Abandoned Ship

I was up earlier than usual for a Saturday-- took a jog uptown and saw my Boxer training by the Meer-- it's been months and we were happy to see one another-- enough to exchange smiles... his a kind of stiff grin through his mouthguard.  I love that he trains alone with the guard in.  He's serious. No mask.  No one is going to step into his 6-foot ring.  

By the public bathrooms a large man singing through a cheap karaoke kit-microphone... Stuck on You... of all things.  Last week it was Ain't No Sunshine.  He was bad.  Not Michael Jackson bad... just bad.  As I passed, like an announcer he cheered me on, through the little speaker-- yeah, Baby Girl, you do it...  Even I had to laugh... no one called me that even when I was a toddler.  I'm certainly no one's baby. 

Most of my life I have chosen the 'high road' in bad situations.  I have opted out of payment, given to charity, refused to argue when greed was the protagonist on the table, gone home with my pride a thin coating against the weather and the haters.  You and yo' damn principles, Tyrone scolded me when I refused to trade food stamps for cash.  I'll buy him lunch, but don't want his benefits.  

Me and my damn principles.  I feel like it's Act III of this Corona play; we're all in it, scriptless, rolling around like blind pinballs waiting to hit some bell or whistle-- illness, death-- job loss, eviction.  We're hunkered down here, some of us.  I've never abandoned the ship of my city before, but my building is less than half-occupied at the moment, and day by day I read Facebook announcements of emigres, deserters. What am I proving here?  I feel like a smoker on my last pack... what next?  

Uptown seems calmer than downtown; no moving trucks here, not much action on the street before dark.  People jogging, shopping... walking dogs, setting up for street barbecues and picnics-- but little anger... more like a what's next attitude and the hangover from 5 months of diminished life. We've become lazy-- flabby, unproductive.  We accept shitty television and whatever sports we can get.  We overpay for cable and internet-- it's become our new expensive bedmate. We argue less at checkout.  We drink alone and accept curfews.  

I've been getting a ton of art-related email.  Virtual exhibition tours, panels-- opinions, critiques, advice.  The 5 or 7 or 10 curators who have shaped the art market.  Over and over.  The social relevance of new art...  etc.  What does it take these days to be an art curator?  When I went to school we had to distinguish forgeries from authentic signatures-- fakes from actual.  We had to know.  Art meant something; there was a history and formal principles to be analyzed.  Like a history of classical music.  And contemporary.  Of course now that 'markets' are more important than art, all bets are off.  People are anesthetized and too lazy to look; they take the opinion of 'experts' like a medicine.  They buy what they are told.  They sell. These things don't wear well; back into the cycle.  

The way things are framed in this life seems to be important.  This is advertising-- presentation; wardrobe, make-up.  I have been shocked in my lifetime seeing celebrities totally 'naked'.  Unrecognizable.  The framing is essential.  I have seen paintings-- works of art-- sloppy and frayed, sometimes finger and foot-printed from an old studio floor... then transformed like funky ducklings into graceful wall-swans, surrounded by mounting trickery like celestial cloud-rendering. Ready for luxury customers.  

I started to think today-- how the unexpected afternoon sunshine transformed the Meer. There was even an unscripted rainbow-- or at least half a rainbow.  The water had just enough current to make a kind of quiet surf-music.  While I am pretty well-versed in naming painters and identifying artwork, I still haven't learned to recognize trees.  Nature doesn't really speak to me the way I know roads and cornerstones-- rooftop profiles and water-towers against skyscrapers... I have befriended lampposts and painted messages... they resonate in my human heart the way bookspines, cigarette packs-- have meaning.  Photographed faces in a row-- vinyl album covers-- stamp books and bootlaces-- cassettes in repurposed wine crates.  The way things hurt, when you are young... the way girls fell in love with one another at a certain age... you knew-- this face-- was going to be your best.  

Trash piles outside the projects are the same as ever... old TVs, discarded furniture, broken airconditioners-- strollers... but downtown, they are filling with things... with cast-offs and cartons of memory.  My people are deserting me.  Not for the first time I have the sense of a sinking ship... but I can find few reasons to hang in.  Maybe the 'principled' of us are on the diseased cruise ship of New York.  After the fear, the distrust, the social distancing and unrest-- the demonstrations and demands... the sorrow... Death has become at least one of the starring roles in this new play. Suicide, I have come to believe, is in all of our DNA... it is part of the human condition and the unique privilege we have.  Maybe the concept of suicide has yet to invade the collective soul of an urban animal.  Maybe we are on some verge.  

I've been thinking about the ocean-- watching hurricanes rage and recede, massive wave formations.  I've been listening, again, to Procol Harum's A Salty Dog... it's a kind of metaphor for grief, this album. It's beautiful and I miss this kind of songwriting-- these albums of our heart that seem memorialized in vinyl. My old copy is quite worn.  It asks me who will inventory my life when it is over? Who will curate, present and frame?  I'm not sure how this play ends; by then the ship may have sunk, and my moot and principled life will surely not be deemed seaworthy.  I hope someone somewhere will still treasure the lyrics of Keith Reid, or whomever...they resonate with even more truth in these times... Let him who fears his heart alone/Stand up and make a speech...

If Six was Nine

Among the thousands of stories and heroics of ER and hospital personnel we read in the news daily, there was yet another recent version of the Jimi Hendrix tragedy.  More last-minute accounts and conflicting narratives of his final night:  the number of pills he took, the one found on the floor, the testimony of Eric Burdon, bad decisions of poor Monica who was scarcely a reliable or competent 'nurse'... whether the Mafia or the CIA or his own greedy management was responsible.  We read, we go back to that moment-- What if, we wonder-- and repeat our frustration and sorrow at the cruel loss of one of our cultural icons who in a few years changed rock guitar--- opened up a door, as these people do.  It is like a record-- it goes round endlessly and really we cannot see between the vinyl lines.

Beneath the veneer of this pandemic which has become 'life' for so many of us, there are other layers of existence-- one being made up of the lonely and otherwise sick, because death does not kindly stop for a global illness.  He rages on, tormenting his victims with cancer, allowing motorcycle accidents and fires-- terrifying explosions and bullet wounds.  And then the secret dying-- the suicides and sleepers, the debtors and evicted unemployed, the ones too confused to apply for government aid-- the panhandlers who can no longer survive on what frightened people do not put in their cup... the sidewalk singers and saxophones, the crawlers and street-barkers who have lost their place.  For all of these on the underbelly of the city, things have become more difficult.  Some reach out a hand for any substance anyone will spare-- bets are off, fear is the black cloud that follows their evening dread.  I see many sitting on the park perimeter, where they can still find the rare city benches that allow a person to lie down.

Many of these people surround themselves with things--- carts and strollers-- anything with wheels that will allow them to transport their possessions a short distance-- to the public bathrooms by the Meer, to food sources which are plentiful these days, ironically; at a bus shed the other night I found three small shopping bags with wonderfully packed dinners inside-- 'Please Take'  the packages said.  I did not.   But most of the homeless still scrounge through trashcans, scavenge outside fast-food stores where lines of people often eat quickly and discard scraps.  Yesterday a girl on Park Avenue and 111th Street was sitting on the curb eating from an old KFC bucket... a Citibike lying next to her-- she was filthy-- her lovely skin streaked with street soot... how do we save these people, I thought?  She looked up at me with eyes that rolled in her head... Yo, Mama, she said...  I kept walking.

I've been going through the possessions of a friend who passed from the virus.  It's a huge daunting task and even his family cannot manage.  He is of that 'race' of people who become a kind of hoarder... we are all guilty in my generation-- we collect things-- we are sentimental-- records, cassettes, cds, photographs... old clothing.  For those who are celebrities and musicians-- fans give them things; fans make them things.  When I was 15 I had a crush on Dustin Hoffman and waited outside his stage door to give him a careful portrait I'd drawn.  I met him at one point as adults and he claimed to still have it... who knows?  People with money have storage spaces and large homes-- on the street one must carry on their back or their carts.  Who is to say what is precious and valuable?

As we go through things-- postcards and pins and guitar picks-- each one opens up a little storybook-- a memory we might otherwise have lost... and some of these things, as we age, become 'orphaned'.. we have lost their identity, that moment... which boyfriend, which pressed flower.. which country?  When people die suddenly, they leave behind a flood of information, of sentiment and even secrets...
back it flows-- out to a vast sea of lost time-- the achingly beautiful moments and the useless unworthy junk... altogether.  Writers and artists sacrifice their lives to unravel these things-- to sort them, rescue them... because we failed somehow to rescue the deceased.

I remember a friend's father who was a compelling but complicated man;  he went home one night when he was in his alleged prime and put a pistol in his mouth.  Just before, he'd been at a diner and had a grilled cheese and coffee, smoked a cigarette... tipped the waitress modestly, as he did.  She spoke to me afterward-- how she could have saved him, had she only known.  Oh, but you did, in a way, I reassured her... perhaps many times... and she did not understand.

The death of my friend's son is the current knife in my back.  He belongs to one of the underlayers of these times-- the privileged happy, with the so-called 'everything'-- and yet they take their lives.  We spend endless nights tossing and regretting and wondering-- if we only-- just to go back-- those minutes-- he was alone and did this thing-- or perhaps, as I like to think, crossed a line-- knew immediately he wanted to go back-- the way jumpers who survive often describe the moment-- and was unable.  If only... Jimi Hendrix... Kurt Cobain... the sad suiciders full of brilliance who deprive us, who cannot bear their burden.  And then,  perhaps we have the story all wrong.

My mother always used to tell me, when I brought home sick or stray animals-- You cannot save everything.  It happened with men, too-- so many worth saving but so little time-- I eventually gave up.  Still, in my evening rounds of the Meer, I meet eyes with those who are willing;  I wave at the ones who seem 'parked' semi-permanently in the dusk with their packages and odds.  The pond is becoming greenish and murky at the edges, like the pool of New Yorkers who remain stubbornly in their city.  Please, I repeat to myself at night, please do not... to all of those who may be teetering on the edge of another world that beckons.  Do not leave us here, wondering, missing... beating ourselves, the way women in ancient cultures beat themselves in mourning... I understand this ritual, now.

I have on my table here a cheap little box with a metal pick inside-- the souvenir of my friend... equal to maybe one single cell in a massive organism that was his legacy.  He died of the virus, not his own hand, although we are left with the same sense of helpless failure.  In the multitudes of minutiae and memories, I realize he was saving himself, in a way, knowing that there is really no one at the end...  who will save us, tragic as it is.  If Six was only Nine....

Red, White and Blue

On July 4th I took an uncrowded 4 train to Brooklyn to hang with my son.  Solitude and quarantine have muffled the sounds of freedom ringing; just a few short weeks ago the pre-sunset curfew was downright penetentiarial.  I craved the sight of bridges and water and the Jersey shoreline-- the sense of distance, of space that is not measured out in six-foot lengths.  I thought the trip might help stir up some holiday spirit.

Walking to the subway was like an audio land-mine... firecrackers and street-caps exploding everywhere... Roman candles and sparklers whizzing by, blasts and M-80s and rockets threatening my old damaged ears.  I was jumpy; the station, even with the heat, was like a quiet refuge.  On the train, pretty much everyone wore a mask-- except the guy by the rear door who was smoking a joint and pointed out to me several times that I was the only white person in the car.  Certainly I was the only person without earbuds-- a captive audience to his rants and raps and disgruntlements.  When he pressed me for a response, I confessed I didn't feel very white, thinking about my unbleached laundry still drying off in the permanent humidity of my bathroom.   It seemed to satisfy him-- he offered me a toke and I turned it down, touching the mask.  In the relative calm of train noise, I felt safe.

In Brooklyn my son treated me to tacos on the roof of a cool Mexican place-- seemed appropriately a-patriotic for American Independence Day.  I had my first drink of alcohol since that last horrid glass of red at Parkside -- when Alan I toasted the proverbial end of the world as the downtown music scene hit the fan.  It burned a little-- like I was somehow disloyal for drinking without him.   A few couples socially distanced at tables seemed subdued... as though they were waiting for something; a young family with a cranky toddler reminded me of how exhausting the relentless claustrophobia of family can be-- how my first quarantine was like a numerical sentence-- me, a baby, an absent husband and the thick walls of early winter dusk that closed tightly around a mother who was accustomed to barhopping and rock and roll nights.  Sometimes I tire my son-the-man with memories and reminiscence... mostly I reduce it down to a general apology for my learning-on-the-job parenting style.

I insisted we check out the view from the Brooklyn promenade-- magical on any night, but the 4th held some promise of pyrotechnics and sky-entertainment, although nothing like the dazzling light-show of 2019-- the crowds, the buzz, the noise. The Statue of Liberty seemed to have shrunk... like someone picked her off and replaced her with a facsimile-- Liberty-Barbie with the green robe and the crown... and what reason had she to stand tall anyway... sham that she became in this administration with her baited false message of welcome to immigrants, the racially charged symbol of white freedom-- in a harbor with few boats, in a city where residents must mask their face and fear their neighbors?  She, too, seemed subdued and ironic...

Where is my freedom, I wondered?  Is it here... on a promenade by a river I've known most of my life, looking at an altered landscape across a bridge I used to watch from my childhood pram-- the one that haunted my dreams for years-- even still?  On my birth certificate which identifies me as female and white-- a citizen of New York City where I find myself tethered-- despite my youthful wanderings and yearnings... ?  What has become of my city-- a scene of emotional wreckage and the slow attrition of all that I loved most?

The post-4th evenings are quiet although I read in my audio manual that the city ambient sounds have a significant decibel presence.   My dusk runs are still punctuated by heart-stopping random firework explosions.  I have become more intimate with Central Park than I ever expected...  I recognize the routine joggers and walkers-- the babies growing and the Boxers getting their mojo back... My egret has disappeared; surely she is somewhere in the city.  The ducks and geese seem to have a certain purpose... recently a few of them line up on the tiny rock island in the center of the reservoir; they have an order-- they do not seem to compete.

In the distance of dark there are few sirens now; the traffic is subdued and tame.  There is an occasional quiet roar from a pack of demonstrators but even these have become less frequent.  Fewer airlines pass above... fewer traffic helicopters.  My windows are always open; I live without air conditioning and maybe hallucinate from the heat. When I was small I believed in a country (my country) called Tizovthee-- sweet land of liberty.  I squinted horizon-clouds into purple-hazed mountains and transported myself there, land of the pilgrim's pride.  Of 'Thee' I sang-- its nickname...  halfway between heaven and Oz.   The mountains paint themselves nostalgically into the sky behind the towers of the El Dorado.  They stay with me as I type into the morning hours, as I waste time and dawdle with books and memories, go from guitar to text.

But there is another component of these nights-- it is a sort of cloud that hovers-- blankets and beckons like a scent... a few of my friends have been captivated and succumbed... I read their names
in the obituaries, on Facebook pages and Twitter posts.  It is there as the sun sets in its fiery death throes of pinks and golds, as the morning sky threatens to replace the black with its electric blue magic... deceives, taunts me into a new day-- or to the edge of sleep.  It sings to me--  of the bloodless cool of breathlessness, of the enchanting nightmare of fever, of a slipping away--a letting go-- of the girl who is lost in a lake tonight or adrift in an untraceable boat-- in a plane with a cut engine, a receding surf and a wind.  For some of us there is another kind of freedom that beckons-- that makes us safe, but offers solace when there is none.  I am learning to forgive those who cannot resist... I understand... there are bells... and as I misheard the song when I was young, without lyric sheets, perhaps the sound of freedom laughing.

What a Wonderful World This Would Be

Tuesdays are trash nights in my neighborhood.  This week the Christmas trees are stacked high for mulch trucks; recyclables are bagged up, and discarded household items-- furniture, bathroom fixtures, books, framed posters and old appliances-- are piled up like flea market dumpsters.  On one corner, an almost-new baby walker sticks up-- clean and unmarked, with its Elmos and Cookie Monsters, rattles and spinners... I couldn't help patting the muppets on their little plastic heads, and wondered how these young parents could have left them cruelly on a garbage-pile.

Okay, maybe it was never a preferred beloved plaything but a space-hogging despised gift from someone the family disliked.  Maybe it caused a household accident and left a scar on their perfect son or daughter.  It tugged painfully at my worn heartstrings, and reminded me that parenting, one of the commonalities in all our lives, comes in all varieties.

I just finished reading Savage Beauty, the biography of world-renowned poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Few women writers of her era reached the kind of star-status she held for some time, entwined as it was with her femme-fatale/girlish image.  One of three intelligent and complex sisters, she was raised by a mother who was multi-talented and a little narcissistic, and who will be remembered mostly for her illustrious offspring.  She is a photograph-- a letter writer-- in the Edna St. Vincent Millay archive.

Recently I've read several statements by 20th-century women of achievement in the arts.  Most all of them contend that motherhood holds little place in the trajectory of a serious and committed artist.  Not one of the Millay sisters reproduced.  Single parenthood is near-impossible.  I suppose I am forced to concede that my career was pre-empted by parenthood... not that I have regrets or bitterness or even second thoughts.  What I do know, most of all, was this 'skin' of sentimentality that descended on the day my son was born.

Pregnancy was fine-- I was tough, a veritable icon of feminism with my bass onstage and my leather boots and rock and roll attitude and huge stomach.  I ignored audience comments and journalist's criticisms about exposing my unborn child to not just excessive noise and jumping around onstage, but the thick cigarette smoke that filled clubs and venues in the unhealthy 1980's.  Then came birth... and somehow all those inborn natural hormonal instincts came in like high tide.  All bets were off-- not only was I protective and 'attached' to the baby, but every single television ad, sappy movie, crying child in a supermarket aisle brought me to tears-- like some latent Pavlovian response.

The biological co-dependence of mothering is a function of nature.  Animals require no instruction in caring for their young, but some of us humans seem to have lost our instincts.  Child abuse, family dysfunction and issues are common; while marriage requires a license, childbearing does not.  As I weathered the various storms of parenthood, I became more aware of the emotional challenges and less quick to criticize others.  I have also realized that everyone has their own parenting 'style'.  For some, it is compatible and peaceable; for others, the needs of children and parents are at odds.  We the parents, one would think, have the burden of adapting or handling the dynamic... but in many families there are immaturities and resentments that disrupt the hierarchy.

While I took responsibility for many of my son's objections, I also know I empathized-- agonized, at times-- disciplined not quite enough, but tried.  My heart was smitten.  It was difficult at times to focus on my own life's work, so entwined I was with the equilibrium of this growing person.  But most of all, I am accountable.

Every year I interview prospective freshman for my alma mater at this time.  It fascinates me to see these kids becoming adults-- their dreams, their local accomplishments about to become maybe global.  Maybe not.  Many of them have parents who were role-models; many do not.  I can remember myself on the brink of college-- my parents seemed to have little to do with my academic soul, although they claimed bragging rights when I achieved something that was traditionally impressive.  Most of what was valuable to me was not so to them.  Music? Poetry?  Not a viable tradable commodity in their world.  Were they responsible for my life?  Not really.  I have friends who were accountable-- who raised amazing humans.  Some take credit for their child's achievement; they brag, boast.  A few of them, tragically and irrationally lost children-- to complex emotional and mental labyrinths, addictions and fragile compositions that lured them to the darkest destination of all.  I don't know how these people recover; they don't.  But life goes on.

While I could never blame my child for anything-- excluding premature grey hairs and umpteen sleepless nights-- I find it most absurd that my adult friends have persisted, through middle and now older age, to hold their parents accountable for their own failures-- even when those failures manifest as a kind of success or creative output.  I used to have a cartoon on my refrigerator of a girl at her desk, penning a letter home--'Dear Mom and Dad... thanks for the happy childhood; you have destroyed any possibility of my becoming a successful author.'  Irony?  Still,  two or three friends of mine go on and on about their issues, despite the fact that fathers have been long defused by age, and narcissistic mothers have been reduced to nursing-home patients.  Ironically, they have usually not become parents themselves; or they have become fallible parents--either overdoing what they lacked, or failing in some other way-- expecting....

There is always someone to blame; ask Donald Trump.  But the most effective problem solvers are ourselves.  We must let go-- on both ends.  Isn't that what love is?  We must do our best, and then withdraw, let things happen.  Accept responsibility but also foster independence-- let the apples fall as they may, we of this culture that values 'eye-candy'... who watch the Kardashian babies becoming style icons before they can walk, who see our friends buying their children guitars, coaching games-- wanting so much for their kids to succeed maybe where they did not.

I have two friends with trans-gender kids.  The bravery of these families is inspiring.  I'm not sure how I would have managed this, being alone.  But there are no guarantees in life.  Despite our illusions, there is an awful lot of improv-- of unknown passages and discovery, accidents and wrong turns; there is no real GPS for the 'lost in the woods' thing.  Parenting is a vague map... some walk, some ride, some fly and some crawl.  Some spend most of their life retracing steps, regretting, analyzing... wasting energy.  We are biological entities... but we have heart and soul.  Lost dogs find their way home, despite odds.  If only we loved one another the way we love our dogs....