Driving Mr. Madden

Throughout my life, my father was something of a mystery to me.  He had very rare moments of joy or lightness, but mostly he brooded-- he paced, he fretted, he lay awake at night.  Of course in the 21st century one would have recognized the classic symptoms of post-war PTSD, but in the 1950's, retired soldiers were expected to re-acclimate to civilian life-- to have families and jobs and be 'normal'.

Whether or not he was CIA, as some of my curious boyfriends were convinced, he'd had a challenging military enlistment punctuated by wounds and acts of great heroism. As many soldiers will attest, the accolades and medals do little to assuage the deep psychological trauma that went mostly unaddressed in those 'happy' days of the 1950's.  Many self-medicated with alcohol or prescriptions, but they were mostly on their own.

At some point in my adulthood, my mother tried to soften the emotional walls I'd created to shield myself from the effects of his moods and disapproval. I was referred to as 'the one who works in bars' with a kind of built-in question as though not even that description was apt. Anyway, during one of his more difficult depressive episodes, she related a story to open my heart  a little. As his enabler and life partner, it was rare that she divulged anything, especially to a daughter whose natural inclinations toward the arts and free speech made her suspect and outside the realm of trust.

During his European service, my father as Captain of the 101st Airborne had a driver. Besides his military field heroics he also participated in some dangerous undercover intelligence missions.  His driver was a black man from Kentucky. They became close. The driver made him promise if he was ever killed in action, my father would go to his family in person and deliver the news.  He did not want his poor mother who could not even read to have one of those terrible telegrams she feared.  So they made a pact.  One day during a risky maneuver, they were attacked and a grenade blew up the jeep.  My father was wounded but not critically; his driver, attempting to shield my father, took the brunt and was instantly killed.

After 9/11 my father was given a hero's license plate which allowed him to park anywhere in the city.  For some reason he seemed a little lightened by this recognition.  While he still experienced periodic deep depressive episodes, he began to attend weekly Old Guard meetings. Being too macho to submit to psychiatric treatment, these meetings were therapeutic.  I guess he was able to pull this story from his memory...  one of the terrible guilts from which he suffered. Most of them were unavoidable-- the consequences of following military orders.  But this was a personal debt he'd left unpaid and it ate at him, decades later.

Why he never attempted to contact the family is a complicated mystery, like most of my father's narrative. For me who goes to great lengths to fulfill even the silliest of promises, this is baffling. But recently it occurred to me that among the landmarks of my life that most irked my father, I married a black man. Perhaps he saw this as a painful reminder and criticism of his personal failure. I don't know; he so rarely gave me a kind look or an embrace; I both feared and hated him.

Last week I read the Count of Monte Cristo... a classic I had written off long ago as a 'boys' book.  It was in my son's teenage library, untouched. And it was fantastically entertaining. Adventure, intrigue, conspiracy, murder, romance... everything one would want.  But most of all it was a story of not just revenge but the resolution of deep irreparable damage from the miscarriage of justice, the way one envious man can turn against another. The unlikely resolution of one man's trauma results in further damage. 

Today as a kind of personal dare I have begun the daunting Divine Comedy. Dante, like Dantès in the Dumas, had been wrongly accused, and the writing of this was a kind of retribution. Whatever the motive, I surely read it in school-- the Longfellow translation which is maybe not the best but I learned today how HWL faced this project just after his beloved wife was killed in a house fire. He, too, was wounded in the inferno. A double dare.  

As we age, the issues of guilt and anxiety weigh on us.  We look back and try to re-interpret our past as though there is a moral there. Sometimes we find understanding-- forgiveness. I tried hard to forgive my father, and have done so, to the extent that I have forgiven myself where he has not. We don't have an enlightened guide like Virgil to guide us through the layers of narrative, to shed light on the good and evil of our present which seems, like worlds past, to have confused the system of punishment and reward.  The life which seemed so easy and simple in the 1950's has become cluttered and confused. One wants to write a guidebook to take us through these times where there are literally millions of digital answers to whatever question we pose. A definitive contemporary Divine Comedy.

In the end, we are each of us responsible for not just ourself, but someone else-- maybe one other person-- fulfilling the promise we made, or explaining, or listening to the man on the bus who looks ill... or the lady on the park bench who stares, day after day, who leaves her lunch untouched on the seat. I am sure that my father, to someone else, was a hero-- was perhaps kind, and understanding. And I hope somehow that driver's mother-- now long dead, certainly, was able to find peace.  After all-- no one's presence could really have relieved the pain of losing her son.  Maybe my father knew that. He was a believer, I think. Maybe at the end, he finally forgave himself.

Bisesquicentennial Harmonies

I'm reading another massive Hungarian novel.  Not sure if it's the Satantango ripple effect or just coincidence, but these novels have engaged me in 2026.  It occurred tonight that I once picked Hungary for a European country report in primary school-- those days when an encyclopedia column and a globe was all that was required. I remember making a topographical map out of colored clays on a piece of plywood... I loved doing these things... but aside from the Magyars and Saint Stephen I recalled little.  My current book-- Celestial Harmonies-- is a sort of tour de force of legend, history, personal recollections and downright lies and fabrications. It's wildly baroque and epic.

Surely these modern authors would be thrilled by their recent election; the literature is suffused with Communist resentment and Nazi guilt. For some reason the city of Budapest itself fascinates me-- the two sides, like yin and yang, separated by water, joined by a bridge. My novel is divided into two parts which fact seems to echo this geography like a metaphor; meanwhile I have much trouble with the names and have no clue of pronunciation.  

In personal experience I have known three Hungarian men-- all of whom were named Imre. One of these was my 'date' for the Bicentennial celebrations in the summer of 1976.  I'd just graduated from college and Imre was a political science PhD candidate.  He had a kind of Brian Jones haircut and wore khaki suits with blue shirts that matched his eyes.  I guess he was cute but I only remember seeing the Tall Ships downtown, and walking from the seaport all the way uptown to Yorkville where he ordered some Hungarian traditional dinner in his native language.

Here I am with this memory which surfaced fifty years later in another American celebratory milestone year in which I curiously find myself steeped in Hungarian lore. There's a tiny irony.  And the fact that this is a year of patriotic guilt as opposed to celebration... American politics and the way our national spirit has been distorted into a Munchian monster resembling Shame more than Pride.  

For those of us who are born and raised with cumulative guilt, this keeps us awake.  Guilt, as they say, is a Motherfucker. I lie awake some nights trying to invent metaphors for the couple-- like shame is the distorted haunting shadow of guilt... the hangover that doesn't clear.  I have friends-- recovered alcoholics and more, who seem married to shame. And yet... there are people like our president who don't seem to understand the meaning of either concept. They golf away their cares while we empaths toss and turn, worry about immigrants and displaced Palestinian children-- wounded Iranian protestors and the starving babies of Sudan. 

King Charles, for one, never looks happy. His expression is appropriately pained and compassionate most of the time-- his known pleasure was rock music-- Status Quo and loud bands that drowned out his sorrows and worries... the guilt that is implicit in anyone so privileged by birth. There is nobility in being a sad king. He has his reasons, too.

The stepsister of guilt and shame is blame.  We empaths tend to point fingers at ourselves... if only I hadn't left my college boyfriend he might not have died... if I'd skipped that Theoretical Shes gig at CBGB's my daughter might have been born healthy. How far can I go? Parents who have lost children in mass shootings and other tragedies manage to find a way to place blame... on the shooter's parents, or the gun companies... on the Camp Mystic administrators.  Lawyers encourage this thinking. It's profitable. Does this make anything better?  Yes for justice, no for misplaced cause and effect.

The shocking killing and suicide by Justin Fairfax last week shook us all. How does one pay for mistakes and crippling guilt or shame or self-hatred?  It's a hideous chain of emotional disturbance and a residual curse for his children. Yesterday's mass shooting by a father in Louisiana is nearly impossible to process. How does one begin with love and arrive at these hideous endpoints? How to minimize damage in these cases? What makes some of us fret and suffer over things we cannot control? I read somewhere that without man, God would be horribly bored.  And without God man would be innocent. Is it fear of judgement that makes us behave or not?  What is compassion and how can one keep it reasonably humanitarian versus uselessly dramatic?

As someone who feels small things disproportionately, I have had to temper my instincts with a kind of rationale-- hiding parental worry and panic, blinking back tears on the subway and streets for struggling unfortunates. Does empathy help? If one is a physical therapist-- yes, or as a musician, executing an ensemble vision...  But not always.  We get in our own way, we suffer and damage ourselves and others. I recognize and adore my friends who love too much, too easily, who fall on their proverbial face time and again and end up as victims... emptying pockets for undeserving predators we don't always recognize. Manipulative panhandlers park themselves outside posh restaurants to try to extort these feelings. It's painful but one must draw a boundary.

Hungary is among the landlocked countries... I think of these as having little relief, somehow... nowhere to breathe. The 2026 celebratory year creates a kind of memory arc for those of us who recall 1976.  I wonder what happened to my friend Imre who walked the city with me in his suit-- whether he returned to Budapest and worked for change in a new generation which could perhaps forget their former German alliance. Here... what a different post-Watergate America we walked-- hopeful enough to elect Jimmy Carter who stood for decency and humanity.  I was old enough to have my young guilt and shames but Vietnam had finished... the guilty president resigned. I had none of the dreadful national guilt and shame I feel now especially when I leave the country. Lost integrity, trust... and where is the blame now? Not a question of nostalgia, but future.  It took the Hungarians a long time to effect change, but they managed. On the 4th of July, I imagine all those who voted for the current president standing up and raising their guilty hand in admission.  Then I will celebrate.

11 A

Since the weekend I've been carrying dread like an unborn child. Literally... the quasi-physical heaviness of a pregnancy, without the joy, without the future. The relentless bad news, the threats to human freedoms and everyday security. It's overwhelming.

I watched a kind of forum on human empathy-- and identified as one of those people who prioritizes others-- known popularly as a 'people pleaser' which is not really a positive thing.  We do no good either for ourselves or others, yet it's built-in-- layered-- a little like a second heart which doesn't serve or beat, but simply aches.  There is no surgery for this; I suppose a high dosage of meds would temper it, but my friends know overstrict emotional self-parenting makes me reluctant to even use aspirin.  

My Irish nanny told me at the age of four not to tell my parents but I was a natural-born Catholic.  I asked her all kinds of questions about things, and I was perpetually preoccupied with the reviving of dead insects, plants, birds... tearing up in Church at the hymns and prayers, obsessed with but unable to fully fathom the Jesus story.  I watched magicians pull rabbits and living things from boxes... the personal metaphor of my personal hat somehow implies this secret belief that something mystical is hidden there-- that life is not all objective-- music, most of all, maybe. 

So while we cannot all be heroes, we can perhaps be conjurors... we can be fixers or healers.  Watching a concert at the Central Park bandshell Tuesday evening I realized how completely altered I was with each piece-- as though I physically melted into the cosmic architecture... I could almost sense the composer and his vision.  To be a musician is such a blessed thing... how I miss the gigs of old. Even those sweaty crowded dive bars-- to be part of the crowd-shaping thing... it was a blessing. 

And the actual heroes... well, they are passing with acceleration. Rick Derringer... we all disagreed with his politics in the end, but I had ties to him through various people I worked with.  One night he came into one of those east village bars in the days when cabaret laws enforced a three-people-only-rule onstage.  We were  a well-working trio... Rick, to participate, sat on a barstool across from the bandstand, plugged in and played like a phantom genius inhabiting our amplifiers.  I tried to remember that, and to honor his passing.

There are times when politics must take a back seat.  The irony of that plane crash yesterday-- in a second we recognize tragedy... the enormity and horror of a scene like this... the human grief... the families... and yet daily we hear news of missiles and war, and equally devastating destruction-- death and hideous injuries... and we digest this. What is wrong with us?  How have we grown immune to the architecture of suffering on a large scale?  Because it doesn't affect our neighborhood?  

I read and I read.  I watch way too much television.  I have friends who tell me they don't watch news... it's too terrible.  I cannot help feeling this responsibility-- just to know, and yet I cannot help. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading books... they are both comforting and alarming... the past has taught this generation little; we seem to be repeating the same mistakes in different clothing. There is no DNA to identify a situation, but the parallels are disturbing.  The suppression of freedom-- the support of freedom to be racist and uncompassionate... what is our human responsibility? If a nation decides to attack another, it's a hideous barbaric choice. But still there are good people on both sides; and one cannot condone anti-semitism because the actions of Israel are aggressive and inhumane.  No religions teach this kind of thing. 

People like me, my psychiatrist friend tells me, get cancer.  They suffer and cannot exorcize what compels them to live inside this chronic empathic cloud. If it's not one thing, it's another.  I worry.  My son is my absolute source of light.  He, fortunately, has not inherited my emotional impairment.  He is smart and forward-thinking and extremely functional. Hats off to him, truly.

Yesterday I tried a local pharmacy-- sick of the lines and the monopoly of these huge drugstore chains and the whole profitable medical industry. It is right by a local mosque; the owner is Muslim and so kind.  When he walked from behind the counter, I saw he was a huge man, with a terrible disability... unidentifiable. I immediately invented this narrative that he'd been somehow beaten and tortured in a torn country and survived with a twisted architecture.  Painful to see him walk... and yet he was happy and smiling and grateful for my tiny business.  When I got home I realized my prescription was nearly at expiration.  I will not complain. I know this is wrong-- I'll simply wait and get a refill eventually. This is medicine; this is a business... and yet for me it is not.  I have adopted the pharmacist into my massive family of those for whom I worry.  

11A.  I hate flying... the slightest turbulence gives me terrible anxiety.  In 1988 I took Pan Am flight 103 the night before that horrific crash; I felt like a survivor in a way.  But I cannot imagine processing the miracle of walking away from a wreck like yesterday's. One man.  Defying a lethal diagnosis... dodging an executioner's bullets.  It's unfathomable... the burden of being that person, if you're someone like me-- how to process, how to return a massive 'favor'... the one home that survived the fires in a neighborhood destroyed... the one standing tree after a tornado. Nothing compares.  Inexplicable. 

Many of my friends have no religious beliefs.  They take a scientific perspective on death as a full biological stop. How does one explain the rapture of music?  I don't know. The thousands of movies that interpret and explore an afterlife-- angels and heaven and ghostly hauntings.  Like a hunting dog, I have often picked up the scent of previous lives, the déjà-vu.  I wonder if the passenger in 11A sensed these things.. how his life will change.  Already real estate brokers are asking a premium for 11A apartments.  People are booking the seat first... they could charge a premium.  

I'm hoping somehow to unburden myself of this weight.  Not hopeful because the news is cumulative;  problems outweigh solutions. Sicknesses far outnumber cures... and will continue. Death will relentlessly equate births... one cannot exist without the other, really... sort of a paradox.  We can only hope that each of us provides a little relief to someone-- sharing a sandwich, proverbially. It's contagious, kindness... really the only thing we can control-- our personal space, the way we manage it. A different kind of pandemic... maybe it's my ingrained vague version of Catholic belief... and the importance of mercy-- to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc.  And maybe the victims of the plane crash were taken to heaven... but 11A was given a mission.  We are all, those here reading-- given a daily second chance.  Trying to decipher mine, today. 

Deadly Shames

When I was a teenager and my father was going through one of his PTSD post-war 'episodes', I hid in the upstairs hallway and eavesdropped on his conversations with my mother.  Some things were inaudible, but after begging my mother to unravel the root of the latest patriarchal angst, she related a story as best she could.  It seems when he was Captain of the 101st Airborne, he had a driver who happened to be a black man.  They were close; my father was anything but a bigot, although he had his rules and boundaries. Anyway, on an especially perilous assignment, the driver asked him to promise that if he were ever mortally wounded, my father would go to see his family, in the midwest US, and explain in person what had happened.  He wrote down all the particulars, and my father swore. 

As it happened, a grenade hit their jeep; my father was wounded but his driver was killed.  Certainly the family got the mandatory telegram and official condolence. My father recovered from the injuries, returned to active duty until August, 1945.  He'd meant to keep his promise but never did.  Before the end of his life, he apparently confessed this to a group of Old Guard veterans who finally, at 80-something, were facing their war-demons with the help of a professional psychiatrist, and maybe got some relief.  He would not have shared this with me.

Years before, when my mother told her version of the story, she hoped I'd show some compassion for my father who was tough and harsh and suffering from not just combat but private guilts.  It helped for minutes; but it occurred to me as well that it was not too late. 

I've struggled in relationships with difficult men and alcoholics, like my father.  The common denominator is not just the baggage of guilt, but the cult of shame.  Shame allows one to continue to avoid difficult truths, and paves a future path that carries the limp of the past.

At the gallery where I work Saturdays, there's a fantastic Robert Gober show that deals with so many historic, emotional and ethical issues.  One of the pieces he chose is an unpretentious ceramic sculpture by Mary Carlson.  It is a tiny, fragile bust of a woman with long hair, covering her face with her hands.  The artist credits Masaccio for inspiration.  The genius of Gober's curation is that among the layers on layers of interrelated narrative, individual pieces resonate personally for the viewer; it's nearly impossible not to be moved by some object or juxtaposition. There is something for everyone, and for me it is this tiny sculpture.  

I remember well in college visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence where I had ample time to study the Masaccio Expulsion of Adam and Eve.  Unlike this tiny ceramic, the figures are monumental and heavy. When I saw them, in the 1970's, they still had the fig leaves which were painted in by order, and removed only in the 1980's after restoration.  But the howling face of Eve, and that of Adam, covered by his hands, are the epitome of human shame.  

Certainly Freudian and other psychologists and sociologists have dissected the subject.  Gober, whose work is impressed with the tragedy and aftermath of the AIDS crisis in New York, is well aware. Studying religious art, I realized that sin is one thing, but shame is the emotional scar one carries.  In the case of my father, and so many alcoholics,  this grows-- it becomes ingrained, and often they manage to transfer it to their children-- like a sort of haunting they fail to exorcise.  Shame, like disease,  is contagious.

Forgiveness is a component of the antidote-- forgiving oneself as well as somehow atoning for whatever crime or oversight tripped us up in the first place.  Most often, perpetrators lack shame, while innocents, overwhelmed with compassion and self-criticism, process their lives as failures, burden themselves with shame they have not earned.  I have friends-- myself included, who feel they do not deserve a happy, healthy home, or some accolade that seems to have come too easily. 

My first husband was a black man.  He was a celebrated musician and a charming person, but interracial marriages were still the exception in those days.  My father was livid.  Both parents boycotted our wedding and basically excommunicated me. The marriage was tough enough; while we're still friends, my ex recently accused me of not wanting a half-black baby.  Of course this couldn't be farther from the truth; I was young and we were both irresponsible. But I began to think about my father, and whether in his sickness he had interpreted the racial issue as a personal reminder of that failure to contact his driver's family-- a thorn which had accompanied his lifelong torment, or more likely simply the scapegoat of a horrific and lengthy war experience.  Being decorated as he was, he always maintained the true heroes had passed away and it was not appropriate to celebrate oneself.  

It's apparent to me that guilt precedes shame... but shame does not necessarily follow.  Still, among the killings, the suicides, the longings and failures, the rejections and divorces, people are suffering; they are sorry, and they regret.  And the legacy of shame distorts not just the narrative but its truth. The current violence not just in Israel but wherever it exists, will ripple down through grief, through pain and bloodshed, and through the lives of all those who perpetrate these acts, who have learned nothing from the past, from art, from the silent wounds that old soldiers hand down to families. It's never too late to repent of poor judgement, to pay for acts of violence which are in the current situation shameless.  Looking at the little ceramic sculpture today, cut off as she is and nailed to a wooden table, I see not just shame but horror.  This is a human reaction not a judgment. And a reminder that these issues, these conflicts... the lineage... goes farther back than those frescoes, farther than any of us can remember.

SMOKE

Yesterday would have been my father's 104th birthday.  He lived to nearly 97... fairly in compos mentis, surrounded by newspapers, brokerage statements, the bluish glow of Bloomberg on the television screen like a night-light... slipping in and out of consciousness toward the end, my mother in her medicated dementia watching from her recliner like a Whistler's Mother real-time tableau-- alternately panicky when he left the room, or wondering who this person on her sofa actually was-- her brother, maybe... certainly not her father who'd abandoned his family when she was very young.

My father was estranged from most of his own large family, seemed to have judged his parents as harshly as I maybe judged him.  He was never happy to see me; he couldn't pretend, and children see these things, with their heart.  My mother lit up when I came home from anywhere; even when she ignored me in my grungy jeans and motorcycle boots on Manhattan streets in the 1980's, it was a kind of wounded pride-- bourgeois disappointment.

But the month of June has always been about him-- his birthday, Father's Day since he was the true and only family patriarch... D-Day, on which he earned a slew of medals and honors.  I stopped attending family festivities at a point; I began to process his disapproval of me as unhealthy and if my absence hurt his pride in any way he would only have cursed me further.  

Having raised my son alone, we celebrated Father's and Mother's Day. Now so many of his friends have become parents, the meaning has been sort of re-branded.  This year I watched the scores of Mexican families barbecuing in the northern fields of Central Park-- joyfully kicking soccer balls around, celebrating a day off.  Most of these fathers work hard-- sometimes two jobs... the number of kitchen workers who shared the late-night uptown subway with me after gigs was impressive.  Many slept-- exhausted, grateful for the air-conditioning as I was. 

My father never seemed happy. He enjoyed certain men who visited; my parents socialized accordingly-- his tennis partners, commuting companions. Company seemed to provide relief that he didn't have to interact with his family.  He failed to appreciate the gifts we gave; even things I made for him, or a little musical we'd put on... he seemed distracted and preoccupied.  As a child, we take these things on-- we blame ourselves... we learn to judge ourselves harshly.  

I've written so many poems grappling with this... trying to excise the knot of it.  He was complicated, and I surely did not fathom his issues, his dark moods, his isolations, post-alcoholic depressions. Maddens, he once told my son, don't talk.  But I, too, am a Madden... and I do, and I will.

My best childhood friend never let go of her father issues.  To me, hers seemed comfortably flawed-- drank a little too much, crossed some lines... but he had pet-names for his sons and daughters... he was handsome and funny.  His indiscretions seemed human to me... his wife was so 'perfect'... I saw him once or twice in the city with other women... but I kept it to myself.  I saw my own father once with a beautiful young woman.  I did not tell anyone.  My sister and I invented little fictions about my mother-- that she had mysterious callers... I even brought anonymous flowers once... but she only blushed, and he barely looked up from the evening news.

We get over these things... or do we?  I learned in my life that betrayals were inevitable.  A parent failing their child is the first and worst of these.  My own son has not heard from his father for nearly 28 years?  Surely this has repercussions... and perhaps I engineered this in that perverse way psychologists point fingers at us for repeating generational pains and mistakes.  Perhaps I picked my husband because I knew somewhere there would be this 'leaving'.  It was like a prophecy-- a fulfillment.  I see so many couples where one or the other has checked out... they are there, but they are missing. Some have shifted their heart elsewhere... some have simply died, in a way... like an old plant that no longer blossoms.  

Are these punishments?  Deep-rooted desires for self-sabotage?  The meaning of family is so open to interpretation.  Gender has been opened to 'not-binary'.  But despite the extended boundaries of family-- so many of us seem stuck in this traditional and sometimes painful categorization.  There is a Father's Day and a Mother's Day.  Full stop. While I fretted over gifts and hand-made cards and cakes... I actually dreaded those Sunday mornings.  The cookout or dinner or whatever... it was stilted and non-spontaneous. There was no joy, except in the company who eventually went home and left us to our ostensibly perfect family.

Recently I randomly went on my mother's 'Legacy' web-obituary.  Mine were the only posts for some years... but suddenly there was a message from a girl who'd lived next door to us... she was older than I was.. she must be 80 now.  She recalled my mother as a sympathetic, wonderful person... her version was the young mother with perhaps a harsh tough handsome husband.  I remember this woman-- her father, too, was distant and off-putting.  She lives in Boston now... and apparently was having one of those moments-- where the past surfaces and some small component-- like seaglass on the beach-- shines through.  

We women weather life in a different way than our fathers did, all gender stereotypes aside.  Our mothers accepted things; we do divorces and separations and we move on.  Some days I look back and cherish my past love affairs as iconic and true... then sometimes I remember those brilliant guitarists and drummers and sax players... and I think... well, maybe they just wanted a gig.  

On the cusp of another July, entering a holiday weekend with mixed feelings-- Independence Day, fireworks day... I am accustomed to a little isolation-- more-so tonight with our air quality issues warning us to limit outdoor activities. I'm glad in a way to leave the month of June behind, with its paternal connotations-- baggage, people call it.  

Our Father Who Art in Heaven, I begin my prayers every night.  Not my biological father, but my Holy Father who is vague and perhaps judgmental as well. As much as it amuses me that I do this, I do it... like a kind of vow... but it comforts, it reassures, it lifts me... has been with me since I can remember-- mine... available, the words... the sentiment, a kind of vague protection? Or forgiveness.  Really the secret of life-- whether it's family or ourselves... we must let it go, but also acknowledge that (like the wildfire smoke, which is not even our doing) these things linger.  

Old Faithful

I have recently confessed to a clandestine summer television binge-- and trying hard to sit through one of the final dull episodes of The Affair last night it began to feel like just that-- an affair with these shows-- the initial attraction, late-night meetings, staying way too long, being entertained by things which are normally boring... then the long-haul 'meat' of the relationship-- the drama and path-windings-- finally to the denouement, the sense of routine and obligation, on to the cringeworthy and downright head-shaking disengagement.

What I did take from this 'relationship' was a geographical affection-- the feeling of Montauk in winter-- the coast I'd befriended as a child-- the nostalgia and sad permanence of the sea as a neighbor, a companion-- the one that outlives us all.  My 'affair' with Montauk even prompted a quick  trip to Provincetown last weekend where I also found a piece of my past remarkably untouched.

I am of an age now where any trip or visit could be the last one I will make to that place; my activity is limited and decreased by circumstances... I find my compelling obligations and callings are those of the mind.  Television has been a guilty pleasure but it was free for some months, and it was all the vacation I could really muster.  At 4 AM Sunday morning,  I came across the movie 'Unfaithful'.  Now all my girlfriends have watched this many times; most of us have gone through phases during marriages or long-term relationships where we were either tempted or forayed... but here was the very quintessence of ambivalence-- with the very beautiful Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez-- love, passion-- the choice, when we had it, and at this moment in life, the choices are much fewer.

Coming in at the halfway point of the film, I couldn't help drawing the obvious parallels with The Affair-- the infidelity, the 'price' everyone always seems to pay as though there is a judgment and a punishment (Fatal Attraction, etc...)... that violating trust is a kind of crime which not only does not pay, but brings tragedy.  Like The Affair, what drew me into this viewing was the 'place'... New York as it was in the late 90's still resembling my version of the city: the homeyness of the loft-- the piles of books... the Soho streets, the taxis... the Strand, as it was... the old stacks before it was turned into a department store.  I tearfully recalled Friday nights sitting in the dusty basement with children (their tiny category was relegated to the rear cellar, near the proofs section) looking at books opened on the floor-- the occasional mouse running through.  Also remarkable in these late-90's productions-- no cell phones... the poetry of the answering machine.  It occurred to me that in our current culture these random meetings would not even take place--- everyone is so involved in their little screen, they do not connect with human opportunities.

When I saw Unfaithful in 1999 it was in a cinema-- on a rare night when I had a babysitter, my young boyfriend and I would go out-- have a dinner downtown, see as many films as we could manage-- be just a couple.  We used to hold hands during movies... and I remember at the end of this one I whispered to him that I had something to tell him... I can't recall now what it was, but in that moment, I felt his pulse quicken-- not just quicken but speed-- and his breath came fast, as though we was in full-blown panic mode.  I realized my very young boyfriend was terrified I was going to confess some infidelity.   And it was that moment-- that heart-racing, fragile moment-- when I knew he was truly in love, that of all partners and husbands-- he would never be unfaithful.  This was the way, as we say now, he was 'wired'.

Of course this, too, is now part of my past.  I am quite beyond my passionate love affairs and much more committed to the work I need to do while I still can-- music, writing, poetry-- these are my companions.  I have never been completely faithful to any one man, and while I have been difficult and struggled with my tendency to outgrow things, I have tried to be honest and not hurt people more than they hurt themselves.  What I now realize, after failing at these relationships-- and I tried twice to change countries for lovers and husbands-- is I have been in love with New York City--  maybe less so with this current version-- but it permeates my songwriting, my poetry, my dreams and personal iconography.  My heart sings here as nowhere else and while I have a sense of past and the people who have strayed in and out of my apartments and life-- it is the place-- fickle as it is, changeable and cruel, beautiful and hideous, sublime and filthy-- to which, in my way, I have been faithful.

Amen.

Death Without Interruptions

I am trying to make friends with Death.  He has been flirting with way too many of my friends and his recent moves to consummate a few of these relationships have forced me to rethink my strategy.  While we are generally reassured that these incidents come in threes, there was yet a fourth last week.   Admittedly, my 'stepmother' the artist did take her own life.  She cheated Death, in her way, and he did not like that.  He expects to beat you at his game, not have you put yourself in checkmate and deprive him of his victory rush.  So he pulled another trick?  The fact is, he lost count, long ago.  He has way too many fingers.

If you've been reading my essays, you know that I've seen him in Chelsea.  Summer heat doesn't phase Death; under wraps his cold breath gives him away.  He likes the galleries; he's rather vain and is sure to see himself in a painting or two on any given day.  Andy liked to include him-- a shadow, a symbol or a doppelgänger; maybe it pissed him off.  He's in all the trendy fashion houses, in one form or another, and as we all know--- he has great taste in music.  He is a patient lover: he can be violent and cruel, or he can be gentle and invisible.  But he will eventually come to all of us, whether we embrace him or fear him, whether we court him or evade him; he will come.

Personally he fucks with my head.  I feel responsible; I feel guilty and inadequate.  He reminds me of my father who try as I might, does not love me as a daughter.  Okay… my cousin was old--- he was ill and had come to a boundary; his passing was a blessing.  My stepmother?  She feared her end.  She was an artist and she wanted an audience, she wanted recognition; she wanted a guaranteed choir of mourners.  Death taunted her-- held a cruel mirror before her vanity.  She'd once painted for her lovers and now she'd outlived every single one.  I was a lone voice for her; my love and admiration was not enough.  She was cranky and bitter in her last weeks, and the truth is, I was avoiding her.  She scolded me; I reminded her of failure.  Even at the end, she left a small pile of envelopes, and I waited in vain for mine.  No sentimentality; her only request, as always, is for me to disperse her art-- to find collectors, to enhance her legacy.  I am the designated 'sweeper' of her leavings.  Nothing more.  I could have pimped for her. Maybe she would have stuck it out.  Sometimes Death makes you a star; sometimes you don't even make the New York Times obituaries unless you pay.

My lovely drummer who passed…. he used to bring me small trinkets from his trips-- purses, tiny elephants from Thailand, cloth fans and memorabilia.  At some point last year I cleaned my closet and donated bags of these things.  So now I feel guilty.  I searched my closet for a souvenir--- nothing.  I somehow brought this on, with my callow attitude toward his sweetness and sentimentality.  After all, he was young-- who could anticipate I would outlive him?  I am guilty.

And that woman in Chelsea--- it was serendipitous that we had met through a mutual friend.  Who could have conceived that she would chase her dog into the arms of Death in the form of a garbage truck? Her dog?  I forgot to ask.  I doubt he feels guilty.  But I do.  I wish we'd never met.

At my cousin's funeral his children remembered poignant moments.  They were loved, had wonderful lives with and without him.  It was perfect.  I wept.  I thought of my own father-- -the one who can't bear the sound of my voice, the mention of my name-- -for Death knows what reason.  I can't think of a single tender moment.  My sister methodically stole my packet of M & Ms every day for years.  I willingly gave up my toys, my allowance-- I took the blame for every bit of family mischief.  She has the birthright-- whether it is fair or unfair, I am glad to stay out of the family spotlight.  My father owes me an apology.  Besides marrying rock musicians and turning down a Harvard Law scholarship… what did I do to him?  I offended his legacy.  I failed to enhance his family with suitable accomplishments.  I work in bars.  I was a single mother.  This is the 21st century.  But he is ashamed.  I did what I could; I paid him back.  I gave them the art I'd lovingly collected through my friends.  I paid my sister and her husband and put her kids through college while I took an oath of poverty and devotion to music.  I am a Goth nun.  You'd think I blackmailed them.  They have weddings and parties and exchange gifts.  My son got a check for $100 for his combined 21st birthday, Christmas and college graduation.  We have many nights gone hungry  Not even a card.  A folded check in a small envelope.

I have dedicated songs to my father; I post his military accolades on my Facebook page.  I honor him in the only way that I can.  None of this matters.  He will take his hatred to the grave and I will not have a seat at his funeral.  Whatever he thinks I did, I did not do.  Death-- tell him.  Whisper.  I go to funerals, I take care of my friends.  I'm guilty.  I give money to homeless people and split my last-dollar hotdog today with a hungry man in the street.  I never stole from him or lied to him or cheated.  I won all those awards.  I even bought him a computer once with money I won and he complained.  So I give up.  Death, compared to my father, is just.  He spared me a few times-- he's whispered in my ear and sat on my bed through a couple of nights…and mysteriously as he entered, in the morning he was gone.

I finally got the nerve to visit my stepmother's apartment; the very room where she put a plastic bag over her head and inhaled lethal quantities of helium several days ago.  Kind of a stagey exit, but painless and effective.  It looked exactly the same; the bed was made, the Saramago I loaned her on the nightstand, the smell of helium was nowhere.  Death had vanished-- no wagging fingers, no morbid reminders.  Just the art, like an albatross--- like guilt mirrors around the room.  But I'll rise to the challenge.  Death has no wish to participate.  It's too late for dying young, he coolly whispered to me as I lay awake the other night… and then, dressed like the 1961 Elvis, he left the room.