Santa Clause

Like an old deer in a city park, I am beginning to pick up the scent of Christmas.  When I think of shopping-- merchandise-- well, tears are all the currency I can muster; even the pounds of butter for cookies will be tough to manage this season.  Thank goodness I conned my son into picking up a bargain tree on Black Friday.  Having a good month with it makes me less guilty about kidnapping nature for selfish decor reasons.  Yes, it's a symbol, and it certainly receives plenty of love and attention in its place by the shelves of vinyl and my double bass-- but come the New Year it gets put out on the curb for recycling, stripped of its finery, and I feel like a cruel step-parent.  Anyway, it is in its domestic adolescence, still drinking up water and I love the smell.  It is my companion, my forest.  I wake mornings to the banging radiator and the piney ghost-aura of Christmases past.

I am closing in on another lifeline benchmark;  it is also the first holiday without my mother.  She would not have believed my age; during our last visits, she refused to believe the woman before her was truly me.  My daughter, she laughed quizzically with those famous eyebrows roof-high?  My daughter is young and so beautiful.  You-- you're not my daughter!  I had to agree, in the end.  I am no longer that girl; I am quite someone else, becoming, every year, still another version of this woman in whose skin I feel not quite myself ('Mice elf', as Sly with cleverness observed).

On Saturday afternoons I often gallery-sit.  It provides a little extra income and keeps my finger in the art pie where all of them once wallowed and explored.  I take the train to Union Square and walking west I can't help observing there is a blossoming colony of homeless or hapless people-- most of them young, with signs, blankets, home goods, possessions, wares for sale.  There are couples and small groups.  Many of them have pets-- dogs, cats on leads, animals wearing sweaters and T-shirts, bandanas and hats, reminding me of the old Tompkins Square population from the 1970's.  There is money in their cups and bowls; tourists and locals chat and pet the animals who are the pimps, in a way, for donations.  People are uncomfortable with poverty and homelessness, but the animals seem to be an ice-breaker.  Many of the young people are reading; they might be students living on the edge, relying on charity to make room and board.  These days I have so little extra; a few dollars each month and my own skill at thrift keeps me from the street.  I pass, I empathize, I apologize silently, and I say a prayer thanking God for another  month of eking by.

There is coffee at the gallery.  The space is luxe and white and the reverb is perfect for recording vocals.  The objects are expensive and beautiful.  I am comfortable with these; I understand their history and their context.  The irony of my life is that I was brought up in museums, among cultural institutions-- I studied art and history and architecture and despite the extreme financial circumstances which ally me with the culture of homelessness, I am steeped in the love and lore of art and at home in this place.  During the week salespeople and stylists and media-experts bring clients in and out; on Saturdays it is church-like; no one calls, and celebrities and billionaires come in to shop low-profile-style.  We are connected by affection and understanding of these things despite the fact that I cannot even afford to buy lunch.  I also encourage students and passersby to browse; I am instructed not to let anyone use the bathrooms but find this kind of rule difficult to enforce.  I am a populist and also know, from years of gallery work, all visitors deserve the same hospitality.

This week there was a plumbing issue and the bathrooms were off limits.  Mid-afternoon, in the first snow of the year, a young woman came in-- wet and snow-dusted, wide-eyed and sweet-faced, and asked to use the washroom.  I had to explain-- felt a tiny pang of awkwardness, knowing the policy of places like this one… but she was cordial and spent some time looking around.  I was speaking on the phone to a relative, admitting my dark mood and still coming to terms with the sad week I'd had-- the loss of another close friend and musician.  I'd been not just on the verge of tears all week… in fact, since the fall leaves began to turn, I haven't been the same, as my Mom might have pointed out, had she lived another season.  The girl left; I apologized again.  

Maybe it was the weather-- the beautiful quiet snow, the dark afternoon, the Christmas lights through the window,  the hangover from yet another funeral, the sense of the dying year… but I was feeling bleak and isolated.  Gigs are getting sparse-- book sales are slow, my holiday calendar is quite blank.  I will see my son-- he will have a brief rest from his work; maybe it is his missing father-- his slightly handicapped childhood, but he rarely expresses much emotion.  He seems so 'normal'-- I do not often expose him to my 'shadow'.  His father-- my husband-- was a happy-go-lucky boyish sort of person who embraced love and marriage with great alacrity, but not so much the 'to the exclusion of all others' clause.   I never nagged or complained; I left.  It didn't bother me that he never sent a penny; only when he complained to the next crop of spouses that he was crippled from child support payments.

At the end of the afternoon a girl came in again--- left something on the desk-- I was about to call after her, when I saw it was the same girl-- and she'd left a lovely wrapped cookie… with a note, saying I seemed to need some cheer-- and whatever it was, she could tell I was a strong woman and would overcome the darkness.  I burst into tears-- like the touch of angel.   It wasn't just that in this culture of phone-addiction and shallow human interaction it's so rare someone actually reaches out to a human (as opposed to a sad dog), but also that I remembered being that person-- the one who felt things, whose daily empathy called for these gestures and this sort of gift-giving and random affection to strangers.  It isn't just that I look different as I age, but that my limited lifestyle has also limited my generosity of soul.  I cried for my lost heart, for the girl I was and now suddenly missed so terribly, realizing my mother was maybe more astute than I knew.

I locked up and went back uptown in a cloud of quiet tears camouflaged by the falling snowflakes, mourning not just my friends but my old self… trying hard to absorb the Christmas message.  After my solitary spartan supper at home, I found her cookie-- realizing with a bit of horror it had been so long since I'd treated myself to anything-- and I loved every bit; it was healthy and handmade and filled with festive ingredients and just so good.  While I was busy worrying, struggling to maintain my minimal post-parental life in the 21st-century city which is not kind to the poor and the non-spending population, I had neglected more important things-- my soul, my heart, my own kindness not just to others but to myself.  Thanking you, Kayleigh (she signed the note) for reminding me; maybe you are truly an angel, the ghost of my Christmas past, come to bring me not just a gift, but-- like the old story, an awakening.

Dogged

Somewhere between dusk and evening, I felt something slip through a hidden entrance- a cracked door, a hole in the sky.  I might have been on a plane from Tokyo... thinking about the way birds fly in a line some afternoons-- as though they are desperately trying to give us a sign, read us a message... and we, the opaque humans that we are-- fail to decipher, to notice, to apply.  I was staring out of a window on a long flight where time zones, geography, space and cultures melt and blur... where the view of atmosphere and clouds takes us to a place which seems un-life-like... close to the place we began, to the place we will rejoin.  Somehow it seems we are not meant to experience the literal milieu of an out-of-world place, that we are meant to be walking on the ground, using our feet and our hands like the primitive beings we once were.

Miles above our home, things like death, God, eternity-- they are within our grasp, we think... dreams and fantasy seem possible... we are one with the clouds... we are in the place of vast infinity and space.  On the ground, in a tiny room of the city, death was paying a visit to a friend I'd made maybe only because his illness compelled him to reach out, to connect with someone with whom he'd never have made contact.  But there we were-- star-crossed and intimate-- we adopted one another briefly, like my seatmate who had bared her heart to me before dinner.

Last month my other friend finally released herself from the agony which had worn her the way some homeless men cling to an old coat which has long ago lost its usefulness, its shape, its reason.  She died like an abandoned animal-- like a dog, the expression is, I think.  Besides me, who was for whatever reason bound to execute her final perverse wish,  there was no one to relieve her, to administer, to comfort.  Her cat, to whom she dedicated her final choices, seemed oblivious and callow.  It ran from end to end of the apartment every time I entered, rejoiced at the opening of a can, purred with gusto after feeding... watched me hawkfully as I failed to find any reasonable solution for my friend's discomfort.  The cancer devoured her like a hungry hyena, but cruelly left just enough so she was conscious of the hell of her disease.  It went on beyond the limits of any decent humanity.  In Hospice they would have dosed her lethally with morphine long before.  The only metaphor I could summon was being in hard unproductive labor for a year.  It was that bad.  Relentless.  On the wall was no Do-Not-Resuscitate, no final instruction except a note requesting that her ex-boyfriend-- the one who had not shown his face for years, even though he lived nearby and was listed as next-of-kin-- be called to pick up the cat in case she died.  From its age, I suspect this note had been posted many years before she had an inkling of cancer, and maybe worried she'd drink too much and hit her head on the floor some night.  Or that one of the myriads of unworthy men she bedded would get rough.

Anyway, 'cats' was on the note; as long as I'd been coming in and out to help her, there was only one surviving animal.  I'd spoken to several people I knew about her situation.  It was dire and she was pretty much destitute.  Personally I was raised with dogs.  My mother disliked cats and associated them with spinsterhood and eccentric lonely women.  She was superstitious and not sophisticated about certain things, but she raised me to avoid their company.  Dogs-- honest and boisterous and loyal.  They stay with you when you're sick; they grieve for you.  But what I discovered among the population of animal-lovers in my friend-circle, was their sympathy for her cat was universal while all they gave poor Lucia was a tilt of the head.

I see hoards of homeless people on the street these days.  I can't take a subway ride without being shaken down by an outstretched hand and a story; it feels like the 70's again.  Yes, I'm a sucker for these people.  After all, I ended up tending to a lonely ill woman who wasn't particular nice to me, and would never have given much attention to anyone's suffering.  I stayed to the very end, to the moment of heeding the instructed phone call on the wall even though I could have punched her ex for his utter lack of showing up, whatever their relationship.  She had no one.

A few people absorbed the fact that she'd passed through my posts and poetry.  The reality of her death was the worst thing I have ever experienced; the agony and hideous lack of closure is impossible to exorcise.  But for a situation where I was not even allowed to arrange a burial or funeral, the number of people inquiring about the fate of the cat was overwhelming.  And not just inquiring-- scolding me, insisting-- bleeding for the cat who was old and fine and not particularly sympathetic or charming... with not a word for her owner who had equally prioritized her animals.

On the Tokyo plane, I watched Lion.  The credits gave statistics on the staggering numbers of lost and missing Indian children.  I wept through most of the film.    Three nights before, I was half asleep and happened to catch some blurb about one of the Beverly Hills Housewives and her new charity to save dogs from cruelty in China.  Yes, I love animals.  I have nurtured strays, fed (yes!) cats and sick pigeons,  felt sorry for dead rodents.   I tried hard to communicate with my suffering friend's cat who seemed to ignore both of us.  But what I cannot comprehend is the utter failure of humanity to sympathize with fellow men as much as they adore their pets.  There are many abused animals, I agree; but the number of sick and negected children-- not to mention neighbors and friends who suffer needlessly and die without compassion and care-- is baffling.

So while I love my neighbors' pets and will care for their dogs when they are sick or away, I can't help wagging a finger at people who cannot find time to look in on a sick or ailing or helpless human being whose unfortunate psyche is created to feel the pains of loneliness and isolation nearly as much as physical discomfort.  The homeless who sit on corners with sad-eyed and hungry  animals get way more financial sympathy than they do alone.  What is wrong with us that we seem to disregard our own kind in favor of animals who I concede have very little hatred in their hearts? But neither do babies and humans who have not been mistreated and punished and deprived.

Let's put the human back in humane... let us not forget our fellow creatures, unappealing and ruined and seemingly ungrateful as they may be; when you are sick and unable and tired and must deal with the pathetically inadequate medical system which favors the rich and the animals among us... it is not easy.  Have at least the sympathy of an average dog.  Amen.