Family Ties

Crossing the uptown park today, it occurred that I had neglected my regular walks and visits.  The Reservoir at sunset-- the usual tourists and locals waiting for the golden minutes to coat buildings with rare urban incandescence-- and a tiny jet trail in the sky, like a distant reminder of the newest American war. The water still covered with a clean-ish snow and ice-layer... one wondered where the ducks were hiding.  I'd last seen them squawking and flapping during the New Year's Eve fireworks... trying to process the fear from what they undoubtedly perceived as an attack... sounding a group alarm-- a warning. 

Difficult to process that we are stepping into the third month of this year... the way the future seems accelerated and indifferent, as though it already belongs to someone else and we, the elders, are being ever more quickly left behind. I'm not quite ready to admit that my February has poured its diminished sand into the March glass which is thankfully one of the longer ones.

Just a week ago the geese seemed agitated and aware of the pending blizzard; more than metereologist predictions I trust bird wisdom; after all, in an Olympic season, they have broken all distance and speed records with their migratory skill. 

Weather issues kept us from outdoor rituals and had me watching more of the Milan games than I anticipated. The rewards and heartbreaks of these uber-athletes are not just entertainment. The best among them have a sort of super-power-- a fixation on a personal goal that transcends parameters.  Others have a kind of competitive energy-- occasionally one sees a speed skater look back, the way racehorses and animals do not. There is team spirit, but rarely a tie in these games.

Personally I've never had that competitive edge, although I recently realized, being the second daughter, that my arrival was the single most psychologically affecting factor in my older sister's life. I never quite assessed my own value, the way she undoubtedly knew every measurement, grade, achievement, failure and bank balance. I gave up plenty of allowance, treats, gifts... just to retain her good will.  It was an endless quest which both my cousins and good friends were quick to notice.  My mother, too, often whispered in my ear ('don't tell your sister'), knowing her nature.  

I have girlfriends, as an older woman, whose friendship is everything for me.  Among them, a few whose subtle lack of trust and critical eye betray childhood indoctrination with this archetypal jealousy, for want of a better word. It's Biblical-- it's Classical... Shakespearean and Fairy Tale subject. It's motivating for some-- they've amassed fortunes and risen to the top of their corporate structures.  For me, it has stained what I would have wanted to keep as a sacred bond-- like ducks and geese, caring for one another.  In my world, it began as the simple coveting of things, progressed to tattletales and toxic narratives culminating in manipulating our aged parents and forging a will which deprived my son and me of all due material inheritance.

Does this make people feel better? Is cheating, lying, scheming, declaring war a means to some kind of inner peace?  It is not.  It is a self-consuming fire that burns and at worst motivates people to become Dateline-worthy murderers and felons. It is maybe an accident of simple birth order... or a true sociopathic embedded obsession.  Over and over I listen to our self-Midasized President who has amassed the largest pot of any previous political office-holder. He can't stop comparing himself to his predecessor-- to downgrading and maligning every Biden-authored program or decision. Will it ever be enough, for a man whose insidious ambition should disqualify him from any of the honors he craves?  

I remember reading The Bad Seed as a small girl and worrying. Watching the Olympic ceremonies-- the medal counting and the bestowing of these symbols of greatness (some of them breaking, ironically)... what would our lives be without these competitions... the lists of bank accounts and billionaires, the excessive piling of assets? It's a little alarming.  Even literature-- poetry-- music... must be 'qualified' and categorically numbered.

As the second-born, I came into the world as 'less'.  I would always be younger, less privileged, less skilled.. at least through childhood. I played the game-- I hung back, I let her have the yellow and green M&Ms and the extra brownie. I covered for her indiscretions and bad love affairs.... at my own cost. I remember sitting in the back seat of a 1960's Firebird freezing in my nightgown and robe while my sister had some kind of sexual encounter with a married gym teacher in his toolshed. Did I divulge the cause of my bronchial infection and school absences? No-- I non-judgmentally indulged my Sister-master.  I might still-- today-- if I weren't absolutely prohibited by friends and other family. I would watch my smaller purse open, the pictures come off the wall... the never-satisfied hunger of some deep deranged desire drain my resources.  And still... I feel whole... I feel sorry for the perpetrator.  Not the President... but my sister, who has a bit of that side-eyed bitterness and deep resentment.  It's unfixable.

There are no more disturbing tragedies than the ones in our own family-- no worse missed opportunities of love and protection and alliance.  It is no wonder the world cannot seem to balance itself, to tolerate and allow, to disagree and smile.  I've heard the moon will turn blood-red Tuesday.  Tonight it seemed so innocent and slightly diminished, like a transparent spot on the still-blue eastern sky at sunset.  I rely on her sisterhood-- from the night sky through the Firebird windscreen to her recovery from the pending eclipse-- surely one of a dwindling number I will eventually not total.

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.  

Goodnight, Moon

The last moments of the year always seem rushed.  They should feel weighted, as though the cumulative burden of 364 days compresses in an inverted hill on some temporal grave.  We are given the post-Christmas week like a winter denouement in which to inventory or regret-- to grieve and mourn or steel ourselves for the coming challenge.  In my image-bank-- probably an illustration from some childhood advent calendar or storybook-- I imagine these days as a chain of painted skaters-- hand in hand, colored hats and scarves flying backward in a joyful procession... waving goodbye eternally as their silvery blades speed them into another chapter.

It seems someone always dies on Christmas-- or just before.  It's a kind of superstitious dread probably left over from early childhood when the death of some relative precluded a family vacation-- death in those days meaning little but a nuisance-- having to forego some pleasure to attend some service and having to whisper around my stern father.  No one bothered to explain anything like it, and except for Bambi, I had little sense of loss-- only obedience and absence.

My son happened to have been born on the brink of a decade, so for him the 2020 demarcation has a certain synchronicitous resonance.  For me, it falls oddly between two strangely marked personal years-- one a prime number which seems wrong, after all this accumulation.  Doesn't anything rhyme with my age anymore?

Nothing, I remember discovering, composing a grade-school poem, actually rhymes with Christmas.  I do remember once trying to write a limerick which began 'You can take the 'Christ' out of Christmas...' but nothing ever seemed complementary enough.  It felt like one of those songs Ezra Pound wrote at some point, and the philosophical and semantic implications were more than I wanted to take on.

I always hated holiday vacations, actually... I longed to be in my room, to linger over my gifts and inventory my toys and closets-- get ready for the coming year in which I would presumably grow and progress.  On trips there was no solitude... and I worried about pets and things which remained at home.  I remember once asking my mother on arrival at some mountain: 'How did the moon know we were here?' And she assured me that it would follow me till the end of time.  It would be there, as she would never leave me.

But she did leave me, my mother... and although I still have my wonderful son to think about, there was no one like my mom for receiving gifts.  She'd sit in an armchair by the fireplace wearing one of her succession of elegant bathrobes (they have all blurred in a vintage fashion-fantasy) and pretend to be completely delighted by whatever awkward article I'd create or buy and wrap up in elaborate boxery to prolong the moments of the opening.  It was as though I'd bestowed some royal honor on her-- she couldn't thank me enough or love it more.  It was everything.

My son just ended a relationship-- at least I think so, and despite the fact I splurged on some fashion faux-pas he craved, I could see there was no joy in his face.  It's fine, he always stoically insists-- or the ubiquitous 'no worries'-- the millennial motto.  I wanted to ask him-- Have you ever missed someone so much you sit and watch the traffic-channel for hours, on the off chance you might see their car or taxi pass in front of one of the street cameras?

But I didn't... and they have their Instagram and GPS...  their thousands of daily messages and I have only my memories and images... a few old letters and photos-- not nearly enough from the days which seem to have grown in importance.  Looking at the calendar, 2020 seems so wide-eyed and innocent... but I am no longer sure that I'll last this one out.  2021 is already winking at me and I have yet to discover its meaning... it now seems unfathomable that twenty years have passed since the millennial timestamp.

This end-of-year interlude of rain has given the moon a chance to rest behind the cover, here.  She has not aged a day since we first met-- her solo act is still the main celestial attraction for me despite what I have learned about the infinite galactic spectaculars.  I've surely tipped the balance of what remains from what has been.  And I've been lucky;  certainly there will be not so many new years ahead.  Most of what I read has been written by dead people, as my teenaged son used to remark; much of what I listen to has been recorded by dead people, and grace to technology, we can still 'see' some version of those we miss the most.

There is a book I used to keep in which I recorded my Christmas lists; besides family, a great number of the names are unfamiliar now-- the fickle trajectory of our life-acquaintances.  I no longer need to list; I am piling up those things I want to 'gift' the world under some imagined tree... it seems unbearable and inevitable that I will leave behind more than I will befriend this year... but the moon has yet to complain... and I will, in her image and the sense of rain, God-willing, walk bravely into the next year with all the rest of you.  Amen.

Lunatic

How many of you out there are secret horoscope readers?  Rational, politically active left-wing intelligent liberals who look down on astrologists and palm-readers but consult their daily vague cheap paragraphs written by people maybe in bathrobes watching daytime soaps and eating Doritos while they bank a weekly check from some news agency?

Okay, I occasionally look.  Maybe more.  The cynic who sneers at friends who won't travel or make decisions when Mercury is in retrograde which have you noticed seems like constantly these days?
I remember a one-night stand when I was around 20-- about to have this romantic night with some rock musician and as the guy takes his shirt off, there's a libra-charm around his neck...and I start to look for the exit, wonder how I'll get through until morning.  Well, maybe I was tougher then.

Besides... what if you're born premature, were scheduled to be a Capricorn and you emerge a Scorpio? Who are you then?  Or say the doctor gives you chemicals to speed up your labor--- or magnesium to slow contractions--- are we playing with fate? Shouldn't the sign be based upon conception-- the moment of conception?  Then there would at least be some scientific consistency here...
I think the fact that Bob Marley shares a birthday with Ronald Reagan, and Hitler with Carmen Electra---kind of kills the credibility factor for me.  Of course, astrologists all defend this with rising signs, moon phases, etc.... but Jerry Hall and I were in labor simultaneously at the same hospital... and I couldn't help thinking about our babies' futures.  She certainly had better drugs and 300-tpi sheets  and still screamed louder than anyone on the ward, so go figure.

I was looking at the moon on the way home from a gig last night--- a big old misty near-full summer moon that undoubtedly was overseeing plenty of heartache.  It looked tired and sort of about to drop.  I wondered what sign the moon is---I mean, that's something to wrap your brain around--- under what astrological circumstances did that chunk of planetary mystery break away and ally itself with our complicated planet for life, love-struck lunatic that it must have been?

I just came back from a trip to my old neighborhood which, like most of Manhattan, has had one of those facelifts that doesn't quite suit its bone structure.  Some of the shops--- like an old diner, a Betsey Johnson boutique, were just vacant, with the sign still there.  I went by my old building--- trying not to reminisce about all the great parties and amazing sex I had in there--- and in the lobby, next to the hideous pseudo-impressionist pastel oil painting of Central Park, someone had tacked up an American flag.  Not a real one--- a cheap reprint on cloth that looked fake.  It wasn't even hung up straight-- it looked like some kind of republican bad graffiti there... or a sign that designated the building as marked or condemned.  It looked pretentious and absurd-- inappropriate and sort of obscene, in the way a moon never does.  Just an observation.

The whole neighborhood looked as though it had briefly tried to become upscale, and then failed.  Empty restaurants, pretentious shops and markets--even a hotel. But everything looked sad and old-new.  I observed some locals coping with the economy; a guy emptying a dumpster of shoes, lamps-- someone's apartment contents.  At first glance the stuff looked cool, I was thinking--- but he'll soon find out the leopard print is screened on, and the leather is Chinese composite material.  He was very cool, though, the scavenger--- was not getting excited or remarking on anything which might call attention to his potential treasure.  Further down the block a skinny man with no teeth was stretched out with a box of Newports on the sidewalk like a summer pastiche.  What possible astrological configuration might have influenced his choice of cigarettes, because this looked major montaged, out-of-context--- like something you'd find on a beach, surfy and turquoise to bring out  your tan--- not the choice of your average black homeless man.   Maybe it was an art exhibit, I thought.  Fringe performance stuff.  But real life isn't staged or photo-shopped.

My brain has been so altered by the way I've learned to think.  I guess it is fairly obvious to non-lunatics that all memories are mostly of things lost.  But I don't want to find new regrets.  My son is driving me crazy today-- moping around, making memories of what he might have lost last weekend.  Still, I am glad I didn't forget to have children, although I miss the ones I've lost; I try to shield them from too much sunlight and from the catastrophes that they won't suffer.

A woman on the street the other day stopped me--- like an ancient seer--- and she said -Don't FEEL so much--it doesn't do you any good.   Oh but it does, it does.  For those of us who haven't yet succumbed to the philosophical and emotional flabbiness that is America now-- it does matter.  It is our way of working out, of warding off blindness.  And if our aging eyes are less sharp, and our ears ringing, let it be from too much looking and too much listening.  My old moon knows what I mean.  I'm beginning to think he's a fellow Aquarian after all.