11 A

Since the weekend I've been carrying dread like an unborn child. Literally... the quasi-physical heaviness of a pregnancy, without the joy, without the future. The relentless bad news, the threats to human freedoms and everyday security. It's overwhelming.

I watched a kind of forum on human empathy-- and identified as one of those people who prioritizes others-- known popularly as a 'people pleaser' which is not really a positive thing.  We do no good either for ourselves or others, yet it's built-in-- layered-- a little like a second heart which doesn't serve or beat, but simply aches.  There is no surgery for this; I suppose a high dosage of meds would temper it, but my friends know overstrict emotional self-parenting makes me reluctant to even use aspirin.  

My Irish nanny told me at the age of four not to tell my parents but I was a natural-born Catholic.  I asked her all kinds of questions about things, and I was perpetually preoccupied with the reviving of dead insects, plants, birds... tearing up in Church at the hymns and prayers, obsessed with but unable to fully fathom the Jesus story.  I watched magicians pull rabbits and living things from boxes... the personal metaphor of my personal hat somehow implies this secret belief that something mystical is hidden there-- that life is not all objective-- music, most of all, maybe. 

So while we cannot all be heroes, we can perhaps be conjurors... we can be fixers or healers.  Watching a concert at the Central Park bandshell Tuesday evening I realized how completely altered I was with each piece-- as though I physically melted into the cosmic architecture... I could almost sense the composer and his vision.  To be a musician is such a blessed thing... how I miss the gigs of old. Even those sweaty crowded dive bars-- to be part of the crowd-shaping thing... it was a blessing. 

And the actual heroes... well, they are passing with acceleration. Rick Derringer... we all disagreed with his politics in the end, but I had ties to him through various people I worked with.  One night he came into one of those east village bars in the days when cabaret laws enforced a three-people-only-rule onstage.  We were  a well-working trio... Rick, to participate, sat on a barstool across from the bandstand, plugged in and played like a phantom genius inhabiting our amplifiers.  I tried to remember that, and to honor his passing.

There are times when politics must take a back seat.  The irony of that plane crash yesterday-- in a second we recognize tragedy... the enormity and horror of a scene like this... the human grief... the families... and yet daily we hear news of missiles and war, and equally devastating destruction-- death and hideous injuries... and we digest this. What is wrong with us?  How have we grown immune to the architecture of suffering on a large scale?  Because it doesn't affect our neighborhood?  

I read and I read.  I watch way too much television.  I have friends who tell me they don't watch news... it's too terrible.  I cannot help feeling this responsibility-- just to know, and yet I cannot help. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading books... they are both comforting and alarming... the past has taught this generation little; we seem to be repeating the same mistakes in different clothing. There is no DNA to identify a situation, but the parallels are disturbing.  The suppression of freedom-- the support of freedom to be racist and uncompassionate... what is our human responsibility? If a nation decides to attack another, it's a hideous barbaric choice. But still there are good people on both sides; and one cannot condone anti-semitism because the actions of Israel are aggressive and inhumane.  No religions teach this kind of thing. 

People like me, my psychiatrist friend tells me, get cancer.  They suffer and cannot exorcize what compels them to live inside this chronic empathic cloud. If it's not one thing, it's another.  I worry.  My son is my absolute source of light.  He, fortunately, has not inherited my emotional impairment.  He is smart and forward-thinking and extremely functional. Hats off to him, truly.

Yesterday I tried a local pharmacy-- sick of the lines and the monopoly of these huge drugstore chains and the whole profitable medical industry. It is right by a local mosque; the owner is Muslim and so kind.  When he walked from behind the counter, I saw he was a huge man, with a terrible disability... unidentifiable. I immediately invented this narrative that he'd been somehow beaten and tortured in a torn country and survived with a twisted architecture.  Painful to see him walk... and yet he was happy and smiling and grateful for my tiny business.  When I got home I realized my prescription was nearly at expiration.  I will not complain. I know this is wrong-- I'll simply wait and get a refill eventually. This is medicine; this is a business... and yet for me it is not.  I have adopted the pharmacist into my massive family of those for whom I worry.  

11A.  I hate flying... the slightest turbulence gives me terrible anxiety.  In 1988 I took Pan Am flight 103 the night before that horrific crash; I felt like a survivor in a way.  But I cannot imagine processing the miracle of walking away from a wreck like yesterday's. One man.  Defying a lethal diagnosis... dodging an executioner's bullets.  It's unfathomable... the burden of being that person, if you're someone like me-- how to process, how to return a massive 'favor'... the one home that survived the fires in a neighborhood destroyed... the one standing tree after a tornado. Nothing compares.  Inexplicable. 

Many of my friends have no religious beliefs.  They take a scientific perspective on death as a full biological stop. How does one explain the rapture of music?  I don't know. The thousands of movies that interpret and explore an afterlife-- angels and heaven and ghostly hauntings.  Like a hunting dog, I have often picked up the scent of previous lives, the déjà-vu.  I wonder if the passenger in 11A sensed these things.. how his life will change.  Already real estate brokers are asking a premium for 11A apartments.  People are booking the seat first... they could charge a premium.  

I'm hoping somehow to unburden myself of this weight.  Not hopeful because the news is cumulative;  problems outweigh solutions. Sicknesses far outnumber cures... and will continue. Death will relentlessly equate births... one cannot exist without the other, really... sort of a paradox.  We can only hope that each of us provides a little relief to someone-- sharing a sandwich, proverbially. It's contagious, kindness... really the only thing we can control-- our personal space, the way we manage it. A different kind of pandemic... maybe it's my ingrained vague version of Catholic belief... and the importance of mercy-- to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc.  And maybe the victims of the plane crash were taken to heaven... but 11A was given a mission.  We are all, those here reading-- given a daily second chance.  Trying to decipher mine, today. 

Memorial Eurythmics

I attended a zoom memorial tonight for the inimitable Buddy Fox, a true stalwart of the NewYork music scene and a friend and supporter for many years.  It got me thinking-- reminiscing, in the true spirit of memorial services-- afterward watching YouTube footage of various events he produced and organized with the greatest enthusiasm and spirit.  These people who dedicate themselves to the arts for sheer passion are of a dying breed. 

It occurred to me on Thursday that the death of John Lennon, 42 years ago, was a sort of wake-up call for my generation.  Like the assassination of JFK, we all remember where we were.  In 1963 I was a little young to sense the generational significance... but in 1980, the shooting at the Dakota was like a massive loss of innocence. 

Of course, the pre-internet spread of news was slower and the moment of apprehension maybe more memorable.  I was at my job in a highbrow art gallery and of all people my mother called to tell me the news, knowing I'd be devastated.  At the time I worked in an Upper East Side townhouse and took the call in the downstairs kitchen-- on a black rotary wall-phone. The kitchen was visible from the street-- it was a huge vintage 1940's/50's room with the classic red and white vinyl floor-tile and antique, rarely used appliances.  It was like a movie set, and several film directors rented the house out for shoots.  I remember the future Mrs. Spielberg did a romantic comedy there; although they paid for the downstairs rooms, I was allowed to keep working, and I somehow bonded with the actress. She had a nude scene and sat with me on a daybed, between takes, shivering and wrapped in a blanket while we drank coffee.  They also borrowed my old Armstrong silver school flute for a scene... I remembered this all these years later, because it happened close to the time of Lennon's death. 

On that December afternoon I was first disbelieving then inconsolable when my mother phoned; she was still beautiful then, and sympathetic.  Surely I had not yet broken her heart and become a full-time bassist in LES clubs. She knew I'd come across John many times-- in the club he supported, in his home where I visited his neighbors.  We in the city took his presence for granted.  Yes, there were photographers on Central Park West and 72nd Street but for the most part he lived like any New Yorker-- shopping, walking, eating out, etc.  People gave him his freedom from celebrity.  New York was like that in former days.  On December 8, 1980, the news spread quickly-- not instantly like today-- and people began to gather in dazed grief outside the Lennons' home. It was the saddest day in the city... and there we were at the epicenter of a generational wound. 

It occurred to me today that the sorrow of that killing may have had something to do with my commitment to music-- as though one could somehow remedy a tragedy by following a path. I moved shortly thereafter into a loft apartment in a converted factory building... and I felt forever changed, redirected;  it had been a kind of coming-of-age.  The image of that vintage kitchen in the townhouse on 92nd Street (where I met people like Claus von Bulow and Gregory Peck) is forever linked to the sad news.  Time-stamped.

My son and I laughingly confessed to one another that we'd secretly binged on Sex in the City episodes during the pandemic.  I'd shunned this kind of television long before, but I was so homesick for my city during quarantine that I obsessively trolled the Manhattan-Before-1990 site, and watched almost any film with vintage scenes of New York as it was, with the Towers watching over from downtown.  This is the version my son recalls; we spent a year or so of his childhood looking at apartments-- seeking a permanent home, exploring neighborhoods and breathing in the air of old rooms.  We surveyed our home-island from the roof Observatory of the South Tower and sneaked into Windows on the World a few times where I knew a guitar-playing waitress.  

So 9/11 was the second loss of innocence of my life.  My son was only 11, had been to the post-Lennon Dakota for a playdate, but we both felt a sort of cement-bond here, in the tragically sad widowed version of New York.  Things heal, but loss remains like a scar, no matter how many new buildings have changed the skyline and face of the city.  They distract but do not replace.

After the memorial tonight I remembered the also-inimitable Stan Bronstein, who played saxophone in Lennon's New York band, and passed away some years ago.  I was lucky enough to share stages with so many of these fallen heroes of the music scene, many of which were 'orchestrated' by Buddy.

I'm reading World's End by Upton Sinclair.  At the beginning the protagonist, more than 100 years ago, is studying the Dalcroze method of Eurythmics-- an academic and obsolete unique approach to music education.  Thinking back, recalling not just the memorial speeches but the vanished dazzle of the local New York music scene, I feel a little Dalcrozean-- brown-edged vintage, 'on-the-shelf', like a dusty box of souvenirs and old postcards.  I remembered how once I tried to keep up a column where I reviewed $1 cds-- for the surprise, for the back-ended discovery.   There were bins of these-- mostly demos and overlooked efforts, but occasionally I found something-- some gem among the proverbial garbage and flowers.  The shops are gone, for the most part.  Instagram and Tik Tok have their own popularity analytics...  anything can make the statistics today.  

But we are all changed since the Lennon days.  Maybe we were punished for the freedom he was allowed to wander publicly, unprotected.  We were taught some kind of lesson.  But celebrity without instagram, etc... well, it seemed a little more tolerable, a little more human.  One had to earn it.  Not to mention that fame and notoriety were a little more separate... artists were more original and unique... even comedy seemed better.  

As we age, our memories are less accurate; it took a roomful of people to describe the deceased tonight and still we did not do him adequate justice.  Thank goodness most of us can recall the landscape we find in old photos-- and can honor musicians not for what they are but what they were.  Many of them are still here in the city-- the scarred and human version that remains in my mind and heart and will not necessarily rest in peace. 

Telling Time

As a nod to Presidents' Day, I watched a documentary, 'Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment',   courtesy of TCM my greatest distraction platform.  Like many of these pre-digital black and white documentaries, it felt deliberate and important.  At that time there was comparatively little spontaneous footage of official discussions and phone calls. I was mesmerized.  For much of the afternoon I obsessed about Bobby Kennedy… the way he put his little daughter on the phone to Nicholas Katzenbach, the way both of them enjoyed the moment—  from a time when political policy-making seemed groundbreaking and permanent.  Their wise approach to a civil rights problem set a precedent.  Democracy was working; the absurd directives of segregation were being avenged, legally.  

The intimacy with which the negotiating was presented-- well, it was reassuring and human.  Bobby's access to his brother, the president, was direct and personal.  The contrast between his lively breakfast table and the staged, formal interaction of George Wallace and his daughter-- well, it was everything.  After a quick 'shoot', Wallace's little girl was removed by her black housekeeper.  Robert Kennedy had a total of eleven children.  Their chatter was not filtered from the soundtrack behind his conversations.  His compassion and humanity were on display; also the courage and devotion to the founding principles of the Constitution.  It was quiet and effective leadership.  

Watching history being made via a 1960's style phone receiver had its charm, for me, craving more and more any connection with what felt like an era of solidity and trust.  Newspapers reported news... speeches were grammatically correct and archive-worthy.  I was 10 years old when the first Afro-American students  enrolled at the University of Alabama.  Just seven years later I was in college, discussing civil rights, protesting the policies of a Nixon-led administration which was slated to be brought down. 

'Who knows where the time goes,' a lyric from that same era asks? It's difficult for me to pinpoint the small events of the last two years which have felt depopulated of joy.  Mostly deaths, cancellations... forgettable birthdays and Christmases, sorrows.  In the papers, daily articles addressing anxiety, depression; even the pod-popular professor of the Happiness course at Yale has taken a leave.  Time is a bitch, they say; it yaps at my heels.  

'I met an old lover on the street today...' This used to be a sort of nostalgia-evoking occurrence.  Often in the city-- on subway platforms or sidewalks-- we have these intersections, we relive small intimate moments and tiny passions.  Some of these people would be forgotten-- the bartenders, the roadies, the casual one-nighters that for the most part had a certain poetry in my life.  Each encounter added color and depth.  Some of them became long-standing affairs or even a marriage or two.  But today-- I passed what literally was an aged man, who tapped me on the shoulder.  Wiping his eyes, removing his mask, with a couple of proffered hints, I remembered him from so long ago.  I guess it is only by registering the age of our peers that we really take stock of our own.  It was a little shocking. None of the poetry that filled my heart on those other encounters-- just the stark realization that we are old people. Grow old with me, my young husband begged when he proposed, paraphrasing the words of Robert Browning-- not exactly the material of seduction for someone like me who lived in the present tense, but comforting-- reassuring.  How we both surely have grown old; while at the same rate, not together.  

The New Yorker today suggested a great archived short piece by Hannah Arendt on the poet W. H. Auden, born on this day 115 years ago, which quotes one of his lethal poems 'If I Could Tell You'.  Hard to imagine that this was written a mere 23 years before the Kennedy moments I watched.  Nearly sixty years from these moments I read, as Auden observed, 'Time says nothing but I told you so.'  

Most of the figures in the 'Crisis' documentary are long gone. Online today I followed the trajectories of Robert Kennedy's children, all of whom are much past the age of their father when he was killed.  It surely was a fairy-tale but tragedy-suffused family; many of his children have grown to honor their heritage and avenge the 'curse'. It's so easy to find information now-- photos, footage, gossip, letters... What is difficult to find is trust.  We live with many of the same terrible issues, but without the old version of democratic credibility or faith.  I doubt things.  Is that simply age and a kind of sour wisdom?  Things don't seem to have the same weight... we are further than ever from solutions and a compassionate human denominator.  Most of the world was afflicted with the same virus; was there no lesson learned from this?

Besides heroic politicians and leadership, I lament the lack of really good poetry.  Auden, we miss your ilk more than ever.  And your trustworthy, perfect lyric, posthumous as it is, 'If I could tell you I would let you know.'

Twinning

The other night I watched a movie called The Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal and a slew of other vintage actors some of whom are no longer with us.  What held my attention most of all were the getaway scenes-- the driving, the reels of 70's New York City through the car windows-- the storefronts and bank names long deceased-- the PanAm building, the concrete corridors as they had been in the years I grew up.  There was a solidity to New York.  Even the skyscrapers were part of an architectural profile-- they stood out, they raised the skyline, but they were part and parcel.  They spoke 'city'.

In one or two scenes you could see the World Trade towers--- they were maybe not quite complete when the film came out... but this was downtown-- the world of finance and headquarters-- it was like a little island of its own, downtown... they were a symbol of future, of Internationalism.  

I remember so well the building of the Towers.  I'm old enough at this point to even remember the Verrazano bridge construction... but the Towers-- we criticized them, we dissed them... and by the time I finished college they were a fixture.  It was their version of New York that welcomed me after my months in Italy and again after graduation, when I came 'home'. On the bicentennial I celebrated them, not far from the tall ships, and walked from the Seaport to Battery Park, all the way up to Harlem. Just now I remembered I was with a Hungarian professor of philosophy-- an odd date-- but I felt a little patriotic and urban-savvy.  

Most of my 1970's city existence took place on lower floors--- study buildings, libraries, museums, my little ground-level studio, the subways and buses, rock clubs.  I worked in a gallery and was given an office of fairy-tale proportion in a grand townhouse with high ceilings and an arched window that looked out on other historic brownstones and mansions.  I felt like a princess.

In those days we did international business with Letters of Credit-- ancient banking instruments that insured payment upon evidence of shipping a painting or sculpture.  Many of the relevant institutions were headquartered in the Towers-- the shipping company, the financial offices.  I'd take the C train downtown to Cortlandt Street, into the cavernous lobby with a mall's worth of shops, before we had malls in Manhattan. There was a B. Dalton bookstore where I'd browse, a cafe where I'd grab a salad and coffee, and then upstairs to do my banking... into the elevators which clogged my ears. The shipping company was a seedy counter and desks with paperwork... but the bank... it was like a soundproofed heaven-- the window view spectacular.  I was young enough to be allowed to linger... another world there... the quiet, the altitude was like an amusement park thrill.  Like a holiday.  Give me your young and your ambitious... you can work here, we embrace you.

When I travelled and returned,  the sheer height of them beneath the plane was amazing.  The twin thing-- like sentinels.  Not many pairs of things in New York-- yes, the El Dorado, the NYPL library lions... but here they were-- anchoring the island... shapes of things to come.  We trusted them.  They were fortified and record-shattering. They were permanent future.  Years later we began to gig annually in the plaza.  I took my son; we visited the rooftop and held our breath.  My son had a little camera and photographed the Towers.  A fellow musician waitressed at Windows on the World... I occasionally visited her just to cop a view.  

We all adopted these buildings with great affection once we got over the resistance of their newness.  They were spectacles and spectacular.  They were symbols and they housed all kinds of things and people... I hung art there, sat in on meetings, saw gold and jewels in a vault, ate and drank... and mostly just inhaled the magical vista that both miniaturized and amplified my city.  It was like a spell... an architectural holiday.

For 20 years we have watched over and over the unimaginable horror of September 11th; it is compelling and terrifying.  We mourn, we grieve... all our lives changed on that day.  I have spent many pages listing the personal anguishes, describing what it was like standing beside the smoldering wreckage with small children silenced.  We've written novels, stories, songs... poetry.  The city has moved on; a whole generation of adults do not remember life before 9/11. It seems incredible-- the way someone dies in our life and we think we cannot go on... and then we do. 

No matter how many memorials, how many monuments and museums... there is nothing that does justice to the strange magnificence of what was there.  The way even the toughest of us old fucks-- we grew to love this place, these twins of solidity.  It was a vision-- a city's worth of people there, of activity... of breath.  The sealed-off world of prosperity and future which erupted into war... the people-- they brushed by us, shared elevators... and then vanished in the ash.  We breathed their cremated flesh and bone. Punished like some biblical idol-worshippers and sinners?  I still cannot make sense of it... the message, the lesson.. a foreshadowing of some massive apocalypse... the loss of innocence, of trust... ? We will go on, some of us; we will remember, yes, and we are forever changed.  

The Fire Next Time

Living in a city we are accompanied, it seems, by sirens.  There is not an hour that passes when some police or firetruck is not racing to some emergency call, followed too often by an ambulance or EMT vehicle.  If you are a parent-- no matter how old your children are-- this is your first association.  You worry, you pray.  People who have lived in cities during wartime have a deeper relationship with sirens.  After 9/11, we in New York city will never be the same.  For some, a siren may be comforting-- the sound of rescue.  For me, it is like a nerve which wakes.  If you have ever been involved in a fire, you understand its destructive power... the damage, the pain, the devastation... is beyond comprehension.  If you have ever been burned-- or cared for someone who was burned-- the process of treatment and healing, if this is even possible, begins at a threshold of pain most of us cannot imagine... and it escalates from there.  It gives war a new meaning.  And the prospect of nuclear war-- the threat-- seems like a hideous anomaly of humanity and an intellectual distortion of the 'program' of mankind.

The London fire this week brought this horror into graphic consciousness.  Our 20th-century symbols of urban progress-- skyscrapers-- can become dangerous traps of mass destruction, as we have learned.  Personally, I like living where I can climb down a fire escape somewhere... the luxury of a view is something I can bypass and something I will not again afford in this lifetime.  But the projects-- every city has its council flats, low income housing.  You get what you pay for; people accept their assignation.  Some are fortunate and live in great Manhattan neighborhoods with river views which cost them nothing.  I used to envy kids in the projects when I was little-- they had a common playground, a sort of small gated community; everyone seemed to know everyone.  They barbecued, they played radios and boomboxes.  Fathers came home and sat on benches in the summer; kids ran under sprinklers, their grandmas knitted and crocheted and gossiped after dinner.  But these come with a price.  The families have very little voice; if there is one bad egg the kids are a little unprotected.  Things happen, the police treat these communities with tough vigilance and less sympathy.  The maintenance is often sloppy and utilities are under-serviced.  The city or state can be an unresponsive landlord.  These people don't always complain or have the resources to know how to complain.

A friend of mine just confessed he is facing the horrifying prospect of losing his teeth.  How many times, recently, have I run into a musician or any one of my bohemian friends who lives below the economic horizon (most of us!) and lacked the means and medical support to take care of this?  Clinics won't repair beyond the minimum.  They extract.  You are poor-- what does it matter?  I worked at an East Harlem clinic one summer and found the dentist pulled children's permanent teeth because he claimed none of them will follow up a root canal; once their pain is gone, they are gone.  It seemed cruel.  I also saw 10-year-old kids with teeth rotting from sweets and lack of care.  Many of them were illegal immigrants and terrified they would be reported if they saw a doctor or dentist.  So they waited.

The point is, decent medicine has become an economic privilege.  It's not Obamacare, it's the damned insurance companies-- the drugs, the ads, the money.  It's a horrid business and corners are cut everywhere.  People are massively rich from this business; system abuses are everywhere and poor people must accept what they get which is substandard. My friend died of cancer, with maybe standard treatment but such minimal palliative care and very little sympathy from the system.  She had no voice, no lawyers to get her missing family millions of dollars from Johnson and Johnson, no experience or ability or even strength to complain.  As her advocate, it was an exhausting and losing struggle.  We had no access to new, experimental and less cruel treatments.  She suffered and died in agony.

Good countries like Sweden house their lower and middle classes with respect and dignity.  These people are cared for with socialized medicine-- just like their richer neighbors. There are jobs for people; there are resources and people are happy and do not seem bitter and angry.  In cities like New York and London-- the populations are huge and growing.  The gap between rich and poor has become so wide, most of us have fallen in.  Business opportunities are abundant in a city, but poor people are poor consumers.  I haven't bought myself a new anything in so long, I wouldn't know what to do with an extra $100.  I scrimp and save, glean cheap staples from weekly sales, walk among the poor.  I do not get food stamps.  I qualify, but I have issues here. I am a survivor.  I live in a coop I managed to purchase many years ago when this was possible.  No building now would ever allow me to rent or buy.  My income is meager.  I am far below poverty level and yet I survive because I have a brain.  It is incredibly high maintenance to navigate New York on $20 a week but I manage and I continue to chip away at my goals and my work.  I feel privileged. I am no longer a mother and can subsist on rice and coffee without kids complaining.  God help me if my brain goes.  I will become a statistic.

People with large families who struggle do not have the time or energy to deal with so many things.  They forget, they postpone.  Daily urgencies take priority.  Some people forget to put batteries in their  smoke alarms.  The people in Tribeca last week who succumbed to carbon monoxide-- what was their economic profile?  But poor people in projects tend to be treated as children.  They are cared for and managed by the state.  It is all they can do to feed their families and get a little sleep.  They have little control over maintenance and options.  They are victims of the system, and when something goes wrong, they are victims of someone else's poor decision.

Bernie Sanders was shut down.  The business of medicine in the US is so vast I doubt anyone will ever blow it apart.  The epidemic of greed is way larger and way more hideous than the plagues of medieval times.  Illnesses are an income opportunity.  Vaccines are sold in the millions; our television is constantly advertising new costly drugs... they are buzzwords in our children's ears... and months later it is the TV legal teams soliciting users of these drugs for lawsuits.  We are lab rats, we are victims.   As long as the medical professionals follow proscribed 'protocol' however absurd and useless it seems, they cannot be sued.  This is the benchmark of medicine in a country where insurance premiums make private practice nearly impossible for medical students who dream of saving people with good preventive care.  So they prescribe, follow the system.  Even when they know better.  They look the other way.  They need to pay their exorbitant rent.   Their patients are for the most part obedient and become dependent.   Especially the poor whom we see sitting patiently in their medicaid-provided wheelchairs, waiting for buses with reduced-fare passes and piles of medicaid scripts and food stamps which allow them to buy masses of groceries which are not necessarily nutritionally sound, but which allow the supermarkets to sell quantities of product at uber-retail.  They offer their benefit card; they do not price-check.  It is not their fault.  They are under-informed.  Some of them voted for Trump because they do not read real news and nothing seems to change their life anyway.  They live in the moment.  They have food and go home and watch television.  They watch on their phones.

I can't even wrap my brain around this government.  What I do see is that people not only have a constitutional right to be free, to voice their opinions without fear-- but also to safety, to health care-- the same care for everyone.  The same engineering and building standards for everyone.   All lives matter.  Not just rich, celebrity lives but every single one of us.  The London fire called attention to this... and for a week or so, we urban people may consider these things... but then most of us will go on and binge watch our shows, and shop, and complain on Facebook, as we do.

Here I am, the aging lefty liberal, on my tiny digital soapbox offering very little.  But at least I am thinking...  and I walk around the city without a phone.  I look at things and talk to people-- not just my peers and artist and musician friends, but regular people.  Everywhere I see and hear things that upset me-- red flags, injustices, infractions.  If you see something, say something, the subways warn us.  Well, there is a human application of this as well.  Not the shysters and crooks who want your money on the streets, but the hundreds of thousands of good, hardworking victims of the system who maybe need a friend or some help.  One at a time, we can do something, all of us.  Put down your phone and look around.  Some things are inevitable.  But there is right and there is wrong.  There is daily tragedy; but maybe some can be prevented.  At least one life might feel 'mattered'... otherwise we are all victims of this regime of the monied, vassals of the Wall Street culture and the perversion of capitalism.  We can be creative... we can think, we can reach out and speak out, we can revive the concept of personal heroism-- love our less privileged neighbors and remember what it meant to be a real citizen in a free country.  Amen.

Heart-to-Heart

The first boy I ever slept with slipped a hand-made Valentine in my mailbox.  He was kind of an artist and sang in a band…I think he'd been dating someone I knew, so it was a bit of a surprise, but the card was beautiful…had some Adam and Eve imagery, a slight Goth/Edgar Allen Poe vibe.  I knew then and there he 'got' me.  It took some thought, some stealth, some insight and some artistic effort.   It was Romantic.  And it did its job.

I've been to February 14th weddings, parties, gigs-- had theatre dates, candlelit dinners, hotel-room trysts-- baked, cooked, dressed up in sexy lingerie, read poetry and danced.  I've been to the Oak Room, the Rainbow Room, the Top of the Beekman and Cafe des Artistes… but most of all, I've philosophized; it's become a sort of 'day of reckoning' for relationships.  And now that there are considerably more of these days in the past than the future,  I can sift through the red-sand nights and find the ones that stand out.

Maybe my best memory is the striped colored heart I cut out for my baby boy--- just 3 months old, which hung like mistletoe in my tiny studio-apartment kitchen, where he sat in his little plastic basket-chair, watching it with intensity while he made it dance with his tiny feet.  Now he is 26 with surely a reservation at some trendy restaurant and a Tiffany-boxed gift for his lovely girlfriend.  He knows about hearts-- about women and responsibility-- matching iphones and uber accounts.  I doubt he remembers the hand-made paper Valentine which provided entertainment for so many weeks.

The other visual which comes up in my heart-shaped 8-ball tonight is a jazz musician on a bicycle.  We'd had a rocky weathery love affair which left both of us a little bruised and battered.  Many months later I was on my way home after a sweaty gym workout-- sure it was the 14th, but I wasn't having any of the hype and froth… and there he was, with roses and chocolate dipped strawberries, asking for a second chance.  We've gone on with our lives, but that night gave us improvisational healing and closure. Valentine-shaped circle of 5ths.

I've already spoken with several unattached beautiful girlfriends tonight who have stoically joked about their match.com dinner, their anticipation, their disappointing date last night-- about illness, children, our aging parents, our jobs.  I've leafed through archived poems and found a few lines which still resonate (Have we not all struggled with buttons,/ slipped an outgrown dream over our heads/to enter someone else’s body/with a rose?).  Funny how I vaguely recall the poetry but not necessarily the man who inspired it.

At this point it is maybe a day to show love less discriminately, the way we were forced as children to give a Valentine to every single classmate, however creepy.  We can all use this lesson, and it never fails to remind us of the old mathematical adage about the love we make being equal to the love we take.  But this is really no longer adequate in our world.  Those of us who can, do-- and those of us who can't--well, they sit home and sulk.  My advice?  Buy yourself a rose, if you really need one.

Besides, hearts for me are bloody things.  I grew up with a father who had a display of medals-- several Bronze and Silver Crosses and purple hearts to commemorate not just his heroic deeds but his painful wounds and deep injuries, and this iconography was very vivid in my childhood.   Or a symbolic reminder of how he was forever changed into the difficult man who raised me to distrust things like flowers and love and men with guitars who all seemed so enchanting and appealing.  And my family?  Deep wounds there which could be glossed over but will not be.  I see photos everywhere of sisters-- heads together, smiling and waving.  My version is rather a composite-- a black and white collage of time-mixing and backward soundtracks, like news clippings of bad deeds which have gone unsolved and unpunished.  At some point there were happy moments, but few pearls remain from the broken shells that wash up on my memory-beach.  My mother-- a different story.  She is exonerated and forgiven for any mistakes; if I had a solid gold heart to spare, it would certainly be hers, whether she recognizes it or not.

Love in the romantic version, as it exists, is probably more honored in its tragic form.  The greatest love stories do not end well, and pain is so much the B-side of any relationship, no matter how passionate and fulfilling.  We poets and dark souls embrace and inhale the smoke from these fires.  This is what remains.  No matter how complete we may be, in the arms of our greatest love.. .the dawn comes, we rise and make coffee, we grow familiar and forget to honor our best moments, and we lose things.  We lose people-- they move on, they love others, we let them go, we prefer someone else-- whatever.  Do we collect hearts? No, but some of us save Valentines and messages.  I still have that Adam-and-Eve card, rumpled and folded as it is.  I still have the striped baby heart, stained and tattered, loved as maybe no other paper heart I have ever made, and there have been many hundreds.

In my email today was a message from an old love-- a song-- so nostalgic and romantic-- so perfect and musical and sad…. my February 14th closure.  How lucky or loved I am,  or have been,  or was.  Tomorrow will be the 15th.   Is it not all really the same?