Delay

Sunday morning I came across an old diary; it fell out of a bookcase where I'd stashed it long ago behind stacks of calendars and discarded manuscripts.  I recognized the cover from some long-departed stationary shop where I used to browse and dream and finally take home a blank book dressed in old print fabric that in itself ignited memory. 

There I was-- at the age of these students I've been recently interviewing... me trying to find their core-- their soul and academic candor.  At eighteen one is so utterly vulnerable-- a single day is critical and life-changing. My discretion had prevailed, as though I was writing for a future self, and many of the boys and crushes and devastators... are nameless and protected.  Princeton for me revealed itself between the lines... I didn't understand the institution until much later, or absorb the significance of what I was learning, how they groomed us like living plants to become productive and resonant.

Looking around my city, gathering the critical daily news, I am overwhelmed with anxiety. It seems as though the first part of my life was a sort of consistent ascent... and now I am quite on the other side of a kind of lengthy plateau of satisfaction. Things have clearly broken... the progression of humanity toward some version of goodness and compassion has surely been interrupted; things feel uncomfortable and precarious.  What a fraud am I, I think; I am selling these optimistic young people a dream that is no longer there... they will not find what I found between the lines, because the lines have been re-drawn, digitized and replaced. I can't imagine my future in this accelerating singularity, and certainly not theirs. 

Not only have these kids grown up with a pandemic absorbing a good percentage of their adolescence, but the images of their heroes seem to have shifted. Their superstars and celebrities have little solidity. I've noticed the way television children seem staged and odd. Styled and changed and airbrushed, they are either brimming with some kind of dangerous overconfidence or they seem 'rehearsed'. On the subway, I observe school kids on their way home-- still rowdy and energized... but they seem somehow different.  I worry about them, the way I worry about my interviewees, the way I worry about the Mexican and Guatemalan children whose mothers sell candy on the trains with their babies and toddlers tied to their back with shawls and scarves... as though they are accessories, not children. I fear they are using their cultural cliches for sympathy. I have yet to witness a single sale. Please, I want to say... do not do this... I will give you a job.  But I cannot.

I can't imagine how my earlier childhood diary might read; most of those things were pre-sorted and discarded by my sister who cared not at all for sibling nostalgia. Besides some of my grammar school's Facebook posts, I have no photographs of the me I was. But this diary-- well it had the sense of me, of young-woman passion and some kind of vague ambition not to become but to 'be' and manifest my purpose. It was reassuring, in a way... as much as it was mortifyingly embarrassing. The players-- the Romeos and villains.. were not necessary to identify.  

My son tells me every day I grew up in the best time; the price of that, I say often, is my aging at this moment.  It's quite true that the second half of the last century was a spectacular revelation of culture and personal invention. The rich archive of film-- art-- music... is testimony.  I rarely run out of inspiration.  Today Ted Gioia on Substack called the new contemporary product 'Slop'. The present seems a bit of an appropriate place in history to begin to withdraw, to drop out.  I'm not sure what I'm learning.  

Of course I'm a bit behind. I watch films that were on festival programs a few years ago... they've had time to settle... rarely do I see the brand new ones. Hollywood in general seems to disappoint, as does music. Visual art... it's all sort of underbred and over-advertised.  Even streaming.. .these Netflix and Amazon award winners-- scripts often make me cringe. A random browse of cable channels brings a variety of game shows based on the most ridiculous premises... and a gamut of reality shows that seem to be designed to propel the cast into some kind of brand-stardom but instead make the adults seem petty, immature and ridiculous.  They are mean and competitive and small-minded.  They seem to be overstyled and blessed with some kind of monied success in life that is baffling and undeserved.  The digital dirty red carpet. I am embarrassed that incoming migrants watch this stuff and deduce that this is America.

It occurred to me today I'm living in a kind of delay... we all are, despite the instantaneous delivery of news. We are in a kind of aftershock from our own election... from the consequences of button pushing and premature action in moments we did not consider.  It takes a minute to translate events into history-- to assess what happened and extract the truth from the millions of accounts and AI phone video.  

In every guitar player's arsenal of effects probably the most essential is the delay pedal.  It makes amplification sound 'real'... it provides context and space. It supplies the 'room' in which we all exist. I watch films and do not pay for the privilege of being timely.  Some of them dissipate once I have distinguished the hype from the reality. It takes old people time to hear things-- we are slow to translate sounds into words sometimes. I am slow to absorb history, to figure out what happened yesterday and how I will go forward. Digital delay pedals can be set to go on forever.  With the analogue-- we create the template; it is all about the signal decay. It's a kind of prolonged audio shadow fading... a kind of death.

My personal delay settings change; yesterday it was half a century... today it might be a few hours. Love takes time, I have learned, but like history, the way we understand it takes longer.  Sometimes I hesitate to revisit memories; they disintegrate upon opening, like dried old paper, they remove themselves further and further in the delay chain. At 4 AM one can see reruns of earlier shows.  Even the news seems a little stable, unchanged. Who would know, turning it on, what is timely, what is original?  It is what we are not told that is becoming a little threatening... and the way we listen ought to take into account the space of our cosmic room... the delay length not just of the past but forward into the future: what is real, what is important; what repeats, what remains.

November Reign

It occurred to me Thursday, having stayed up all night after a late gig, facing the massive cooking-marathon with equal parts of anticipation and dread, that I hated Thanksgiving as a child.  I don't have those warm Kodak-memories of family and holiday cheer.  Like most children, I didn't particularly care about food, especially unfamiliar things.  Even playdates, besides beloved milk and cookies, brought strange smells and styles of cooking that made me customize schedules to exclude mealtimes.  Family structure in those days was rigid; parents forced children to eat, made few concessions to aversions and allergies.  We sat at table and absorbed dysfunction without having the skills or permission to process these dynamics.

How things have changed... mothers and fathers seem super attentive to their kids' food preferences.  They experiment and compete.  Even the cooking shows on the Food Channel have under-12 contestants who can not only prepare but know about food chemistry and cuisine.  In the 1950's we had unsophisticated palates.  My mother became a better chef as time went on, and lunch progressed from grilled velveeta-cheese to salads and wider nutritional choices, but our childhood food experiences were limited.

Thinking back, most Thanksgivings were at our aunt's.. not our 'blood-aunt' but one of those women in my parents' circle that we referred to that way.  She had her actual relatives crammed into an expanded dining dais-arrangement that was always uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking.  One of her sisters was super fat and had married a blind man; my sister would make weird faces at him and whisper to me that he can't see her anyway, but I was halfway between suppressed giggling and actual fear of his disability.  I hated the food.  Rolls were safe.  Milk.  Even the pie was awful.  Back then my mother would sometimes let me have a peanut-butter sandwich before we left.  And it wasn't the food-- I just wanted to leave, to go up to my cousin's room and look at her strange dolls and books.  To go home-- back to my little easels and looms and library.  My lair.

Once I reached teenage years, I could do volunteer work-- serve at the local shelter, cook for the poor and sick; this was a relief.  During college, these holidays were for reuniting with old mates-- for football, for some-- the meaning changes.  Newly married, I wanted my British husband to experience American tradition-- despite the fact that I had to invent mine since most of my extended family had 'fallen out' by this time from divorce or petty dramas.  And once my son was born, well.. I reinvented the day for him-- there was the Wednesday night visit to the inflating of the floats, then the parade... and I learned to cook turkey and host my musical families with joy.  I'm an adult now, I repeated over and over when my own family began to leave us out of their inner-sanctum invitations.  Me the single Mom-- perpetually hung over from lack of sleep and late-night gigs-- the annual Hendrix tribute foremost on my mind every late November; I checked the Head-of-Household box on my tax return and appreciated the one perk of being a sole parent.

For a time in the 90's and early 2000's, my annual dinners were all-night parties; I hosted people who hated their families, European transplants who simply enjoyed the food, my son's friends who escaped their own dinners, strays and band members.  My house was full and my cooking skills impressed even me.  There was music... there was joy and great conversation.

This year, for the first time in decades, there was no Hendrix tribute.  There is no more BB King's; Iridium closes down before 10 PM... even the Cutting Room seemed not welcoming.  I struggled to find the motivation to plan a dinner.  So many friends have been ill, have lost family members and parents, lost their personal mojo to the crushing daily reality of Trumped America; the holiday reminder of an increasingly distant past and pending future isolation grows a little more palpable.  My son's relationships are in flux; many of his closest friends are married and have started their own families.

My usual guests have seemed less enthusiastic than in the past.  I have dropped a couple of them along with the more challenging dishes-- the sweet-potato/green-apple casserole which requires hours of prep-- the pies.  I still do a huge turkey with my well-loved stuffing-- the cranberry, the other fixings... my building staff waits patiently for their plate-- my son eats up a storm, but my own enthusiasm has shifted.  I keep diagnosing the start of this as the 2016 post-election shock.  It's hard to believe that by next November we will have chosen again, god-willing we are able to survive one more year and have the collective sense to do something about this.

Nevertheless, this was the smallest table in a long time.  I didn't even bother changing into my traditional dress.  We sat and enjoyed one another at an intimate meal, and I finished clean-up at a reasonable hour.  Of course there are a few days' worth of leftovers and sharing, an extra reason for my son to come uptown and help me with my Christmas tree... but the shift in time is apparent.  Maybe I will have grandchildren before long and these traditions will regain their magic.  I'm not sure.  Watching this cartoon president pretend to honor the confused military ranks certainly took the air out of our Thanksgiving balloons.

I thought this year about the 1963 holiday-- how profoundly, post-assassination, our world had changed... how in 2001 I felt so conscientious about giving and appreciating, about generosity and post-9/11 understanding... the second generational loss-of-innocence for us baby-boomers: we re-set  our sense of compassion... humility, humanity.  But Thursday night the football game was blaring from the back room-- nothing on my turntable; halfway through eating I realized we hadn't lit the candles.  And just this morning, on the last day of a sad month, I can't seem to recall saying my usual Thanksgiving grace.  Amen, November.