Dollars and Scents

I'm reading 2666.. the mammoth Bolaño which is divided into sections. Currently I'm in the hellish panoramic depths of a chaotic and distinctly Mexican criminal investigation into the serial killings of young women.  In these times, there was no electronic trail to follow and these women-- some of them actually girls-- go missing and turn up mutilated, raped, abused.  It's compelling and disturbing reading. Somehow it mixes in my brain with the Nancy Guthrie mystery. But the relentless sequence of bodies.. it takes days for their absence to be logged, and since most of them are poor working women in the dubious culture of Santa Teresa, the news is neither reliable nor nationally remarkable.

So I'm not yet sure how I will process the whole of this novel.  His writing is luminous and his narratives are compelling and readable. I miss Bolaño with a personal sense of loss and grief.  These dark people who have left us a world that is both startling and comforting... the characters remain with us, are us.  My intimate friends have become the ones in these books... the authors a kind of paternal presence.  They are there for me-- they do not change. By their means, I see through myself--' As Though Through Glass', my 2015 collection was titled (followed by the (implied) denouement phrase 'I watched you shatter').

In a dark place today, I feel as though I am witnessing the crumbling of a dynasty, of a civilization... the crooked mistakes of what one once saw as progress undermining us like massive fissures and portentous seismic adjustments.  I am seeing Jeffrey Epstein as the ultimate modern Superhero or Villain.. it doesn't seem to matter anymore.  With the seven sins as his private constitution, he manipulated the world, preying on contemporary addictions to greed, false senses of power-- massive money, schemes and games.  I am relying on this story to bring down the great web which seems to have entangled and entrapped our better intentions. I also realize there is too much at stake here... and not everyone implicated is as simple as the Prince Andrew fall-from-grace. But something like the financial crisis feels as though it's unraveling in a dark background. Pay great attention to the man/men behind the curtain. For way too long we've had our heads in the sands of the internet and phone-distractions

Lately at 4 AM I pick up a guitar and try to remember who I am. Songs come like prayers-- so many of them commemorated old friends or times.  Occasionally my old torch-lamp flickers-- the one I picked up on a corner dump in Trenton in 1972-- it still belongs, the way some things don't...and blinks as though the spirits of Alan and others long-gone are my audience.  When I was studying art I had to give a talk on the Giacometti sculpture at MOMA-- The Palace at 4 AM... I remember I went a little too deeply into the psychological space... it still resonates, these empty personal rooms of an artist's vision.  Like so many things from an analogue past it became part of my private architecture, my iconography.

Among the ever-increasing numbers of disposable emails today was one advertising a new 'pale pink' apartment complex somewhere in Brooklyn.  I once lived in a pale pink building which seemed to be the unintentional outcome of some kind of concrete facing of an old factory on the East Side of Manhattan. Pink is not an enticing attribute for an urban building. I was never 'that girl' who wore pink-- not even the rock-and-roll kind. Maybe for some lost character from a Sex in the City episode or a Barbie fan... but today... perhaps the color of diluted blood. 

From out of some blue, today, came the opening line of a William Gaddis novel... 'Money?, in a voice that rustled'.. something like that. Written today, it occurred, there would be no question mark. How innocent the days of The Bonfire of the Vanities seem.  The enormity of instant wealth-- mergers and venture capital...cryptocurrency fortunes... the bloated corporate banks... the new American economy of tilt. The whitewashing of money, the normalization of evil. 

Often I walk down the street and identify the smells of luxury... well-dressed women with pricey perfumes that have become part of a compulsory culture of scent.... and then there is the cheap cologne of debt which hovers... sometimes indistinguishable, but loud.  I don't know how these people perceive their own flesh... we have become so accustomed to customizing what we are given... with money one can dispense with unmentionables, or acquire newer versions-- teeth, hair, skin... we can ski on broken limbs. There is progress here, but for whom? 

In the 1970's my friend worked for Halston.  She used to give me samples and gift me their uniquely scented bath talc.. it was subtle and a little earthy.  I loved it. Obsolete now, a nostalgic friend found a container on eBay, from Canada... gifted it to me.  It's not the same... it is like an AI version of the stuff, we both agreed, after a month-long wait, paperwork, and an import tariff of more than the cost of the box. A contemporary disappointment.. a vintage fraud. Besides, talc is now an illegal substance, I think. 

I will go back to Bolaño who understood women although he did not live to see a decent Mexican President and the political perversion of the American dream.  The scents of death and rotting corpses in a hot climate not quite as bad as the stench of a rotting America. As an oddity and closet rebel, it was maybe never my dream, but it is currently becoming my nightmare. 

Winter Options

On the frigid Friday when we're boycotting everything... striking, protesting... I went out, and New York City somehow always seems to be business-as-usual.  While I remember distinctly the sense of empowerment I felt demonstrating as a teenager in the 60's-- like part of an army of compassionate humanity, today I feel snubbed and overlooked.  Even the weather is daunting. Victims of the cold here receiving little sympathy; they are anonymous and powerless. The wounded martyrs of ICE demonstrations are filling news platforms, and yet the bodies here-- mostly homeless, some nameless... have suffered from another kind of ice... and their narratives maybe quietly heroic. Two men I discovered Tuesday in a doorway-- one a migrant terrified to check into a shelter or warming center. Hours later, shivering in my apartment, I fretted about these men; they were not young. Reluctantly I called 311 and they promised no names would be asked.  But promises in this country in 2026 seem to be threadbare things.

Most of my friends are staying inside in this polar vortex; for those with draughty old apartments and insufficient heat, sometimes a reality check outside in the form of a brisk walk kickstarts our internal thermostat. But I find many of the shut-ins more nostalgic than ever-- binging on the 'Manhattan before 1990' sites and vintage city photos.  For the second time last night I watched I Am Twenty-- an extraordinarily poignant Russian film from 1964 with a story behind it.  But the art museum scene-- the poetry, the conversations-- brought me into the usual nostalgia and longing for a time when these deep discussions among friends were daily occurrences.  Also-- the old version of Moscow is on display and fantastically interesting.  

I am no longer sure who anyone is, in this time when even my friends have enhanced their face, have altered their lives to depend on mobile phone platforms and award-show culture.  I also watched-- again,  the Louis Malle 'Place de la République' in which he interviews regular blue-collar type people on the streets of Paris.  This is the version I recall from my first trip there in the early 1970's... and somehow each person he questions seems to have a very candid answer.  The fact that they are 'who they are' seems now a treasured state of being.  A certain intimacy radiates from just the stark honesty with which they face a microphone and camera.  It is disturbing that I don't feel this connection in casual conversation today-- in interviews and televised dialogues.  The obvious make-up and hair aside, everything seems scripted and manipulated-- calculated, prepared, and 'filtered'. 

Several of my neighbors have gone on small holidays and returned tanned and unprepared for this unusual cold spell.  They have also avoided disturbing politics and daily discouraging takeaways on the diminished value of democracy in America.  But these people have money-- they have options.  There is no option for the two men trying to sleep in the Lexington Avenue door-niche Tuesday night. 

When I was a teenager, my Aunt Rita had a little shop.  They sold John Meyer of Norwich clothing-- sort of preppy but decent quality wear for suburban men and women.  Casual clothing-- practical things.  Of course all these brands have been reinvented in the digital age, but back then I was something of a hippie, and... well, the clothes were not for me.  I did make wool curtains for the store fitting rooms and then made myself a warm winter skirt from the extra.  I sat on a vintage stool at a counter after school and folded things, hand-wrote tickets and promotional postcards.  I loved it there. In January, they had a shipment of what they called Cruise-wear-- suddenly summer clothing-- bathing suits and cover-ups, T-shirts and khaki shorts.. golf-wear.  My aunt had to explain this to me... it was a thing.. and I suppose even the concurrent shop window display gave people a break, a sense of hope in midwinter 1960's when snow was plentiful and the cold was consistent and predictable.

The saleswomen were all friends of my aunt-- one especially remains in my heart-- a tall, elegant Jackie Kennedy type with a lovely speaking voice and innate elegance.  We became sort of intimate. Her husband, I remember, was this tall photographer.  He was so handsome-- and a little rough.  He both adored her and had that macho edge one puts on because in his heart he knew he'd married 'up'.  I saw him with other women in the city.  This was common then; no one spoke of it.  Later she suffered from breast cancer... and he left her.  When the shop closed, we lost touch and I went away to college. In the end I heard she'd remarried to a man who spoiled her-- took her on exotic voyages before her premature death.  I am surely older than she would have been. Today I miss her-- her patient explanation of 'cruisewear' to a girl whose small world did not encompass weather-driven vacation choices. She touched my life in such a gentle way and I hope she is warm.

I miss these people who knew exactly who they were; the people of the Place de la République are here among us somewhere in the city-- delivering things, slicing meat in a bodega... making pizza maybe... but they are rare.  My aging friends are a little fearful and insecure... they begin to walk with hesitancy and they mistrust, with good reason, the institutions which were designed to protect us. Everything is inappropriately invasive and these people who seem to live in old photos and memoirs-- well, they call me, narrating their disappointments-- maybe looking for sympathy, not always aware of this.  

Perhaps I am guilty, too. In this culture where one does not 'see' oneself, I am surely afflicted.  To protect from the diagnosis, I avoid mirrors, avoid too much effort to change my appearance.  Inside I am pretty much the same, although I miss the alacrity and candor with which I once greeted people and embraced their intimacy.  I'm a little guarded and not sure these 'others' know themselves.  They think they do, but not in the way these French working people on the street knew exactly where they were going and why. 

We do change.  My son has changed me profoundly.  I am now a football fan-- a sports fan.  One osmotically absorbs the passions of one's loved ones.  And he will not know that I switch off the pro-bowl game to catch a rare cameo of Tarkovsky who has sadly left this world... or Yevtushenko, reading his poetry in 1962 Moscow... to screen-- one more time-- the world as it was when I was barely ten years old,  when I Am Twenty would have been beyond my understanding and certainly not something my parents would have taken me to see.  Fortunately, like most things of the heart, one does not have to exchange one thing to allow for another. Unlike the two men on Lexington, we have options-- maybe not economic but emotional and intellectual ones.  May we put them to better use.  

What We Think About When We Think About Snow

During one of my random online reading jags which can involve tangent after tangent, winding up in some dead-end cul-de-sac in a country whose name-change has confused me, I somehow got to Joan Didion's list of favorite books. It's been widely circulated, this list, as Joan is fairly universally admired for her clarity and seriously earnest writing. A young writer with less brilliance and direction would want insight into her formula.

I was vaguely reassured that not a single title on the list had escaped me. Remembering I had a small interview published-- years ago, during which I was forced to commit to my own 'desert island' list of novels. Novels, yes... they have always entrapped me, although I wonder now, with my mental timeline diminishing, if I would devour Proust the way I did at twenty-- or Dickens (I think I would)... or why I currently find Thomas Mann's religious novels so satisfying. On and on...

I take great comfort scanning the shelves of my library at night... maintain a fairly rigorous schedule of reading, although I digress. Nor have I been led too far off-course except for the recent discovery of a few forgotten Nobelists and some brilliant contemporary Europeans (nothing in 2025 came close to 'Solenoid' by Mircea Cărtărescu). But lately I've begun to wonder who I was when I read George Eliot or, like Joan, Ford Madox Ford. So I looked further to see when the Didion list had been compiled and for whom.

Snow... today... a sort of blessing, especially weekend snow. As a winter baby, accumulations were a gift. Also the frequency of postponed birthday celebrations... or childhood illnesses... someone always had chickenpox or measles... in those days of nominal vaccinations. How life has changed. My winter reading mostly Jack London or Sigrid Undset... cold American pioneer novels... later, Thomas Mann. And nothing like the Russian winters of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. As an older adult-- Laxness, Høeg, Fosse... on and on...

So much chatter today about where one was in the blizzard of 1978, or 1983, or 2006. A kind of weather-nostalgia and of course in New York City the snow transforms our landscape-- softens the verticals and rounds sonic edges. I distinctly remember reading Mark Twain as a girl while my father watched football in our jalousied porch room with the Venetian blinds drawn at dusk.

Like many Americans today I binged on football to distract from the disturbing confrontations around the globe. At a point, after hours of football, I get this sort of nausea-- like psychic claustrophobia. My father had his first major nervous breakdown during a blizzard weekend. The panic of being shut in with his young family-- the responsibility, the claustrophobia... the scent of whiskey in that room with the newspapers strewn around and the snowy visual noise on the TV screens in those days-- black and white, the muffled roar of the crowd from the rear console speaker... the tiny athletes like toys on a static screen.

Maybe I've inherited the football syndrome from my father... shut in here... although me, I pick up a bass and let my fingers wander, and scan walls thinking books do not just furnish a room, they have become my family. Unlike my father's daughters, they require no upkeep; they do not ask questions, they seem to understand how the narcissism of this media-obsessed culture has cornered me into a sort of cork-lined analogue stubbornness. They witnessed the process, they populated the years and the memories and will outlive my small-minded existence, will go on to furnish other rooms.

The snow will melt-- eventually, after it acquires the grey five-o'clock shadow of city soot. For now, we are a bit graced-- pardoned, dismissed...postponed. Plenty of city people sleeping off hangovers in the cold morning... regretting or rejoicing the upcoming Super Bowl contenders... dusting themselves off, absolved, a little blessed... a little taste of Arctic innocence. Forgiveness, like many things, will sadly melt away and we are left with what we inherit from our own mistakes. No Super Bowl of life, of country, of existence. In Kiev and Minneapolis and Iran there is no melting; the ICE of another composition and cleanup is not simple. God help us to figure this one out.

Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

Christmas, Bloody Christmas

Single digit countdown to Christmas. I'm listening to this Marlon Brando documentary... I forgot about the kidnapping of his son Christian, the troubling path he took... his struggles with substance, his eventual early death.  I can't help thinking of parallels with Nick Reiner. Something about sons... the way Marlon intended to keep his free from the abuse and poor handling he had experienced by his own parents. 

When we were kids my sister's boyfriend lived next to the Reiner family; I remember playing there, watching them get in the car and drive away.  We loved Christmas even though we never got anything we asked for. My father liked Macy's.  He'd pick something out that he thought suited us girls-- ice skates, some strange walkie-talkie toy that didn't work well-- a home badminton set... nothing extravagant. Every year I wished for a horse. I would keep it in the garage and ride it to school. One year my father planned a trip to a dude ranch. My cowgirl fantasies were on fire, but it was cancelled.  Someone died... or my father drank too much and had another episode.  It was a pattern-- the disappointment, the broken promises.

Families like the Reiners-- they looked happy. Carl made little jokes. My father never made jokes to the children. The prelude to Christmas was filled with activity-- Glasswax stencils on the windows-- chains and beads for decor... cookie-baking, our stockings hanging, rows of greeting cards lining the fireplace. Making things for my family-- using whatever I had to buy something and wrapping it.  My father always seemed miserable-- even Christmas morning... whatever he got, it was all meaningless although he seemed to like the holiday breakfast; we had rolled pancakes and he had coffee.

There were some good things... our housekeeper understood me-- she'd collect lengths of yarn and wind them on spools.  I loved this present, in a homemade box. I'd make lanyards and ropes; sometimes she'd give me scraps and rags and I'd make doll clothing-- tiny quilts. My aunt gave me a book.  She was a teacher and it was always a good one.

I bought my son unusual toys-- solid things like wooden trains and small building sets.  Shapes-- things from museums. I remembered wanting some stuffed toy with a rubber face-- a Yogi bear maybe. One waited for these things.  Months of longing and mostly disappointment. A doll made of a clothespin consoled me. My son had this reindeer made from a sock. It was everything... at night he sang to it in his baby language-- held it right up to his face. 

We give birth to a miracle creature-- a blank canvas. We swear we'll keep them safe and pure. I tried my hardest to be an intentional parent.  I listened, I explained, I watched. Still... at some point, somewhere, my son behaved badly.  He was angry-- he was rebellious and rude. Where does this come from?  One spends years of hours going over and over one's mistakes.

One Christmas I was breaking up with a boyfriend who put slutty underwear and one set of dishes under our tree. I could not decipher the meaning of these.  In a mood, I took my son downtown and we sat in a diner on Ninth Avenue drinking cocoa, listening to cheap Christmas loop-tapes, waiting for our musician friends to wake up in the dark afternoon and join us. A cop came out of the bar across the street.  We heard a gunshot and in seconds he was lying there in the road. It was his own gun. My son saw nothing except the slew of NYPD cars that converged with what seemed like seconds; he had a little toy police car and it was thrilling for him. At least I think so. I wrote a song called Christmas Lights. It was the epitome of a black Christmas. 

Still... I swore I'd never break a promise, and I haven't.  Not to him, anyway. There was a time when he was utterly ruthless to me. He was a teenager; he was angry at me-- at his life. We as parents would do anything.  Confronted by a drug-altered grown child brandishing a weapon,  the average loving mother is not afraid to die for her son-- a meaningless sacrifice-- but that he might ruin his own life as a murderer without parole.

The irony of the Reiner's son tragedy: all they cared about, I assume-- was that their son would not sabotage himself-- that he'd be saved-- safe.  I would have sacrificed anything-- money, my life... to set mine straight. He's good... but there is no guarantee.  There are good times and bad times. Once we wreck ourselves the scars open up and bleed at times. Here these struggling parents-- and as they say one is only as happy as one's least happy child-- gave their very lives-- everything they had-- and their son is ruined. Drugs ruin people.. so do bad experiences and the reasons people begin to anesthetize themselves.  I dated a few addicts; watching me wrap gifts way back my stepmother commented: 'Give him a carton of vodka-- that's all he wants.' The substance is not what they really want, but what they need.  It replaces the issue, it disguises the wound. Who knows what bothers these boys? Who knows what bothered my son? I was frantic some nights waiting for a phonecall and that only made it worse. The news that he had been arrested felt like good news. At least he was alive.

Christmas morning marks the birth of the baby Jesus who was marked for tragedy. There is no parallel here except the suffering of parents. The Reiners are no longer here to grieve for their son's tragic life. Marlon, with all that talent and crazy love for his first-born, was unable to prevent the spiraling. Me-- my son seems to thrive although I will surely disappoint him at Christmas.  I can't possibly fathom what it is he really needs, although I am pretty sure I gave him the essentials, that he outgrew his teenage angst and attraction to the bad-boy narrative-- that he is a solid man and has a moral backbone. It's a twisted Christmas story and we're all a little battered and torn this year. There is no closure, nor happy ending. The world goes on... Christmas will be over... I will remember good and bad ones.  We usually can't get what we want but try to remember the many who do not get what they need. There will be deaths, births, flashing lights and choirs of angels... and there will be next year, for those of us who remain to mourn the ones that do not.  Amen.

Saturday's Child

Black Friday for me has the sense of mourning-- of a Bloody Sunday or post-apocalyptic temporal hangover day.  I'm certain some psychologist invented the retail version just to pry us all out of our post-prandial malaise, and gear us up for the next profit-generating holiday adventure.  God forbid we should lie around regretting things we might have said to our table-mates, or feeling sorry we ate so much or not enough. As a child I couldn't wait for the holiday to be over.  I sampled other families' traditions as an invitee in my college years and discovered they all seem to leak similar petty rivalries and bitternesses once the alcohol seeped in.  

Now that I've passed the long wonderful years of rock and roll Thursdays, Hendrix tributes, celebratory post-gig turkey sandwiches on-the-go at 3 AM, then the maternal/extravagant hostess/chef fantasy, I've whittled it down to a one-handed count.  Deleting the dysfunctionals of my immediate family, barring random overseas guests or surprises, the bare essentials are my son and Mice Elf, as Sly called it. As my son becomes more and more of an admirably ambitious man, intimate occasions are few and farther between. With my life continuing to shed its former frenzied activity layers, these evenings have become more emotionally saturated.  

While I think back on the myriads of holiday meal hits and misses... one or two fights with a boyfriend who manipulated me into foregoing family visits... a few crises... I try to minimize the nostalgia.  And while my son lives just across the river in Greenpoint, it doesn't diminish the fact that I feel terrible saying goodbye.  Maybe people shop like mad to block the sense that time like a rushing city pedestrian has passed another block and we are on our way to the Christmas finale and the interment of another year.  

This morning I tried to walk into a department store-- was greeted with some slowed-down version of Silver Bells and left with tears streaming. Pathetic, I scolded myself.  Yes, it's been a year marked by grief and loss, but these things accelerate as we age... we are supposed to expect this. My son uncharacteristically took the day off for a short trip with his current girlfriend.  Today I am thinking they are already on the way back, and she, like me, will be sad and missing him.  Life is filled with events... and they all too quickly become our past.  For those of us who are genetically dark, any comings and goings are sad. I recalled today a trip to the shore with an ex-- we were so deeply connected and yet so mismatched. Everything hung on this weekend excursion... the tension was unbearable, and the premonitory sense of an ending undeniable. Afterward he wrote a song that said 'I am in our room waiting here for you to come and change my mind'.  I could not do that, nor was I inclined to.  I could only think of the seventies song Motel Blues where Loudon Wainwright begs some young girl 'Come up to my motel room and change my life.'  It somehow seemed more passionately convincing. 

It doesn't help that I'm currently reading Niels Lyhne-- one of Rilke's very favorite books.  The language, even in translation, is rich and soulfully descriptive and the overwhelming sentiment of deep-seated nostalgic grief is palpable.  The author, Jens Jacobsen, died at 38, and struggled with the looming diagnosis of tuberculosis for twelve years.  Last week I finished Lucky Per-- another dark Danish novel of both enlightenment and despair.  In Scandinavia grief seemed a kind of status quo... the darkness is an assumption; I feel embraced in a way-- less alone.

A week ago Saturday we were all so saddened by Tatiana Schlossberg's piece in the New Yorker.  Nothing worse than the prospect of a mother losing her child.  The Kennedy family saga is emblematic of American grief-- their personal casualties are statistically and emotionally overwhelming.  And there seems no end in sight.  

Thursday morning I walked across 92nd Street where I once worked in a townhouse, selling art to the privileged.  I knew every building-- the neighbors-- the Mason-Smiths and the Paines... old American names-- a former Manhattan dynasty--  all passed now.  For a brief time we rented an extra office on the same block from a wonderful couple... Lester and Pauline Migdal. I was in my twenties and Pauline's daughter was a thirty-something brilliant architect who was dying of cancer in Switzerland.  There was some very early camera technology available so that from her high-tech Swiss office in the 1980's she was somehow visible as a shadow-- a silhouette-- to her mother. On 92nd Street I sat with Pauline drinking coffee and silently (no audio) watching her daughter slowly deteriorate. I had not yet become a mother but witnessing the longing and inevitability deepened my capacity both for maternal love and for sorrow. It is a small comfort today that Pauline has passed on, with her terrible grief.  

The loss of my baby girl whose place at the table only I can see left an indelible scar. It further opened my capacity to empathize with these mothers.  Every single human loss is wounding to someone... every one of us has had a mother... and for those in my generation, we miss ours terribly. But the sorrow of losing a child is something unbearable; their fragile suffering, unimaginably painful.  Back on 92nd Street, my future was an open kaleidoscope. Death was a very tiny numerator in the fraction of my life.  The Mason-Smiths had a colorful chef who suffered from a chronic throat ailment... he turned out to be one of the earliest victims of the AIDS crisis.  There was so much more mourning to come. As we go on, the dark memories compete with the light. We are the only animals cognizant of our own doom; some of us struggle with this deadline; others confront it head-on-- some by taking it into their own hands.

The future has an inevitability; the specifics are unknown.  We hoard moments-- we hoard things-- some of us hoard money.  Maybe it makes them feel safe. I hoard memories but am aware that the hub of my brain has sprung leaks and things have seeped out.  When I opened my copy of Niels Lyhne there was a receipt in there from 1992...  I remembered buying this at a used bookshop on the Jersey shore for $2.00 with my 2-year-old sitting on the floor looking at pictures.  I remember Tom Verlaine showing me a copy of maybe this very translation in the proofs section of the Strand the night we discussed Tranströmer. 

They come back with clarity, these lost weekend moments.  My daughter was still a possibility-- not yet conceived. That same year I cooked a goose supplied by my Scottish friend Lena whom I cannot find somewhere in the south of France. She writes me a postcard with no return address. There is a wisdom there... at some point all of us will have no return. For now I am without bargains or seasonal purchases but officially thankful; I will ride the downhill to the end of the year-- into the next which at some point seemed an impossibly distant future.  And that, too, will surely pass.

Fall-back

My son was born the first week of November... accompanied by the urban score of Election Day, the NYC Marathon... the first seasonal cold wind, the crush of dead leaves underfoot and the shocking afternoon darkness on the first Sunday of standard time setting. Each passing year I am overwhelmed by the nostalgia of parenthood. Our children cannot understand how we annually celebrate their arrival... how the indescribable agony of childbirth announced that we were splitting ourselves in two... how we sang silly songs and blew out candles but in our heart was the future soundtrack of an unwritten Roy Orbison ballad.

Even with photographs, it's difficult for our kids to understand the young, naive woman who was their mother, the novel intimacy of harboring a growing human inside a body whose power we'd maybe only recently absorbed. In my case, I was fulfilling a callow promise I'd made to my husband-- to have his child, despite serious reservations.  Our courtship had been brief but intense; 'no one will ever love you the way I do,' he repeated as he showed up in airports, intercepted my daily itinerary, flew transatlantic until he was broke, waiting for me to nod my head while he begged, on one knee, for me to become Mrs. British Journalist.  

So when my husband strayed, I tried to brush it off-- he was insecure-- he was dramatic; it would fade. I waited it out, remembering the pleading oaths he'd sworn... and then the surprise of pregnancy. I grew up quickly... held out hope, suffered. It wasn't so much the demise of the marriage as the betrayal of something in which I'd let myself believe. I talked to my growing stomach-- confessed, confided.  I'd agreed to define myself as part of a couple... and now the definition had become smeared-- obsolete... wrong. I no longer knew who I was or even where, having transported all my instruments and gear to the UK.

We urban dwellers learn to sleep through sirens... but the subdued quiet of a West-London 3 AM was more than I could bear. I returned to my city where the noise drowned out sorrow, the autumn rain camouflaged  wet eyes, and pounds of candy corn took the place of whiskey. I got up on smoky stages looking like a balloon and played my blue bass.

Who am I, I wondered, as I walked November midnight streets of Manhattan with a baby carriage? My exhaustion was overwhelming but did not translate into sleep. I felt hollow without my maternal stomach, traumatized at the act of separation and terrified of the task of raising a person when I no longer recognized the skin I was in: someone's mother... a nursing machine, one-half of a couple whose future was a puzzle, whose past was maybe just a terrible mistake-- a con job?

Thirty-six years later I woke up today after setting back my manual clock, having watched the last game of an entertaining World Series I would never have enjoyed had I not raised a sports-obsessed man. The apple fell far from this tree. I began the day with a radio interview; somewhere in the world people were hearing my music... it was shocking, in a way.  Somewhere I was still a musician-- a songwriter, despite this waking image of my life as a kind of huge parchment game-basket with thousands of lettered tiles leaking out in piles. 

Last week I watched a documentary on dying.  It was distressing-- horrifying, dismantling.  Again-- who are we, creatures who frantically train our bodies and minds-- run errands and break hearts... when we are all headed for the same unappealing and painful fate? 

Savoring my free hour after the clock resetting, I noticed Sheryl Crow was on PBS with a less-impressive Jason Isbell, conversing about her songwriting and playing samples in the grand hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exceptional sound system and a rapt sophisticated audience. Jason's accompaniment was annoying.  She is very polished-- even with her pancake make-up and false eyelashes... she can sing. I pondered her lyrics 'If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad.' Is this art? Am I bitter?  The last gig I played I went home on the subway with $60. I considered walking 5 miles to save $1.45. According to the internet, the starting range to book Sheryl Crow is between $300,000 and $499,000.   I remember meeting her, many years ago-- juggernauting along with her endorsements and rockstar hookups, following her dream on the road while I was wheeling around a baby. Not that there is a musical comparison. And after great success, Sheryl has more or less purchased motherhood.

I've noticed my son's friends are beginning to have grey hairs.  This ages me. His very boyish former science teacher greeted me in the street the other day... 'Did I recognize him,' he wanted to know, sheepish about the fact that he was now fifty-something? Are we judged by the way others see us?  I remember well, after a high-school musical performance, my mother asked 'You think you're good? This is high school!' These were my parents... maybe I over-processed their judgment which was skewed by the fear that their daughter might make the terrible choices I've since embraced.  

Tonight in the early dusk the sidewalks are littered with trampled discarded marathon signs and placards. Some of the runners were still limping along Fifth Avenue nearly twelve hours after the starting gun-- some falling short of their goal, some failing entirely.  I'm almost relieved another November milestone is over. Tuesday the mayoral elections will pass, and then it will be my son's thirty-sixth birthday.  He will celebrate with his friends; I will not share my nostalgia and current malaise... he seems to be happy with who he is at the moment-- not to question or doubt, not to empathically suffer along with ill friends and neighbors the way I do.  He will enjoy spending his money eating and drinking. He does not think about his absent father whom he barely recalls, and he certainly is little acquainted with the dark streak that marks my heart like a cross, like a wound. 

Meanwhile, hearing my own song 'Black Bells' on a radio show reminded me I am consistent if nothing else, and not ashamed of what I have produced, although I could always be better. Hard to judge oneself, and if one doesn't exploit social media, there is little access to external judgement or assurance.  Am I happy, in the Sheryl Crow sense?  Do I regret? No... maybe...  I endure these phases-- the doubt and black moods a lifetime of creativity, intermittent betrayal and suspension of belief have guaranteed. They are my 'material', for better or for worse, 'til death do me part.  If I choose, I can hear the sirens, but have learned-- Daylight Saving or Eastern Standard-- to sleep with them.