Moon Mullings

On the suggestion of a friend last night, I watched the PBS documentary Chasing the Moon, released in 2019, already a time-warp away. Nothing more metaphorically and physically integrated into the successive generations of my lifetime than our lunar companion-- sister, confidante,  constant ineluctable celestial shadow. From crib gyms and baby mobiles to nursery rhymes and Good Night Moon, essential to our visual and oral origin-architecture. 

Archival footage from the documentary shows the nostalgic, mostly black-and-white world of my childhood... the deceptively innocent 1950's and the ensuing politicization of the solar system.  I well recall getting herded in elementary school into the concrete basement cafeteria where a mounted old TV set showed us the first manned American space launch-- part of a desperate and sometimes rushed massively costly program in response to the prior Russian 'one-up' success.

The seven initial astronauts were heroes.  As much as I obsessed over my Yankees baseball cards, I knew each of the Mercury men like uncles. I knew their wives' faces, envied their children's proximity... admired their casual humor and calm demeanor in the face of dangerous missions.  Celebrities.  I had just turned nine when I witnessed John Glenn's parade in the city.  As opposed to the Knicks' recent event, real paper tape rained down on a massive crowd twice the size of the security-limited NBA celebration. American flags were omnipresent; it was historic and iconic and yes-- media black-and-white. 

Space exploration was a kind of fantasy fulfillment. Every sighted child on this earth grew up looking at the sky and dreaming about the planets and stars. Our parents bought us primitive telescopes. Actual interaction-- to escape our mortal environment here, seemed impossibly imaginable.  And here we see the original witnesses... with their instamatic cameras and binoculars, watching history in real time with palpable excitement. We, the 21st century TV streamers, we witness the cameos and footage of JFK addressing the nation with young enthusiasm and courage, with ideas and ambition.  And the old acclaimed journalists-- Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, bringing their personal brand of poetry into the language of broadcasting.  We remember their words like secular sermons. Oratory. 

In 1969 I spent a few high-school months in rural Mexico, sponsored by the Experiment in International Living. On July 20 my little village congregated outside a local store which somehow had harnessed antenna technology and a TV set.  I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on a blurry screen walking on what the local Veracruz population called el conejo en la luna.  It seemed, like many things that summer, unreal. I was embarrassed to see the flag planted as though the universal ineluctable was being staked as American.  

It always baffled me that exploration of landscapes and monuments which pre-existed man by millennia were 'staked'.  Why was discovery processed as possession?  All of these real estate sales and transfers... whose land is this anyway? Air rights?  Everything parceled out for profit.  It seems wrong.  The moon-- a competitive destination in the space race... what will happen next?  A Trump-site? A lunar Mar-a-Lago?  Does naming the Gulf of Mexico make it so? Is it not just a reference?  $10 from every American pocket, they estimated, back in the 1960's... and somehow it belonged to us.

There it was... my lovely moon-- the small hole in the sky or the goddess and magical orb that followed me from the city to our Cape Cod summer rental, who never left me except for a monthly curtain call, who patiently watched outside my bedroom window while I slept, cried, read books, did homework, painted pictures... who listened in utter silence as we sang or complained or paddled canoes up New England rivers... featured in maybe half of my songs and poems... mentioned or not.  Now a symbol of political dominance, cold-war competition, currency.  The American dream transferred to outer space... 

Deep cut... to reality... to the billion-pixeled technicolored digital version of contemporary television... the omnipresent phone capture, the cheap over-representation and constant barrage of imagery and news... the mistakes and fakeries, the altered and filtered and air-brushed, auto-tuned interruptions and blasts, the biased and unreliable reporting, the world so overly accessible... and a huge catastrophic mess of information that has separated the haves and the have-nots further than ever before. Our deeply ingrained heart-stocked memories now stored primarily in trillion-triplicate on an iPhone cloud.

As a girl, my father would turn on 'the news'.  Yes, it was a thing-- it was reliable and authoritative.  We trusted journalism.  Other countries were not quite as fortunate as we Americans, my father explained.   The truth was not always shared.  And there were secrets-- scandals,  political manipulations.  But gradually as I age we have become America-the-reality-show. Certain days it's the shit-show for sure.  And not only is it the politicized moon, it is the privatized profit-taking industry which bloats the Musks and Trumps of this era.

And yet, my moon-- the very same one that engendered a massive political and industrial movement, she is there for me, over the Harlem Meer with the soundtrack of the geese and ducks and the clouds moving across her face... she is there in her monthly costume changes... her constant and scheduled disappearances and entrances.  

Heavens forbid they should discover a trove of rare-earth metals beneath her face.  The Sea of Tranquility could become another Strait of Hormuz and the world will be warring for ownership. SpaceX and Blue Origin will certainly have an advantage alongside the new American oligarchs and their investors could bloat into trillionaires and beyond. The coming decade will determine the next installment of this documentary and whether we will witness an astronomical space odyssey or political lunacy.  Either way, I will look out of my city window tonight, between the tenement walls and courtyards, and whisper, with hope and love, Goodnight, Moon. 

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. 

Hospitality 2

While the Thomas Wolfe title and clichéd aphorism says You Can't Go Home Again, I think you can.  It's not the going-- that's kind of a geographical distance, but the coming that's tough.  'I'm going home', one says, bored at a party, annoyed with a social event-- exhaustion, a literal boundary-- a statement.  But 'I'm coming home' is something you say after time-- to your estranged family, to your ex... to your children, after an absence.  'Come home, baby,' your boyfriend says on the telephone at 3 AM and you cry, because it means a reversal of heart-- a reconciliation, a reunion.  You are not just leaving one place for your own apartment... you are coming 'to' someone-- a safe, familiar reality.

When my mother was in the throes of dementia, she'd phone me and beg me to take her home.  Where are you, I'd ask, and she'd reply she was at 'the apartment'.  Of course she was at her lifetime home, but her altered brain no longer recognized this.  Her heart, however, longed for what she had known and lost. It was poignant and heartbreaking for me who longed only for the mother I had known and lost.

Nearly thirty years ago after renting and resettling many times, I bit the bullet and bought an apartment here.  I searched and investigated and looked at hundreds of candidates... calculated what I could manage and picked a place.  It's old-- it's funky, and for me, living in a studio/loft with my son and sundry stragglers, it seemed palatial. I bought into a coop-- with many wonderful people who wrote for the New York Times, composed music, taught art-- creatives who made this like a sort of communal old home.  There was a live-in Super who'd been born here; single-handed, he kept the building immaculate and repaired things with pride.  It was his home. It was our home.  

As time went on and the city economy evolved, this old economical investment became more of a 'find' for people with money. Lured by modest prices, they bought in, renovated, sold.  The building profile began to change-- the old tenants dying off, and the new electing to have doormen and amenities I would never have preferred.  I realize I am not a homeowner but a shareholder in a corporation whose priorities are no longer mine.  People have combined spaces which were not meant to be combined-- violated wall insulation, installed cooling and heating systems whose noisy apparatus sits outside my courtyard windows. Our monthly costs have nearly exceeded my income.

Sell, my friends and neighbors advise me.  Daily I read real-estate emails listing the various moves of celebrities and investors-- from home to home, from design-space to new design-space.  I look-- I read, I wonder how I will survive.  I have given up most luxuries; I cannot even afford summer air-conditioning bills. My plumbing needs replacement; coop laws require professional insurance certification that is more than I can bear.  So many of my friends have left the city. 

I can remember the first nights I spent here-- the strange sounds in the walls and old radiators... will I ever feel 'at home' here, I wondered?  Gradually I spread out-- I built walls of bookshelves for my library... I hung artwork from friends and acquaintances.  My things occupy niches... furniture has been handed down from various sources.  My son has long ago moved out on his own and more than ever, this place has taken on the shape of me and I have morphed into the shape of this home.  It's old and it's packed with interesting things that inspire me.  I walk the halls at night and look at these things. I have records-- cds, cassettes-- guitars, basses, tools for creating... piles of old fabrics for quilts and small stamp and rock collections. It's a sort of home museum.  People come here-- not frequently the way they used to, but occasionally-- and they marvel at what is sort of my own portrait-- or a mirror of what matters to me.  

For true New Yorkers, we are first of our city, then perhaps Americans.  We love our home town-- huge, complicated, dangerous, overcrowded... endlessly fascinating and thrilling.  It's like a dysfunctional relationship I will never give up; I am married to my city, even in its current love affair with money and the corresponding cultural decline.  I watch the World Cup with interest, but it's the Knicks that have my heart.  The home team. 

The note left by the Iranian soccer team-- thanking America with great sarcasm for 'hospitality' (the lack thereof) was upsetting.  I wonder whether they would have been treated this way in New York City; somehow I think not. It was a complicated issue but in the end this is sports, not politics.  Besides, very few national teams are limited to their own countrymen; players come from everywhere.  I read somewhere that of the many sets of brothers participating in the World Cup, only a few played for the same nation. 

Today in the first real demonstration of dramatic summer heat, I walked from Soho to East Harlem. It was a little brutal... but opening my door-- I felt embraced by the sense of 'coming' home. This has become my family-- the walls, the furnishings, the lights and the old floors-- it's as though we've exchanged DNA. I've absorbed the ghosts and the invented narratives of former tenants from more than one hundred years ago.  There is no one waiting here for me, sadly... and yet there is everything else.

So I began tonight thinking about the Venezuelan earthquake victims... I have had nightmares about these kinds of catastrophes forever.  There is nothing more terrifying than a large-scale natural disaster that erases all safety-- all stability, all sense of home-- of life, family... it is unimaginable and so much worse than tragic. The collapse of buildings... the destruction and death and unspeakable horror of the lost and missing. And yet we still make wars and simulate this kind of destruction.

I guess the graphic news images reminded me of the great blessing of my home-- in the heat, in the absence of luxury, to be able to walk uptown and greet people who sit on stoops in summer evenings... the man with the curved back who sleeps on Madison now and is fed by neighbors... the dreadlocked young man who has built his cardboard castle at the entrance to the Q train-- who has amassed a little library and is writing The Great City Novel in minute ink lines in a tiny notebook.  He gets his morning coffee free from Starbucks and sleeps well these days, he tells me. He would not trade his home, he swears on a dog-eared Bible, accepting into his shopping-cart shelf an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which I have no doubt will be well read.

So America has a large birthday coming up.  Here in New York, people are excited about the colossal spectacle of Taylor Swift's wedding.  If one searches history sites, there are several dates for the birth of our city-- typical of its diversity and concurrent narratives.  As for me, I'll catch the fireworks, celebrate as an urban patriot, watch the ships in the harbor.  Somehow after midnight I'll manage the crowded journey back uptown after which I will be (God willing), in the words of Van Morrison, Coming Home.

Hospitality

When I was younger I loved entertaining. I loved cooking a large meal-- baking, spreading out copious plates on a table where my musician and artist-friends would gather on unmatched chairs-- two on a piano bench, a few on Fender or Ampeg amplifiers which provided extra seating and wheeled conveniently.  For the most part I loved my guests, although occasionally I had a few undesirable intruders who drank too much, sloshed red wine on the rugs, stayed too long. Generally everyone seemed to enjoy these evenings-- like a kind of salon, with some guitars inevitably pulled out as inhibitions waned. In later years people commented on the company-- they wanted to know who was coming and who wasn't. And one night some unidentified person walked off with a painting-- took it right off the wall and I assume stuck it under their coat. It was brazen and hurtful and I still have not forgiven whomever it was who violated my hospitality. 

Once I had a baby I limited these evenings to holidays or celebrations and they were considerably less wild, less generous, less hospitable. As my resources shrank and living costs blew up, priorities had to change. I often remember my mother-- her dinner parties for my father's business associates-- how she fussed over hors d'oeuvres and menus-- place settings, silver service and wine choices. By today's standards her dining room was very modest-- the table extensions made it cramped but she persisted-- with her crystal chandelier and the fancy china. There was something positively homey about it all. Today, corporate dinners are most often catered or moved to restaurants. 

I can remember sitting at the top of my family's staircase, eavesdropping... sometimes I'd sneak down and open the hall closet where I could bury my face in the ladies' furs, and try on the men's hats while the grownups chattered on.  The dogs were locked in the alcove, we were sequestered, and the house smelled of perfume for days. There were place-cards, invitations, gifts to amuse us.  There were formal thank-you notes and after-gifts my mother would display on the mantelpiece, all mentioning her stellar and warm hospitality.

The word confused me-- I'd broken my leg and been x-rayed and treated in a local hospital.  Why were people mentioning this sterile awful-smelling place in relation to my mother?  It was also ironic that grandparents ended up in the very place they felt least welcome, and most uncomfortable, with the deceptive name. No one has really ever explained this semantic discrepancy with any finality.  

Most Saturdays I work at an art gallery.  I'm generally there alone and it's a vaguely intimidating place, as many galleries have become in recent years. It's as though they establish an aura of exclusivity and discourage average people from entering-- a social boundary which walls off the often baffling and exorbitant pricing of art-- intentionally intimidating, implying only the gallerists have the key to the mystery of collection and value. I am there alone; I'm careful to welcome people, to dress casually and encourage a positive experience looking at exhibitions. 

By contrast, at home I've become a little reclusive. Maybe since the pandemic I lost the habit of hosting groups of people. I'm more private and less sociable; I'm covetous of my time. Gigs used to give me an opportunity to welcome friends and socialize behind the curtain of music.  Everyone had a good time and then I could go home and be alone while staff cleaned up. Personally I don't use instagram and refrain from posting family and private events on my limited social media. I don't share health status or much besides my work and maybe my son's when he solicits this.  Raising kids, the very idea of solitude became impossible-- a lost luxury some of us rediscovered in older age.  And good fences good neighbors do make.  City dwellers in apartment buildings tend to keep healthy distances from our neighbors. We hear too much, we observe more than we should and we try to ignore over-intimacy and establish boundaries. It's an art-- to be warm and friendly but not invasive.

Last Saturday a woman came into the gallery, pulled up a chair and began a conversation.. She'd somehow been personally stalking me... after a convoluted soliloquy about her lifelong pursuit of the arts, she tried to convince me to let her stay in my home.  But it went on --- it became unsafe and alarming.  There was no 'no'.  There was just more manipulation and pleading.  She would not leave when guests and clients were asking questions... she sat herself in an office and just stayed. In the end I asserted the meanness I reserve for extreme situations. It had gone on for hours and I was literally shaking.

To distance myself from the episode I walked a good five miles uptown.. ended up passing my son's favorite Mexican restaurant where the doors were open, welcoming customers in the early summer weather.  I took out the phone he makes me carry to take a photo to send him and there in the corner of the frame was a young rat-- as nice looking as they come-- sniffing around outside... and then it entered. Slipped in. I wondered whether I should interfere and alert staff but I watched as it casually crawled underneath a table where two well-dressed women were sitting.  It explored their feet.. unobserved... did that hesitation dance rats do... walked itself around the place, and carefully left.  Totally unnoticed... that little rat taking advantage of city hospitality and beyond... or finding the place not suitable-- who knows why it left? 

I couldn't help drawing parallels to some of the characters of my recent weeks-- the stalker in the gallery, those few who have invited themselves into my home... and the places I've been where I felt strange or judged or misplaced. Being on an extreme budget, I do not have air conditioning.  It makes my home less hospitable for sure in the summer. It's a kind of protection. I'll do my socializing off-site. And God-willing I will manage to avoid any seasonal hospital hospitality. 

I Say Goodbye

Okay.  I really wanted to like the final Colbert show.  I had expectations. And to be truthful, I answered the phone a couple of times... took my eyes and ears off the TV. Also I was buoyant and a little emotionally intoxicated from the second Knicks win over the Cavaliers.  Factually, I never loved the show in the first place. I sympathize, he tries... but it's a little like being on a date with that charming handsome intelligent man who cracks jokes over dinner and pours your wine correctly... but you can't wait to get home to that hot crazy guitar player who makes you laugh.

I grew up craning my ears to hear the Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson show from my parents' room.  It was like forbidden fruit. Some nights I'd lie on the floor and listen outside their door.   I loved the way the audience  laughed. When I had my own place and a tiny b/w TV I got to watch from a bed on the floor with my guitar player live-in boyfriend.  It was special. 

When Letterman took over it was perfect. Everything about the show-- his guests, his cynicism, his lists, his skits and bits... was perfect. I loved the band.  Hiram Bullock was to become one of my favorite musicians and friends.  He was smart and cool and brilliant.  

In the last years there is too much competition for late night.  You see the same guests on all networks... no loyalty or feuds or even political differences.  Everyone hates Trump with similar ferocity. Who to pick?  Musical guests no longer compel me; they occupy a very short segment. Hosts take up half the show with their monologues. The audience doesn't count as much. 

Colbert is nice.  He's become something of a hero-- a TV martyr. His cancellation is an eerie foreshadowing of the compromised future of media platforms. What is happening here, etc.? I read today about his grief episode... where he shared with Anderson Cooper that his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was a boy.  Touched me. But he had a mother and many other siblings. Some of them were in the audience tonight and they all seemed wholesome and happy and normal.

Memorial Day is almost upon us.  My father died shortly before his ninety-seventh Memorial Day.  I remembered how I wished he would die in a plane crash.  Not a car accident-- one of his brothers went that way and it was a scandal because he'd disowned his own family. But a plane crash seemed instant and sort of poetic, especially for a former paratrooper who was at home in the sky. It's a terrible guilt but I wanted my mother to have a husband who deserved her kindness and I wanted a 'real' father-- the kind of father maybe Steven Colbert is. 

But the show-- ?  Well, for those of who were hoping for the Pope, we got Paul McCartney.  His facework is marvelously done and he's charming and maybe a NYC legend at the moment... he lives ten blocks away from me.  He once stopped into a club where I was playing on the upper east side... well, he started to, until he was swarmed.  And the Ed Sullivan theatre connection-- the history.  I always actually thought Ed was creepy-- ditto Lawrence Welk, and the children's show hosts-- Soupy Sales, Captain Kangaroo, Ringmaster Claude, even Mr. Rogers (apologies).  But the guests were superb.  No contest.  Immediately recognizable.  Iconic. Variety.  

Maybe there was a  message in the McCartney appearance.  He's eighty-something and promoting his new album.  I wonder if he would have done the show had he no product.  But he reinvents himself.  He goes on. No matter that each reincarnation is that much less stellar than the one before. It's been fifty-six years since the Beatles broke up. Admittedly, Paul played great bass tonight on Hello/Goodbye. Really good.  But for many of us who always preferred Stones to Beatles, our favorite was George.  He was a rebel. Sir Paul is metamorphic and has rounded corners.  You could tell Colbert was thrilled and that was nice.  It made me forget about Jon Batiste whose success baffles me. Everyone wants to be a rockstar--talent or not. Like instant rice-- just stick a bowl and some water in an instagram oven and you have it.

But Colbert will go on. Cancellation is the new black.  It's like death; suddenly people who never cared become your supporters. I actually watched the show tonight-- or some of it.  Isn't that the point of television anyway-- the viewers, the money? I wonder what McCartney was paid and who paid it. Literally a ha'penny in the billion pound bucket of his wealth and continued royalties. Like Bruce they can't stop.  I wonder if the Pope had been on Late Night whether he'd have given the godly finger to the management at CBS... a Fatherly scolding. I'd like to shake the whole damn country. But we're complacent-- we worship mediocrity and elect morons. And we wave goodbye. It's wrong.

Memorial weekend I'll say a prayer for my unhappy misunderstood father. I'll remember all those great guests on the Ed Sullivan show-- Elvis, Little Richard, the 'original' Paul.  The more things multiply the further we are from the originals.  Scroll through the thousands of faces onscreen at any given moment... it's underwhelming. Goodnight, Steven... we'll surely be seeing you. 

Driving Mr. Madden

Throughout my life, my father was something of a mystery to me.  He had very rare moments of joy or lightness, but mostly he brooded-- he paced, he fretted, he lay awake at night.  Of course in the 21st century one would have recognized the classic symptoms of post-war PTSD, but in the 1950's, retired soldiers were expected to re-acclimate to civilian life-- to have families and jobs and be 'normal'.

Whether or not he was CIA, as some of my curious boyfriends were convinced, he'd had a challenging military enlistment punctuated by wounds and acts of great heroism. As many soldiers will attest, the accolades and medals do little to assuage the deep psychological trauma that went mostly unaddressed in those 'happy' days of the 1950's.  Many self-medicated with alcohol or prescriptions, but they were mostly on their own.

At some point in my adulthood, my mother tried to soften the emotional walls I'd created to shield myself from the effects of his moods and disapproval. I was referred to as 'the one who works in bars' with a kind of built-in question as though not even that description was apt. Anyway, during one of his more difficult depressive episodes, she related a story to open my heart  a little. As his enabler and life partner, it was rare that she divulged anything, especially to a daughter whose natural inclinations toward the arts and free speech made her suspect and outside the realm of trust.

During his European service, my father as Captain of the 101st Airborne had a driver. Besides his military field heroics he also participated in some dangerous undercover intelligence missions.  His driver was a black man from Kentucky. They became close. The driver made him promise if he was ever killed in action, my father would go to his family in person and deliver the news.  He did not want his poor mother who could not even read to have one of those terrible telegrams she feared.  So they made a pact.  One day during a risky maneuver, they were attacked and a grenade blew up the jeep.  My father was wounded but not critically; his driver, attempting to shield my father, took the brunt and was instantly killed.

After 9/11 my father was given a hero's license plate which allowed him to park anywhere in the city.  For some reason he seemed a little lightened by this recognition.  While he still experienced periodic deep depressive episodes, he began to attend weekly Old Guard meetings. Being too macho to submit to psychiatric treatment, these meetings were therapeutic.  I guess he was able to pull this story from his memory...  one of the terrible guilts from which he suffered. Most of them were unavoidable-- the consequences of following military orders.  But this was a personal debt he'd left unpaid and it ate at him, decades later.

Why he never attempted to contact the family is a complicated mystery, like most of my father's narrative. For me who goes to great lengths to fulfill even the silliest of promises, this is baffling. But recently it occurred to me that among the landmarks of my life that most irked my father, I married a black man. Perhaps he saw this as a painful reminder and criticism of his personal failure. I don't know; he so rarely gave me a kind look or an embrace; I both feared and hated him.

Last week I read the Count of Monte Cristo... a classic I had written off long ago as a 'boys' book.  It was in my son's teenage library, untouched. And it was fantastically entertaining. Adventure, intrigue, conspiracy, murder, romance... everything one would want.  But most of all it was a story of not just revenge but the resolution of deep irreparable damage from the miscarriage of justice, the way one envious man can turn against another. The unlikely resolution of one man's trauma results in further damage. 

Today as a kind of personal dare I have begun the daunting Divine Comedy. Dante, like Dantès in the Dumas, had been wrongly accused, and the writing of this was a kind of retribution. Whatever the motive, I surely read it in school-- the Longfellow translation which is maybe not the best but I learned today how HWL faced this project just after his beloved wife was killed in a house fire. He, too, was wounded in the inferno. A double dare.  

As we age, the issues of guilt and anxiety weigh on us.  We look back and try to re-interpret our past as though there is a moral there. Sometimes we find understanding-- forgiveness. I tried hard to forgive my father, and have done so, to the extent that I have forgiven myself where he has not. We don't have an enlightened guide like Virgil to guide us through the layers of narrative, to shed light on the good and evil of our present which seems, like worlds past, to have confused the system of punishment and reward.  The life which seemed so easy and simple in the 1950's has become cluttered and confused. One wants to write a guidebook to take us through these times where there are literally millions of digital answers to whatever question we pose. A definitive contemporary Divine Comedy.

In the end, we are each of us responsible for not just ourself, but someone else-- maybe one other person-- fulfilling the promise we made, or explaining, or listening to the man on the bus who looks ill... or the lady on the park bench who stares, day after day, who leaves her lunch untouched on the seat. I am sure that my father, to someone else, was a hero-- was perhaps kind, and understanding. And I hope somehow that driver's mother-- now long dead, certainly, was able to find peace.  After all-- no one's presence could really have relieved the pain of losing her son.  Maybe my father knew that. He was a believer, I think. Maybe at the end, he finally forgave himself.

Bisesquicentennial Harmonies

I'm reading another massive Hungarian novel.  Not sure if it's the Satantango ripple effect or just coincidence, but these novels have engaged me in 2026.  It occurred tonight that I once picked Hungary for a European country report in primary school-- those days when an encyclopedia column and a globe was all that was required. I remember making a topographical map out of colored clays on a piece of plywood... I loved doing these things... but aside from the Magyars and Saint Stephen I recalled little.  My current book-- Celestial Harmonies-- is a sort of tour de force of legend, history, personal recollections and downright lies and fabrications. It's wildly baroque and epic.

Surely these modern authors would be thrilled by their recent election; the literature is suffused with Communist resentment and Nazi guilt. For some reason the city of Budapest itself fascinates me-- the two sides, like yin and yang, separated by water, joined by a bridge. My novel is divided into two parts which fact seems to echo this geography like a metaphor; meanwhile I have much trouble with the names and have no clue of pronunciation.  

In personal experience I have known three Hungarian men-- all of whom were named Imre. One of these was my 'date' for the Bicentennial celebrations in the summer of 1976.  I'd just graduated from college and Imre was a political science PhD candidate.  He had a kind of Brian Jones haircut and wore khaki suits with blue shirts that matched his eyes.  I guess he was cute but I only remember seeing the Tall Ships downtown, and walking from the seaport all the way uptown to Yorkville where he ordered some Hungarian traditional dinner in his native language.

Here I am with this memory which surfaced fifty years later in another American celebratory milestone year in which I curiously find myself steeped in Hungarian lore. There's a tiny irony.  And the fact that this is a year of patriotic guilt as opposed to celebration... American politics and the way our national spirit has been distorted into a Munchian monster resembling Shame more than Pride.  

For those of us who are born and raised with cumulative guilt, this keeps us awake.  Guilt, as they say, is a Motherfucker. I lie awake some nights trying to invent metaphors for the couple-- like shame is the distorted haunting shadow of guilt... the hangover that doesn't clear.  I have friends-- recovered alcoholics and more, who seem married to shame. And yet... there are people like our president who don't seem to understand the meaning of either concept. They golf away their cares while we empaths toss and turn, worry about immigrants and displaced Palestinian children-- wounded Iranian protestors and the starving babies of Sudan. 

King Charles, for one, never looks happy. His expression is appropriately pained and compassionate most of the time-- his known pleasure was rock music-- Status Quo and loud bands that drowned out his sorrows and worries... the guilt that is implicit in anyone so privileged by birth. There is nobility in being a sad king. He has his reasons, too.

The stepsister of guilt and shame is blame.  We empaths tend to point fingers at ourselves... if only I hadn't left my college boyfriend he might not have died... if I'd skipped that Theoretical Shes gig at CBGB's my daughter might have been born healthy. How far can I go? Parents who have lost children in mass shootings and other tragedies manage to find a way to place blame... on the shooter's parents, or the gun companies... on the Camp Mystic administrators.  Lawyers encourage this thinking. It's profitable. Does this make anything better?  Yes for justice, no for misplaced cause and effect.

The shocking killing and suicide by Justin Fairfax last week shook us all. How does one pay for mistakes and crippling guilt or shame or self-hatred?  It's a hideous chain of emotional disturbance and a residual curse for his children. Yesterday's mass shooting by a father in Louisiana is nearly impossible to process. How does one begin with love and arrive at these hideous endpoints? How to minimize damage in these cases? What makes some of us fret and suffer over things we cannot control? I read somewhere that without man, God would be horribly bored.  And without God man would be innocent. Is it fear of judgement that makes us behave or not?  What is compassion and how can one keep it reasonably humanitarian versus uselessly dramatic?

As someone who feels small things disproportionately, I have had to temper my instincts with a kind of rationale-- hiding parental worry and panic, blinking back tears on the subway and streets for struggling unfortunates. Does empathy help? If one is a physical therapist-- yes, or as a musician, executing an ensemble vision...  But not always.  We get in our own way, we suffer and damage ourselves and others. I recognize and adore my friends who love too much, too easily, who fall on their proverbial face time and again and end up as victims... emptying pockets for undeserving predators we don't always recognize. Manipulative panhandlers park themselves outside posh restaurants to try to extort these feelings. It's painful but one must draw a boundary.

Hungary is among the landlocked countries... I think of these as having little relief, somehow... nowhere to breathe. The 2026 celebratory year creates a kind of memory arc for those of us who recall 1976.  I wonder what happened to my friend Imre who walked the city with me in his suit-- whether he returned to Budapest and worked for change in a new generation which could perhaps forget their former German alliance. Here... what a different post-Watergate America we walked-- hopeful enough to elect Jimmy Carter who stood for decency and humanity.  I was old enough to have my young guilt and shames but Vietnam had finished... the guilty president resigned. I had none of the dreadful national guilt and shame I feel now especially when I leave the country. Lost integrity, trust... and where is the blame now? Not a question of nostalgia, but future.  It took the Hungarians a long time to effect change, but they managed. On the 4th of July, I imagine all those who voted for the current president standing up and raising their guilty hand in admission.  Then I will celebrate.