Recognitions

My friends know I have never been really on top of technology; while I bought and messed with electronic synthesizers and keyboards when they became commercially affordable in the 1970's, I was late to get a computer, lagged far behind in digital 'joinings', and only recently, on the insistence of my son, carry a cellphone for emergencies.

Besides the standard bedside-worthy pile of books, I have an old iPad (2011?)-- for recording inspiration-- lyrics, as they typically come to me in the dark. The fact that one doesn't need to turn on a lamp is convenient.  It also delivers messages-- from the random 10 or 12 people who have access... and the way this penetrates my daily agenda is extraordinary. I can only imagine how the daily psyche of normal people is shaped by the constant barrage of texts which unlike email seem to have full access.  

Since I have lived alone I have the habit, late at night, of browsing my bookshelves. Like leafing through a photo album or web-surfing-- or the hermitic version of taking a drive, it's comforting and reassuring. I have a wealthy person's library, somehow... collected over 60 years by hoarding things I read and loved, lingering in old bookshops in the days when buying was an analogue-only activity and road trips and random travel digressions presented these opportunities.  Libraries used to pare off extra copies--- their sales were extra-serendipitous because the books were almost giveaways-- sorted and pre-filtered by institutional acquisition priorities.

Huge books have punctuated my life... I can vividly remember where I was when I was reading War and Peace or Proust or The Recognitions-- more recently, Peter Nadas, Marguerite Young (still), Thomas Mann. As a girl I fell in love with the sheer weight and reassurance that this was not just a one-night stand, but a long-term relationship.

Last night I wandered across my shelf section of Joseph McElroy... the copy of Women and Men I've had for nearly 40 years, and which has been coveted by readers who visit me.  It is unread-- pristine, my copy... for some reason I searched my iPad at dawn and found a Paris Review piece on reading this book-- meeting McElroy-- another of those quintessentially New York City writers who has shaped the urban post-war canon. Like Gaddis-- he's difficult. I shared it with one of my few friends with whom I message.

And then 'I am millimeters from the abyss', I told my friend this morning... it just texted itself... the operative word being 'from'... and I had this image of Dick Van Dyke, just recently celebrated in a video, nearly immolated in his neighborhood wildfire, then being returned to his unscathed home yesterday.  We saw the  photograph-- all of us-- on the 'entertainment' pages... it distracted from the one of Jamie Foxx with stitches, the constant litany of photos of the prep school Valedictorian-turned-murderer.  There is little refuge here from the worrying world-tensions, patriotic anxieties and catastrophic climate threat. 

Most of all I am haunted by not just recent deaths but the ebb-tide of mental skills I am forced to witness among my decreasing circle.  My mother at a point became overwhelmed by an incomprehensible sea of words which whirled around her withering brain like a terrifying tsunami.  A friend has been afflicted with a cruel and progressive form of aphasia which has left her stranded and near-mute on some non-verbal desert island.  My neighbor upstairs who shared my love of literature can no longer see. And a horrific brain tumor has devoured most of the capacity of another.  I visit her and she is beached in a bed, unable to communicate. 

The vertical/horizontal grid of bookshelves has always been stabilizing. And the books are my friends... my mentors; they are my past, my present, and many of them are inside me. It is a great comfort to scan the titles at night-- to pull one out and know it is there-- all of it-- with a kind of permanence. The diminishing number of unread ones beckon... Don't leave me, they call out at night... We have not yet become intimate.  It is a kind of future for me, at the edge of this looming unknown catastrophe before which many of us graze at this age.  

This year I have been more or less fortunate to have survived and mostly recovered from an accident which temporarily froze my daily activity.  It helped me understand and appreciate the pitfalls of human existence, and left me a little more grateful for the outcome, considering the odds and the ends of blind human faith. 

As a girl and a teenager we had a few end-of-year family rituals-- every New Year's Eve my Mom would ceremoniously wish me a blessed future;  it became a compulsory phone-call as we aged, with a little bit of superstitious 'prevention' in the mix.  When she passed away, all bets were off, so to speak. I mark her absence most of all at that end-of-year moment, she who was most responsible for my existence, for the blessings... for the strength with which I rehabbed myself over the past 10 months. She was not much of a reader herself, but she read to us as children-- Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson--- Francis Hodge Burnett and A. A. Milne-- Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis... Johanna Spyri, Lucy Ward Montgomery...on and on... it was a bedtime ritual which I carried on with my own son, but being a musician and having night-working hours I often left a cassette tape to read him to sleep. 

The perceived acceleration of time this year-- the occasional empty hours and the speed of days-- obsesses me.  I cannot seem to make things matter more, although I still write my poems and make my songs. Few care about what I do-- fewer read or witness. Whether or not 'recognition' has a sort of parental role in adult lives is something we struggle with.  Celebrity, fame... seem to equate less and less with quality of work, although that is a bit of sour grapes.  At the edge of this sense of passing, I am propping up the months with my reading lists and projects; it helps anchor one's existence in a rocking sea of the unknown. There is travel and romance for some; for me there is the opportunity to spend long hours with the creations of great minds-- to mix my thoughts with theirs, to blend my flaws and weaknesses and come out with a possibly better version.  For my dwindling friends to whom I confide dark morning thoughts, I will try... I will turn the page of another year, God willing. 

Closely Watched Trains

At 8 or 9 PM on New Year's Eve I generally try to phone one of my friends overseas where the year has begun in earnest.  It feels a little special-- as though we are bridging some time gap and violating some order-- me here in the past, getting ready to go to a gig, listening to the sounds of the future-- the singing and rowdy partygoers who have passed the finish line and have already begun to unwind and absorb the vaguely monotonous reality that 2018 or whatever year is not so different from 2017-- at least not yet.  My Norwegian friends were drunk and optimistic that we are all going to blow this one wide open.

Working as a musician on this night is a sort of brilliant copout.  I am not responsible for the success or failure of the party; there is no anticipated date, no dinner reservation or romantic disappointment-- just amps, microphones, music, dancing, alcohol and noise-making... and then I get paid and go home to my peaceful little uptown hideaway where I am relieved that the world passed another milestone without disaster, that there were no deaths in Times Square; the MTA is at least holiday-operative, and the global clock is still ticking.

The subway ride home at 4 AM January 1 is special.  Back in the 1980's public transportation was free on this night-- a gift to the city, so anyone could afford to get home somehow-- even those who had lost their wallets or spent every last dollar in bars and clubs.   I can remember being so poor as a student, we rode the train to Coney Island and back as our celebration; standing on the beach watching distant fireworks was intoxicating.  At some point full-fare was restored;  this year the extreme cold was the main topic...  it made things little extra festive-- we were all so relieved to be off the street and in a relatively warm car.  There was, of course, the prerequisite vomiter, the sleeping drunks... but mostly just revelers with their parties still in tow, stumbling in and out of train doors with paper hats and crowns and joy.

I am always relieved, these days, to go home after a gig-- relieved that there are no major disasters, no stage-pissing or broken bones, no lost chords or tuners-- and somehow this night I sensed the awkward-shaped package of 2017 tie itself off.  I felt clean-- unburdened of dread, and slightly lifted from the muddy ground of the old year which brought month after month of sad news-- death, illness and tragedy.  I was letting it go; or rather, it was releasing me.  Across the car from me was a twenty-something man with his knees drawn up,  skinny jeans down around his hips, designer underwear and bare back in full view.  Obviously he'd lost his coat-- he'd had a rough night.  The boys next to me began to try to wake him-- what should we do, they asked me, the obvious 'senior' passenger and designated mother? Let him sleep, I advised; he's safer in the warm car until he sobers up and can figure out his itinerary.... but they were adamant... he woke, the sleeper-- and in his dark wet eyes was the halo of narcotics.  He was angry-- defensive-- he was some kind of beautiful and non-gendered persona-- belligerent, wounded.  I could imagine he'd been personally traumatized-- disappointed or even abused just hours earlier; there was guilt in his attempt at defiance-- there was also resentment and old grief.  It took a few minutes until he recognized something behind my guitar case and my wraps...  a maternal presence;  on the verge of complicated tears, he at last confided his destination-- yes,  completely disoriented and traveling further and further from his Brooklyn home.  So we all put our January-1 heads together and mapped out a route with transfers and station-jumping so he could remain inside until the last exit.  A young couple took him across the platform at 42nd Street-- they hugged me as they departed the train.

There is always a great media-fuss made over the first baby of the year; inevitably in this huge city there is a birth shortly after midnight.  I realized, as I rode the rest of the way uptown, my train-mates were my newborns of 2018.  The sad, wounded coatless Brooklynite... the young couples with glitter-tattoos, the chef on his way to the morning shift at Mount Sinai, the tired bartender from Artichoke Pizza who plays upright bass and hopes for a career in music; he took his hat off as I left and let down his beautiful black hair-- with his lovely voice and hands-- I know he will be a star.

We humans begin to lose our memory as we collect time, but most of us seem to retain a special slot for 'firsts': the first day of school, the first dance, the first minute of pregnancy, first night we spent with almost every single lover-- even if it was also the last.  We can play back things-- the room, what he wore, the way he felt under the sheets... these things seem to persist somewhere, like a recurring dream.  And of course the moments with our children... even the difficult ones, when you are wracked with some fever or even labor, and your toddler is needing you to read to him.'

I played my  usual Monday gig, still in the spell of the new year, and returned home on the Q, realizing things were already dissolving into normalcy.  People were tired and cold, not many smiled or shared on the train or the platform.  Today I stopped for a coffee and finished my first book of the year, or really, the last of the past year-- a Salman Rushdie.  There was a little girl, nagging her father to read to her; he was distressed, searching his phone, pacing a bit...  she came over to me with her book, and her sad mouth, and I was nearly unable to read-- my voice cracking and nostalgic for the babies that were so grown up and the one that had not made it.  Here, I wanted to say to her father-- you have a clean slate.. what can be more urgent than this opportunity which fate can take from you any moment?  She leaned on me, this child, the way they do--with trust and affection, like a stray dog.

Tonight, January 2,  I wept in the cold-- for the already widening distance of the last year, for the missing children of my first day who are already lost in the city... for the lights, for the ghosts of the Christmas trees that lined the sidewalk on Lexington with hope and anticipation and now would be lying spent on the curb for sanitation pick-up, for the homeless men who must leave the warmth and light of the 96th Street library at 7 PM closing, for the crosstown bus driver who confessed he had no one to go home to after the night shift; for the passion and love and first nights of the past, the small family searching these buildings not so long ago for the home we discovered, for the emptiness of the future as a solitary woman who gleans from fruit vendors and thrift shops in a nondescript coat of non-recognition, trying to savor the grace of the beginning, while the world and time is thrusting us ever-forward.  We are prepared for the weather, some of us-- but not for whatever fate holds for us in the next onslaught of days and weeks and months.  I was so blindsided by 2017, trying hard to re-baptize myself into some incarnation of hope-- resolving, as we do, we perennials, to observe and honor what we are given, and to pray for another beginning when this one, too, has worn itself out.

Crowded Hearts

March is the month of betrayal.  Not officially, but it has always seemed that way.  December--- the end of the year--- we begin to know there are things we do not want to take with us into the new year… but-- well, it's Christmas, and no one wants to rock the family boat… then January, we are all so exhausted, and cold;  February---well, one of my friends told me he'd wait until after Valentine's Day to tell his girlfriend he no longer loves her… but by March-- -really no excuse, and we're all getting geared up for spring and new beginnings. The baggage we have dragged from the icy winter--- well, it just looks tired and the weight is unbearable.

I have seen the husbands of friends with other women-- having an intimate coffee, brushing a stray hair from her forehead the way lovers do.  I have learned of other sad infidelities and indiscretions.  I am not a moralist; I am a rock musician.  I do not judge.  But somehow the word 'fuck' is not to me a random curse, or even a wishful verb; in the month of March it sounds something like religion.

Actually betrayal is all around us-- we are just too weary and pre-occupied to look it in the eye.  Your boyfriend could be texting virtually anyone at any time.  Phone calls used to be surreptitious and obvious--- the middle of the night ringing, the hang-ups, the strange envelopes under your door… there used to be a certain romance to betrayal.  Now it is just a cheap tweet.  

There are artistic betrayals, too: people who steal our ideas, our lyrics, our melodies.  And people who misquote and misinterpret us.  Friends and family who brand us punk-rockers when we are trying to be rootsy and real: haters who call us 'jazzers' or teenagers who call us old fucks.  I have learned never to feel betrayed by a teenager; I do not underestimate their penchant for truth.  

Today I walked in the rain through the Harlem Meer.  There were seagulls croaking and squawking the sounds of the sea.  This may be as close as I get to the beach, and they seemed to know that.  A small family was throwing bread to the ducks, and the children were as happy as children can be--- no toys, no babysitters--- just some old sandwiches and the little quackers.  A gull came right up to me, inquisitive and bold.  Its head was whiter than it should have been, with the dingy mud-slush and the smutty fog of the last day of this long grey New York winter.  It knew I had no food.  But it still gave me that tilted head stare, and we locked in.  

So I had one of those Proustian moments-- remembering my pre-school teacher, Mlle. Jeanne (we had to speak French there for some pretentious reason) had brought me this exquisite hand-cut wooden jigsaw of a Nantucket gull perched on a wooden buoy.  I was home with a broken leg which had happened chez l'ecole because I threw myself wildly on a forbidden piece of playground equipment and managed to snap 2 bones in several places.  

I must have developed some kind of relationship with this patchwork gull, whose every fragment I memorized-- struggling over and over with the puzzle, and with my sedentary confinement.  My parents put me in front of the old black and white set most of the time, or outside in the yard with blankets, like a 1950's polio victim on a chaise.  But Mlle. Jeanne-- a spinsterly nun-like woman with woolen dresses and no rings-- brought me a puzzle and a book called Teach Me to Read.  I spent afternoons with this book until I was ready for Dick and Jane and then Curious George and Madeleine and Eloise.  By the time my cast was re-sized, I was into Nancy Drew and the Hollisters and everything I could get my hands on that wasn't censored.  No one but Mlle. Jeanne paid much attention to my education--- just my ponytail and little dresses, because pants were impossible.  Sometimes she sang with me-- little French songs like 'Les Tiserands'… and music from Gigi and The Sound of Music.  Rounds and harmonies.  

I emerged from the cast a profoundly changed human, with thoughts and dreams and stories and a sense of independence rare in 4-year olds, because I had created my own inner world called Nantucket.  I could now walk to the library where I began with the A's and read every single book in our little local branch, systematically--- including the Scott's postage stamps catalogues.  I graduated from Nursery School and Miss Jean, after trying in vain to convince my parents that I belonged in Music Academy, told me their hearts were crowded in a way that hers was not.  This was a great lesson I was to take with me; whenever something doesn't work out, someone's heart is crowded.  My ex-husband's, my parents'-- mine, occasionally.   Miss Jean was told not to come back: maybe my first betrayal; but she had given me the tools with which to cope.  I never learned her last name.  

But what I suddenly realized this afternoon, looking at that whiter-than-white gull in the late afternoon haze… the biggest betrayal of all is the one we inflict on ourselves.  We let ourselves down; we forget who we were, who we are, and we turn into our own grouchy husband or wife.  We forget to love, we forget to look down at the cobblestones which are the sidewalk by the Harlem Meer and see a lost pink barrette as something meaningful.  We forget to pick up coins and smile at people and walk slowly through the aisles of a grocery store and wait patiently for the annoying lady with the walker to handle every single can of stewed tomatoes and not buy a single thing.  We forget to listen for the sea and we forget to love the unlovable which sometimes includes ourselves when we are broken or betrayed or about to be.

To Text or Not To Text

New York City can be divided into two sociological groups:  people who text, and people who don’t text. 

The concept of telescoping information and response into an incredibly limited format is ancient; the current version unfortunately lacks the impact of a telegram sent, say, in the 1940’s or 50’s, when abbreviated language was more like a huge zipfile of meaning.  It seems now that something is completely missing.  It's cheap, like verbal fast food.  Of course, people are different now—people don’t understand things that I take for granted.

Repetitive, useless motion has certainly damaged our brain and occasionally wrists and hands… but at least I’m moderately aware that the ability to reply 40 times in a minute can dilute the message.   I’ve also begun to believe that I am some evaporating breed of dark brooding guilty emotional wreck that is on its way to extinction.  I'm sure statistically fewer people suffer alone in dark rooms; they now take drugs, and beat their landladies with wooden beams.  They OD on massive amounts of mind-numbing medication or they binge drink and crash vehicles. 

There is a blind man in my neighborhood;  I see him at the library and we speak.  I feel this enormous embarrassment in his presence—me with my free coffee refills and 20-year-old boots—for what I don’t lack.  Is that the inverse of entitlement?  My kids are pissed off that they don’t have a trust-fund-sized allowance.  They despise my refusal to carry a cell phone and my Luddite habits-- my appreciation of old, used things, of kindness.   The fact that I listen to the old neighborhood Polish holocaust survivor for long minutes,  the same incredible stories over and over—how she jumped from a plane, crawled through animal tunnels, hid under feed-bags, starved… and how no one writes her memoir.  I am nearly compelled to volunteer--- and then the conversation inevitably reverts to her complaining about her daughter who had no children, after heroically managing to survive the concentration camps so she could pro-create, now her progeny has no wish to respect this.  I’m sure her daughter texts. 

People who text--- a theoretically silent thing--- tend to be loud.  I notice this at the gym--- older people are quieter; they read the Times, watch MSNBC, ESPN, Law and Order.  Younger people have the screen on—usually the Kardashians, if I took an actual poll--   their ipods going, and they are tapping wildly at their smartphones.  Occasionally they answer calls--- frowned on, by notices posted everywhere—but who reads these? The people who already knew this, of course.  So they speak—loudly--- didn’t their preschool teachers program them to use their ‘inside voice’?  Apparently not.  When their friends come, they converse—so that it’s hard to ignore--- about their problems, about the market, about their weekends, their hangovers, their eating patterns---who they love and hate.  I try to love them.  I forgive them, the way someone in some supermarket is forgiving my own kids for their habitual tasteless narcissistic ‘loudness’. 

I think about the blind man--- how embarrassed I am that he must witness this behavior--- like he’s some superior sensitive being, because he's aware that he annoys people enough by his disability… but I’m still sure he listens and smells things with more perception than I.  And he’s probably irritated by my excessive politeness and guilty kindness.  Maybe he’d like to punch me. 

Looking around on the C train downtown this morning, I could pick out the tourists.  Some of them look less mean.  Some of them are dressed differently or wearing new items they mistake for New York ‘Style’.  Some of them have old-world charm and you can feel their inherited sense of family.  New Yorkers are always darting their furtive eyes around, looking at their phones, checking each other out or making a huge effort to appear too cool to look.  But you can feel their competitive gleeful flaunting of whatever it is they are wearing or reading or texting on. 

I am in such tight financial straits, I can’t imagine even carrying an ipad on a crowded train where someone could steal it.  How do all these people afford their iphone plans?  Their shoes and multiple bags?   My rich friend gave me a gorgeous designer bag and I still carry my $10 one--- the expensive one looks a) comically out of place with my thrift-level clothing choices b) pretentious and c)like maybe I bought it on Craigslist just to carry on the street.  Truth is, it’s heavy.  And I don’t need to be wearing my sins and savings in public simultaneously.   

The other truth is, my resistance to text is annoying to others.  They don’t want a pay-phone call, and they have little sympathy in fact for middle-aged people who are not fashionably dressed.  For aging rock musicians who get on the crosstown bus with a gig-bag like they are trying to act like a kid.   I mean, when you’re young and carefree and hot, you can ‘affect’ the down-sizing style of grunge or vintage mix, and the guys in Starbucks will still compete to take your order, will flirt and ask you about your music, will show up at your gig and look at you with those eyes the romance novels have made a cliché.  Your messy hair falls on your face in that charming way that makes everyone want to brush it back, just to touch you.  I stand patiently and invisibly in line now, and remember that person as a kind of fictional character in a favorite book.

So my new prayer is ‘please God, don’t make me have to apologize’.   I don’t need to be cute and admired, or even served with respect.  I just want to avoid accidents and serious injury and maintain a compassionate demeanor.  I don’t want any false pity or attention.  I want to hold back the tears, politely excuse myself from over-intervention in the lives of the tiny subset who are less fortunate than I am and sense my excessive empathy.  I don’t think I’d ever punch anyone because they’re callously annoying and intrusive, and I don’t want anyone to want to punch me because I’m a nasty old library-user who too often confuses kindness with guilt.  I am going to try not to find myself navigating the streets, uttering ‘sorry’ like a verbal tic to texters and phone yappers who are walk-weaving like drunkards.  I feel like a polite old British grand-dad, and curse myself for this repetitive, useless act that is undoubtedly wearing away at my edge like an arthritic joint.  Please.  Jesus, even that is annoying.