The Ground Beneath My Feet

For maybe seventeen years, from my 27th birthday on, my home base was a modified studio apartment in a converted factory building.  I call these my bachelorette years, despite the fact that I was married (twice), changed countries, became a mother; somehow this was where I ran, came back to roost, escaped, convalesced. When I first moved there, part of its charm was the Mobilgas  flying horse directly outside my front window.  Like a magical hovering hallucination, it witnessed and blessed my love affairs, my joys and sorrows, guested at my parties and celebrations.  At a point the horse was removed and a multi-plex theatre was built.  So there was still the rear window, where a sapling tree had grown tall enough to graze my sill and bring morning birds to sing to us in bed as we slept against the cracking interior brick wall of an old chimney. 

It was a cool old building, and because the apartments were like small lofts and recently re-purposed, it was mostly populated by young singles-- artists, several fashion models, a pair of Rockettes, a stripper, two drummers, a hair-stylist... photographers, drug dealers. My motley friends and rock musicians were comfortable hanging out there, crashing there, getting high with the English hipsters down the hall, smoking on someone's balcony or sunbathing on the roof.  It felt in a way more like a dormitory than a building.  We had the best parties that often spilled out into the hallway where neighbors were only too happy to open doors and spread the cheer.  

On Wednesday I went down to that neighborhood to preview an auction of great old rugs in what used to be a loft space but was now tarted up like a department store.  I barely realized I was in my old neighborhood-- the street was stacked with multi-storied new constructions that looked crowded and crammed and airless.  My old back window would have been hemmed in-- our little sill-sparrows, the maple tree-- would have been displaced.  I walked up to Second Avenue-- the old supermarket-- A & P, then Sloan's, I think it was, then maybe Pioneer-- and now a sprawling Chase bank.  My son's old school was sheathed in scaffolding and netting... even the movie theatre called Beekman was being demolished.  I remember there was one huge modern apartment building which stood out... now it looked a little aged and dated-- dwarfed.  Back then there were cyclical recessions; money was a little different.  Yes, there were some affluent couples... but their luck changed and at our state-sponsored pre-school we were often all in the same boat-- crumbling marriages, unfaithful husbands, Visa problems... buying each other cheap bags of chips or sharing ice cream among the kids.

I remember sitting on a stoop with an English woman who'd had two babies in rapid succession.  The children were adorable, but I was shocked to see they lived in this pricey high-rise with almost no furniture and a mess of clothing, toys, dirty plates and cups everywhere.   I remember the toddlers so well-- Harley and Alison. Almost like twins... they were unwashed and wild, tough and spirited, and their mother seemed to have aged twenty years in three.  Her husband had lost his job... one of those things... we young mothers spent long hours sitting on sandbox ledges, pushing swings, exchanging woes and intimacies.  Where are they? Who will remember them?  It has been some thirty years since I sat on the wall outside that building, astonished at the reality of what I'd imagined to be a charmed, rich life.

Forward to the rugs-- old, handmade things of great beauty.  The online catalogue was spectacular and shining.  It always touched me that the makers-- not just artisans but artists-- colorists-- took years of their life to create something that would be walked on.  The metaphor of hand-woven carpets is a kind of poetry. So I wandered through the newly-renovated space like an explorer... hung and lined with yards and yards of these patterned wool tapestries... and somehow, without the online photos-- they became what they were-- just rugs.  They were living, used... old, walked on... things of beauty but humble and quiet.  The price tags were obscene.  If they could speak, they would have been ashamed.  

At some point in college my boyfriend and I decided to make a rug-- we would design and execute a hand-knotted creation. We looked in museums, bought a book from the Cooper Hewitt.. and I spent many nights turning pages, inhaling the colors and patterns.  It was difficult; we were overwhelmed with studies and jobs and we abandoned our project.  But in my 120 year-old apartment, I have one of these rugs of similar vintage.  It was owned by others before me, and it occurs that it will go on living when I am gone.  It is a thing of great beauty and soul-- the colors, the small discrepancies and mistakes woven in intentionally by a person who lived perhaps in a colorless landscape without flowers or trees, and yet created a rich, rich tapestry of floral and chromatic mastery.  These rugs I assume were the gardens of desert cultures-- their windows and decor.  

During the pandemic, I occasionally took a photograph... and a piece of my rug would appear, like a magic vision. It is always, unlike me, photogenic; it steals the stage, even in a tiny corner.  I know all of its regions; I imagine the maker.  When I write it is here.. when I play music, when I turn out the lights... it is still here.  Unlike a garden, it asks for nothing and never fails me.  I do cringe when my son visits and occasionally spills a little whatever... but they are resilient, these old things.  Organic and uncomplaining. Voiceless, perennial... humble, rich, quiet and like a magic lamp maybe replete with more story than I can ever write, in this room we share-- my witness, my companion, my elder, urban floor-garden.

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.