(No) Regrets Only

February, I used to say, is a gypped month.  It was my birthday month-- the Presidential birthday month-- the home of Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday.  So many expectations for a mere four weeks; anyone who pays monthly rent feels a little resentment. But I was always a little sad when it ended; the probability of childhood snow days nearly disappeared... and the coming of spring brought with it expectations and celebrations that felt premature.  I wanted to hold onto the 'youth' of the year... 

In winter months I traditionally interview prospective freshmen for my alma mater.  Generally I am finished by January, but this year they piled on some stray incomplete applications.  It's becoming a little more awkward as I age; I can't imagine many highschool seniors want to speak to a chronological senior about their future.  My 'class of...' tag betrays me; since Covid I find doing a blind telephone interview has its advantages-- less judgment, fewer visual cues. While much of the process is more or less a formality, I try to engage students in a real conversation-- to sample their insight, curiosity, intelligence.  I actually enjoy most of them, although there are some who are obviously over-prepped, steer the discussion to a sort of script they have maybe written out.  Some even research me on the internet and say things that will resonate with my career or my interests.  This is downright creepy-- a boldface violation of privacy but inevitable in this internet culture.  

At the end of the interview I often ask if they have any questions for me.  Most of these are the kinds of things eager students raise their hands and inquire in class-- canned or generic queries that seem predictably rhetorical.  But this year-- one of these last-minute girls asked me if I had any regrets.  Regrets, I asked her?  You mean pertaining to my education?  My life?  A film strip on high speed played in my head-- ex-boyfriends... should I have gone on tour in 1990?  More children? My blogs and poems are well stocked with my naked mistakes and failures-- past loves, apartments, residences... people.  Do 17-year olds think about regret-- was she reading some introspective novelist who woke her up to the complexities of life? Was she already beating herself up for not having taken AP chemistry or skipping varsity practices?  

At 70 now, I am as old as her grandmother.  Maybe she figured the topic of nostalgia was appropriate.  But the short answer, I explained, was No, I regret nothing; I have valued and loved my life.  She seemed content... although after we hung up I had flashbacks of my own first year at college... whether I had considered the concept of regret in this first year of independence, of responsibility.  My mother had taught me to write formal 'regrets' to invitations I turned down.  I knew the word in that context.  She had notecards with little doves on them;  the word reminded me of a bird. Egret with an extra 'r'?  I also remembered how I was convinced by a series of painted valentines and notes a sophomore boy put into my mailbox.  They were beautiful (there were also birds and flowers painted in)-- they were evidence that he loved me, and I turned away from another and began to love him in return.  Did I ever regret our relationship?  I didn't marry him, I didn't follow the obvious narrative.  But I didn't really regret that. 

Did I regret not taking a course?  Not doing well enough?  Wasting time at college, failing to accomplish one thing or another, quitting ballet, dropping out of choral singing?  Not really.  I tried hard to conjure my college-girl psyche and regret wasn't really any part of that.. nor could I imagine asking such a question of an adult. It seemed vaguely disrespectful, like asking a middle-aged woman if she missed not having children. 

My first year at college I was housed in a suite of women.  One of my roommates had an eating disorder.  I used to wonder what was in her head-- she began meals with healthy salads and finished gorging on stacks of desserts and cookies.  Then the inevitable in-house vomiting.  It was time-consuming and counter-productive. A form of actual, physical regret... and maybe a lesson that you can't really erase your actions-- you can  stick your finger down your throat, but the way in and the way out seemed equally punishing. I wrote a story about her, but it felt sort of invasive and I never published it. She's actually successful, despite all that wasted time.  I wonder if she regretted her nutritional drama.  I avoided the bathroom and eventually moved in with the boy who drew the hearts. No regrets there.  Life went on.

Recently I went to dinner with the younger brother of an old highschool friend and he blurted out during the meal that his whole life was a string of regrets.  It's sort of an unbearable thing to hear-- and how does one respond, except that it is a point of view, a judgment... obviously there were decades of going to work, getting paid, accumulating security.  But maybe not much besides a pension to inspire him in old age.  I also have friends who had many children, who regret not taking time for themselves.  There is now, I always tell them-- this is still life-- going forward.  Don't regret the present and forego the future, I say, but it seems self-righteous and annoying. We have what we have.  There are 'reins' if we can find them.  Some are hidden, some are difficult... but you can steer things.  Or you can regret.

I have another childhood friend who spent most of her life drowning herself in some of kind of family dysfunctional soup.  It existed, I will attest, but you get up and leave the table... you don't eat it over and over, every day, like my bulimic roommate.  I can't imagine what her response might be to the question of regret.  I regret her wasted life; no one was more talented and interesting, but she cooked it away with her incessant self-absorption and acidic resentments. 

Of course I waste a ton of time; maybe a little less because I don't use a cell phone.  These have eaten up disproportionate hours of creativity, I think.  People post their creations constantly but nothing seems to rival the output of say a Shakespeare or Milton or Mozart. And these people did not have tools for recording work... it was tedious and time consuming.  Having just finished a book, with all digital tools, I am a little overwhelmed with the process and marvel at these older artists and writers.  

I've failed, I've missed things and people; I spend way too much time watching films and listening to things...  In the mail today was a formal invitation to participate in some public ceremony-- a sort of stage...  Regrets only, it said.  I will not attend;  I don't really need extra slices of someone's enormous pie, or I may end up like my poor overstuffed roommate.  But it occurred, sending back the reply-- besides this final last attenuated February week, the  never-ending piles of unfinished songs and poetry-- I will not take on the burden of regret.    

Valentine's Day Postmortem

Valentine's Day always provokes a little reminiscence-- some wisdom-seeking, since true love for me has been more of a temporary phenomenon... or an impossible quest, punctuated by death or tragedy.  And things linger... the scent of it, the absolute certainty of what evaded me-- what I gave away or abandoned. 

There were times, of course, those 'pinch-me' moments, when things seemed ultra-perfect... even during marriage, I was happy.  But I always return to a moment in London in the 1980's... where I'd moved to make my young husband equally happy... hearing him, his terrible voice singing in the shower a Smiths song... Stop Me... the lyric which paralyzed me: 'Nothing's changed...I still love you...only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.'  The 'my love' at the end of the line is the chilling blow.  I can remember I was making the bed, that wonderful bed in the Acton Lane flat, where I  had felt consummated, celebrated, wifely.  But suddenly I began to doubt. Whether the song like a curse oozed onto the windscreen of my vision, or like theatre foretold an impending disaster, it was the moment I began to squirm.  

Maybe I looked for cracks in our perfect wedding portrait and our little romantic life, but there they were... not just the seeds of some discontent, but the evidence.  'Only slightly' would perhaps have been forgivable. In the end there was full-on infidelity.  Of course, as many of these rogue lovers and husbands insist, it is you that created some insecurity-- you, your touring and your band-intimacies and gracious audiences.  It set him off to find his own solace-- with the help of alcohol, and friendly divorcees at his office who were more than happy to accommodate his insecurity, his alleged loneliness.  

No one in this world ever wants to accept 'less'.  Whether it's a smaller tip, a briefer kiss, five times a week instead of seven, it is no longer enough.  We are such fragile creatures-- we speculate, we personalize, we suspect. It is evidence we have been demoted.  To be demoted in love is unacceptable.  It is painful and one step away from rejection.

The inverse of love is not hatred, but the absence of love. Indifference.  Elie Wiesel wrote of this-- the pain of neglect, the sense of abandonment; in this culture, to be 'unseen'.  It damages children, pets... deflates egos and hurts people.  

Our culture is fickle and harsh.  Celebrity can be a flash in the pan. It's not easy to be the best selling artist or most sought-after actor... it's a height from which you can only fall... and even these perfect couples-- well, they sometimes break apart.. or one stops loving the other, or finds someone else... it's difficult to go from #1 to #2.  

I've watched my son over the years go in and out of relationships-- doubt himself when it seems things are optimal... cause things to derail, then regret and try to put them back together.  The Prodigal husband-- it's a thing.  A couple I know divorced, remarried and then divorced again.  

Occasionally I dream about my husband, the one who swore it was just a song... who'd also sworn no one would ever love me the way he did, no one had the capacity of love that he had. Similarly I dream about a dog I had years ago-- that I come home and I've neglected him-- he's unfed, emaciated... My psychiatrist friends say dogs are dream-substitutes for our own selves.  But when I dream of my husband, he's not a dog or a substitute-- he's at a bar talking to someone... or he's walking away-- it's the devastating feeling that whatever peak of emotion you both managed to scale, you are on the way down-- it is 'less'--- he is leaving you... and there is nothing quite as difficult.  I've had affairs where you sabotage-- you anticipate and you ruin things, you 'fold' before the game is played out.  It's a kind of cowardice.   I know many single men who claim to love their bachelor status.  It's hard to trust people.  Nothing makes us more vulnerable than love.  We can lose money, lose our home, our job-- but finding your partner with someone else is the deepest wound.  It is a kind of death.  

In New York City where supposedly single people outnumber couples, Valentine's Day is still a looming silliness with which we tend to measure ourselves-- our relationship health, our single-ness, the admission of envy of some of my friends who have no romantic partner and feel diminished, or the ones that discredit and malign the day.  Coming as it does just days after my birthday, it was always sort of a denouement day for me.  I've been to weddings and received heart-shaped guitar picks engraved with the names of couples who went on to despise one another.  

My ex-husband championed the band My Bloody Valentine which debuted about the same time as The Smiths.  Ironically, they broke up, got back together, etc.  Personally, I'm just relieved it's over.  I never really liked the color red...  and while I cut out paper hearts for my friends and co-workers, I'm relieved to have not slightly less but no expectations.  I love those whom I love.  Some of them are still alive.  Things seem to work out.   Or not. 

What I Am Not

 I'm reading the autobiography of Edward Dahlberg.  His prose is uniquely compelling-- descriptive and  'limber' with literary intelligence.  He is classically trained and gifted... in a way that writers do not seem to be, these days.  From the very first sentence I was enchanted and hooked.

Last week I watched a documentary about the jazz scene in Pittsburgh, called We Knew What We Had.  I was in tears-- the quality of musicianship, the wholehearted commitment to performance-- people like Art Blakey, Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, Ray Brown...the exquisite command of what their instrument can do and what they select in the moment.  I was actually standing in front of the television.  Tough for me to call myself a bassist.   Most of these musicians have passed; the documentary relies on their surviving colleagues and successors to describe them.  A few players have famously left their life story-- Miles, Mingus, Art Pepper (my personal favorite) but not many are really writers, nor did they all have the luxury of the retrospective.  Their lives and deaths were jagged.

While I cannot put myself in the same sentence as these masters, I have the skill to appreciate what they did/do, the good fortune to have enough education to find them... the belief, maybe, that when we expose ourselves to things that are really good-- to 'art' (or Art, as in Blakey), it makes us better.  

Solitude and confinement in the past year has forced on us the bandwidth to contemplate our own autobiographical truths... who we are, what we love, what we miss... and while we are focused on health as a priority, and politics-- social change, issues... I'm not sure we've all made the effort to improve our solitary human condition.

When I was a girl I imagined each person was given a sort of scroll of life-- like a map-- and certain things were 'set' but others were chosen.  As we got older, we passed through this trajectory; I'd imagine 100 years and at 50 I'd be halfway done.  But people died-- they left us before their time.  Was this 'written'? Preordained? Was death a punishment?  I struggled with this and came up with a sort of darker version of  life's 'certificate' as a tiny core on which we built day by day-- like a tinker toy city that expanded.  I laid out plans for things-- I listed ambitions and designations... books I needed, records.... like recipes a chef collects.

Now that I'm in the winding-down phases... I see life as the finite infinite we are given; as we grow, we become-- we annex and enrich-- the focused among us-- and we subtract.  We lose daylight on the way to winter, we pass up opportunities--moments... we watch television, we look at social media... we read endless posts and news articles... that stack of magazines by our bed has now become a three-story virtual pile.  We also spend a good part of life butting our heads against things-- trying on relationships that don't fit, changing our bodies to become our heroes, imitating and following instructions that lead nowhere.  I have become aware of my own autobiography as what I have done-- not nearly enough-- and despite the so-called best-laid plans, what I am not.  

Like those brilliant jazz pianists, I tried to incorporate a fair amount of improv into the course of my life and that brings with it the added risk of failure, of tangent-travel that is not always efficient.  I don't regret most things-- even the failed love affairs that broke me.  I am not a partner.  I have not grown 'with' someone, which seems, in the past year, to be the privileged state.  That said, I have watched so many people lose their personal 'half' and mourn and grieve in a way that seems irreconcilable.  

I am not a collaborator; I am fairly solitary.  Musically I have worked with wonderful artists but have not been a partner, nor a celebrity.  As a player,  I am not a 'noodler'.  I don't fuck with other people's songs and play what I think is right.  I don't really like writing for others; I have too much to say on my own, and need to be edited.  Lately I am less of a scribbler; I attribute this to technology and to the pandemic: we don't carry pens and paper with us-- we don't wander and converse randomly, we don't dawdle and gape and listen to the dreams of others because they are publicly masked and sober.  

Several times this week I was asked 'what I do' and I have replied 'I am not a musician' with that 'lol' gesture I've grown attached to.  I am not in love; I am not sure I have the capacity for these things, although I remember well how important they are.  In my projected or actual autobiography these episodes are married to songs or poetry or places I may or may not revisit.  They are recorded in letters and diaries... I am not sure anyone will discover these things and I will perhaps not spend my limited time revisiting them.  I am not unhappy.  As I told my son over and over when he grew up, we are rich people; we do not have money.  He had a hard time wrapping his teenage brain around that one, but his little one-line Valentine's Day message to me indicated that he may now understand.  

I am alone; I am not alone.  I am surrounded by wonderful things and opportunities-- many of these in books and audio resources.  The present is here, but the past has so much to offer.  People like Dahlberg or Erroll Garner who are utterly brilliant but so little 'searched' compared to the celebrities of today.  I fail myself every single day and the fact that I commit each night to the possibility of growth tells me I am not dying yet.  We are strong; we lift weights and play football... and then we bleed out in a second.. we are crushed, we are broken-- we drown, we suffocate.  I am not nearly enough, and yet several times I have been something to someone. Does this comfort me?  It does not; I am not counting deeds.  I wrote a song for a jazz musician this year-- she will never record this now, but she loved it... in the modulation the lyric went 'Well I've been somebody's lover/But he don't need me now/ Like a broken clock, an open box/Some things are just too late.'  The repeat... Some things are just too late.  I am trying to be tough and go forward; the night is not gentle or good. 

Dear Liza

Back in the 1970's, when I'd been living out my first chapter in the city as a self-supporting independent dreamer, my father showed up at my humble apartment which was a converted first-floor office I rented on the cheap.  'You're overdrawn,' he announced, without a trace of sympathy or paternal emotion, which was his MO.   At first I took this as a backhanded critique of my drawing techniques...I was still studying art... but then I realized he was talking dollars and sense-- the only advice-road he ever crossed where I was concerned.  SO... my checking account was $10 in the red and this, according to him, was a financial and moral sin.   Did he offer me a coffee-- an ice-cream?  A street pretzel?  I'd given up all luxuries to survive my little spartan life as a student with part-time jobs at Bloomingdale's, at an art gallery, babysitting... earning $90 maximum per week.  I gave him my word it would never happen again... and it didn't.

It occurred to me, listening to my son rattle off the numbers of his friends with wealthy parents who backed their start-ups, bought them apartments, set them up with stock portfolios... this was my strict lesson in economics-- my hard-landing, my teenage Brexit.   While I had little in common with my military Dad who disapproved of my life choices until he died, I raised my son with a parallel ethic.  But somewhere in the last 40 years, urban values have changed.

Last night I listened to Danny Fields talking via the LES Biography project about city life back in the 1960's and 70's... the music scene, especially... and I nearly salivated.  Yes, I remember when there were maybe 1000 hip people in New York who were doing things--- very few of them had money, but there was a certain fierce bohemian patriotism... we hung out and listened and exchanged... things were being discovered... things were new and hypnotically interesting... you'd miss them if you stayed home.  Even mainstream music was pretty good-- bands were inventing and becoming.  Records were important and in the clubs, no one dared get up and perform unless they had a concept.  Not much of the avant garde was on television, and punk was so much more than a recording-- it was energy. It was live.

Not watching the Grammies has become a no-brainer.  This is not music-- it's some new kind of industry that has little to do with discovery and everything to do with marketing, cultural manipulation.  Money.  I admit I turned on television for a quick minute in time to catch a quick visual meme of Jennifer Lopez thrashing it out on a piano-top... and I literally felt sorry for her.  Okay-- I'm pretty old now, way past the age of strutting onstage half-clothed... but let's face it, there's a small fortune's worth of spandex and Spanx in the Beyonce and J-Lo shows these days.

The truth is, I feel rich.  I am grateful to have lived in the Danny Fields version of New York, and lucky to have seen what I saw, usually without paying very much if anything.  But the time-- it was worth it.  Staying out all night year after year, dragging myself through classes and gallery afternoons just to make it to another night of back-to-back gigs and inhaling the charged air of downtown.   I never 'made it' in the music business... and I still feel rich.  I never asked anyone for a dime, once I settled the 10-buck debt with my father.  In fact I paid him back in spades, but that's another tale.  He went to his grave without sampling a single one of my living catalogue and it doesn't bother me.

I guess we can't help wanting things for our kids-- I'm sure he wanted me to have the best appliances and home decor-- the perfect tennis-playing husband, the country club and the vacations... For my son, I want him to have that discovery New York gave me-- the jolt, the inspiration-- the courage to be what I wanted-- the values I cling to that had me starve for years for a painting I craved, work weeks on end to collect $50 at a gig, walk miles carrying heavy equipment...   But it seems while I was mothering and forging onward, the urban garden turned into a money crop, and I'm a bit lost here.  One thing I do notice: rich people, with a few exceptions,  do not feel rich.  They are insatiable and often unhappy.  They trade in their wives, their homes, their cars, their clothes... and still they search for more.

Someone asked me the other day about my Bucket List.  I remember the first time I heard that expression and didn't recognize it.  It's a recent coinage, I think... although a bucket is a pretty Mother-Goosey kind of image.  What I thought of immediately is that old folk song-- 'There's a Hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza... '

There's a hole in my bucket, for sure.  But my list is kind of checked off.   And so many of the things I'd wish for-- well, I've done them, in a sense.  Traveling the world-- I guess I saw plenty of places playing backroom gigs and going to art auctions when I was young; and I can look at images, watch films... no hotel room hassle, stressful delays, no airport security.  My shelves are lined with the best books I'm lucky to have become acquainted with-- because plenty of young people come in here and have never read Pushkin or Celine or Borges.  I visit the past with these authors who open their minds and landscape for me.  I read on trains and kids sometimes ask about my book... they often note titles on their phone-- their version of a bucket list.

Maybe the after-effects of something like poverty have seeped through my cracks and wrinkles and changed my chemistry from a longing young girl feverish with passion and ambition, to a wiser and warped older woman who just wants some time to finish my work and study that of my heroes.

Last night that Supermoon was pretty amazing.  It outshone any of the red carpet jewels the Oscar nominees will be showing off.  As for me, I'll be doing a gig somewhere, wearing the not-on-the-bucket-list necklace my son gave me for my birthday.  It's tiny and magical and so perfect, the way these things are meant to remind us of a star-- an unattainable tiny point of light...   perspective.  Somewhere in this city of competitive bank accounts and 7-figure Valentine gifts they forgot the point of beauty.  Nothing compared with that moon that hung there for every single one of us-- homeless or penthoused... not the ring of Steph Curry or the trophies of Tom Brady and Cardi B.  So keep your eMemos and iNotes going... I've still got plenty of work to do, God willing, but fixing the bucket is not on the list.

Exchange

I live on the edge of two neighborhoods… on the cusp, on the border.  It suits me.  I am close to the park and short blocks from grand homes and institutions.  I am also two blocks from the projects.   Across the street from me, my neighbors have an East Harlem zip-code, although I'll wager all of them have a better income than I do. Personally I spend most neighborhood-time going north and east-- past the projects-- exploring bodegas, playgrounds, small bakeries and shops, listening to languages besides English, browsing among vegetables and fruits used in Mexican recipes,  reading labels in Spanish.   Even the Christmas decorations have a different flavor.

At this point in life, I am spending more and more time alone.  I walk; I think; I soliloquize and invent… I may even talk to myself.  I wander-- down strange and familiar streets, into places; when I am alone my ear is sharper-- I hear things outside and inside my own head.  It''s as though I dare myself to become lost in my own city--- to lose myself, to become someone else, in a way-- like a character in my own story… a kind of odd controlled schizophrenia; I leave my house and turn left and suddenly I am anonymous and unknown.  I blend in and I am simply a woman.  No one greets me or looks at me… I am free, in a way-- unencumbered and clear.  It rests me… it provides my blank canvas.

I think I've always craved some kind of solitude-- even the kind you have in a group.  I like people but am reluctant to commit myself to any society that excludes me from other choices. Maybe it was my dysfunctional family (we all have them) and their failure at honesty-- but I never feel that I completely belong anywhere.  Even marriage felt odd to me-- it required my husband convincing me this would be a good thing… and besides, I'd be making someone incredibly happy and giving up nothing.  It seemed to make sense.. and I got to cross another border-- to belong to two countries, as I chose-- and that suited me… but the boundaries of marriage never felt right to me.  Maybe I was a terrible wife, but other women encroached on the walls of my own marriage-- my husband failed to protect me, and I left.  Motherhood was quite another issue-- but I was still someone's daughter, someone's lover, someone's sister… I could still live between identities, go from neighborhood to neighborhood-- play in bands and enjoy my son's basketball games with pride.

It's possible that solitude gives us clarity… in my case, the acceptance of my own penchant for straddling borders--- for being two people, in a way-- the one who walks and the one who observes--  the speaker and the listener.   At my age, I notice I am more blunt, more honest.  I say things directly; occasionally I offend people.  I see my own peers walking around clearly burdened with their pasts.  We have all experienced so much; for some, they are stooped with the weight of it, fearful that little will happen in coming years to balance or complement their life.

My son's friend asked me to help him return a ring he bought his fiancée a few years back.  It's such a beautiful thing-- it's vintage-y and unique.   He lost his Mom recently, and maybe that somehow altered him; he also knows I've returned rings and changed my own mind many times.  It doesn't bother me and I've never really regretted much in my life; it all seems to have brought me to where I am, which is not a bad place.  There's a book of poems I remember reading: Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.  I've always loved that title… as though this is the way I've lived.  Returning the ring-- dealing with the receipt and the agreement and the salespeople… it all seemed so absurd that this intimate, personal decision we make gets so 'handled' by so many people-- the processes-- the invitations, and name changes-- the paperwork and vows and all the guests and witnesses-- the home-buying and the furniture choices… and suddenly it was as though I was so close to my own relationship thresholds-- maybe in the very same store where my fiancé  had bought the lovely ring that had felt to me like a 25-pound weight.

It took my son's friend 5 years: maybe 2 to really believe he'd made the wrong choice, and 3 more to actually find this ultimate closure.  Finality.  He has a new girlfriend now.  When we get older, some loves we realize were addicting, or consuming, or manipulative-- or they looked like someone else, or they reminded you of something, or your best friend talked you into it… or whatever.  And then some affairs look absurd and like some kind of period of insanity.  And after it all, after a lifetime-- there are those moments that shine-- through time, from the half-light of this moment, back to that one… there is still this beauty-- something right and true… and we feel lucky, even though we never held on, that we felt this way.

We have so little present-- all of us.  Just this nanosecond of awareness-- the rest is just a movie-- an invention.  So few of us take the time to appreciate these tiny things we are holding at this moment only-- unless we are on the verge of loss.   We mourn at funerals, we bathe in morning light when we are aware our days are numbered-- we love those we can no longer see, and we miss what we no longer have.  Handing over the ring, I was aware someone else's moments were in my hand briefly--- even the feel of the box-- I could imagine how much it must have meant at the time, and he'd spent many multiples over what was appropriate ('in over his head', as he put it)… but there it was, becoming an item in a shop window for someone else to give their loved one, to become part of someone else's story.  I felt empathetically unburdened.  These symbols never had much credence in my lifetime, as I've said… and the truly spiritual instances of the meaning of marriage are more like star points in the dark liquid sky of my own history.  But then again, I am someone who likes to cross borders, to travel between worlds and rooms and to inhale winter evenings and mix them with older constellations and lyrics I have surely misread or mispronounced… and I emerged, on my way back toward Harlem, to the song of the melting snow, me stepping every block from past to present to future, between worlds.

Heart-to-Heart

The first boy I ever slept with slipped a hand-made Valentine in my mailbox.  He was kind of an artist and sang in a band…I think he'd been dating someone I knew, so it was a bit of a surprise, but the card was beautiful…had some Adam and Eve imagery, a slight Goth/Edgar Allen Poe vibe.  I knew then and there he 'got' me.  It took some thought, some stealth, some insight and some artistic effort.   It was Romantic.  And it did its job.

I've been to February 14th weddings, parties, gigs-- had theatre dates, candlelit dinners, hotel-room trysts-- baked, cooked, dressed up in sexy lingerie, read poetry and danced.  I've been to the Oak Room, the Rainbow Room, the Top of the Beekman and Cafe des Artistes… but most of all, I've philosophized; it's become a sort of 'day of reckoning' for relationships.  And now that there are considerably more of these days in the past than the future,  I can sift through the red-sand nights and find the ones that stand out.

Maybe my best memory is the striped colored heart I cut out for my baby boy--- just 3 months old, which hung like mistletoe in my tiny studio-apartment kitchen, where he sat in his little plastic basket-chair, watching it with intensity while he made it dance with his tiny feet.  Now he is 26 with surely a reservation at some trendy restaurant and a Tiffany-boxed gift for his lovely girlfriend.  He knows about hearts-- about women and responsibility-- matching iphones and uber accounts.  I doubt he remembers the hand-made paper Valentine which provided entertainment for so many weeks.

The other visual which comes up in my heart-shaped 8-ball tonight is a jazz musician on a bicycle.  We'd had a rocky weathery love affair which left both of us a little bruised and battered.  Many months later I was on my way home after a sweaty gym workout-- sure it was the 14th, but I wasn't having any of the hype and froth… and there he was, with roses and chocolate dipped strawberries, asking for a second chance.  We've gone on with our lives, but that night gave us improvisational healing and closure. Valentine-shaped circle of 5ths.

I've already spoken with several unattached beautiful girlfriends tonight who have stoically joked about their match.com dinner, their anticipation, their disappointing date last night-- about illness, children, our aging parents, our jobs.  I've leafed through archived poems and found a few lines which still resonate (Have we not all struggled with buttons,/ slipped an outgrown dream over our heads/to enter someone else’s body/with a rose?).  Funny how I vaguely recall the poetry but not necessarily the man who inspired it.

At this point it is maybe a day to show love less discriminately, the way we were forced as children to give a Valentine to every single classmate, however creepy.  We can all use this lesson, and it never fails to remind us of the old mathematical adage about the love we make being equal to the love we take.  But this is really no longer adequate in our world.  Those of us who can, do-- and those of us who can't--well, they sit home and sulk.  My advice?  Buy yourself a rose, if you really need one.

Besides, hearts for me are bloody things.  I grew up with a father who had a display of medals-- several Bronze and Silver Crosses and purple hearts to commemorate not just his heroic deeds but his painful wounds and deep injuries, and this iconography was very vivid in my childhood.   Or a symbolic reminder of how he was forever changed into the difficult man who raised me to distrust things like flowers and love and men with guitars who all seemed so enchanting and appealing.  And my family?  Deep wounds there which could be glossed over but will not be.  I see photos everywhere of sisters-- heads together, smiling and waving.  My version is rather a composite-- a black and white collage of time-mixing and backward soundtracks, like news clippings of bad deeds which have gone unsolved and unpunished.  At some point there were happy moments, but few pearls remain from the broken shells that wash up on my memory-beach.  My mother-- a different story.  She is exonerated and forgiven for any mistakes; if I had a solid gold heart to spare, it would certainly be hers, whether she recognizes it or not.

Love in the romantic version, as it exists, is probably more honored in its tragic form.  The greatest love stories do not end well, and pain is so much the B-side of any relationship, no matter how passionate and fulfilling.  We poets and dark souls embrace and inhale the smoke from these fires.  This is what remains.  No matter how complete we may be, in the arms of our greatest love.. .the dawn comes, we rise and make coffee, we grow familiar and forget to honor our best moments, and we lose things.  We lose people-- they move on, they love others, we let them go, we prefer someone else-- whatever.  Do we collect hearts? No, but some of us save Valentines and messages.  I still have that Adam-and-Eve card, rumpled and folded as it is.  I still have the striped baby heart, stained and tattered, loved as maybe no other paper heart I have ever made, and there have been many hundreds.

In my email today was a message from an old love-- a song-- so nostalgic and romantic-- so perfect and musical and sad…. my February 14th closure.  How lucky or loved I am,  or have been,  or was.  Tomorrow will be the 15th.   Is it not all really the same?

Under Cover

More than 30 years ago, I made my first demo-tape.  A keyboard player who worked with some rockstar really liked it-- took a copy, gave it to his boss.  A year later, my song was on the radio.  A little changed, rearranged, but it was definitely the song.  Funny--- no one had contacted me; I hadn't signed any papers.  I called a friend; he recognized it-- then we called the keyboard player.  He stammered and stuttered, apologized… apparently it had been 'adopted' or folded into some recipe which someone else seemed to think he'd invented.  But the hook-- even the lyric, the theme--- it was there…

My friend consulted a lawyer.  You are going to be a rich girl, the lawyer said to me.  But what was the meaning of this?  That I would sue some huge record company-- me, a small-time new artist with a 4-track demo?  We had meetings, we had papers… and I pulled out.  It wasn't about the money, it was the shameless version of apology I received from the producer--- about how maybe you hear something, and it stays in your subconscious, or it re-emerges with an idea-- it may or may not be mine.  What-ever.   It was the first music-business lesson.

Later, I was asked to co-write with a pop-star.  This meant she would cover my song and we would split royalties.  When I protested, they said they'd rewrite the song and I'd get zero.  Second lesson.
Besides, if my music was so eminently adaptable, maybe it was generic and not good enough.  Back to the drawing room.

So the Pharrell/Marvin Gaye thing registered as something of a 'Huh?' moment for me. I mean, there is little I hear these days that is not traceable to something else.  The production may be updated or changed--- the beats, the sounds-- but the melodies are so non-memorable.  I'll bet after the Grammies this year, the only person who really saw a spike in sales was whoever manufactured John Mayer's glasses.  The visual seems to have eclipsed the song.  The spectacle, not the soundtrack.  I'll bet Stevie Wonder has noticed this.  And then there is Angus Young--- in the same clothes he was in the first time I saw him, almost 40 years ago.

I'm about to publish a small book of poetry and have been obsessing about the cover.  The Bo Diddley song has been going over and over in my head.  It's odd-- in old times, books looked pretty much the same-- leather bindings--- occasional hand-tooling and gilt trim for the very rich.  But what was important and valued--- was the text.  A book was its contents.  Now?  So many are so under-read.  The classics are recycled, reprinted-- covers evolve, books are 'styled' to sell as objects.  Sometimes, in 'new' books,  good writing is hidden beneath the plot; like a metal guitar shredder, the 'notes' obscure the absence of core melody.

When I was younger I did a Sunday afternoon solo gig on Bleecker St.  Don't you know any covers, the owner used to complain? No, I answered, priding myself on my principles.  I actually wrote a song called 'Cover' so I could finally answer 'yes'.  And one called 'Undercover'.  That one felt right.   I am neither a borrower or a lender.

So now it is the first day of spring, and we in New York City are about to get a dusting of snow.  Our sidewalks and streets have just been stripped of the last of the winter 'cover' which revealed underneath a vast layer of soaked and pressed litter-- like fossils of Christmas and Valentine's Day and thousands of candy wrappers and flattened Starbucks cups everywhere.  Walking down Madison Ave… to my right were the clean shop windows filled with all the bling a rockstar's wallet can buy… and to the left, is the gutter spread of trash, of objects covered with the grey-black film of melted dirty snow.  Jewelry, garbage, leather bags, garbage, porcelain, garbage… art galleries…garbage… until I began to reverse the order and really everything lost its meaning, its 'cover'.  Later today this will change… like a new coat of paint, the sweat and spit and dog-shit and the papers-- everything will be magical again for a few hours.

There is another author with the same name as mine.  Her book is about incest--- about her father raping her, her childhood trauma.  I don't know what the cover looks like.  My own father thinks I wrote this book.  He hasn't spoken to me for years, but he really hadn't spoken to me before, so the mistaken identity thing was a kind of icing on his paternal bitter cake.  It's useless for me to explain that this is another person, because having a reason to excommunicate me-- it suits him.  As I was contemplating my cover today-- maybe a moment where I'd hand my finished book over to my father and receive exoneration-- I began to think.. .well, this never happened to me… but other things happened.  The fact is there is shame in my family history and cause for shame.  Cover-ups and substance abuse… and my own father never harmed me, not physically-- but his absence and lack of sobriety caused childhood trauma that shouldn't have happened.   The irony is, I am the one that spent years trying to apologize--- trying to atone for his sins, trying to appease his anger.  So maybe, in a way, that other girl is me, has uncovered things that are not so far from the ones that should not have happened in our house, even thought the 'cast' is different.

Making up my bed this morning, I thought of all the things that happened, inside these covers, and other covers--- the intimacies, the passion, the nights of refusing intimacies, the hours of sickness, of feverish children who feel entitled to pass nights of illness in their mother's sheets, of nights of grief and desolation, of nightmares and beautiful dreams of our missing loves that cruelly disintegrate as we wake. The way my son and his girlfriend spent hours picking the quilt that dresses the bed in their new apartment.  Because so much of their life will take place there, and it is important.

In truth, my father, like most people,  will never read my book.  He won't listen to the songs I've recorded, and that is fine.  But he just may see the cover.  Or not.

Hole-hearted Love

Ice is sliding off the brand new World Trade 1 building… they are putting up protective scaffolding.  There are ghosts everywhere in that downtown square.  Anyone can feel them.  To have erected a slick expensive Port Authority money-maker so close to a sacred area seems somehow an inappropriate challenge to the skyscraper Gods. There are souls there… there are living fossils… business as usual here in a 21st century phallic overpriced tower with bragging rights seems a violation.  Some boyish spirit is up on top, throwing chunks down, the way my mischievous son couldn't resist throwing gravel from our roof on the cars below.

Valentine's Day is tough for 9/11 widowers.  Some have not learned to love again.  This building does not represent closure for anyone except the developers who will bank the profits.  It pokes the sky like a bayonet, like a pointy thorn in grieving skin.  Hearts are not welcome here.

So many of my friends are feeling down on this particular day.  My facetious Facebook remarks about requited love being over-rated are not appreciated.  One of my girlfriends keeps reminiscing about a perfect February 14th, oh-so-long ago.  What she will not remember is that she sabotaged and abused every single relationship she ever had, and ends up compulsively alone with a bottle or a pint of Haagen Dazs watching Bette Davis movies on Netflix, rewriting the past.

I have been to not one but two February 14 weddings…. one with the red heart-shaped guitar picks with the names of the bride and groom forever.  I still have the pick.  They still have the divorce papers, I assume.  The other one lasted 5 months.  Couldn't take the July NYC heat.

For me, I always take this day with a grain of salt.  I lost the great love of my young life to a horrid illness and rather than bitterness and child-support, I only have the lovely letters, sand from the beach where we slept our first summer, promises, a piece of his old jacket, a box of cigarette butts, some locks of his golden hair… memories.  Everything else has been gravy.  The meat and potatoes of my life, actually.  Children-- things of love that are beyond love.  My family.

Weather can make things a little worse.   For the moderately depressed and solitary, a snow day can be a trigger.  My own father, when we were small, spent a snow-bound weekend barricaded in our den with several bottles of scotch and ended up in a hospital rehab.  I understand him now, although he'll never know, and I can never say that to him, because that was an era of denial.

I can't stop thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman.  The weather was thawing when he shut himself in; it was practically spring.  They do say that April is the cruelest month, and more suicides take place in spring than in the dark winter months.  Or maybe that's not the way it happened at all.  But my Dad-- in the 1960's--- we had telephones, and a television, and when that claustrophobia set in--- there were no windows-- the snow was nearly 4 feet high.

Today we have the internet.  We are shut in, but our friends talk to us and look at us and email, and we exchange heart wreck and poetry and songs at 3 AM… a window in the darkness.  For true heartache, nothing helps.  I keep telling my niece, who can see her most recent 'ex' on Instagram-- laughing, hanging out, half naked with his latest tattoos not of her… We are women, I say.  We are the biblical 'vessel' which in layman's terms is a 'hole'.  Men fight and lie to get inside of us.  Some knock and politely enter,  some slide in, some thrust themselves in… and some crawl in like a dog.  But when they leave-- and they do leave-- even my first and only true love who assured me we would stay this way forever, on the beach-- entwined-- has long been buried like the good Catholic he was-- they leave a hole in our heart in the shape of their body.  In the case of my niece, it is a rapper's penis-shaped hole.  Whatever.  But we don't enter them in the same way.

I always knew this.  In the 7th grade this kind of cool older boy with a blue car used to drive down the road  as I walked home and would roll down his window and stare at me with these hooded eyes like a snake.  He told me he was going to get inside of me and of course I had no clue what he meant, and I would run…and he never did, but someone did.  And then I knew what he meant.

For most women, all these holes leave a scar somewhere.  Some of us are married to other men, and never let anyone see these marks.  New Yorkers have a 9/11 scar somewhere inside.  Those towers left a hole in us, and this new monstrosity does nothing to bind that hole.  Quite the opposite.  I can't help thinking there was someone--- at least one person inside, who had no family, no loved ones--- a lost soul who had no funeral or service, no name read aloud, was never engraved on the walls. Odds are, in New York City, there are lurkers and strangers everywhere.  Maybe he is throwing the ice chunks down.  Maybe he has befriended Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The snow muffles things--- mutes things.  A strange white blessing in a city of soot.  Like the white rose petals we threw onto my friend's coffin as they buried her.  And spring will come, whether we like it or not.  I believe this with certainty.

My heart is worn like an old shoe.  It is scarred and marked and tattooed everywhere.   I have loved too well and too many times and not well enough and have cried enough to make tracks on my face.  But it still beats.  Just 2 weeks ago Philip Seymour Hoffman's was beating and maybe he was dreading Valentine's Day-- -the weather report-- breakfast, the unbearable contrast of his children's innocence on the West Village playground.  Who knows?  But as all of us who have witnessed birth know--- the millisecond between life and death is that one heartbeat.  Between utter joy and unfathomable despair.  And in between is a beating bloody heart.  Relentless until it isn't.  Love, like our bodies, is timestamped.  Women, I believe, take the hit most of the time.  But let's own it.  Alone, in a relationship-- separated, together… whatever… like all matter, or anti-matter, it changes in form.  Embrace it in all seasons, in all its forms.