Hail Mary

There are days in which I have little to offer, although it is hard to keep one's mind silent when the autumn sun is clear and shines effortlessly on those of us who are not in the midst of hurricanes and typhoons.  Even in those ravaged places, we know, the mornings after are cruel and calm and show unspeakable damage with blue clarity and the watery whisper of a quiet sea. Our well-dressed reporters and journalists with furrowed brows survey and film, photograph and interview.  We check our social media and breathe a bit easier... we give a little money-- we gasp and sympathize, we go on with our day. 

Yesterday I went gallery browsing-- the theme being indigenous Australian artists.  It rewarded in a way that contemporary American has not, in recent years.  Inherent soul and story-telling-- these young artists inherit the myths and beliefs of their cultures, and even without explanations, they manifest.  In their presence, one surrenders.

Earlier in the week I visited a few of the sick and aging among my friends who are imprisoned in an existence they can't have imagined or foreseen. As time goes relentlessly on, there are many of these... no solution, and my presence gives merely a tiny atom of distraction to a cavernous lonely discomfort. There is no companion for pain and suffering; I find myself always walking home from these visits... as though I need to remain in a kind of prescriptive sentence of solitude to process what I have witnessed.  A few of these people might return to some kind of disabled living situation; deterioration is part of life... it's just that we childishly don't imagine it will really happen to us. Yes, we take care of our health, we take the recommended exercise and precautions-- some of us too late-- but we cannot avoid the reaper's overture.  

One of my friends has reached a point of collapse. She has bravely suffered the utter inexplicable indignities of a brain cancer which gradually absorbed her beauty, her grace, her keen mind and now her body.  Sitting by her bed, her head turned to one side, it was like speaking to an injured fallen horse whose life and fate displays its pride and sorrow in one eye. She breathes, occasionally sighs... I could swear I saw a tear.  Music, I said... makes one sad... and she seemed to agree.  I walked the seven miles from North Bronx to my apartment, trying hard to supplant this vision with memories of her vitality.  It will take some time; the dull and needy neighborhoods beneath the train tracks provided a kind of visual accompaniment to these souvenirs. And suddenly... there is the bridge over the Harlem River... the sunset... the glory, the antipodal irresistible reality.

For some, memorials and rituals are important.  The pandemic era made this less so, in a way.  The pomp of services was disallowed and one grew used to mourning in a kind of vacuum.  Death-- the death of others--  is the portal through which all grief expresses itself. Tragedies are often measured by its  statistics.

Australian indigenous art is permeated with narrative... and as in most cultures, these narratives often interweave with death.  It makes the art more compelling and true-- more universally articulate. There is also a kind of hope or rebirth that permeates all religions.  This is our deepest wish-- to return to some kind of life or afterlife. As though the sad material of human beings had a value... still, we believe this.

In the aura of what I witness, I return to my computer and come across a feature-- about how contemporary artists deal with concealing their under-eye circles.  While I truly hope this is some metaphorical piece about the omnipresence of tragedy in art, it is rather a cosmetic piece. Irony noted.

Maybe my epiphany of the week is how some kind of narrative (or the utter opposition of it with philosophical content) compels us-- from the Bible, classical art, indigenous painting, to modern literature... and yet we struggle with the absurd human inability to decipher our own.  While we control and change direction and envy and pity and weep and laugh, we rely on anything that is not our own. 

My son, this week, is obsessed with the baseball playoffs.  It's an American thing and, surely, the love of sports brings more people together than politics. It's a finite thing, too.  There is a clear winner and loser.  Not so even in elections, with the electoral college nuances.  It's confusing.  With baseball-- barring happenstance-- the final teams are pretty surely the best.  One believes-- one hopes. This seems to be the common denominator-- hope. Millions of people in stadiums and bars put on costumes and make the prayer sign. Even I, for the sake of son, root and cheer.  We read the stories of each player and feel connected. It is giving us a viable distraction in a difficult month. 

Walking into a church for some instant spiritual support, it occurs that for most women, no symbol will eclipse the Virgin Mary.  If we could reinvent her... but we cannot, and her meaning has been manipulated and distorted.  We have tried-- the Barbie Movie, etc... but no.  She is the suffering mother, the comfort, the grace, the vessel and the very epitome of grief.  Even the athletes call on her. In every culture-- we are born with some sense of belief... it connects us-- makes us human, and gives us the courage to hope-- despite all odds, despite my ailing friends being down 3-0 in the series, or not ever having made a single playoff... or even a team... there is this thinnest thread that in an impossible narrative just might lead to a miracle.  

A-women.

Death Be Not Proud

I used to love Thanksgiving.  This year-- with the threat of war everywhere-- my own friends unable to agree, people divided by religion and politics arguing-- the migrants everywhere in the city confused about their fate... the prospect of a holiday wears on me. The older I get, the less resistant I am to infection by societal ills. My son and I went to see Oppenheimer Sunday.  I was very affected and wanted to talk about things... but like most of the theatre, we just went to have a coffee and life moved on for him.  Not so for me; I am haunted. 

And I'm no longer sure about things.  When I was younger my beliefs seemed airtight-- had conviction.  I had faith-- some kind of support system. Maybe it was watching my mother disintegrate, slowly... her generational beauty slipping from her like old skin.  She saw devils and flocks of birds.  Some days she sang it out in a midnight howl; other days she barely croaked a weak 'no'. She saw things-- she felt things.  I backed her up, swearing I, too, could smell the black snakes coiled among the mattress springs; she slept in a chair.  My architecture began to creak as her crooked future unraveled.

Every time I read in some news article that so-and-so died a peaceful death, surrounded by family, I think of my Lucia, standing in the stairwell like a skeleton, a thin sweater clinging to her ribcage like a clothes hanger.  Until the last weeks she'd been too proud to ask for help, hid her illness from daylight, slipped out of her apartment in late evening to pick up some yoghurt or tea which would barely sustain her.  

But the last weeks, for which I was conscripted, were beyond nightmarish.  To comfort myself I wrote poems-- a living, rolling eulogy so her suffering might not be in vain, and so the unwilling witness I was could have some higher purpose.  I had known birth-- the protracted minutes of agony, the endless crescendo of contractions until you were outside of your own body.  But death, in these rooms, was a hideous slow drama of one... a whole-body soliloquy with no particular point.  

I prayed; I left the room for some hours to visit various churches.  I begged for her suffering to end. But it was the longest week, the last one, and death came not on cat feet but hovered like a hideous vulture stealing breaths and yet keeping her awake.  Lyrics circled like songbirds, but anything above silence seemed more painful.  I listened to the last groans of life, heard and smelled things for which I was totally unprepared... all because I could not bear to say no to this formerly beautiful woman who had completely run out of options.

In the end, it was like a coming of age, or the worst dream I'd ever had... not to mention the EMT workers who appeared to collect the body and screamed at me for executing the last wish of a dying woman I barely knew.  I wasn't even sure if her assumed name was real. I only know we shared an intimacy few people will ever experience.  And my life was never the same.  

So I've grown to mistrust death-- to mistrust pain and diagnoses and illness... to respect the final authority of Time, with his companion Death, who will outlive us all-- each and every. And as these anniversaries present themselves, growing in number until (as my Mom warned me) the death dates far exceed the births in one's calendar, I am no less bothered by these statistics.  In fact, today, it occurred to me that the toll exacted by these absences is what really ages one... we wear loss like an old face.  

We do our best to comfort friends and family who have cruel diagnoses and accidents-- who lie in sickbeds and depend on us like children.  Those of us who have watched death, who have sat bedside in  final hours-- with or without medicines and drugs, we know.  But most of us have not seen war.  And yet, around the globe, there are wars-- there is artillery and explosives that are virtual death machines.  Not even in beds, children and soldiers are lying now-- suffering, untended... victims, the prematurely violated, tortured... for principles of life and territory which can only be determined by negotiation, in the end.   

Even Oppenheimer has died-- whatever his legacy-- both brilliant and terrible... he surely suffered the agony of death by cancer, and his words, via Hollywood, now resonate once again.  We, the audience-- the successors of his generation, have access to great knowledge and opportunity.  Yes, the science of life is such that Death will always author our final page, but we do not have to become his handmaidens. 

Scarecrow

When I lived in Mexico, I envied the people their special relationship with Santa Muerte.  I could never warm up to a holiday where there was grave-dancing and celebration.  Death was fearsome for me;  Edgar Allen Poe and Edward Gorey gave me nightmares.  I had no living grandparents (well, none we were allowed to acknowledge) and little intimacy with the elderly.  There was a white bridal gown in a box in our old attic that my sister insisted was used by the spirit of our deceased Grandma on the occasions she visited.  I shivered.  

The first actual death in my young life was my best friend's mother.  She died during the summer-- of cancer.  I could not imagine losing my own Mom-- the thought absolutely terrified me, although I often wished my father would disappear and leave her eligible to couple with some random prince or even a kind carpenter or fisherman.  My friend's Mom had these downturned eyes and permanently worried brows.  I felt safe in her home-- sleeping over, on little trips; she was the leader of our Brownie troop and she was kind and soft-spoken.  I was devastated by the news of her death; her daughter had to leave the summer program where they'd put us to distract from the fallout of her advanced illness.  I had to stay behind where I wept and tried to process the concept of 'gone-ness' in my 8-year old world.  I offered to lend my own mother-- to trade places.

Not long afterward the widowed husband remarried a woman with three children.  The new mixed family was buoyant and festive.  He seemed to blossom with a new wife... and that was that.  But I carried my friend's mother's memory like a badge-- like a missing tooth when I smiled.  No one seems to notice, and it's inappropriate to be weeping daily like a drama princess when the immediate family has made great effort to recover.  It put a wedge between me and my best friend; I missed her Mom when I slept over-- the milk and cookies, the way she braided my hair so it wouldn't pull... her soft sing-y voice calling Good night, girls! when we were up past midnight whispering and giggling.

I'm not the poster child for Life Goes On.  The losses and griefs take their toll.  Besides Jesus, there is a litany of saints and angels in my nightly recitations-- all of whom are conspicuously missing from my life.  The past year or two has had its own version of pain; the fact that the world seems to be grieving does not comfort much.  I remember my aging Mom complaining there were so few left of her acquaintance-world-- crossing out in red the date-book names that no longer required birthday cards.  Her Christmas list was down to single digits.  

October has always been a sad month for many reasons... I also dread the ambivalent celebration of Halloween.  I've never been a costume-enthusiast... and while I appreciate the parade, the souls of the departed give me no incentive to party.  Thirty-two years ago I went into false labor on October 31st and prayed I would not be giving orange and black birthday parties for years to come.  As it happened, my son waited a full week, for which I am grateful.  Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater my mother used to recite as we carved teeth on our Jack-o-Lanterns; she was a late October baby.  

A week ago I walked back from Harlem along the East River... for a while I was shadowed by a man who pulled out a knife and asked me for money.  As it was, I had none-- food stamps, which I offered... he blinked his red-rimmed eyes and decided not to hurt me.  Was there a guardian angel behind us? It occurred to me that I was not even frightened. A few blocks later,  the sun set and produced a vivid double rainbow which truly merited the 'arc-en-ciel' nomenclature... I can't recall ever seeing anything that compared in New York City.  The Hunter's Moon this week-- has had an exceptional performance-- a soloist among choruses of clouds.  

Late last night-- almost dawn... I took out my guitar, as is my habit... and the lights in my living room began to blink.  That would be Alan, I said out loud.  Spirits.  Ghosts... I am approaching a point where absent friends will soon exceed the ones who are here.  The pandemic has whittled down my circle of intimates to a very few.  It is a kind of limbo... I feel more connected to those who have passed.  We speak, we exchange.  I sing to them.  My own daughter walks among them.  

I haven't visited my mother's grave for nearly three years; she'd have turned 97 this week... this seems uncanny.  I celebrate her pumpkin-carving hands when they were still manicured and elegant-- me, in my uncostumed non-finery, like an old scarecrow with arms extended,  ghosts and spirits perching.  

Jane of Kings

Scrolling through random TV, channel after channel is routinely showing some film or series of extreme violence... pain, human aggression-- terror... blood, injury... death.  Either some scenario or elaborate criminal plot which involves weapons and retaliation...  or war;  science fiction monstrosities with hostility and vicious hatreds. Then there are the natural disaster movies with catastrophic occurrences-- widespread destruction and damage, global tragedies... 

And then there is this unprecedented newsworthy human year: watching images of the Ganges River swollen with corpses, the 23rd psalm came to mind--- the valley of the shadow of death.  Yea though I walk there, the psalm dictates, I shall fear no evil.  

My friend Jane passed away just ten days ago... her 'moment of decease', that is, because for weeks she had been something less than living.  She'd forbidden me, knowing my inclinations to confess and reveal, from mentioning her name in my poetry or blogs.  This was difficult.  Since I was small, I have loved the name Jane as though it were a sheet of prismic glass through which to view the world.  Queen Jane, Bob Dylan wrote... and she was.  Ravaged by a cruel diagnosis, she met her fate with courage and relentless bravery, like a good Catholic.  

Nothing to declare, the hospice priest categorized her, although she tried to muster a few lightweight sins and omissions just for the process... she was true and honest, empathic and observant, smart and acerbic.  Even my son liked her... and he doesn't comment on many people.  At my behest he willingly took her home-baked care packages and always came away with some worthwhile wisdom or TV recommendation.  

The worst part about a long farewell is that the ending overshadows the rest-- at least temporarily.  While we all drudge up past memories and tendernesses, the horror of illness hangs in the air like a low ceiling.  My father died at nearly 97; my mother survived another 16 months without him.  I remember too well the  'old man' claustrophobic smell of the room where they both sat year in and out in their nineties... although they were clean and neatly dressed. When I visited my mother during her last months the air was lighter without him... but I began to realize that she was sitting there not in her own scent but the lingering scent of her husband, like a cloud or a shroud.  She'd befriended death; she was trying to find the doorway. 

While Jane and I had some fun afternoons after her diagnosis, the treatments were erosive and the day ends early for the terminally ill. It is all they can do to go through motions of living while they are being observed.  Being Jane, she fussed and worried over me-- was I eating, did I want a coat-- boots... hats?  These things became important; she lectured me on the merits of make-up and hair arranging since we no longer had our former beauty to conceal our flaws.  She dragged me to shops and stocked up on the junk food she loved despite my protests that she choose healthy options.  We even went to a senior center one day with me shaking my head... she insisted we'd each get a free pair of glasses and she chose some wild blingy glam frames.  The finished pair never materialized.  Later she playfully threatened the staff:  I'll be dead before those glasses appear... and she was.  But it was funny.  She repeated it during her last weeks.  

She was funny.  She was vain and always wore her make-up though she cared more for her birds than herself.  Her things-- her personal treasures-- were copious and carefully selected.  She surrounded herself with a kind of beauty.  But she had no partner... prohibitively selective she'd been... one of a breed of city eccentrics who live this way-- in a sort of community, in a sort of cocoon... knowing neighbors, generations of friends and neighborhood characters... and pets of all kinds, none of whom, save the pair of birds, outlived her.  

She was kind.  She understood things... we talked and laughed on the phone... we'd neglected one another for years until her illness gave us this opportunity for sisterhood.  We shared things-- youtube and films and books... she read my work and gave praise when it was due. She pushed me like a mother. I tried to be uplifting about her diagnosis; there are miracles, I insisted... no one can predict your outcome.  I began to carry her name with me-- like a song-- a prayer-- a constant mantra, as I do... all day... when I walk, when I run, when I clean house or lie awake at night.  Please God or Jesus or Mary... make her well... Jane... I coopted her name like a lyric.  

At the very end I distanced myself a little.  I didn't sit by her bed waiting for the finale.  I sat a couple of times, but I had to separate myself from this Jane-- from the dying Jane.  Then maybe, I thought, she will live.  I sat in churches-- the hospice chapel, St. Patrick's, St. Vincent's...  I talked to birds, to statues of the Virgin... to my ceiling at night... my various crucifixes.  I tried some Hail Mary's.  

And while we try to remember her now.. it's blurry.  I'm not sure to whom I speak, when I conjure her image... I try to erase the scent of death-in-hospice, the stale bedsheet smell, the disinfectant and the coldness of the nurses and aides.  I don't know what death is supposed to be-- the preferred version is that one 'dies peacefully' but I am not certain Jane did not rage a little in poetic fashion.  It is a relief when suffering ends.  I miss her more these days as I miss Alan and many others and walk truly in the shadow of death this year which has altered forever my own heart, my own trajectory.  What I realized today-- like my mother who sat in the room of my father... I walk with her... it became a habit... and while I will add another name to the litany of my private prayer-chain, and I have formally grieved and repented... lit candles, wept, recited... I am left alone with the Prayer of Jane.  

Dress Rehearsal

For some reason day by day I keep looping back to exactly one year ago.  Some of this calendar-nostalgia is related to my poetry 'diary' which I've recently edited.  Of course hindsight is always a little interesting, especially when many of us had little but our own thoughts and sorrows to harken back to.  For anyone  that maintained an actual paper day-book,  thumbing through non-dogeared 2020 pages finds everything as it was written only... nothing fulfilled... as if an illness shipwrecked our lives and confined us each to an unpopulated island from where we wave weakly, unseen.  And despite the restoration of activity, we are not yet on the 'other shore' of safety... we hesitate to put our feet in celebratory waters, to toast one another with bare faces, to laugh publicly unmasked.  

For my ill friends, as I have mentioned many times, there is some consolation in knowing life as we knew it has not gone on without them... that their peers and neighbors have been limited and quarantined similarly... although they are suffering less.  I have grieved often-- for those I've lost, for moments which became more poignant... so much we took for granted.  Such are the lessons of life: we don't know how much we have until it is gone.  Illness is a major highlighter of experience.  I see my 'confined' friends panning through minutes for gold... reducing their wishes and dreams to a new 'smallness'... wistfully sighing over a coffee on a park bench... a walk by the river.  These things have become impossible... the way I used to long to simply see my mother with a cigarette on her telephone, twisting the cord with her beautiful fingers, critically admiring her manicure, her rings-- things she did unconsciously while she gossiped and whispered.

And still... the end of cancel culture for some is a kind of celebration.  A few friends are booking vacations, planning parties, buying concert tickets.  For me it's as though I've been through a kind of sieve, where all the extraneous things have been removed and I'm left with fewer needs, fewer complications.  The pared down version of life for me feels manageable-- simple.  I've come to terms with my needs and ambitions and they are noticeably less than they were one year ago.  There's a parallel between me and my two friends who are winding up the final yarn-ends of their life, who have let go possessions, dreams... and lie in the reality of a bed with a view-- some flowers, a meal... pain the only enemy they must resist, the symptoms of their illness a clingy companion-- a shadow.  Some days the sheets are clean and the nurses are kind.  Maybe I am too empathic-- the spongy, guilty/sad version of me who knows in a nano-second I could be the one in the bed; I have been there and often wonder why I was allowed the gift of time, and why, as Paul Simon said, I often spend it 'writing songs I can't believe' and failing to perform them.  

My intimate girlfriends are sad... they rely on my darkness, in a way. We don't judge one another, but accept our chronic sorrows like an illness. Some nights I lie awake and imagine losing the ability to speak, to write... I understand and absorb the slow rich hours of the sick when I visit my friend in hospice-- sometimes watching the clock hands circling, listening for hallway sounds... thinking about the elasticity of time-- how terror frames seconds and she often waits in the bright sunlight of pain for a simple cloud of relief to pass.  How she tolerates the intolerable and boredom is the coveted edge of a quiet sea at dusk. 

How they miss their mothers, these women who in a hospital bed are suddenly helpless children with no one to comfort and sense their fear.  For so long I have been my own mother... and I became, in a way, the mother/daughter for my own Mom when she was dying. There were times in her life when she spoke to me as a sister-- she confessed.  How she loved my father's smell... that's when she knew he was 'the one', though I find it hard to imagine she loved his 'old man' scent at the end.  Sitting in the hospital chair I wrote a note to my friend with a ballpoint pen and a pad I'd left her.  It somehow reminded me of the morning after parent-teacher night.  I'd picture my mother with her long legs sitting at my little desk, my handsome father with his hand on the chair... looking through my papers and projects.  We'd all do an annual self-portrait.  I asked my Mom to cut my hair because it seemed so much easier to draw yourself with bangs, and I wanted them to admire my work.  The morning after, my teachers always commented how handsome my Dad was... and I'd search my desk carefully for a note.. but there was none.  Every year I'd leave my little notebook open with a pencil... but they never took the hint.

When my son was a schoolboy I always left him a note; doubtful he read this or cared... such is life.  We try to anticipate pains and needs... but we misunderstand, we fail.  I do little to comfort my ill friends.  My worrying and telephoning are badly timed and useless. We do these things for ourselves, I think... we fluff pillows and fix blankets.  There was a Martin guitar in the chapel of the hospice... I suddenly craved playing something but shivered to think about the women and men who wander hospital hallways like a human jukebox trying to cheer the sick and dying who often roll their eyes and groan quietly.

I thought about the thousands of patients who had lain in this bed in the room of my friend... pandemic or cancer-- what difference did it make... I am still in the wake of grief-- of loss... in the shadow of 2020 in an unfamiliar forest of future where illness seems to be a kind of normal.  It does little good to watch someone drown and douse yourself with water in sympathy.  Some of my friends are nurses who have devoted months and months to saving people... and I don't know why I can't seem to find the thrust to move outward from this dark orbit.  

Years ago I read Susan Sontag's 'Illness as Metaphor'.  It is humiliating and dehumanizing to be a patient.  I fear this-- we all fear this, even those of us who are hypochondriacs and seem to wish for incapacity. But most of all it is a kind of rehearsal for death--  a foreshadowing, a preface.  I am not ready... who of us is? Besides, I've always hated rehearsing.  Still, like a kind of tinnitus the daily death logs and statistics ring in my head and haunt me.  It is death I am trying to come to terms with... and it is not yet possible.   I suppose life is the antidote; sympathy does not require suffering or guilt or sacrifice. We had Jesus to teach us these things, and you'd think I'd have learned some 2021 Easter lesson.  

Tonight the rising full moon was directly opposite a spectacular sunset behind the west-side skyline... like life and death... for once the sun and she had come to terms with the stage of sky... and it was only against the backdrop of utter darkness that the clarity really spoke.  Shine on, my Mom used to sing... all of those wonderful moon songs in her funny high voice that I can play back any time on the phonograph of my old heart. And it does, and it will-- in sickness and health, long after death do us part.  

Rain of Kings

There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend Tyrone often announces.  Categories change from day to day, from monologue to monologue.  He's a curb philosopher-- a wise-man without an address, and I'd just as soon get my instructions and remedies from Tyrone. Today-- it's all about the weather: Tyrone and I-- well, we don't dread the rain.

In younger days I often walked along the East River promenade with a baby stroller, my little boy gleefully pointing at boats on one side, me crossing myself as we passed the daunting Cornell hospital buildings on the other-- imagining patients trapped inside... how beautiful sunny weather made them feel ill and ashamed of their confinements, but the rain made them feel safe... convalescent. Today I have friends embedded in hospital rooms-- sentenced to a random but cruel diagnosis.  Who of us expects to be invalidated, incapacitated?  We dread these things, but like rain on our wedding day... well, they don't quite seem real until we are helpless and alone in a dimly-lit room with terrifying machines and digital screens which blink our fate. 

Graveside funerals are so much more poignant with umbrellas... even when I was small, I felt God was grieving from the sky. When I moved to England and married my son's father, the chronic damp sunless weather -- day after day-- embraced my young bones like a dark premonition.  I dispensed with umbrellas and took it, straight up and grey, with the clouds of our failure hovering inside and out.  There will be a royal funeral procession this week-- perhaps the weather will comply.  London rain is epic-worthy.  

Endless essays and articles about loss swimming in my current digital libraries... memorials, obituaries, confessions and prayers...  And then there are the annoying optimists-- the positive, cheerful, grateful Pollyanna's of Facebook and Instagram-- the meme-writers and quoters of happy-faced human emojis.   For the chronically and terminally sick there is little here to celebrate with pain and discomfort the only really constant companions.

I am the useless sympathetic friend.  I want to do something and I really cannot.  Grief and illness counselors have their programs, their suggestions and prescriptions-- none of it comforts the way seeing rain outside one's hospital window might, knowing perhaps you are missing sightly less.  I've been there; the fortunate among us have been there-- paid a bit of toll, put some body parts on layaway to keep the wolves at bay.  

My Irish nanny told me once that the world needed a break-- that rain meant the sky had a sort of cold-- it needed to rest the sun, to cry-- just like children.  I can't remember where in the Bible God created rain... but He certainly used it to punish mankind.  And likewise, it rewarded.  It nourished the land-- sometimes brought biblical miracles--manna... and in places like Louisiana, fish have actually fallen from the sky; frogs in the midwest.  

No miracles are expected with today's rain, although it is my most welcome soundtrack and visitor.  Somehow it connects me to my 'people'; I know they are wet or pensively looking out at the traffic and umbrella congestion-- maybe just a bit melancholy.  Things have happened in rain that would not have happened-- you have run through streets with some person... and because you are wet, you undress at his place and end up drinking from a strange cup by his window in the soft laundry-scented cotton of his clothes.  It becomes a sort of home for you.

I can't recall my mother ever looking 'wet'.  Her hair was always  'done' and she was umbrella'd from door to car and back.  My father-- yes, he was wet.  He played tennis and walked dogs in storms.  My Mom kept her head above water when she swam.  We all had rubbers and galoshes.  I don't remember hers.  I picture her grave in the rain... her coffin and the six feet of earth will have kept her dry... but despite the multitudes of deceased surrounding her, the soft mound where she lies seems desolate on these days. 

For my ill friends-- I am aware my cloying sympathetic melancholy helps not at all.  Nor do shaking my fists at the sky, begging doctors and nurses, telephoning and weeping, rosaries, novenas...  We are not remedies for one another.  Neither of my friends seems to have had a great satisfying love-- a man to lie across their bed and suffocate them with sorrow.  The parting, with romantic drama, is a little more 'post-worthy'... the mourners step into the spotlight... the widowers and wounded lovers.  But in the end we are left with a statistic... an empty bed, the imprint of weeping... a memory of pain, of regret, and then the rain.

Scrabble

This morning I came across a quote from Cervantes: 'All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will improve... for it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever and... since the bad has lasted so long the good is close at hand.'  Well... it touched me-- like a mother's hand on my face, until I realized-- these are the words of a deluded madman, are they not? I thought of Job-- then a friend lying in a hospital on a ventilator, witnessing or not witnessing the disintegration of his own brain. 

'We have all been here before' the song from 1970 was running over and over in my mind's ear like a damaged vinyl skip as I woke... and wondered, as I often do these days, if I am losing my mind or simply misplacing pieces of it.  While identifying the music in my head (often it is my own invention which takes form in a dream) from the Deja Vu album,  it occurred that we have not been here before... at least not I... and I am not sure when the good will come as I watch another friend suffer from the relentless tide of late-stage cancer and there are no highlighted days on her calendar-- not celebrations or moments of relief without drugs.  

My own mother warned me-- Pick something beautiful, she used to say... but I continued to opt for the dark and difficult.   She read to us from Bambi... my first souvenir was the word 'thicket'.. I was enchanted by the aura of words which led me into hidden passages and opened doors that seemed a little forbidden.  These days-- entering older age at an intersection of quarantine and cultural procrastination... well, it is an unforgiving sort of wilderness-- a bad mirage.  It is like stepping out and not knowing where the deep sidewalk crevasses may lie... there are no maps for this.  

And still, watching the news, accosted daily with the barrage of online activities and people--even friends-- competing for time on social media... it is as though things have not stopped accelerating. My peers are both bewildered and a little terrified... we have been simultaneously halted in our tracks and left behind.  No wonder Bruce Springsteen had a DUI.  It's not easy navigating reality and the dark gravity of what is still in our head.  He was writing a song of himself... ? Personally I have no license, no car... but I was 'there'...

Some of us have begun memoirs and autobiographies.  Some have begun to shed memories... or to find, as I often do, this 'soup' of sentimentality and nostalgia simmering on a hot stove of unfamiliar ingredients.  Compounded by the challenge of losing our taste and smell... has anyone else spent nightmarish hours wondering at the metaphorical resonance of this virus symptom?  As though we are intentionally misplaced... what if we were bloodhounds, any animals who became entirely useless and disoriented and could not find our way home?

We are at this threshold, many of us... I see even celebrities losing their minds, making bad choices-- a bit of Quixotic paranoia, a bit of desperation to be relevant-- inventing drama, putting it up on a screen for others to judge, to approve... to be watched or seen because we can't seem to find our own Deja-Vu here.   Our own mental illness has become sort of an entertainment raison d'être... it makes news, it reaches others... Personally I feel like a reverse ventriloquist-- like I must speak for those who cannot-- the ones lying in hospital beds-- the forgotten neighbors who fear leaving their apartments... and the ones who are no longer here.  They haunt my dreams.  

We are all future ghosts and corpses.  I'm sorry, Mom... it's a terrible thought but it is a life force.  I leave virtual daffodils at your sad grave every day; I have failed you simply by fulfilling my own program.  Like Bruce, maybe-- and I was uncharitable to him-- I am driven but not driving, thank goodness.  Last night I saw Demi Lovato and the Duchess or whatever she is also prostrating themselves... Yes, they are given a platform and it behooves them to take it for themselves, however dramatically they insist the opposite.  Our Governor-- can they not find someone else to crucify?  These people are maybe discarded too quickly.  You voted for them and they are human and on a platform and made mistakes.  I remember how quickly they took down Eliot Spitzer when he was trying to dismantle the frauds of Wall Street.  Where is our perspective? Heroes are all flawed... scrutiny cannot fail to reveal them.  

Yes, we women have all suffered injustices and disrespect; at this moment of my life I occasionally peruse the scrapbook of my girlhood and the incidents were plentiful and appalling.  I was busy trying to become the voice for something I have surely failed.  Rather than identify as a whiner I opted for the larger picture.   Two of my friends, coincidentally, have just begun-- out of boredom or disappointment-- jigsaw puzzles.  Comforting to know there is a solution; it will work.  The rest of the world seems to be fragmenting.  Perhaps I the aging chicken have become my own fallen egg.  All the Kings Horses, etc... 

Un-combed

My friend is in the unenviable state of medical purgatory.  Many of us have been there; more of us will be, as the years accelerate.  While she anxiously awaits a full diagnosis, she must contend not only with perceived symptoms but with the unperceived.  Then there are the additional pains and discomforts brought on by torturous probing and exploratory protocol, because when you are helpless and punctured, they 'bring it on' irregardless.  All, presumably, in the name of an appropriate treatment-- a cure-- which is several steps more complicated than simply naming the disease.

Despite our compulsive identifying and classifying of things, we do not all fall into a simple solution box.  We sit in hospital waiting rooms with hundreds of bodies and faces that do not much resemble one another.  Besides obvious crutches and bandages, we know little of what ails our neighbors.  Sometimes our neighbors do not even know what ails them.  And behind the physical manifestations there are our emotional labyrinths-- our panics and anxieties, our deep childhood wounds which fester or recede only to assume center-stage when we feel weak.  All of the self-help and proverbs--  even religion-- are suddenly not enough to guide us through a sleepless night of crisis.

When I grew up in the 1950's parents weren't as 'hands-on' as parents of the 21st century are expected to be.  They left strollers outside the supermarket; we walked ourselves to school as small children, and played without supervision in parks.  Things happened-- even relatives spoke and handled us inappropriately, but no one mentioned these things.  We were cared for, but I never had that sense that I could talk intimately with my Mom about things that bothered me... yes, we had our friends, but few of us had that sense of emotional safety.  We grew up and music was like our confidante; many of us used sex and substances for comfort.

I raised my son with attention to a parental safety zone.  I wanted him to be independent, but I also wanted him to feel confident that his needs--emotional and physical-- were being met.  Yes, there were rough patches of infancy-- colic, bad phases-- but he was a relatively easy baby.  He spoke words at 12 months and expressed his needs as best he could.    As a 24/7 single parent this made a difference; I had no help and worked most nights doing gigs, while he was sleeping.  He rarely woke to notice I was absent.  One night a neighbor was sleeping over while I worked... he woke up... she gave him a water bottle and put him back to bed.  But he kept calling-- asking her for a comb.  "Comb.  He needs a comb,' he implored-- using the third person, as he did.  So my neighbor kept taking his little blue baby comb out of the drawer and fixing his hair.  But he would shake his head and repeat.  When I called during break to check in, I could hear him crying.  She put him on the phone --'Mama-- COMB'... he was saying...  At last it occurred to me... we had a bedtime ritual, after I put him in the crib... I would read him some rhyme from a huge old coverless anthology of verse... so I recited on the phone some things I knew from Robert Louis Stevenson-- the Swing poem, the Land of Counterpane...  and immediately he calmed and curled up with his little finger.  Poem, not comb.  It was comical... but also I realized it was his little bedtime 'need'... his comfort.  Fortunately I figured that one out.

My baby girl was born with a fatal heart defect.  Neither the doctors nor I were able to diagnose and repair the hole through which she disappeared.  Her needs, unlike those of her brother, were unreachable.  They haunt me still, because when we love someone, we adopt their pain.  She and I had barely been separated; I grieve daily not only for her angelic soul, but for my failure to provide her comfort.

My son is a man and his needs are a lot more complex.  Tonight we spoke about Antonio Brown and the dissolution of his once-promising career.  I always feel so much empathy for these athletes-- knowing how much they put in day after day-- the sacrifices, the sweat and training.  Then they are thrust into a spotlight, showered with sums of money that are almost beyond their ability to manage, preyed upon by media, women, fame parasites.  And once they taste this kind of celebrity-- well, there is no normal. What are his needs now? He is in the midst of meltdown mode.

Our needs change as we grow older-- they increase, and then in ways they decrease.  As adults, we figure out how to provide our own needs-- not to depend on partners, friends and children. But when we are ill, all bets are off.  A day without pain is a gift; a successful treatment is a reward.  We paddle upstream hopefully toward some version of recovery.  But first, this requires a proper diagnosis-- for someone to really listen to our symptoms and complaints, and devise a medical course.  For this, we are at the mercy of professionals whom we pray are astute and on point. As for emotional symptoms-- I have friends who have been seeing a shrink for decades.  Some have regressed into childhood memories and early trauma to encounter their younger, less damaged self.  Does this help?  At this age, no one is going to rock us to sleep or read us nursery rhymes out loud.  Still, we can try to listen.  Loneliness is easily diagnosable; fear and anger less so, but we can check in and listen and offer not to deliver our signature brownies or cookies, but to see what they need--  a clean stove or some menial errand or maybe to simply hear a caring voice tell them how much they mean to us-- that we are not just who we are, but who we have been-- with our canes and limps and aches and scars.  This life is a package deal and we all get our unraveling at some point.  So share the wealth, whatever that may mean, with someone who needs it today.

Instagram Coffee

When I first went to college I signed up for a minimal meal plan, to save money for tuition.  There were no cooking facilities or even refrigerators in dormitories back then... I had one of those cheap little electric kettles and I bought myself packets of instant cream of wheat-- a relatively new product.  The previous years I'd gone to high-school in a morning session (over-crowded school-scheduling) which required a 5 AM wake-up to walk dogs and put together a sustaining breakfast.  I cooked myself a pot of hot porridge or wheat cereal-- this took some twenty minutes-- with butter, cream (yes-- my indulgent mother) and brown sugar,  cafe-au-lait-- which had to get me through six long break-less hours until lunch. Even the memory of it is hearty and good.  My first homesick dormitory morning of instant mush was horrifying.  It tasted like paper--was either pasty or soupy-- gritty and awful.  Coffee was no better.

I've never been able to drink instant coffee.  As low-maintenance and minimal as my eating habits have become, by necessity, fast food has never been my thing.  I like brewed coffee-- pour-over, fresh-steeped.  In my son's well-designed office there are several varieties of machines which produce a perfect cup in seconds; individual servings with endless combinations of roasts and flavors... lattes, espresso, cappuccino-- all pre-measured, packaged in a disposable clean pod... all tasting, to me, suspiciously like airport coffee.  I've noticed many, many new chains of dedicated boutiques, all featuring some brewing or roasting specialty-- the craft of coffee, the process-- some at a premium that rivals the price of a good pound of fresh beans.  They all seem to have a following.  It seems even the post-millennials know the difference between office-brew and high-test.  My son goes out to Starbucks for his caffeine fix.  Manhattan is packed with chefs and food choices.  While McDonald's and Burger King don't seem to suffer, restaurants of all varieties,-- take-out trucks and stores offer seriously decent dishes for every meal.  Sommeliers have never been as sought-after; cheese experts, pastry chefs are in high career-demand.

So what happened to music?  Why do we get this variety of instant shake-and-bake beats and lyrics that pass as records?  Where are the writers and the inspired, tormented poets-with-guitars?  Out in a tent on a backroad in Mississippi?  Sleeping with the gypsies in a caravan in Croatia?

I've been playing in bands for 40 years or so, and consider myself a second-tier musician.  I sympathize with the geniuses of my circle who surpassed their curriculum before they even entered music school-- who could not only show their teachers a few things but can play their proverbial asses off.  Many of them live in low-income or subsidized housing projects.   Some of them are dead, having indulged their souls and bodies in the process of challenging their own talents... or tormenting themselves in the self-doubting ritual of most brilliant artists who see the light and cannot quite get there every night.  Few of them receive the acknowledgment they are due; they must turn on award shows and watch the endless accolades of achievement doled out to the mediocre and uninspired.
It is like watching a cup of instant coffee win the taste award year after year.  It's a depressing sentence.

On another level, I co-host a weekly jam in a New York City club whose name bears tribute to one of the great figures in American music.  Many of our friends and wonderfully talented colleagues join us in celebrating our community here, in perpetuating a certain tradition.  But nearly every week we are joined by someone who gives themselves a list of credits-- who gets up onstage and displays the musical flavor-profile of a water-cooler-style instant coffee.  Do they get this?  Are they listening?  I don't know.  Some of it is simple skill and practice.  Some of it is 'ear'-- the ability to discern what is good from what is merely adequate.  But much of it is simple failure to listen.  Can these people distinguish a freshly-grilled burger from a fast-food filler-patty?  I would think so.   But here they are, offering up the audio version of plastic food choices, sometimes via instruments which belonged to celebrities before them, which cost a small fortune, but sound cheap and misused.

Or is it that we are not just deaf but blind?  In this world of a billion pairs of fashion eyeglasses, people do not see themselves.  We have Beyonce-unlikes who flaunt themselves on the street-- women of age with enhanced lips and injected faces who choose to dress and behave like their own daughters.  I remember becoming 40-ish... I could see in the mirror I was turning like a late-summer leaf-- from a youngish woman to a mature one.  At first I was panicky and loathed myself-- discovered tricks of hair-color and make-up.  But then I began to realize it's not so bad-- I don't have to be beautiful all my life; it's time to focus on content.  I've been loved; I can still continue to love.  So I have left behind my girlhood; there is still the memory and the experience.  And now, I have long left behind my 40's and in photographs quite see the beauty I did not understand at the time.

Recently I had an accident on the subway steps; it wasn't too serious but I noticed my knee had somehow kept the memory of some old injury and was stubbornly refusing to heal itself.  It was reminding me of my past-- fiercely holding on to some long-forgotten fear and stress of pain-- maybe from my ballet days.   A friend of mine has had a cancer recurrence.. like a message from his body-- a voice-- a scar which was untended.

Late Monday night, after my gig, I watched St. Louis Blues on some free non-cable network.  This is the story of the great W.C. Handy-- his struggle with music.  Even the actors playing these roles-- Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt--- Ruby Dee... had a kind of genius and exquisite talent we rarely see in our time.  The voice of Eartha Kitt-- unadorned, unadulterated-- those eyes-- I could not take my eyes from the screen.  The temporary blindness of W. C. Handy-- the depth of his musical nature-- how he nurtured and groomed this as he matured.  I think of my fellow musicians here--- even myself, with my handicaps and mediocrities-- how many thousands of nights we stood trying to understand ourselves onstage-- learning to listen and find our place in the music; how we suffer and starve-- me, the Princeton summa cum laude girl with the scholarships and accolades-- struggling to just be-- to let go of being loved, admired-- to be sometimes misjudged or slighted, hit on by club-owners and horn players--- chided, praised, cheated, marginalized and drowned out-- just for these moments of musical truth-- for my tiny contribution to something larger.  I am no genius; I am a cog, but I think I am finally a listening, genuine cog.

W.C. Handy had his retribution: parental forgiveness, restoration of sight-- great lifetime acknowledgment.  Not so for me-- I have my old scars, like the pain in my knee which will heal, telling my story, somehow inserting themselves into the music-- the experience, the joy, the sweat and truth we try so hard to convey, with tedious long years and words-- 2-track soundbites and voices ringing like old bells in the face of the Instagram wall that stands before us with ever more facile digital brickwork, every day.  And yet, I wouldn't trade a single analogue minute, old and scarred as I am, me and my vintage guitars, my scraps of paper and my dreams.

The Fire Next Time

Living in a city we are accompanied, it seems, by sirens.  There is not an hour that passes when some police or firetruck is not racing to some emergency call, followed too often by an ambulance or EMT vehicle.  If you are a parent-- no matter how old your children are-- this is your first association.  You worry, you pray.  People who have lived in cities during wartime have a deeper relationship with sirens.  After 9/11, we in New York city will never be the same.  For some, a siren may be comforting-- the sound of rescue.  For me, it is like a nerve which wakes.  If you have ever been involved in a fire, you understand its destructive power... the damage, the pain, the devastation... is beyond comprehension.  If you have ever been burned-- or cared for someone who was burned-- the process of treatment and healing, if this is even possible, begins at a threshold of pain most of us cannot imagine... and it escalates from there.  It gives war a new meaning.  And the prospect of nuclear war-- the threat-- seems like a hideous anomaly of humanity and an intellectual distortion of the 'program' of mankind.

The London fire this week brought this horror into graphic consciousness.  Our 20th-century symbols of urban progress-- skyscrapers-- can become dangerous traps of mass destruction, as we have learned.  Personally, I like living where I can climb down a fire escape somewhere... the luxury of a view is something I can bypass and something I will not again afford in this lifetime.  But the projects-- every city has its council flats, low income housing.  You get what you pay for; people accept their assignation.  Some are fortunate and live in great Manhattan neighborhoods with river views which cost them nothing.  I used to envy kids in the projects when I was little-- they had a common playground, a sort of small gated community; everyone seemed to know everyone.  They barbecued, they played radios and boomboxes.  Fathers came home and sat on benches in the summer; kids ran under sprinklers, their grandmas knitted and crocheted and gossiped after dinner.  But these come with a price.  The families have very little voice; if there is one bad egg the kids are a little unprotected.  Things happen, the police treat these communities with tough vigilance and less sympathy.  The maintenance is often sloppy and utilities are under-serviced.  The city or state can be an unresponsive landlord.  These people don't always complain or have the resources to know how to complain.

A friend of mine just confessed he is facing the horrifying prospect of losing his teeth.  How many times, recently, have I run into a musician or any one of my bohemian friends who lives below the economic horizon (most of us!) and lacked the means and medical support to take care of this?  Clinics won't repair beyond the minimum.  They extract.  You are poor-- what does it matter?  I worked at an East Harlem clinic one summer and found the dentist pulled children's permanent teeth because he claimed none of them will follow up a root canal; once their pain is gone, they are gone.  It seemed cruel.  I also saw 10-year-old kids with teeth rotting from sweets and lack of care.  Many of them were illegal immigrants and terrified they would be reported if they saw a doctor or dentist.  So they waited.

The point is, decent medicine has become an economic privilege.  It's not Obamacare, it's the damned insurance companies-- the drugs, the ads, the money.  It's a horrid business and corners are cut everywhere.  People are massively rich from this business; system abuses are everywhere and poor people must accept what they get which is substandard. My friend died of cancer, with maybe standard treatment but such minimal palliative care and very little sympathy from the system.  She had no voice, no lawyers to get her missing family millions of dollars from Johnson and Johnson, no experience or ability or even strength to complain.  As her advocate, it was an exhausting and losing struggle.  We had no access to new, experimental and less cruel treatments.  She suffered and died in agony.

Good countries like Sweden house their lower and middle classes with respect and dignity.  These people are cared for with socialized medicine-- just like their richer neighbors. There are jobs for people; there are resources and people are happy and do not seem bitter and angry.  In cities like New York and London-- the populations are huge and growing.  The gap between rich and poor has become so wide, most of us have fallen in.  Business opportunities are abundant in a city, but poor people are poor consumers.  I haven't bought myself a new anything in so long, I wouldn't know what to do with an extra $100.  I scrimp and save, glean cheap staples from weekly sales, walk among the poor.  I do not get food stamps.  I qualify, but I have issues here. I am a survivor.  I live in a coop I managed to purchase many years ago when this was possible.  No building now would ever allow me to rent or buy.  My income is meager.  I am far below poverty level and yet I survive because I have a brain.  It is incredibly high maintenance to navigate New York on $20 a week but I manage and I continue to chip away at my goals and my work.  I feel privileged. I am no longer a mother and can subsist on rice and coffee without kids complaining.  God help me if my brain goes.  I will become a statistic.

People with large families who struggle do not have the time or energy to deal with so many things.  They forget, they postpone.  Daily urgencies take priority.  Some people forget to put batteries in their  smoke alarms.  The people in Tribeca last week who succumbed to carbon monoxide-- what was their economic profile?  But poor people in projects tend to be treated as children.  They are cared for and managed by the state.  It is all they can do to feed their families and get a little sleep.  They have little control over maintenance and options.  They are victims of the system, and when something goes wrong, they are victims of someone else's poor decision.

Bernie Sanders was shut down.  The business of medicine in the US is so vast I doubt anyone will ever blow it apart.  The epidemic of greed is way larger and way more hideous than the plagues of medieval times.  Illnesses are an income opportunity.  Vaccines are sold in the millions; our television is constantly advertising new costly drugs... they are buzzwords in our children's ears... and months later it is the TV legal teams soliciting users of these drugs for lawsuits.  We are lab rats, we are victims.   As long as the medical professionals follow proscribed 'protocol' however absurd and useless it seems, they cannot be sued.  This is the benchmark of medicine in a country where insurance premiums make private practice nearly impossible for medical students who dream of saving people with good preventive care.  So they prescribe, follow the system.  Even when they know better.  They look the other way.  They need to pay their exorbitant rent.   Their patients are for the most part obedient and become dependent.   Especially the poor whom we see sitting patiently in their medicaid-provided wheelchairs, waiting for buses with reduced-fare passes and piles of medicaid scripts and food stamps which allow them to buy masses of groceries which are not necessarily nutritionally sound, but which allow the supermarkets to sell quantities of product at uber-retail.  They offer their benefit card; they do not price-check.  It is not their fault.  They are under-informed.  Some of them voted for Trump because they do not read real news and nothing seems to change their life anyway.  They live in the moment.  They have food and go home and watch television.  They watch on their phones.

I can't even wrap my brain around this government.  What I do see is that people not only have a constitutional right to be free, to voice their opinions without fear-- but also to safety, to health care-- the same care for everyone.  The same engineering and building standards for everyone.   All lives matter.  Not just rich, celebrity lives but every single one of us.  The London fire called attention to this... and for a week or so, we urban people may consider these things... but then most of us will go on and binge watch our shows, and shop, and complain on Facebook, as we do.

Here I am, the aging lefty liberal, on my tiny digital soapbox offering very little.  But at least I am thinking...  and I walk around the city without a phone.  I look at things and talk to people-- not just my peers and artist and musician friends, but regular people.  Everywhere I see and hear things that upset me-- red flags, injustices, infractions.  If you see something, say something, the subways warn us.  Well, there is a human application of this as well.  Not the shysters and crooks who want your money on the streets, but the hundreds of thousands of good, hardworking victims of the system who maybe need a friend or some help.  One at a time, we can do something, all of us.  Put down your phone and look around.  Some things are inevitable.  But there is right and there is wrong.  There is daily tragedy; but maybe some can be prevented.  At least one life might feel 'mattered'... otherwise we are all victims of this regime of the monied, vassals of the Wall Street culture and the perversion of capitalism.  We can be creative... we can think, we can reach out and speak out, we can revive the concept of personal heroism-- love our less privileged neighbors and remember what it meant to be a real citizen in a free country.  Amen.

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.

The Anti-Saint

Death is in the house this week.  Not that he is ever anywhere else-- I often feel his cold breath on my right hand, reminding me not to take my eighth notes for granted.  Some nights it is my left ear-- like he is whispering to me in some weathery language: Listen to the rain, he says… or Notice how the fog speaks-- how it blurs lines and descriptions-- yes, this is his language, his courtship-- his entry…

Last week I sat with him by the side of my friend.  He taunted me-- She's mine, he said; she's been mine for years now… this is just the final approach…  Then stop the suffering and have her, I scolded him…  Ahh but don't you enjoy this time with me, he asked?  You and I and Jesus-the-cat in this lonely dark apartment, you with your silly rosary beads and your sympathy?   Me just having a rest in the city-- usually I must be quick and urgent here.  Exhausting, these urban hubs-- with the hit-and-runs, the shootings and overdoses… the jumpers and depressed, the muggers and murderers who beat me at my own game.  Then I have to consider revenge.  But you-- you're so quiet here…you the writer of my music… you're so facile with the language of gravestones and black winds… it's so peaceful sitting with you in the dark, watching…

This is the way Death spoke to me while he also watched my friend writhe in her extended agony without emotion.  He was quiet, he was cold.  I left him for a few hours and he finished the deed, left his mark and no sign that there was peace at the end.  My vigil was clearly over, and I ended up without a souvenir, without closure-- on the other side of the hideous yellow police-tape which was used to mark off her doorway.  No answers, no autopsy; without a will or testament, she is legal property of the city medical examiner's office, another cold corpse in the morgue awaiting the appearance of some kin or family who never showed up during her illness-- so why would they want to pay for a funeral?

There is little I can do; after all the nights and days of fear and diagnosis, treatment and suffering and anxiety… the questions and tears--- decisions and research… I cannot even be certain of her name.  She is another mystery-- another open wound in the sequence of human experiments for which I have somehow enlisted, my friends tell me-- out of some genetic defect which continues to prompt me to turn around every time someone says 'help'.  Or 'Mommy'. Or even 'Mami'.

I can't seem to sign up for lucrative jobs-- me, who turned down a Harvard Law scholarship-- the sore thumb of my family, with the ivy league black sheepskin.  I refuse to gig in club-date bands or even tribute projects which might compensate reasonably enough for me to afford groceries like a normal person--  to take a taxi every once in a while,  to see a movie that's not on free TV, have a coffee I didn't make myself… to buy anything that hasn't been used by someone else.  I admire your conscientious deprivation, Death commented-- As thought you're preparing for the next life-- when all bets are off.  And he has spared me, once or twice--- or many times-- when a city bus brushed so close as I crossed an avenue-- when a plate glass window fell 60 stories and sprayed me ever so lightly with the tiniest splinters… he's definitely loaned me a few free passes.

So how do I explain my attachment to a no-win situation-- a doomed patient who was not particularly loving or nice or even appreciative, although at the very end she did express some tough gratitude, and I assured her it was my privilege to have been able to be there? Was it my privilege?  Was it my own personal penance, my perverted version of twisted sainthood to atone for all the mistakes I've made-- the bad marriages and the failures?  I definitely identified somehow with my poor deceased friend, who had paid a lonely price for a pile of bad choices.  Was that it?

The truth is, I love my life.  I cling to my bizarre stoicism and spartan lifestyle and I manage to produce something I feel is worthwhile.  My distractions are emotional and empathetic ones; my path is often lonely and without luxury.  I read a description of middle-income housing  qualifiers last night and was shocked to discover the low-end cut-off was 10 times my annual income.  I am not just low, but below poverty income-qualifying.  Who is going to sit by my side at my end, with no prospect of reward or inheritance?  I have yet to come across my own double.

Still, I know I would have made the same choices, again and again.  We can't take all this stuff with us, and I have plenty of meaningful stuff, although I have no fortune.  No, I did not ask Death for a bit of extra time for good behavior, although maybe that is what I intended, subconsciously.  I have work to do-- things to leave behind that someone some day may value.. not in dollars, but in worth.   There is no closure at the end; there was no relief for me, and I feel the spirit of my friend wandering the dark streets--- after all, she is in the morgue, a kind of urban  purgatory; she did not help herself or me with any information or truth that might have made the process easier.  I, too, am stubborn and have some pride; I might have wanted control of my own end, when I had lost all else-- even if it meant dying like an abandoned dog, in pain and without loved ones-- only some version of me, which in itself is doubtful.  What separates me from my friend? I leave my poetry-- my music-- I make cds and books-- my 'calling'.  Do people acknowledge even the artistic version of sacrifice?  Occasionally there is a comment, or praise, or 'likes'… but in the end, it is another item for the loss column, on the balance sheets of pragmatism and poor financial health.  But I will continue, despite lack of closure.

For my friend there is perhaps burial-- or cremation, or scientific autopsy-- but there are still dreams and memories, and a past somewhere-- customers who drank what she poured, men who made passionate love to her-- cats and pets who slept at her feet.   And then there is me, the sleepless writer who will continue to commemorate this woman's poor life, to try to find some meaning and beauty, perhaps rescue something from her self-imposed obscurity-- martyrize her anti-heroics and pedestrian eccentricities, make some attempt of poetry out of the raw materials of disease and squalor.  Then-- like the rest of us, I will wait for my hour to look Death in the eye and say.. Remember me?  This is what I have done.

Keep the Change

It's been a banner flu season.  The weather fluctuates from 16 to 70 degrees arbitrarily, robbing us of a proper winter (no one complains, really).  Our current administration doesn't believe in climate change, despite the science and all evidence, and is supported by a significant sector of the population that maintains that God controls weather anyway. He apparently created man about 5000 years ago, despite the fossils and relics in the Smithsonian; he had Noah build an ark and board two of every creature.  Even I, in Bible School at the age of 6, asked, 'Where did the dinosaurs sleep?' and got sent to sit in the hallway.

I shun vaccines and get my immunity from sharing microphones and water bottles with my fellow musicians.  We're exposed to so much coughing and sniffing and germ-swapping, it seems to keep us going.  I let my baby boy eat plenty of dirt in the NYC sandboxes; he didn't miss a day of school until he began willful truancy-- another story.  My ill friend won't eat ice cream or drink Gatorade when she's dehydrated, because she thinks sugar causes cancer.  She has stage 4c advanced metastatic disease that is so bad the tumors surely weigh more than the little that is still woman.  The pain is off all charts, the doctors avoid her, the nurses speedwalk in and out of her room, recommending things for which there is no technician available.  The drains are not functioning, her intestines are blocked, her ribs are on the verge of cracking and it's tough to breathe in most positions.

Being an actor, she watched the Academy Awards the other night; she still votes as a SAG member, and it provided some distraction.  I do not watch these things, but she told me about the envelope at the end-- how it gave her some hope that maybe she has been misdiagnosed.  We both love Idris Elba.  Was he even on the show?  I have no idea because I haven't seen a Hollywood movie in years.  I pray now that her TV won't break down because besides the morphine and oxy's, this is the main drug.

Tonight I am making her chicken soup.  I am a little happy because she craved it and it's something I can provide.  I am whistling inside; we had a great talk this evening in between her induced sleep cycles, and she can manage a few spoonfuls in the morning if I strain it carefully.  It's as though we're in the midst of a massive California brushfire in our tiny log cabin and I am outside calmly throwing glasses of water at the wall of flame.  These are my dreams.

In the world outside her disease, there is this metaphorical political American cancer.  Forget the influenza epidemic.  It's as though people in this country went to the polls and decided-- well, here we have the common cold… and here we have-- well, whooping cough or something.. .and then here we have-- yes, cancer.  Let's try cancer for a change.  It's really only a diagnosis… which my friend had at the beginning, when her laugh was still boisterous and theatrical and her red hair bounced around when she bartended.  It was like a script… a drama?  I'm not sure how she processed it, but she did omit some of the difficult choices that were recommended because reality is a strange scenario for most of us, and despite the nomenclature, nothing is real for most of us until it is on-fire/in-your-face.

When you are suffering and ill and even your dreams are blurred with medications and pain, the world is difficult to understand.  You become narcissistic not-by-choice and unable to think.  You occasionally lash out in bitterness and agony and it's difficult for those of us in the room, when the elephants begin to rage and stomp.  My friend is a staunch Democrat, as are most of the more artistic and talented people I know.   In her moments of clarity, she rants about the current President and administration.  Life in America is less appealing, we agree.  Despite all the negatives, despite the unbearable worsening existence to which she is sentenced, day after day, she refuses hospice care; she has an incorrigible belief that somewhere, somehow, there is going to be a way out.  Someone is going to find the key to this door of the house of terminal hideous illness.  It is a kind of belief and if Jesus were here, he would wash her feet.

I have just published a new book of poetry.  My friend has no interest in this, finds my lyrics depressing and would rather watch TV or talk.  The book is under an indie umbrella and we all have to foot the bill for these projects.  I am forced to do an amount of promotion to pay the debt.  My friends know that I live far below the radar of any economic level.  I don't know what a vacation is.  I have no practical containers for the chicken soup because I don't get take-out, ever, on my food budget of $20 a week total.  On the way out, I ran into a neighbor who looks quite a bit like Trump, and surely voted Republican.  He has the mannerisms of a self-made non-charismatic man whose money causes people to treat him with deference.  So, he says to me, I hear you have a new book…. should I buy one?  I shrug.  I happen to be carrying a few to the Post Office. He puts his hand out… opens his wallet as though he is tipping me.  I have a $50, he says, is that okay?  It's $20, I answer, without emotion, looking down so I won't see his billfold even by accident-- with the black and platinum cards and the fat wad of green.   I don't have any small bills, he announces… So why don't I slip it under your door later?  I shrug again… as he rolls..ROLLS my precious book like a newspaper, like he is going to beat a dog with it… my precious lovely book with the expensive matte-coated cover which cost me close to $20, each one… I resist the urge to cringe, and mumble the Post Office, time, deadlines, whatever...

So I get home…is there a bill under my door?  Somehow the guy seems to recall (he did smell a bit like he'd had a cocktail or two) that he'd given me a $50…. So there is a note…no envelope.. a note… which  says.. 'Hey I read the first poem-- about the Chevrolet-- good stuff… Keep the change.'  Trumped I am.

Skin Deep

When I was young, I had perfect skin.  It meant nothing to me-- in fact, it had absolutely no currency in my life, was sort of an albatross that made it nearly impossible for me to become a punk-rocker outcast-type.  My older sister had acne.  She also had a slew of boyfriends and hiked her skirt way up when we left the house for school.  I wanted her skin.   She hated me for mine, and I would have traded in a second.  Acne would make me look older-- as would braces on my teeth, I thought.  People commented on my skin-- aunts and cousins--- the doctor.  When I went to buy make-up, even as a woman, the cosmetics salespeople would remark-- why do you need make-up?  You have perfect skin.  Lloyd Cole had a song about this.  I did nothing to deserve it-- ate plenty of chocolate and fries and smoked cigarettes-- but it remained, as it was.  Beauty's only skin deep, my mother used to say, and despite my flawless facial surface, I still believed my sister was way more attractive.

In the office of my Primary Care physician, a woman sits at the front desk and does intake.  The right half of her face is horribly deformed, as though it was burned or blown off in an explosion.  She is in her late 30's and it's tough to look at her.  She has no functioning eye or mouth; the left side is marked with some kind of warty growths, but somewhat normal.  Her voice is steady and courageous and sweet; if I were blind I might imagine her as beautiful.  I commend my doctor for hiring her because she is unsettling, physically.  As for her dignity-- I cannot say enough.  She is well dressed and stylish from the neck down.  Her hair is neat and pretty; her hands are lovely and efficient.

When my son was born, he was adorable and perfect.  I couldn't stop admiring him, especially since I felt I didn't deserve to have this baby; I hadn't planned this, and my lifestyle for the first 3 months of pregnancy was a little crooked and a-maternal.  His infant skin was so tender he couldn't tolerate any animal products-- wool, fur-- anything besides soft natural cottons.  It was as though his surface was a metaphor for my heart; here I was-- a new mother-- a protector-- and suddenly I felt stripped and raw and on the verge of not just tears but utter emotional collapse at the slightest hint of tragedy or sadness.  Maybe this is what they call postpartum depression.  I was a single mother and utterly enchanted with my baby; there was absolutely no room for self-inspection or analysis.  I was too busy trying to remember all the little infant things I had never learned and too absorbed in managing his care while I worked and kept my life on the level.  But in caring for another being, I learned the depth of compassion.

As a young woman I fell in love with a black man.  Our attraction had nothing to do with color, and his strangeness had more to do with cultural rather than racial differences.  Sometimes at night, I awoke and admired the beautiful contrast of his dark, strong arm draped across my body.  His skin had a different feel and smell and taste.  In those days, some people in some locales didn't appreciate our marriage and our presence as a couple.  The differences fascinated me; in the end we separated, but we both learned things about appearance and acceptance.

My skin is no longer perfect; few things about me are pretty; we enter the autumn and winter of our lives and our human foliage begins to fall away.  Many of my women friends fight this process with injections and treatments; their medically-enhanced beauty is truly skin-deep and temporary, but it suits them, and it doesn't bother me.  Nor does the economic ability to do such things.  Money, I have discovered, is a little skin-deep as well.  It is temporary and may create a sense of security, but people still get ill and have accidents and mishaps, and while they may be comfortable and well cared-for, their lives don't seem to be more valuable.  They do give more to charity-- as do people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, etc… but this kind of billionaire philanthropy seems a bit skin-deep and cavalier-- it is acknowledged and rewarded, but do they suffer or sacrifice to do this?  They all seem to drive expensive cars, live in enormous houses, collect things and wear rolexes.  They do little more than balance their tax burden, while being applauded for stunning generosity.

As for my friend who is ravaged by cancer, she grows thinner every week.  Her skin is translucent and stretched over the contours of her face in a way that is startling. She resembles an anorexic; her once long, graceful limbs are spindly and twiggy;  the bones of her knees are knobby and prominent beneath her loose pants.  I feel I can see through her skin into her soul; her veins are greenish and sickly.  She is skeletal and taut-- both old and young, like an underdeveloped fetus.  She walks with bitter resignation, daring anyone to comment.  I told her she looked pretty the other day; she had on a purple knit cap and her features were feverish and her skin was flushed from the cold.  She was furious and screamed at me… this is not a word that applies to her physical or mental state, she warned me.  Do not use this language in my presence.   I wept-- I am not tough-- I am permeable and fragile.  I wear my heart everywhere; without tattoos, my skin betrays me, my tears are ready and I am unarmed.  I will not tell her again that she has acquired this sort of porcelain-doll facade-- and while her eyes have lost their spark and are glazed and empty from pain and the drugs, there is a kind of quiet holy dignity in her long-suffering expression-- and after all the treatments, the side-effects and the rashes, ironically-- she has perfect skin.

Veterans Are Us

The day after.  Election night was a bad dream, I prayed.  But it wasn't.  Wednesday was a wash-out; I barely left the house, was tired of answering calls, got no comfort in commiserating or listening to pundits on television.  Exit polls are disturbing; our own exit from this country is maybe the only relief.  By Thursday I had to re-enter the world.  The weather was near-perfect, and I tried hard to manage my affairs, to face again the senseless near-death agony of my friend who is using all her strength to tolerate my pathetic words of sympathy and hope.  She did manage to quip that dying in a Republican regime doesn't seem quite so bad.  For some, like the woman who suicided on 69th street last month,  it will be a choice; for others, it will be a cruel reality.  For my friend, I am praying there will be some kindness in dying-- that it will feel as though some blanketing arms are reaching out to take her to a place where good mothers exist,  'they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem'.

The Sisters of Mercy is the first song I truly fell in love with.  I lay on my floor and listened-- over and over-- first to the Judy Collins record my Mom had bought.  With the sunshine and yellow flowers on the cover, these songs gave me hope that somewhere there were things worth discovering that were not just in books and in museums.  Sisters of Mercy was a musical church for me.  More than the folk songs I'd loved-- and the rock and roll-- it was a hymn I could carry inside me and recite.  The lyrics were not just magical but holy.  I researched the writer, Leonard Cohen, rode my bike to the record store and found his album.  His voice was strange, but all poets on recordings had sounded strange to me-- the audio Dylan Thomas had been a shock.   These songs were an alternate world of sad comfort.  I could read their address by the moon.  My Bob Dylan was a troubadour, but this man was my patron saint.  I forgave him everything and drank daily at his well in the solitude of my young teenage room.

The fact of Leonard Cohen has not always lived up to the myth of the music.  He was flawed and womanizing; insecure and egotistical at once.  His search for spiritual truth seemed pretentious in a way; his sadness is epic, but who among us is able to tame these demons?  I only know these songs became part of my canon.  His poems and novels disappointed me, but the songs-- especially these early ones-- allowed me to become who I am with a little more confidence.

I've been reading a compilation of interviews with Roberto Bolaño… a few essays and remembrances interspersed ...He, too, is among the choir of voices who have sweetened my life.  The martyrs of art and poetry who have given everything to take us on a journey of 'core', who were not afraid to open curtains and break windows.  They are not all for the weak of heart-- or maybe they are.  Artistic pioneers are brave people.  They explore psychological caves and alienate others.  They sacrifice much to become who they are.  In our culture today, these people have groupies-- lovers, fans, followers.  Does this matter?  I suppose so.  Bob Dylan is about to receive the Nobel Prize-- not that he doesn't deserve accolades, but this one seems misplaced. Then again there is Leonard.  Comparing him to Irving Berlin, as Dylan did in that prescient article in The New Yorker last month, seems a little too 'surface' for my Sisters of Mercy.  Leonard takes us into our own inner church, provides the personal hymns that play alongside our sorrows and joys.  He is the bed on which we lie and know there are deeper things still, and that our tiny human tragedies can be woven into some beautiful fabric of meaning, if only we were up to the task.

I miss Bowie; I miss Prince; I miss Roberto Bolaño and Lorca and I thank God for their brand of bravery on this Veteran's Day where I salute my Dad who was a true wounded hero of the 101st Airborne (the military alma-mater of Hendrix, I informed him once, which provoked a scowl) and was duly decorated and honored.  He, too, was a poet, although his modest lyrics were recorded only in tattered war-letters to my Mom.  He ridiculed my music and my heroes-- Leonard Cohen was an anomaly for him-- and yet I maybe inherited some passion he possessed.  My record albums helped me cope with my teenage years.  Music was listening to me, even if I could never reach my Dad.

So, blinded as we were by the hideous 'sunrise' of day 2 and 3 of the Trump victory-world, that sun was reverse-mercifully eclipsed by the passing of Leonard Cohen.  Yes, mercifully he left the world before our elections; from the David Remnick interview,  I suspect he was not thinking too much of American politics, dwelling perhaps on the spiritual, trying in his way to promote or accept his new album-- to share this with his son, to try to allow himself pride in a project that was thankfully completed, like Bowie's, before his death, and which will allow us-- like Bowie's-- to glimpse a little of his transition, his process-- to share the end with a great man.  We even were privileged to read his final email to the immortalized Marianne who pre-deceased Leonard, but not by much-- a kind of closing of some circle, in a way.  He seemed resigned and peaceful; after all, he accomplished so much.  A prize seems somehow cheap and silly for this man.

My friend is nominally comforted by the number of lovely souls who have crossed over this year-- who have paved the road to the next world with music and understanding and have had to leave this one in which they thrived.  They leave us  mourning and devastated-- not wanting to go on without these people who for some of us seem more a family than our own.  Not so with my friend; she has no visitors aside from me and a few paid medicaid nurses and aides who are sent to ensure that the apparatuses and tubes do not malfunction, to investigate the next hideous indignity of this process of agonized dying which merits no medals or awards.  She rarely has the energy to even listen to music; her enthusiastic support for her candidate was limited and her dismay is palpable.  And she managed, heroically, to vote.

This morning I awoke after only a few cheap hours of sleep-- with that heaviness of mourning.  I experienced this recently with my father's passing, and with the death of David Bowie which came at such a cold and light-deprived time of year.  The leaves have just turned; they burn with fiery radiance in the sunlight around the reservoir in Central Park.  In a few days they will be gone.  Soon I Will Be Gone, says my favorite Free song-- over and over.

Some of us cry for ourselves, for our  lost and missing years when we were beautiful and well loved.  Most of us, unfortunately, face older years with challenges and heartbreak.  Life is fraught with loss and pain; even joy, in these years, has a shadow and is lovely with a kind of regret.  We older people feel a bit exiled; we are emigres of our own youth, of maybe the core of our lives; we are missing so much and so many at this moment, and each day brings the end nearer.  The four years of this regime are precious years for Baby Boomers; how much productive life will we have left?  Must we drag around the weight of this national shame, this arrow in the heart of our young passion and the liberalism we thought we invented in the 1960's?

Yesterday I stopped into several churches.  Some were closed;  one West Indian church was not just open, but had set out bottles of seltzer for the thirsty-- crayons and paper for children.  I was alone in a pew, listening to someone clumsily practicing Bach on the pipe organ as the sun streamed through the stained glass.  It was warm and homey.  Some of their parishioners are bound to be illegal immigrants and the idea that a congregation who welcomed me in their absence would be threatened-- well, this, too, was another stab.

I cannot bear to play the Sisters of Mercy today.  There is not a line in that song that doesn't resonate with every small and larger tragedy I've witnessed.  Like a new lover or a prism-- it endlessly fascinates and touches me everywhere.  It's all too raw, too sad.  Reciting it to my heart reminds me that sorrows are relentless-- the machine of life moves on, planets turn, storms happen, death is inevitable for the good as well as the ugly; beauty is transitory, but music is a path-- from God to man and back again, from life to death-- from lover to lover, from mouth to heart-- it fills the Cathedral of our loneliness if we will only enter and listen.  It is and always was waiting for you when you thought that you just can't go on.  Let us listen and learn -- really listen, and open our hearts.  Healing is impossible-- we are truly the walking wounded, but maybe that is okay.  The disappointed and the ones left behind… especially for us, and those who've been traveling so long.