Odd-i-sea

Recently I got an email from an old friend-- well, we shared a job-- she replaced me and discovered I was the only 'ear' qualified to comprehend the insanity and challenges required by her daily agenda.  So we had a kind of bond.  This was more than thirty years ago.  I remember I introduced her to a man I knew-- she was the kind of woman anyone loved to date-- fun, smart, well-dressed, just edgy enough to appeal across the spectrum.

But suddenly-- well, she'd changed her life, moved across the country, again... approaching 70, blurting out that she'd messed up-- failed to find her calling, maybe-- that perfect relationship that eludes most of us. It was a moment-- and I am privileged to be on the receiving end because I do see how some of us spend decades following tangents, under the illusion that we are 'in the moment', aligned with some karmic rhythm... maybe in love with another fun loser, deciding yes, we can be a back-up dancer at the age of 40, or a master chef, or a fashion designer.  It's all spread out there, when we are young-- the choices, and we are at the edge of a vast river of time that seems utterly infinite, and some of us just want to inhale the scent of water, sense the passage of time-- watch the clouds reshape, the inevitable miracle of sunset... it goes on.

Bob Dylan at 85 mentioned in a recent interview that 'Time stands still while we move.' Not original-- there are  umpteen lyrics going back millennia but he does have a kind of 'authority'.  What he says seems to matter... it percolates and becomes 'word'. Maybe that's what my friend misses-- a certain  lack of impact.

I met a young woman last week who plays bass-- she has a Spector which undoubtedly cost her more than I've ever paid for an instrument... but I mentioned Lou Reed (Spector endorsements by his musicians) and she had absolutely not a clue. Icon-- cornerstone... absolute blank.  Okay.  She's Korean... but still... is it my bad to expect young musicians to have some classic rock referential? 

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey will undoubtedly introduce a whole virgin generation to the classics... the way Oppenheimer maybe reminded us that horrific world destruction is only a button away. I'm not sure I want to see the new film-- I hate watching bloody recreated battles and heroics and super-heroes.  But I'm the minority.  The Charles Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame caused me to vomit up my dinner at the age of 8.  My son grew up seeing movies like Hostel as date-night fare.  

But what do we expect?  We who studied and read and digested historic literature and the sequences of Kings and empires... now see a generation that values the present above all else.  And supposing they are right-- in terms of physics, and the Time-Stands-Still theory, this is it. And we are infinitesimally unimportant in the universe.  Our lifetime is meaningless.

In my early thirties,  I had that cartoon on my refrigerator-- the one with the well-dressed woman looking at her shopping list and captioned 'Oh my God! I forgot to have children!' When I got home from giving birth to my son, I took it down with irony and a tiny sliver of regret.  And it was only the merest quirk of fate that motherhood happened-- an unrehearsed moment, a rogue sperm, etc. 

Conversely, how many times do I beat myself up for a negative scenario-- if only I'd taken a night off, maybe my daughter would have been born healthy... or obsessing over that woman who fell into a manhole.. if only she'd parked inches away?  It goes on.... we move, while the moment sits there.  Daily choreography presents itself so that we encounter random adventures-- me, just a half hour ago, with my bag of yesterday' bagels... and a homeless man, right there outside the store-- his head on a table, outside in the heat and the wildfire-polluted air... people on the sidewalk wearing masks, and there he was-- sweaty and dirty as though he'd been in a fire himself.  The bagels were clean; he was hungry... it was perfect.

I have many friends of all kinds; some torment themselves daily that nothing they've done was ever enough while some seem to gloat and float in a clueless contingency of confidence.  Some are psychologists-- psychiatrists... who have totally abandoned the concept of compassion. They do not see or hear or fathom that they might be missing the machinery of emotion.  Perhaps that makes them professional.  

So to my friend... I am the quintessence of unprofessional, unclaimed, unacknowledged, unrewarded.  I suppose the rhythm of my life is such that I cannot even make an assessment-- negative or positive.  Aside from regrets about my daughter, some missed opportunities surely-- maybe I expected less.  I've also listened to plenty of stories.  They interest me.  I care.  I have learned that the reasons people choose for their trouble or outcome are not always the essential reasons.  So many failed relationships.  I have strings of ex-boyfriends and non-boyfriends.  When one is in a relationship, other men feel 'safe' around us-- they confide, they open.  There are women in this life-- who change men... it could be the way they feel-- their skin, their scent... it is irresistible. Some men discover this too late.  It's sort of a magic thing... it happens. Few possess these women.  The metaphor of Helen... 

I have no clue what Christopher Nolan will do with Homer. But the metaphors always obsess me. I am not sure about Gen X or Y or Z... their frame of reference seems so limited. It used to amuse us that Jay Leno interviewed people on the street whose knowledge of current events was non-existent.  Now this seems epidemic. But does it matter?  Me, an aging old relic with shabby clothes and way too many books... still unable to assess my own existence beyond the simple math of sharing a bagel with a homeless man. 

Post Post-Partum Post

Walking in East Harlem today, summer Fahrenheit beginning to assert in the city mix, the uptick from air conditioner exhaust... a young mother with one baby in her arms, another at her side tugs at her tank and points toward a bakery.  'Did I tell you to shut your mouth?' and she whacks him-- hard... across his ear... his little face scrunching into a silent wince, tear-tracks clearing a clean line down cheeks stained with a long-day's soot and play-dirt...

Babies are little heat-machines... any woman who's carried inside or outside well appreciates the relief a stroller allows, cumbersome as they can be on public transportation.  And children are simply overwhelming-- especially when echoes of your old carefree life creep in like passing car-music-- some 5-inch heels you crave in a store-window... your baby-daddy taking just a little more time to pick up the Happy Meals...  and all new mothers know the shock of cataclysmic hormonal changes--  swimming in estrogen as you are during pregnancy, small issues ride over you like candy... but suddenly you are sweaty and cranky and exhausted and your front door feels like a prison gate.

I noticed this week Alanis Morissette doing the talk-show rounds-- maybe some promo for a coming album... proudly pregnant and bringing her rock-star confessions about post-natal depression.  The Queen of TMI whose well-produced radio-ready emotional cries occupied a generous portion of the 90's airwaves... now the spokeswoman of depressed new mothers.  Who else--Cardi B?  Brooke Shields a few years back?  The society of botoxed, fashion-elitist, nannied, chauffeured, and all-around privileged-- now earning talk-show and book-income as conflicted mothers.   Somehow this high-profile whining doesn't move me.  Even Khloe Kardashian, publicly humiliated by the father of her new baby-- deals with billionaire motherhood.  I salute you, Khloe-- victim of the same insulting behavior so many of us have passed through.  You are a role model.   But my hot friend today with the two babies and God-knows how many at home has no glam squad.  What she does have is food stamps and a place to live in the Projects, unlike some.  What she does not have is help.  Tutelage.  Someone to listen to her. NEI (Not Enough Information).

When I had my son I was already 36.  My career had taken a positive turn-- my record was doing well in the UK-- I had a huge deal on the table-- and then I found myself pregnant-- unplanned, unwarned... with a young husband who pleaded and begged and promised to become the Mister Mom every working woman dreams about.  Okay.  I toured-- I performed-- I wrote, I signed deals, made promises.  The baby came-- my husband, as was his custom, was drinking heavily.  The doctor threw him out of the delivery room and I met my son for the first time as I was to live most of his childhood-- alone.

Okay... many, many dramatic episodes as only the finest British actors can play them... in and out, drunk and sober, on his knees, on planes, on telephones-- with and without flowers... and I found myself back in New York with a baby-- the ultimate heaven-blessed gift of nature-- a healthy, perfect, adorable little boy-- and a heart-splitting slam of psychological claustrophobia that felt like a perpetual car-crash.  Unwilling to share with anyone this sense of abandonment-- failure-- inverted joy, whatever... I wandered the streets of my neighborhood at night with my stroller-- up and down-- in and out of 24-hour stores with my little sleeping bundle... trying to walk myself into exhaustion... but when I returned home, I couldn't lie down--- I couldn't listen to records-- it was too memory-soaked-- or even watch television-- it was like being assaulted.  Reading was impossible-- when it rained I'd talk on the telephone, or move us up to the laundry room where I'd count headlights on the wet asphalt outside and wish I was a passenger.

One night I was so exhausted I was maybe hallucinating, worrying I'd neglect some crucial baby-caring task-- and I wheeled us into a Mental Health clinic.  I need to see someone, I said.  The intake process was weeks.  I am not going to make three weeks, I announced, and while a nurse carefully lifted the baby into competent arms, they sent me upstairs to the facility director who told me he thought my thyroid was completely out of whack.  The diagnosis-- an educated stab in the dark and a kind of pretext-- gave me a little relief... and just confessing to this stereotypical Psychiatric Neurobiologist with a bowtie and a theory... was therapeutic.

What they did not diagnose then was this postpartum depression or postnatal or whatever biological or emotional havoc these things wreak on women.  Coupled with my missing husband and a disintegrating marriage, an abrupt change of lifestyle-- I was used to playing in clubs, hanging out until dawn--- wilding and feeling like an uncaged animal.  Or after breakups-- tough days--- you'd go out to a bar, listen to other people's issues, drink surrounded by good music and flirt a little with a cute bartender who reassured you the future was going to be so much better than the present.

I survived... no meds, no prescriptions--- a few sessions with a therapist while a nice intern played with the baby through a glass door... and of course I never had the urge to hurt my child... I loved him all the more, never drank, never left him even for a second-- I nursed my own wounds and failures into a scar of motherly fortitude and managed somehow, through free clinics, $1 bags of doughnuts, and Goodwill stores, to get through the challenges of babyhood.  Yes, Alanis.  No herbs or oils or mountain retreats.

So I am less sympathetic to the whining celebrities on television-- with their perfect makeup and clothing, looking like cover plates and talking about their tough life... while a gorgeous husband, a team of nannies and assistants waits at home with a clean bathroom, freshly washed crib linens and perfectly mashed organic baby food.  Walls of sympathy for Beyonce and Cardi B-- more than I earn in a year for an appearance to raise awareness of this syndrome.  Did my mother and grandmother not suffer?  Surely this is not new--- what is new are the meds and treatments which earn some people money.  The public whining-- the celebrity confessionality which fuels Instagram and social media like nothing else.  Tiny tragedies-- nothing bloody or gory... just infidelities, rehabs, breakdowns-- that kind of thing.  A little postpartum retrospective, to give some credibility to the perfect image.

Motherhood is hard; single parenthood is long and relentless.  Even when you are sick, there is no relief.  And when something wonderful happens, there is no one who claps their hands with you.  I was a mature woman.  I had no money, nor public assistance, but I had some experience.  For these young unprepared girls without role models there is little comfort.  They have traded their girlhood and their freedom for a dream of family that mostly deteriorates with time.  Every day we hear about abandoned children, hurt and abused children.  I try to understand the sorrows of the mothers-- not to condemn them.  There is help, but not really.  You are in this or you are not.  God save the society that disallows abortions and thereby fails to protect children from suffering future neglect.  I know very few women who have not made these difficult choices, in favor of a life.

It is Pride weekend.  When my baby was young, a gay couple moved in down the hall from me.  They were very handsome and very much in love but withering and sick with AIDS.  They were also so kind and loving... they loved the baby so much and came often in their pajamas just to hold him.  One died and the other threw himself off the balcony; I missed seeing this by seconds... but I will remember them especially on Sunday... two men who somehow empathically understood my mothery loneliness-- they embraced me with the baby and the future they would never have, shunned by their families, but enviably with one another in an eternal bond... they healed me like nothing else, and I cared for them as I could, in vain.  I cannot write this song... and my son is a grown man now.  Even the memory of my sadness has a kind of nostalgic sweetness that never shows in those baby photos.  And unlike the little boy who was slapped today, my son never had to worry that it was his fault... that he was wrong... in any way... because he was just so 'right'... and that is a blessing.  Amen.

Walkin' Blues

I took one of those epic late-afternoon city walks with my niece last week… from the new Whitney Museum all the way up to East Harlem.  She observed that wherever she goes, there is inevitably someone crying on the street.  I'd definitely seen some criers at the Whitney-- really, really sad versions of performance art, as if the vibrant exhibitions, the architectural spectacle and the hoards of tourists and hipsters weren't enough.  We found ourselves dodging these traveling little passion-plays and mimes who seriously cheapened the art.  I pitied them-- they were embarrassing, amateurish and annoying.  In a city like New York, where the blocks are dense with every kind of entertainment and scam artist, the last thing anyone wants is to bring this carnival inside.

Outside there are the girls and their cell-phones-- gesticulating, yelling… boyfriend drama… couples coming together and coming apart… hungry, cranky babies… the Greek-drama variety of street beggars who screw up their face into a bawl to make us all dig deeper into our pockets.   Something just incriminating and wrong about this; no one of us really wants to 'wear' our tragedies in public.  Crying is an intimate and private privilege.  It has a reason, a story-- an aura.  On the street there is way too much competition.

My niece's current issues are with her family-- the difficult declaration of independence.  I know this family: they are, like so many others, way too invested in emotional incest-- in relying on their own members for acknowledgement and the American family version of 'happiness'.  She is sensitive and struggling and she cries.  She wants to break free, but she is not quite ready.  Crying is a symptom of metamorphosis from one stage to the next.  On the street, criers are hyper-aware of one another, the way addicts and users recognize each other.  For me, it can be contagious.  I am way softer than I would like and any kind of sorrow usually elicits my sympathy.

Our walk evolved from practical transportation into a sort of journey where you feel swept into something larger, and you can't stop.  We are different people-- her landmarks were very different from mine.  But one thing we had in common-- neither of us could bear to turn down the parade of panhandlers.  The stories-- the props-- people hadn't eaten in weeks, newly-released prisoners, veterans, fathers of handicapped children-- a woman with a lump on her face that looked like she'd sewn a golf ball into her  cheek--she needed $7,000 to have it removed and she was a mere $1,200 from her goal.  I have often to remind myself that these people are choosing to be beggars… and feel more sympathy for the couples kissing and separating at the train station-- for my friend whose business partner was getting on a plane after a casual goodbye, even though they'd been lovers and her heart was no doubt breaking a little.  I thought about another friend who refuses to hear about illness, funerals-- he seems so hard, so insulated and unfeeling-- but maybe he is stretched so thin, is so brittle, so fragile, that anything will set him off, and he must step over the criers and avoid the beggars to keep himself from melting.

When I was growing up, we had a black housekeeper.  She came most days to clean, to do laundry.  She was generous and large-spirited.  She sang while she worked and brought little packs of M&Ms everyday.  My Mom left her $40 a week underneath the kitchen radio.  She called me funny nicknames and she loved me like one of her children.  I often sneaked downtown to her 'hood where there were no white people… where there was no air conditioning but plenty of shared kool-aid and lemonade.  She sang in her church choir and sang Odetta and Etta and Aretha while she ironed.  The songs made her cry.  When I was older I played her my records and she listened and we sang along, together.  She knew what was good, and she knew exactly who she was and where she was going.  I trusted her; In a way I loved her more than my own mother.  She was safe, she was strong, she was pure and clear and had answers.  I followed her to church a few times-- the only white face in the congregation, and she introduced me as her child.  People sang and cried and testified.  She played me my first B. B. King record, and it was like musical crying.  The Blues, she explained.  I couldn't really grasp it-- blue was a color,  it was black people's music (she called herself a Negro).  But it was so good.

I often feel that my sense of being loved and accepted as a child was born in that church; that somehow the music was the blood and the mortar and the glue.  My family was too emotionally tangled to be able to let go-- they were figuring out how to be a family, but seemed always to be reading someone else's instructions.  I shared this with my niece, who is too preoccupied with her issues to really listen.  I thought it might help because really, we grow up and find that what we need is out in the world, and what we need to become is outside our little fucked-up family circle-- even when they resent and hate you for this… and the antidote is not in substances or a bottle or pharmaceutical, or psychiatric-- but in whatever we embrace and become.

When I got home I learned B.B. King had passed away, maybe even while I was walking and listening and counting the criers, and hearing that first vinyl in my head….'When I wake up Early in the morning /Blues and Troubles all around my bed'... and the sound of that guitar like nothing I had ever heard before then, and him calling someone Baby, with the record noise.  Young B.B. with his pompadour on the record cover, 'wondering what is gonna become of me'…

And what 'becomes' is that all these people have passed-- my housekeeper, the singers in her church-- Odetta, B.B. and the rest.  But what a rich life they had, some of them, with their sorrows and blues and rough nights.  The criers on the street and in their rooms must remember that their end comes all too soon, and growing up and leaving is painful. We all weep and mourn in our own way-- we are all criers-- but more important, we must try to reach out and listen and live, and leave when we must, and love the ones we're with, but not too much... and care, but not too much… and get up and start walking some days when we're not sure where we're going-- just walk out that door and see, really see the landmarks on the way, and brush ourselves off and sing.