Neither Nor'easter

My father, after a 1960's weekend-long winter Nor'easter, checked himself into a psych facility for a considerable stay. Coming from a family who only disclosed good news, I never quite knew whether it was alcohol, classic depression or business issues with some military PTSD in the mix. I remember he was essentially glued to the sofa in our windowed porch room with the snow piling on the jalousie glass slats insulating like soft white feathers. Football on the black-and-white set, an ice bucket and a bottle of Johnny Walker on the end-table, financial newspapers spread like a blanket... 'In my White room with black curtains... goodbye windows, tired starlings...' lyrics swarm my head when I think of that long weekend.  

Two-plus days of relentless rain in late September New York revived a little cancel culture. It was enough to saturate the glue which holds together the fragile pieces of my generation's aging psyche, and cause a bit of brain-melt, a bit of panic for some.  'You up?' I saw several times in my messaging app... but I didn't dare reply lest the sound of my own voice betray my isolation-- the echo of solitude.

The social media of my peers is a little sad. It ranges from 'those who do protest too much' i.e. happy photos of family events and excursions and food...  to lengthy detailed descriptions of medical nightmares with selfies from hospital beds and requests for aid.  Then there are the chronic daily historians who post memorials to the ever-growing population of the talented deceased. Old photos and files that grow heavier each year because the anniversaries continue to cycle like an unbroken record on continuous play. We look at our newsfeed to discover which of our former bandmates and acquaintances have passed away-- some in real time but altogether too many who somehow slipped away unremarked months ago.  We failed to notice they stopped liking our posts--  stopped wishing us well on our birthday... and we learn they may have died in their apartment or home undiscovered for days, having retired from jobs, their presence not missed by anyone in particular until their voicemail is full, their email has reached a storage limit...

Some post brave photos which do not hide their wrinkles and sagging faces.  So beautiful, people comment.  I mean-- this is life and we age as biology dictates.  I remember Gloria Steinem, my idol as a teenager, telling America 'this is what 60 looks like' as she bravely flaunted her un-altered great looks for a camera.  But soon afterward, she succumbed to the temptation of plastic surgery.

I'm moderately horrified to see photos from gigs... I do not check mirrors and do not 'see'' myself as others do.  I bravely ignore cosmetic realities and play my bass with pretty much the same drive as before. But I see some women on the stage with their faces pulled and pinched and pumped jumping around like old rabbits and I feel sad.  It might be hard to look me in the eye, with my slightly melted face, but unless one has a small fortune and can afford constant attention and consistent maintenance, the altered results of procedures just project a weird sort of insecurity to me.  Like one of those arthritis drug commercials. I don't find this version of Madonna pretty... it's desperate.  But what other version is there? 

I remember when witnessing a friend turn 30 aroused deep pity.  By 40's I was womanly and in love with life.  Joys and challenges of motherhood eclipsed my personal middle-age ambitions but I managed to produce and perform on a level I found satisfying.  Now in my 70's there's another benchmark altogether.  Tonight I watched a Bergman film I'd seen in the 1970's... thinking these characters are so much older and now I could be their mother. Many actors are dead. I've taken their place in line... the ranks move up and up, and eventually we'll fall off into the sea.

What terrified me this weekend was the idea that the glue will disappear before the substance... so that we'll become as a pile of threads which formerly made a stunning dress.  My mother was this-- threads of clarity and intelligence floating in a world without gravity as though she'd lost her footing altogether. What will become of us, we who thought we were so clever and strutted our little accomplishments across a smallish stage for years? What next? 

While the expression 'moving forward' is omni-present in our social and other lives, many of my peers are not moving forward, but looking backward as though their past accomplishments reassure their current version that they had or have value. One wastes the present rediscovering the past which will fail us in the end because the more we disturb it, the less intact it becomes.  And I learned with the death of Alan Merrill that the future is tenuous as well, because the best-laid plans can disintegrate with the death of a critical bandmate... and there is no residual trace of something that never happened. My own father, while he recovered from his episodes, never seemed to really grasp the concept of 'forward' but languished with sobriety and a bit of misery into old age with God-knows-what haunted thoughts and dreams.  Old soldier that he was, he seemed ready to take his place in the front line at nearly 97 years.

So here we are with the tapering rain and the wind in a kind of extended weather denouement and somehow the assurance that a brighter day will dawn. Floodwaters will recede and evaporate leaving damage and scars, but the world will go on.  Not so much our own lives... they are becoming less and less resilient and one day one of these events will be ours and we will be no more. Who will find me? Who will remember my small sorrows and regrets, who will know these lavender-flowered patches in my bedquilt belonged once to a hand-me-down dress I wore on my first day of first grade?

I spent a good part of Saturday night browsing my library shelves-- wondering whether to go back to Dostoyevsky, could I ever read Boswell's Life of Johnson in its entirety, Gibbon's Decline and Fall... ? I finally chose the last Saramago novel I'd been saving... I remember going to hear him read some years ago... he was an old man, and spoke no English-- rarely traveled.  The astonishing thing about Saramago is that he met and recognized his soulmate at 66-- left his partner and directly married this woman and ensured a passionate and creative future.  Meanwhile, I was utterly thrilled, waited on a huge slow-snaking line to have him sign a ratty copy of The Rise According to Jesus Christ. He patted my hand, knowing it was my heart he was signing, not a crisp first edition for lucrative resale. Priceless. It occurs tonight that, God willing, I will soon be the age he was when we met. There will be no more Saramago to read... but at least I will not have left these pages unturned.  

Murder by Death

Twelve years ago the woman I referred to as my adopted stepmother suicided in her apartment.  For two years prior she'd been begging me to help her with this; she was in her mid-90's, in constant pain, had sort of wrapped up her life and even presided over a couple of retrospective exhibitions that paid tribute to her career as an artist. Her preferred farewell was a heroin overdose. You, my dear, with your rock and roll junkie friends, can get this for me, she insisted. But the complications of facilitating someone's death-- of copping drugs, administering or even just leaving them on a nightable... can result in a murder charge.

She was furious with me.  After decades of organizing her art-- selling, showing, documenting-- she froze me out.  She finally orchestrated an exit with plastic bags and towels-- sealed doors and several tanks of helium. It became a tabloid story-- sort of a vaguely gruesome scenario which eclipsed her reputation as an artist. This was unfortunate and for me-- well, I suffer guilt...  Damned if I do, damned since I did not.  Her final act of revenge: the one possession I was to inherit-- a sketchbook-- was left to another-- a double slap because I loved her.

The world of musicians has long crossed paths with the edges of culture: the highbrow galas, but also the very lowbrow dirty street junkie culture and the sometimes intriguing world of pornography and the sex industry.  The stars and celebrities hung out at gigs and late-night clubs. In certain historic eras, club behaviors exceeded boundaries of what is generally deemed normalcy. Performances sometimes used violence, blood, sexuality as part of the show-- elaborating on the angst and passion that drove the music.

I met a man who was known for Mapplethorpe-type photography. He was occasionally at gigs and asked me to create music for his films.  I had not seen them but knew they pushed boundaries of sexuality and human relationships. For years I refused but on one night he was with a persuasive woman; we had a great discussion in which he scolded me for my lack of ambition re: my own songwriting.  Anyway, I agreed to provide 14 songs for a horror film he was planning. The premise was a girl stalking a serial killer, begging for her own death, which the killer refused; it was sort of a twisted unrequited love thing. 

So I went into the studio of my choice and recorded.  For weeks he sat quietly and respectfully... made very few suggestions, had files made for the film, paid all bills, including my guest musicians... and left me with recorded original songs which I released as a cd.  Shortly thereafter he was arrested on some drug charges, did prison time; all of his reels and computers were apparently confiscated.

Fast forward... post-prison he continued to work... kept my studio friends swish with assignments... wrote me occasionally, asking for my collaboration on his writings and photography publications which I refused.  Certainly no edgier than Serrano or Araki or Moriyama... it just was outside my aesthetic comfort parameter. Meanwhile we had copious and active email conversations about the issues of bondage, pain, sexuality-- the line between art and violence.  The man was brilliant and dedicated.  Dark. He was also a loving and concerned father to a boy who had both physical and psychological issues. But I found his work disturbing.  I also cannot watch war films, Hostel, any kind of torture.  I cannot. 

My very famous writer-neighbor was an insatiable womanizer. He used to confide in me.. it occurs to me now ironically that he had actually slept with my old stepmother when she was in her prime and he was young.  But at one point he had an affair with a very well-known writer who insisted on being slapped while they had sex.  Not just slapped but sort of beaten.  He found it difficult and she found him unsatisfying so they broke up. I remember seeing a film called Things Behind the Sun where the singer of a band gets gang-raped and her sexuality is thereafter permanently inextricable from a kind of violent abuse.  It's disturbing.  But one must admit, there are people who crave physical abuse... who crave even perhaps the act of murder or death.  How does one process or resolve these things?

Last week I saw on network news that my film director who passed away last year is now being investigated as a disturbed serial killer. The Gilgo Beach murderer, one reporter alleged, is a saint compared to this man. They were uncovering all kinds of props and weapons and things from his basement... digging holes. Because of the internet search-association with my under-watched music videos for which he provided images (without my knowledge, but I did not protest), I'm being hounded-- dogged-- by several news platforms-- reporters, Dateline-style investigators. They even pretend to be cd buyers and listeners. It's humiliating and disturbing. Netflix producers are salivating.

The fact is I find it difficult to imagine any scenario but the one where his fictional inventions are being confused with reality.  His narratives and deep delving into the mechanisms of sexuality, sado-machism and even death-- have resulted in a colossal misunderstanding.  Of course I cannot be sure. This is the stuff of jury trials and investigations. One must pay for crimes, but must one pay for the criminal narrative? Where is justice on this edge of love and pain, of pleasure and violence? 

I do know there is a roster of women who have disappeared.  I have known a couple.  One no more than twenty sat long hours in the studio quietly while I played my guitar and sang.  She was utterly beautiful; later she sent me copies of her writings which were heart-breaking and tormented. She was obsessed with self-punishment and also in love with the dark director. She'd escaped some terrible family situation and did not want to be found.  She'd changed her name. I felt maternal. She left him; he was sad, but I heard from her several times.  He is now being accused of the disappearance of these women.  The Gilgo Beach killer is a predatory heinous mutation.  R.C. (as he was known) was rather a kind of extreme and edgy male sanctuary for abused and traumatized women. Whatever went down seemed in a bizarre way consensual. 

I've been studying ancient civilizations this year-- an online course. The terrifying cruelties allowed and practiced by some of these sophisticated cultures are horrific.  King and crowds watch deaths and torture and choreographed hideous violence for sheer entertainment.  What kind of civilization is this?  And yet these things are still practiced today by mostly sick people. But when the victim craves being a victim?  What does one do? I am on the side of art which can use extreme images to mirror our worse instincts. And there is the fact that these Hostel movies and others which celebrate gratuitous violence gross enormous sums at the box office.

While I have no idea or proof of the actual Philadelphia alleged serial killer narrative, I do know how manipulative the media is, and how lawyers and reporters spin stories to make them sensational and lucrative.  It terrifies me more than the crime. There may be a version of crime but I am certain there is a broad misunderstanding here. The psychology of pain and cruelty is complicated and evades me, but the copious conversations I had with this man seem so much more honest and truthful and closer to a kind of deep human intimacy with psychological aberration than the harsh and clumsy indictments they are televising. I delved into them today-- the way these detectives and reporters are delving into his possessions and home and grounds. What I found was a fascinating, brilliant man who seemed more sane and quiet and accountable than most of us. Brutal honesty... that seems the operative here.  For those who claim responsibility for extracting truths, dig a bit deeper, and God help them. 

Death of the Cool

Long ago in the city I had a chaste affair with a client of the art gallery where I worked.  It was sponsored and encouraged by my boss and ended when he went back to Greece. He left me a tasteful Tiffany bracelet the value of which far exceeded the sum total of all my possessions at the time.  So I returned it-- and with the proceeds I bought a great raincoat and a Husqvarna Sewing Machine-- absolute top-of-the-line with a set of fancy stitch cams and multiple accessories.  It was white metal, weighed a ton; at the time I made things and this was like the Porsche of equipment. I sewed quilts galore... wedding presents and baby gifts-- pillow, comforters... I cut up childhood dresses and patched them together; I amassed Liberty handkerchiefs and thrift-shop scrap bags. It was my companion... it welcomed me after work and kept me company through the nights I waited up for whichever musician I was living with at the time. I couldn't wait to get home to it.

Like any well-made machinery, it required maintenance.  When I took up rock and roll in earnest, I neglected it. Decades. At some point after 9/11 I discovered it was self-oiling and failed from lack of use, so I frantically searched repairs. Of course the obvious shops were not in my budget.  I instead went exploring the fashion district and came upon a tiny sliver of a storefront chock full of old machines. One had to sidestep inside down a narrow hallway to reach a worktable/counter behind which was a high wall of shelving stacked with hundreds of machines-- tagged, untagged-- all varieties.  A small, elderly Chinese man with little English greeted me and when I wrote out the brand name, he lit up.  $30, he said. Favorite. Two week.  So I lugged the thing on three subways to 27th Street and confidently left it in what I was sure were his competent hands.

You're crazy, said my boyfriend at the time.  The guy is a mechanical disaster. No, no, I insisted.  He is a genius. He has psychic diagnostic powers and magical hands. Two weeks later I called the number he wrote down on a crumpled scrap of Chinese newsprint and after about twenty rings he picked up, told me he needed a part and it would be another two weeks-- maybe another $20.  This went on... I was in and out of town; I let it go.  I prayed to the Swedish and Chinese gods.

Eight months later, I collected it, paid $60 cash, got it home to find it only sewed in reverse. Well... my Swedish neighbor upstairs was so overjoyed to see his own country's brand, he borrowed it and swore he'd get it going. I left it up there for years.  He actually fixed my black raincoat-pocket and other things.  He died several years ago; it sits now in my closet, waiting-- neglected. The Chinese repair shop is now a luxury high-rise. 

Yesterday someone posted photos of me at a glam rock show wearing a purple satin blouse. I remember how Alan begged me to dress for this one performance where I unfortunately discovered that guitar straps slip right off of satin; it was a rough gig. I'd gone to my friend Jayme's on the UWS to borrow it.. she had closets filled with vintage great clothing and things she'd remade.  It's perfect, she insisted.  No returns... I'd traded her some vinyl, fair and square. I don't know enough about fashion but I took it to a resale place and it sold in one day for a very decent price.  Wow.  Jayme.

So yesterday thinking about her...I stopped at her apartment building on the UWS.  I can't remember when I'd seen her last... years... the pandemic widened these gaps... but she called me every once in a while; we both raised sons on our own... had intimacies to share. The doorman told me she'd moved in with her brother, out of town. I was open-mouthed... she was one of those truly bohemian city fixtures.  Her apartment was old but she created this exotic and homey vibe with purple velvet and just great 'stuff'. She had excellent taste in music, too. Old Stones, Kinks, Faces...  she could tell a cool new band from a poser in a second. She was brusque but also quiet and soft-- formerly sexy and sought-after by rock and roll elite.  One of those lithe women you see among the crowds at Monterrey or Woodstock. Cameras loved her low-slung jeans and hippy tops... her great haircuts. Even when she was broke, people comped her-- her hairdresser, her doctor, her dentist.  It was uncanny. 

Apparently she'd not just left the building.  Late last night, after a deep-search for her brother, I found her three-line obituary, from June. She'd been privately and quietly cremated. I was devastated. No one seemed to know about it... as though she slipped out of a back door when we weren't looking.  She'd done this once at my Thanksgiving dinner; my friends overwhelmed her and she went into the bathroom, maybe got high, and disappeared.  She cared little for food and socializing.  Her magical husband had died young and I think she never moved on from the perfect tantric sex and bohemian heaven he provided. She did come to gigs although she often left early-- quietly.  She was also a valued and an astute critic of my work.  

I'm reading Dawn Powell; following her vintage characters through the post-war version of Greenwich Village is a trip. The apartments-- the fashion-- the wild parties and rituals of entertaining. Aside from the changes technology has imposed on dating, we're fundamentally not all that different.  Just the details-- the interiors-- the materiality.  It's another, much more desirable world. The one I could count on in Jayme's place-- the vinyl, the occult and Goth books, the exotic textiles and the layers of personality. Someone who valued her fostered animals over her own livelihood, and who would not consider life without a paintbox and a sewing machine.

I heard a young woman comment the other day 'Mid-century style is over. No one wants it'.  I took it a little personally. And yes, we Baby Boomers are beginning to outlive our utility. The 1980's and 90's have much more appeal to current generations than the women of Dawn Powell. My apartment is stocked with library, vinyl, instruments, art and tiny memories. Odd trinkets in drawers and old rock-and-roll T-shirts that are losing value. Who will recognize the stained glass heart earrings my college boyfriend made me for our anniversary fifty-five years ago... the leather bracelets I got in Berlin before the wall came down-- the Camden market coat with metal trim...?  Will my son know my Pleaides editions of Proust bought in 1970's Paris or my fifty-three Trollope novels all collected from sundry used bookshops? 

Most days we city dwellers pass thousands of people on the street... and only the few we 'know' will light us up like human candles. The recognition of our trinkets, like old fossils, do the same.  But maybe, like my old sewing machine, they no longer serve.  It occurs to me that Jayme spared us the sentimentality of death and the post-mortem inventorying and distribution. I miss her terribly today and am still recovering from the disbelief of no farewell or phonecall.  No notification, no address, no ceremony, no grave, no tree planting or charity directive. We older people have the illusion that we are what we leave behind... but in truth we have likely outlived our usefulness-- our valued possessions have little meaning to the next generation and while I can hear the endless melodies that spill out from my bookshelves and collections, they will eventually be as mute as the resonant final lesson of Jayme.

Before the Fall

August rain always seems to begin at the rear window, then spreads in a soft crescendo across my apartment. Like a drawn curtain, it recedes, never quite erases the dark but leaves a kind of summer ghost symphony behind... like distant traffic music or trains that never come.

And then you’re left with the same sense of not quite being washed or blessed... the vague feeling you had at summer camp when you lay there in a damp cabin thinking of home, or after your Borough-of-Ealing marriage ceremony when you lay there wondering when your new husband was going to leave you. You could feel it.

I am distantly related to Arthur Miller, via a branch of the family we both preferred to forget.  I was actually originally destined to be christened Arthur, but the surprise of another daughter changed that. Still, I thought about him-- wrote a poem once about wanting him to pick me up from school and tell me I had potential. 1962 was my first summer at sleep-away camp. I was nine, and supremely homesick without admitting. When we got the August news Marilyn had suicided I told everyone she'd been my aunt and used the narrative as an excuse to let out six weeks of tears. 

My cousin called this week-- about to move his young family across the country back to the East Coast. He was feeling anxious and sad-- a kind of separation dread that seems familial. He, too, is related to Arthur. To distract him I recalled driving my son up to a college he didn't want to attend one August; he'd basically burned too many high-school bridges and this was a kind of fate. He was totally uncooperative and hardly spoke to me those days. I packed up the required dorm-room accessories and tried my hardest to arrange things when we got there, while he kept his sullen face and ornery attitude. I was on the verge of tears-- that terrible August dread in my heart mixed with parental angst.  He was untouchable.

My ex-boyfriend drove us the eight hours upstate. He had always been a personal 'option' if all else failed, but I couldn't have known then he was already married to someone else. Orientation required us to share a room in a cheap motel while my son spent his first adult night as a freshman. At 3 AM he knocked on the room door and sheepishly came in.  We turned on the cable and the three of us watched Jackass until dawn.  I'd never seen anything like it but I'll never forget the perverse laughter in that room filled with gloom, family tensions, my aching heart praying my tough son would not inherit my tendency to dark blues. It was a kind of cultural crossroad--bonding. I also developed a little rock-and-roll style crush on Bam Margera. He distracted me.

Years later my son told me he'd never been that desolate in his life. I all too well remembered my first semester away from home-- the August heaviness, the summer camp nights.  My best friend's Mom died that same Marilyn summer; it was the closest I'd come to imagining the loss of my own. Mrs. Gaines covered for me when I played wild games with my friend and her brothers, took me to the hospital once for stitches and made up a palatable tale for my own Mom. A stand-up parent. I grieved deeply-- for my friend, for myself, for whatever one processes as sorrow at nine years.  

I followed the terrible tragic narrative of Bam Margera. Even hs warm, wonderful mother could not save him from the pain he brought on himself like a dark fate.  The whole college trip is somehow linked with that crew--  the sheepish irrepressible silly giggling, the twisted disturbing behaviors and a kind of dark empathy. So many years later these guys are aged 'boys' still pranking and risking their bodies to entertain us. I have a weird soft spot for them even though I am officially critical of this kind of stuff. I hated the Three Stooges, slapstick-- even the Flinstones were annoying.

I lost my own mom one August, although she'd virtually left cognitive reality years before. Still, these dates pass with heaviness-- her anniversaries, and the failed marriage of mine, a distant epoch away, especially on rainy nights when the vague future relief of September is tainted with 9/11 memorials.

Arthur Miller died the day after my 52nd birthday.  I never mailed the packet of poems I'd addressed to him decades ago, nor did he ever pick me up from anywhere. I'll bet he never watched Jackass. I'm sure Marilyn couldn't bear another August in the wake of his evaporated passion and his desire for something else.  I wrote a poem for her in 1966 when the Sounds of Silence record was on continuous play in my teenage room. 'August die she must...'  was chilling. 

Jackass, despite various tragedies, lives. Bam tries hard to reinvent himself; his parents are saints. He's no longer even cute but somehow he got inserted in the mix of my late-summer iconography.  Funny how these things stick to us like an old shadow. My cousin is driving across the US with his dog and his California ghosts.  He'll be fine. And me-- I can sense the rain tonight like an old gravedigger huddled under a tree.  Die she must.  All of it.  

Wo-manicure

I have my mother's hands. Purely a physical rather than a metaphorical comment, the observation followed me throughout adult life. Deny as I might, as I grow older I wonder if even the increasingly prominent roadmap of veins is identical, like a fingerprint.  Watching my hands on the piano or laptop keys, they are so like hers it is alarming.  My face in the mirror-- the undeniable genetics of bone structure, expression...  I see her. The similarities are uncanny... and yet the buck stops there.

On Friday afternoons my mother had her beauty day.  She went to a salon called Ila or Isla-- many of her friends were there-- aunts, etc. They shared a hairdresser called Eleanor-- a bleached blonde with a kind of ducky upsweep who wore pancake make-up and orthopedic shoes.  Eleanor's cutting tools moved like Edward Scissorhands' and she managed several coiffes simultaneously.  Between chairs, tools were soaked in medical troughs of turquoise liquid that smelled like sulfur.  Everyone was bound up in rollers and curlers and metal pins, and sat under enormous heavy drying hoods like aliens while another set of women did manicures. 

As a small child I had to sit through this beauty day. I hated the stench of hairspray and the women chattering, and Eleanor didn't particularly like children. But there was a gift shop next door where a basket of tiny porcelain animals sat by the cash register. At five or ten cents, I could choose one for each hair-day; my little menagerie grew. One fateful afternoon I was placed in a booster seat in Eleanor's station and my long braids were transformed to imitate a shoulder-length cut with bangs my mother tore out of a Seventeen Magazine spread. I hated it, and unbelievable as it seems, I have returned to a salon only once in my life. 

Much to her horror, I have never had a manicure.  To this day I have the excuse of musicianship as the 'basis' for this, but it is also a choice.  My generation grew into puberty casting off bras, refusing makeup, embracing our natural bodies, only to find ourselves now in a world of extreme cosmetic sophistication and a ubiquitous standard of self-care we could never have predicted.  On every block it seems there are multiple nail boutiques and salons packed with women and a number of men being pampered.  I could never imagine having my feet handled by strangers--massaged, soaked, dressed, polished. It terrifies me, like a kind of public intimacy that is on display behind a storefront. I don't get it. 

The vintage scent of my mother's hands is palpable, nine years after her death. She'd clean our noses after our bath and the residue of polish and  cigarette-ghost was part of the nightly ritual. When I visualize my mother she's always on the telephone... one of those old black rotary things with the curly coiled wire. Her lovely hands with the red polish and a cigarette... as she talked and laughed with the receiver cradled under her chin so she could multi-task... sew or wash dishes or bake. She was chronically attached to another world-- a friend, maybe-- she was a girls' girl. I was so often an interruption and had to win her attention.

One traumatic night in particular comes to mind today... I'd been playing at a friend's house... one of my mother's preferred companions for me... a girl from a fancy private school-- an only-child with the name of a car who lived in an enormous house with a circular driveway.  The dining table where we lunched on Wedgewood dishes was enormous. Her Mom's hair was flipped and sprayed into a dark helmet; her father was an older man who smoked cigars.  We always played in her room.. she had pink toy horses and amazing things.  But she also taught me about sex.  She secretly read me texts about body parts and masturbation.  Dog-eared books were hidden under her mattress... where did she get these? I came home feeling guilty.

So this one night I went down to the kitchen and waited in the half-light while my mother-- her post-prandial work done, sat-- cigarette in manicured hand, on the telephone... gesturing to me to go upstairs... but I stayed... mesmerized... feeling confessional and confused.... I could not go to bed.  At last she finished speaking and gave me that look. I tried to tell her about the book. She literally did not reply.. she pointed the one perfectly painted nail toward the door and I went, feeling more sheepish and confused and guilty because not only had I committed some sort of sin, but I'd also violated my mother's privacy.

I learned not to confide things to my mother; years later I found I was a kind of self-judging pubescent prude. Not sure what she expected of me, I was eventually liberated from familial standards.  She loved to sing and was very shy but played the piano with a kind of finesse. And while she never came to a single gig or listened to anything I did, she made comments on my fashion choices or lack thereof... and continued to side-eye my bare hand.  In the end she had dementia, and all vanity and sentimentality evaporated. No one rescued my old artwork or my little beloved porcelain menagerie but I choose to think she secretly approved of our manual 'twinning'. 

Two of my boyfriends have told me they loved especially my hands. And they serve me-- they can draw a little, paint a little... they finger the bass and guitar the way I intend... I am grateful.  But my feet?  The rigors of ballet as a girl, the hazards of pointy rock and roll boots and vintage stagey footwear that didn't quite fit have taken a toll. I'm not proud. Several years ago I dated a jazz musician who obsessed over my feet.  I hide them-- I mean, the beach is one thing, but I'm not featuring them. Still... he claimed to love them.  He nagged and nagged outside of manicurists' shops for me to have them 'done'.  I refused.

One night he got me a little tipsy... we went to bed-- I passed out and woke up to find he'd painted my toe nails black.  I was horrified... angry.  He was overjoyed and couldn't stop celebrating my damn feet. Admittedly they looked edgy and cool in my platform sandals. But there was something Rosemary's Baby-like about having been foot-ravished while I slept. The polish eventually wore off, along with the relationship. 

Today I criticized my son.  We have open boundaries as far as emotional discussions but physical criticism is a little off-topic. Looking down at my ropy old hands, I immediately regretted my comment, and while  I think our bond is tough enough to weather this, the discomfort was familiar. I am not my chaste mother, although I have inherited her graceful fingers and a different brand of stubbornness.  For an instant I remembered the toe-painting-- and how it was really a kind of sexy tribute-- an unpredictable intimacy I failed to appreciate at the time. My mother may even have approved. And unpainted as they are, fretting and picking and tucked into a metal slide, I will somehow always have her hands. 

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.