Songs from a Room

In the familiar old heat of my beloved 'back room' last night, as is my habit, between 2 and 5 AM, I was watching films. On these dense airless summer days, it's always a little warmer in here, as it is colder in winter. We're fortunate to have this 'extra' space-- old, soft sofas and chairs-- the TV-- my little closet writing nook, random guitars and basses on the furniture... and a wall of books, of course.  The ceiling fan occasionally makes a sort of ticking sound, like the proverbial clock on the wall... my only company.

I have lived in this apartment far longer than anywhere else-- far longer than I anticipated.  I can look around and remember the various configurations of this room-- when it was virtually empty, and children used it for train layouts and games-- when two sofa beds were often made up to accommodate overseas guests and stragglers-- when I struggled with a novel, staring up at an enormous fat monitor with a blue screen and white text, dreading the alarm which signaled the dissolution of my solitude into breakfast-prep and getting my son to school on time.

There is a fire escape outside one window, although I rarely go out there now... an occasional visiting bird reminds me, but city ordinances forced us to remove plants and other 'hazards' (an old rocking chair, etc.)... and now this has become a bit like my personal Proustian cork-lined refuge.  In the back of these old buildings which converse easily via courtyards and alleys, nights are quiet. I hear the hum of air conditioners and motors but little else besides the strange sort of symphonic white-noise of the city which always feels about to crescendo and then doesn't.  It's indescribable, this soundtrack; not many are privileged enough to hear it... but there are these films I see--- mostly the kind with little dialogue-- which use this sort of atmospheric noise like an orchestral score. 

Still in the swampy-thick of this Nersesian mega-novel, I feel a little hallucinatory and anxious about the status of my city.  On the screen now there is a 1960's shot from an airplane approaching Manhattan-- no WTC towers, but the poetic density of older New York.  It feels so vulnerable.  We watch air-strikes in Gaza, in other parts of the world... vintage footage of post-war destruction... and I cannot fathom that I have earned some right to feel so 'safe' here in my back room which from the heat-emitting effects of cable boxes and laptops is warmer than the outside temperature.

Then there is a mediocre c. 2000 movie with Ben Affleck.  He's a wonderful actor-- and his inherent intelligence shines always.  Here he is young and boyish, as I always remember him; his teeth are still his own-- he transcends the banal dialogue and we believe him; he is himself.  The version we have now of a darkened and disgruntled playboy is not right.  Forget about sexual appetites and attractions... he doesn't belong with the Beyonce'd version of Jennifer Lopez he got this year.  He's complicated and critical and, like the best of us, a little self-loathing. 

But it was so long ago-- the making of this film.  He was a boy.  I was a considerably younger woman and actors like Brad Pitt were in their 'young' prime. As we see these people age, it reminds us that we are that much older, that we are uncomfortably close to some kind of final denouement.  I inventory various configurations of my life, often; my son doesn't remember details of his childhood-- maybe it was the intrusion of technology which distracted from absorbing the minutiae of reality. Personally, I can provide an inventory of my mother's old 1950's kitchen-- the black cast-iron trim on the maple cabinets, the green formica and the deco table and vinyl-upholstered Breuer-style chairs.  I can open the pantry and see the various jars of sweet pickles and mustards and relishes-- the ketchup bottles and cans of sardines and tuna.  I can read the labels and smell the vaguely cinnamon/cardamon scent of her little collection of bottled spices.  

And still I wonder when these things will fade--- when I won't be able to mentally circle my second-grade classroom and name every child in the seats. Some of my friends don't remember their teachers' names.  In school I was often told I had a sort of not photographic but phonographic memory.  I could recall conversations in real-time.. I could hear voices as though played back in a certain core of my brain.  Not so much anymore, but a few of those moments resonate.

Last weekend I went up to see my beloved neighbor Patricia. She is still smart as a whip, but at 98 she has to admit some frailties. She can barely see now, and it's a struggle to listen to me read to her. Last week I brought up a large book of photographs which really interested her; her comments were astute and enhanced the text. She knew these people and these places, and the backstories.  But I also realized the challenge of 'reading' a photograph-- the way companions must translate reality for a blind person.  There was one in the museum several weeks ago.  He was being wheeled around and his 'minder' was doing a fair job of listing paintings, but not really the job I could only infer this man required.  

So I tried my hardest-- to describe the sense of space-- the distances, the attitudes, how a model's hair was styled, how it had been raining and the streets were reflecting... what the weather might have been from the clothing.  It was tedious.  I exhausted her, and my descriptions were so suffused with personal suppositions and editorializing.  A picture is worth 1000 words; mine were cheap and inadequate.  But for those of us who can see, we take so much for granted-- we waste so much time; we fret and bemoan ridiculous things, we sacrifice to marginally improve our appearances (some of us)... and in the end... we have merely the past, an unappreciated present and a tenuous future. Picture this and picture that, one of my early songs sang in its chorus.  'Picture this, the morning after... the camera won't lie like you.' I still remember these and most of the thousands of lyrics.  Picture that.

La Recherche des Chaussettes Perdues

The other evening, skimming through a drawer in my son's old room, I came across an infant sock.  In a Proustian moment, I was sucked into one of those emotional 'rivers' of the past. The tiny sock was decorated with charming colorful train cars, but like something one no longer sees. I could recall with some clarity how this was the first article of clothing that seemed to engage my baby boy at three or four months.  He'd stare at his feet particularly in this pair of socks... wave them around and coo.  No other pair-- no matter what color, pattern, picture-- had this effect, like a magic lantern-- they sparked him, gave him a kind of obvious joy.

But one day, as babies do, he must have over-enthusiastically kicked or pulled or randomly peeled during one of our marathon walks through the city... and a sock was gone-- missing. I retraced our steps, frantic... with that new-mother passion, but no success.  There is some statistic somewhere, surely metaphorically speaking, about how humans spend six months of our lives looking for lost socks. That day added significantly to my total.

Perhaps because he is my genetic offspring, he somehow processed the loss... and while I still put the single train-sock on him, and it evoked the same cooing and chirping sounds of obvious happiness, I had to pair it with a blank. He looked at me; he gestured and seemed to even speak in baby gibberish. There is something not quite right, Mom, he wanted to express... something is missing!

One of my all-time favorite photographic essays is Nicholas Nixon's ongoing visual chronicle of the Brown sisters.  Featured in the New York Times several years ago, these are a series of group portraits of four sisters-- taken annually and chronologically-- through their lives. We see them as girls, then as young women, then slowly aging-- shifting positions subtly. We read on their faces their increasing maturity, their deepening texture and complexity, and their tiny sorrows and difficulties.  Maybe because the elder sisters are around my age, I see myself in their composite. Of course in this era of AI, one can digitally age a face in seconds. But nearing fifty analogue years of 'chronicle', the project grows more and more compelling to those of my generation.  

Having weathered both the standard griefs of a normal life as well as the unexpected losses of recent years, I can't help a sense of dread that one year a sister will be gone-- and like a gap tooth in a formerly joyful smile, it will be all about the one who is 'missing'.  This is the reverse poetry of later life-- like the negative space of a photograph or the shadow which replaces its source, it is the absence that concerns me.  And I can't help imposing my emotional prejudices and narratives-- reading in their faces a break-up or abandonment-- of pain or suffering-- current and future illness.  There must be a dark one afflicted with some inherent unhappiness, a conflict or secret issue.

But they all seem so healthy... and so blessed in their sisterhood, their loving and tiny brushes against one another-- the gestures and casual affectionate touching.  Both posed and unposed, bravely facing the camera in a sort of womanly and familial solidarity... despite the passage of time, the disappearance of youth, one cannot help but envy.  Even the oldest, who is first to display the facial ravages of natural aging-- well, we know she is the fulcrum... especially loved by the photographer, her husband, whose compositional embrace is the 'extra'-- the 'other'-- less visible subject. 

What we don't see, what we supply-- the loves, the children-- the careers and informational details of these women who we implicitly trust-- and maybe one more than the others.  For me I am compelled by the eldest-- her womanly soul, her maternal-ness.  She is slightly ahead of me in years, has outwardly changed herself the least (even her hair is quite the same)-- she who in her graceful aging is deeply long-loved by her husband, to the extent that the gestalt of the sisters became part of their intimacy.  

A near-fifty-year marriage is like a sort of sea.  The extremes-- the shifts, the rhythms and constant motion-- the storms and dramas, thrashings, drownings, and then the future goes on with or without.  I never managed to log enough in either of mine to complete a journey; they were rather like crossings or explorations.  A little landlocked and seasick, I disembarked before they fully revealed. Contemplating the Brown sisters, the rich chronology of lives, I feel a bit remiss.  It's not exactly regret, but like my baby son sensing the lost sock in his underdeveloped intellect, you are not exactly sure but something seems to be missing.  

More than anything, ironically, it is the unseen which I 'see'-- the omnipresent photographer who understood the joys and the tiny sorrows, through all the ages he had known.  And for knowing-- for recognizing love, for somehow creating a future out of the present, and documenting a past which touches us all.  God protect the Brown sisters, I say to myself almost selfishly.  It is something to believe in-- something solid and real, bright and fading, old and new.  

I doubt my son would remember the tiny sock, if I showed it to him... nor would he have the sentimental response, if I tried to impart the narrative, or the patience to listen.  Sometimes I think he has taken a practical reverse life-lesson from me who has spent an inordinate amount of time searching for lost things, for sensing the missing even before it disappears. But maybe that is a clue to our lives-- that we must love what we have, here in the present-- even the small things, before they are washed away by the seas of life which will have their way with us all, in the end.

Camera Obscura

When my adorable son was barely three years old, he came upon his first 'little person' on line with us at the supermarket.  After thoughtfully scrutinizing her, he cried out… 'Look, Mom! It's a girl just turning into a lady!' Of course it is difficult for young children to comprehend the phases of life-- the concept that they are going to grow up, that their own parents and Grandparents were once young-- that this is a slow, gradual, continuous process.

Now that I am entering a late phase of life,  I again find it hard to grasp the lessons of time, to accept the harsh losses and assimilate the regrets of my peers who seem oddly unprepared, despite decades of identical 24-hour daily allotments, for their senior years.  Recently I saw my Dad cross over-- cross, with all its meanings, is the appropriate word, because he wore a tough and cantankerous skin over his purple hero's heart, even in death.

My mother, on the other hand, has deteriorated slowly and with a kind of demented grace.  She sits in a chair like a soft throne, with her thinning white hair pulled up in a tight knot, her famous cheekbones still defining her profile, her skin still soft but papery.  It is her eyes that tell the story-- watery, unfocused-- occasionally expressive but progressively less and less present.  Where are you, Mom-- in some honeymoon dream with your handsome decorated lover lifting you over some threshold, standing above the falls with the deafening roar of water rushing you off into another undertow of memory? It is difficult to know whether the sadness I read into her increasingly blank stare is hers or my own.

From her chairside, I facetime my son-- her favorite grandchild, the nurse-companion assures me-- and the three generations share a moment.  He is quite a man now; time has done its work here, too.  I meet his old school friends on the street and some of them have begun to lose their hair and take on that look of premature disappointment men in their 30's and 40's often wear.  The babies I held so recently are adults now-- the young couples I knew are turning grey, losing their religion.  Witnessing these passages is the way I process my own.  I am relatively unchanged, consistent.  I have different expectations.  I gave up on my vow to own a limestone townhouse on East 70th Street; I no longer want one.  I treasure my things, my books---  thank the angels I can still play bass and write songs and poetry.   I ask for little else-- can survive on the barest minimum in this city where I feel rich without money.  Yes, I was fortunate enough to have had the foresight to invest in an apartment when they were oh-so-cheap… exchanged vacations, movies, restaurants-- for a home, 'ant' that I was, having left my 'grasshopper' husband in the UK with the rest.

When I moved into my building it felt palatial.  We'd come from a studio apartment; my son endured his kindergarten friends remarking he slept in a closet; he did.  The head of our new coop was this elegant, intelligent woman who turned out to have been the fashion editor of the New York Times at a time when this was culturally important.  Her husband was a world-renowned Swedish photographer whose fashion photos were spectacularly smart and iconic.  Since I had a Swedish boyfriend, our kinship was sealed.  They took me under their wing, so to speak.  I adored them.  We shared evenings and ideas.  They were perennial attendees at my all-night musical Thanksgivings, and were treasured and wonderful guests.  Gus, the photographer-- also shared my passion for music.  He came to my gigs-- even the difficult solo ones-- critiqued my songwriting with brutal honesty and a sharp POV… gave his opinion freely of my friends, their work, etc.  He came to school events and photographed the children.  He'd knock on my door at night when I was home and sort through cds and art books.  He brought me albums and tapes and taught me so much about jazz.  When I visited Sweden, I'd bring him small things… I even photographed his boyhood home-- the apple trees and the stream running through his memory.  He was like the father I never experienced.  His love for his own children was boundless and unconditional, and somehow he realized I'd missed out, and generously shared a paternal affection.  I was proud of him.  His choice of wife-- stellar.  More than anything-- his decisive modus operandi-- as though he knew exactly what he thought and wanted and laid it out there.  This is rare.  True honesty and a point of view to go with it.  He attended coop meetings and harshly criticized injustices.  He supported me in my crusades and shared my sorrows without pity.  As a couple, they were the emotional roof over my head upstairs.

As he got older, he was a little more cantankerous-- scolded my friends at my own table, announced he disliked people to their face… knocked on my door and demanded that I cook him Swedish meatballs, bake him cookies-- insisted on eating on my sofa where he left stains and spilled wine.  Whatever was on my stereo, he would take it off and put on either Bud Powell or Art Tatum or his very favorite, Slim Gaillard.  He liked a bit of humor with his jazz.  He loved women, beauty in all forms… and knew how to convey a message with an image.  During the last year, he began to pocket small things from my apartment.  I caught him in the act once, and he responded, without remorse,  'You don't NEED this.  You don't even notice it!'  It was as though he was aware our time was a little foreshortened, and he needed some souvenirs.  He was becoming greedy of moments as the sand ran down in his hourglass.  I, too.

Last week he passed away.  My grief is disproportionate; after all, I am not even a relative.  To their children, with whom I am not nearly as intimate, I can only express sympathy and condolences.  To his wife, who somehow understands my attachment, well.. I will cherish the future hours we can hopefully spend together, sharing ideas, like two women.  She is the maternal role model I never had; the enduring, amazing wife-now-widow.  I will listen and learn what I can, while she is here and generous with her evenings.

Recently an aging fashion designer stopped me on the street and asked for them.  They were quite the 'it' couple in their day, he always assures me, and generally accompanies this with an anecdote or two.  This time, for some reason, he graphically described the palpable chemical attraction one could sense between them in their prime.  For some of us, imagining people in their 80's and 90's as the Rihanna or Brad Pitt of their era-- well, it takes imagination… but I have learned now… such is time.  These waves crashing onshore at this moment, the surfers riding this crest, the shells and animals and fossils that we find in their shallow temporary graves at the water's edge-- will be less than memory in mere minutes.  All our selfies and photos-- well, they are just digital sand.

The images Gus left behind-- both photographic and realtime-- are etched in my memory.  The photographs are fortunately ingrained in the internet and in books; he has left a hefty legacy and will not be forgotten.  It is his persona that has left a mark on me-- the in-your-face direct line to his mind-- his affection, his humor-- his laugh, not to mention his gorgeous physical presence and unique style even into his 90's-- his personal fashion and his pride, and his compassion-- his unequivocal appreciation for whatever I had made, and the example he set as a father, a husband… and a friend.  I grieve for selfish reasons, as one does.  Last night, in tribute… I reached for my Slim Gaillard… and it had vanished.  Dearest Gus.