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. 

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.