What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.

Bookends

Like a blot on our conscience, the fires burn on in California. A kind of hell ironically consuming the City of Angels, we are reminded to one degree or another that we are vulnerable-- hurt, touched, concerned, destroyed. The emotional 'noise' of human trauma seems constant, and like a warning punishment, this one is close. There is looting... the military presence... and the blame game, too-- the politicizing and weaponizing of catastrophe.  There will be recovery narratives and those who profit from them. Like Hurricane Katrina, some of the deep human damage is unseen. 

Yesterday walking through the Harlem Meer at dusk, I nearly stepped on a small stuffed animal... a little squirrelly thing, wrapped in a tiny blanket... I picked it up and ran ahead toward some strollers leaving the park... but no one claimed it.  It's a damn toy, one woman scolded me.  

When my son was a baby, his first 'cradle toy' was a stuffed sock with a kind of stitched face... with tiny felt antlers.  It was cheap and squishy and small enough for even an infant to grasp.  As he fell asleep, he waved it back and forth and watched it. Ghee-ghee, he called it. It was his first baby-word. In those days when I dragged him to work and back... loaded with baby stuff and my own, we logged so many miles the carriage manufacturer replaced our wheels at no cost.  One night in a soaking rain I had to hail a cab and in unloading everything outside our door, we must have dropped Ghee-ghee on the taxi floor.

I called every medallion company in the city... they thought I was crazy.  Ghee-ghee, my baby boy kept repeating... nothing else.  He refused to eat, cried himself to sleep. He woke many times... inconsolable, exhausted.  Next morning I began a diligent search of stores for this toy... I'd naturally memorized the label and phoned the company in South Carolina... it had been discontinued, but they were sympathetic.  Maybe fifty phone-calls later (pre-internet days), we at long last located one... and arranged a fedex shipment to their showroom here in midtown.  Our Ghee-ghee had been washed and squished so many times, it little resembled the brand new one but I wheeled him into the showroom, three days after our loss, and he happily exclaimed 'Ghee-ghee' when they offered it, with a kind of casual grab. The whole place broke out in applause.  

Seeing footage of displaced children... much more fortunate than those in Gaza who were left completely without, and sometimes physically wounded-- is maybe easier to process than the deep, catastrophic loss of life and property.  It is the small things that touch us-- the man combing through rubble for his missing wedding ring... or someone's cat that managed to survive a fire and jumped out of steaming rubble... a cup.. a small symbol of survival in the wake of massive loss. Children, we are told, are resilient.

During the pandemic I often passed a mother and her severely autistic teenage son in the park.  He walked, waving his hands and making sounds... he cannot be touched, she warned, or he would tantrum.  But he had an old stuffed bear... and a matching scarf he kept tightly around his neck. It occurred to me a fire event strips these ultra-sensitive children of their only comfort. How does one fix this?

In a drawer somewhere I have my two wedding rings... these things apparently survive fires but not so relationships.  A kind of sentimental irony: one has nearly no meaning. Underneath my bed-- an old guitar with the capacity to bring to life all those songs I wrote and played... like a magic lamp.  It would not last a minute in a fire. There was a time people wanted to hear my musical stories on a stage... we nervously debuted our hearts, took turns on stages.  I am attached like an old sentimental child to things which with any luck will outlive me-- and will surely be discarded by the next generation as empty and without value. 

This time of year my student interviews engage me. Yesterday I spoke with a boy who left Afghanistan in 2021; his family was in some danger, and his sisters would have had no educational future, had they remained. They fled, with few possessions... were moved from one encampment to another.  In the process, he lost his pen.  He used this to write stories and to study and learn English.  Worried, and finally placed in a school here, he was shocked to be given a Chromebook. So he adapted... and his English was wonderful... his gratitude and love for his sisters... his father has finally found work in a large store, despite the language difficulty; his mother works in a bakery. He thinks about his pen, he said. 

Throughout history wars and catastrophes have forced people to hurriedly pack a few possessions and leave.  Home is so much more than a shelter. Old people and children are attached to things that cannot be replaced. In the end, life prevails... survival. There was a moment on camera this week of Bruce Willis thanking the firefighters. His luxurious home is safe, but he simply has lost everything... another version of what is missing. 

I am not sure what is coming for us all now... the constant visual drone footage surveying the Los Angeles damage.  The ruined homes make the destruction live for all of us who fear what we can lose-- our things, our minds.  Maybe we are all slated for a kind of devastation;  maybe a renewal of some version of faith and compassion. Had I been able to cross personal boundaries in my official interviewing role, I would have shared with the Afghan boy the Paul Simon song from Bookends.  I was 15 when I heard it, the age at which he was violently torn from his home. From the warm safety of my teenage room, with my plastic stereo... the record... it opened and closed with the lyrics that haunted me throughout my life... a kind of prophecy... 'preserve your memories... they're all that's left you.'

Thirty-five years ago I often wheeled my baby stroller into a church... I was struggling and it gave me a little strength.  One day I approached the altar to contemplate the unfathomable Crucifixion.... my son was maybe 10 months old.  He leaned forward and looked; he loved the church, too.  He pointed his little finger up at the suffering but calm Christ figure. 'Ghee-ghee,' he pronounced, with a kind of absolute certainty.