Light Sings of Wear

The cost of shipping has increased.  On a personal level, the cost of mailing has become a burden.  The art of letter-writing has certainly fallen into a sort of category of eccentricities.  I have tried hand-deliveries where I can; to include a tiny memento or scrap in an envelope raises the financial bar and punishes me with a kind of fine.  Postal rules are confusing and discriminatory-- they favor neatness and conformity; I am interrogated at the counter with queries which, if you are a poet or  outside-thinker, scrape at your deeper conscience.  We are condemned to technology.

Tomorrow would have been my mother's birthday.  I know that I loved her, despite her flaws and bigotries, her failure to understand things.  She fell somehow outside technology; even to see her driving a car seemed unnatural.  I grew up loving the number 27; it was sacred and while the presence of my father on weekends could ruin my day, I only knew I could not live without my mother.  The excitement of Halloween always included plans to surprise her.  One thing I am grateful for: she appreciated my handmade gifts and actually wore some of them.  My father seemed uncomfortable even opening a box from me.

Adult Halloween is another anomaly.  Of course, when your children are young, you fuss and carve, you bake and pile, hold little hands on the sidewalk or stand guard at your front door, cooing over neighbors and schoolkids in disguise. If you are a musician, you put on a mask and witch's hat-- a cape and fangs--- then you watch other adults in fantasy-outfits winding up on a dance floor, becoming characters for a night.

Thirty years ago, I went into early labor.  I prayed I would not give birth on Halloween, knowing how children feel gypped being born on a holiday.  I lay on a hospital gurney, watching the heartbeat of my son who had clearly outgrown his womb-home; I had ghoulish bruises on my ribs from the size of that baby.  Happily, they sent me back home where I waited until Election Day... but coming back that night from the old Lenox Hill Hospital, I felt 'costumed' as a mother-- more prepared to remove than embrace it.

In the early difficult months of single motherhood, there were several deaths in my circle.  Having no budget for caretakers, my baby sat or slept through several funerals.  He even had a little outfit-- people gift you these things when they are born-- which was dark and serious.  It was sitting at the back of St. Vincent's, reciting the Lord's Prayer, that I began to feel the enormous comfort of holding an infant-- the bond, I suppose, that forms despite all of your confusion, your lack of preparation and the awkward intrusion of 'schedule' on a musician's life.  It was there-- listening to the sounds of grief, sensing the permanence of loss, that I lost my disguise and became a mother.

My son will soon turn 30; my mother would have been 95 tomorrow.  95--  one of those numbers she loved to see on my school papers; I often brought her that pleasure, as a good student, but it only created the sort of expectation that parents in those days held like a gun to our heads-- the one gun I did not fear.  I have a new book now; the last one was published just in time to place it in her long-fingered hands and see maybe a small glint of recognition at the cover photo.  Maybe not.  We hold these personal myths closer as our future grows shorter.  No one is there to 'grade' our adult work... even criticism has become something one buys into; marketing has replaced the art of reviewing and prioritizing.

Last night I read some Kafka.  The myth of the tormented genius sometimes exceeds the work.  I often think Franz in this culture might have been a gaming addict.... but surely the technology would have distracted and diluted the passion to create-- allowed people, as it does, the illusion of connection in the reality of isolation.   Here I sit at a keyboard in the dark, backlit by the strange blue light my mother (and Kafka) never knew-- the ease of publishing, of sharing, provide a certain comfort.  Still my pile of library books on the old farm-table, candlesticks and wood, lined pads and ink-- an uncarved pumpkin of possibility in my pre-Halloween solitude, with the city in my window like the massive bag of tricks it is-- the pack of dogs-- the never-ending parade.

January is the Cruellest Month

Another bloody year. Literally so, in some countries. Here, besides a few celebratory murders, not much violence marked the transition. Now we are bleeding into day 4, and the same pre-new-year depressed friends are equally post-depressed on my answering-machine.

My son is applying to college which seems to me some kind of virtual occupation. Forms filled out online, the importance suddenly of being earnest on the internet where most teenage profiles are somewhere between fantasy, irony and blatant lies. We read in US news and World Report that due to the herd-nature of the Baby Boomers, there is the largest pool of college applications for fall, 2008. What was going on in 1990 besides Kurt Cobain emerging that prompted these people to behave like adults and reproduce?
I can’t remember. I’m losing pre-natal recall.

No wonder my friends are depressed. If they’re not facing massive college bills, they forgot to have children and the mirror reminds them that at this age their own grandparents were pulling up stakes. Some of them spent long teenage and adult hours learning to play guitar…practicing, playing in thousands of bands, listening to records, studying. Trying to make it, sometimes making it; going to rehab, moving in and out of relationships; failing to succeed, succeeding at failure. Failing at failure. I like that one.

We had no heat last night and for some reason I had the illusion that the TV would provide some kind of warmth. I sat with a blanket too cold to look for the remote and saw some late-night rerun where the host was playing Guitar Hero. The game. Which is realer than real, and maybe gives the gamer the same rush some rockstar gets when he pulls off a massive hot solo onstage. I am afraid to test this out. In fact, for a parent with apparent manual dexterity, I never mastered any version of Nintendo or Playstation. I retired at Space Invaders.

But it makes you think. Not just Guitar Hero…there is the Band of Brothers game now. My old Dad had to drop out of a plane with a parachute, get blasted by shrapnel and gunfire, suffer permanent hip-damage and post-traumatic stress. Now there is the virtual version. I wonder if it pisses him off. I don’t ask, because anything I ask pisses him off. We had it too easy, we post-war children who went to college. We were allowed to use our brains. Some of us write books, wrote for television. I can’t imagine writing lines for a talk-show host who is playing a virtual game on television. I can’t imagine who invents the Band of Brothers game when there are actual veterans still living. But there are terrorist games that allow you to virtually experience driving a plane into one of two populated glass-walled towers.

As my son presses ‘Submit’ for one of the colleges of his choice, I wonder how they are processing his virtual application for a future. He found these colleges on an online list. His girlfriend didn’t even know Indiana was a state, even though there is a minted quarter to prove it. I remember my college choice was based on some blonde boy who fed me peyote in Mexico. I wanted to go where he was.

At this point, war to my son is a movie, music is a computer game, college is the recipient of an online form. Tonight he watched the Knicks rather than the Iowa caucus results. At his age I was working for my candidate, despite the fact that I couldn’t vote for 3 more years. College was the Emerald City, life was Oz.

My son wants to make money. Cramer-money. College is a game with real money as reward. At least I think so. The internet is free, but these applications are pricey. Up to $85 to press ‘Send’. No pictures. This is not only not required but not permissible. Bad people misuse things like this on the internet. Bad people misuse things that are real; they misuse people that dream. This depresses my depressed friends. Not so my son. He watches films like ‘Hostel 2’ without flinching.

I watched Barak Obama speaking in Iowa. My son sent a virtual application to that state. For a minute, I felt as though I was in a time warp, as though the things that came out of this politician’s mouth were not rhetoric but real. As my son dried himself off by the TV, he asked me ’He’s good, isn’t he?’ I think so, I answered. But then I realized he thought this was maybe a film, that Obama was an actor…after all, some of the candidates are actors….some of them were our mayor, who is also a character in the 9/11 simulated virtual game. It is hard to tell the game from life. It’s hard to distinguish gospel from bullshit on the internet; it’s all in hypertext. How these colleges can designate their future class from the virtual pool is beyond my grasp. And how these kids with the right to vote are processing the choice of candidates is also a mystery ..Is it another online game? More SAT-worthy multiple choice? At least they must go to the polls. Or not.

For Christmas this year a friend put our old family-movie footage onto dvd. It was a great gift. ‘Nothing is reel’, the card said. Somewhere, I was. As my son will be or will not be, in Indiana or Iowa or Arizona. As our next president will have been one of these candidates. Or not. I personally believe in Iowa.