It's Nelly's World

Lineage

2012-01-28T05:16:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I drive through a town with no name and no place, because it is every place. It is just as well not to name it, because naming things corrals them, and sometimes you want them just to leak all over the page, saturating every memory with the same ink to bring them together in the blue wash. To assure yourself you are still the same: The past is not in a different zone, latitudes away from where your eye lands just now. Your past and the people who made it are here right now.

Old buildings carry with them accreted emotional layers, air-dried, of the people who lived in them, one on top of the other. Why do they read as predominantly sad? Why is most life, when over, an encrustation of sufferings? I feel it as soon as I look at it: unhappiness, crushed hope, years collapsed too soon. With a sprinkling of efferverscent moments, joy and the spring of luck and hands caressing skin. That happened in these walls, too.

The redbrick building I pass slowly was built the same time as the one I suddenly recall: in the twenties. At the exact same time that I am in an old Subaru that sometimes makes strange noises, I am inside the building that glides by (a light turns yellow up ahead). That is because I am now in Akron, my hometown (you can be in yours, too, crossing miles and years in a brilliant flash), in the dark interiors of the Twin Oaks Apartments. They were across the Portage Path--itself a road into the past, that of the long-disappeared original peoples who had worn it down to hard-pack under their stolid, moccasined feet--from the Portage Country Club. I daresay no one who lived at Twin Oaks belonged to the country club. My grandmother lived there.

Sometimes we fall. Sometimes we have something we think we will keep forever, and then we lose it. We fall downward.

That is the story of life, and its inevitable tragedy: not the loss, but the belief that in the end excoriates--that we will never experience it. Sure! We will have into old age what we have now--oh, and also that there is no such thing as old age. That which is nothing but a final series of losses.

The front door to her apartment was never used; the way was blocked by a huge dining table wedged into the hallway. It belonged to that past she never believed would leave her, either: the stately Tudor house in the town's best neighborhood, into which she and her husband had clawed their way from the decks of the ship that arrived from Greece to the shores of new hope. Uneducated, but driven--I am educated, but undriven, which may be the true tragedy hidden in the immigrant's story--they worked, each at their trade. My grandfather's was (need you ask) restaurants. The first, the Roxy Cafe, in downtown Akron held great promise. The town was gripped by rubber fever: the newly populist automobile had put every hand to work making tires, and still the workers poured in. The only similar jobs boom one could experience now would be in China, and it might be as pleasant: the work was long, hard, dark, and smelly. But it was work, jobs by the thousand.

There was only one thing wrong with the Roxy Cafe, and it was not its phalanxes of white-draped tables and bentwood chairs arrayed with military precision, its gilt-painted walls and dark-wood booths and neat checkerboard tile floor. It was that it was opened on the eve of the Great Depression.

But he bounced back: there was no choice for a Greek. There would come a time for more restaurants, each more impressive than the last, until the late fifties, and another boom, this time supporting the Continental pretensions of a downtown establishment bearing the name The Beefeater. Thus was a wish attained: the final expunging of any taint of the truly foreign. The way had been made clear, before this, by the gentle twisting of the odd otherness of the family name, Roussinos, into something more palatable: Russell.

My grandmother's work was similar: to study, closely, the customs and manners of the native-born and emulate them. Thus the woman with the grade-school education learned where to send her children to college (cleansed and white bastions of the highest reputation), what clothes to wear (anything from the pages of Vogue, bought on trips to the department stores with velvet-covered banquets in their inner sanctums of couture, where the salesladies knew her name), what to prepare for dinner (House & Garden was the Bible here). The meals were six courses, and though they sometimes contained the best of Greek cuisine--garlic-studded legs of lamb, homemade kourabides, taramasalata--they also reveled in ice cream bombes and ornate hors d'oeuvres bristling with toothpicks.

They were consummate students of the American way, Gatsbyesque. And then, they fell. Perhaps it was my grandfather's habit, American-hopeful, of buying stocks on margin. Maybe it was simply the trajectory of many a life. Downsized. The furniture, most of it, went. Sold, dispersed. I have the canopy bed of their youngest child. My sister has the olive-velvet settees from the living room; my other sister has the wicker screened-in porch furniture. Their dining table, seats for twelve, followed them to the three-room apartment at Twin Oaks. It never fit.

My grandfather died, as grandfathers do. My grandmother lived on, never sure again what she was living for. The small apartment depressed her. It depressed me. The kitchen was so small. She slept in a twin bed. The place still reminded me of him. She bought a lottery ticket every week. She still hoped to pull herself back up, and out of there, Twin Oaks.

She called us often. Get me out of here. I'm lonely. She had never learned to drive. She was a prisoner of the Twin Oaks Apartments. And this is what I felt when I drove by its doppelganger, far away but as close as the mind will sometimes allow. The sense of falling, falling, backward. Into time. Into the past, or into the future, all of a sudden, mine.

The Play's the Thing

2012-01-21T06:01:00.000-08:00

Maria. Why appear you with this ridiculous boldness before my lady?
Malvolio. "Be not afraid of greatness": 'twas well writ.
Olivia. What mean'st thou by that, Malvolio?
Malvolio. "Some are born great"--
Olivia. Ha?
Malvolio. "Some achieve greatness"--
Olivia. What say'st thou?
Malvolio. "And some have greatness thrust upon them."
Olivia. Heaven restore thee!
Malvolio. "Remember who commended thy yellow stockings"--
Olivia. Thy yellow stockings?
Malvolio. "And wish'd to see thee cross-garter'd."
Olivia. Cross-garter'd?
Malvolio. "Go to, thou art made, if thou desir'st to be so"--
Olivia. Am I made?
Malvolio. "If not, let me see thee a servant still."
Olivia. Why, this is very midsummer madness.

--Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Outside, the early dark falls in a freezing rain. The fire indoors is necessary, and I pull as close to it as I can without lighting my sweater as a flare. And then I reach for one of the free calendars saved from the mail (World Wildlife Fund, Humane Society, Defenders of All-That-Was-Once-Natural-and-Soon-Is-to-Be-No-More) and begin charting summer.

Not my summer--that still exists to me only as hopeful scrawls over June and July weekends of the motorcycle rallies I want to attend and may never get to--but my child's. It is so complex, and must be mapped so far in advance, that I need a separate flowchart for it. God help me if I schedule Farm Camp for the best week of Wayfinders, or town camp when Seewackamano is full of his friends. All heaven help me! This is my midsummer madness, in the frozen heart of winter.

The centerpiece of the summer camp lineup, and possibly of our whole life up here in the boondocks, is Shakespeare camp. For years now, we have been in thrall to a periodic transport of magic: the child's production of plays over four hundred years old, written countless galaxies from the iWorld that is all these children really know. Together, on an outdoor stage in the Catskills dubbed The Little Globe, they offer up the truest proof that great literature can live, its meaning as immutable as granite, forever.

For two weeks, the actors immerse themselves in old English, in characters and rituals and historic detail that is as foreign to them as the back side of the moon. My son bounds out of the car every morning with his lunchbox and disappears into sixteenth-century England. And then, one humid summer evening, we convene.

The fanfare sends its gathering notes over the mountain pines. Parents wait, motionless, on bench and blanket. Then the costumed children--six years old, ten, fifteen--emerge from the woods behind the stage, or file down the aisles. The play begins, their small voices now big with immortal poetry. They do not recite the lines; they live them, for they comprehend. They know who they are, completely and down to the bone: Puck, Orlando, Beatrice.

In another week, the muslin shirts and embroidered bodices will again hang silent in the director's home, waiting for another summer to begin, and my son will be splashing in a pool, or riding bicycles with friends, or making animations on a laptop. But because of a small miracle that is actually quite large (this is here, by chance and by the Ashokan), a boy has learned that two weeks can be marked on a calendar. They can also be timeless.

Wonderfulest

2012-01-14T05:29:00.000-08:00

With a little patience and a lot of paper, I could map out every great thing in my life. I would discover, when I studied it, they are all to be found at the junction of other people and chance. Where these two roads meet, wonderful things appear.

Riding a motorcycle takes you to that corner faster than any other way. Motorcycle riders are a source of the same endless surprise that their rides offer them--open to serendipity and to what happens: to the great Come What May.

Through a chance meeting (and is there any other kind?), one rider has lately become a friend: closer and closer, bit by bit. Funny and magnanimous and generous, he is willing to share his friends in turn. And so, one night a while ago, I found myself at a table of people new to me, and the possibilities they represented were spread out like a feast. As in fact a feast was on the table in front of us; it's a very good restaurant. But some possibilities are tastier than others. Midway through the meal, I asked the man next to me--talking to whom proved a bit like getting rocks out of a mountainside garden--if he wouldn't mind changing seats. That is because there was something about the woman on the other side of him. Our mutual friend had had the idea we might get along. He is perspicacious that way.

A few rare times in a life, we are given what we need at the precise moment we can use it most. A person appears whose words, ideas, spark and burn.

They reveal themselves slowly, though, in their ideal purpose as catalysts of furtherance: that is in fact how you know it was "meant" to be. Because you had no idea, at first. No idea that a friend can help show the way with such a bright light, or even that the way had been so dark before. Not to mention how much fun it is to talk about the things that matter most to one, when they are also the things that matter most to the other.

I was told at first only that she was an artist. OK, an artist. There are millions of those. But a real one, one of the true uncommon, and one who just happens to have a studio in the factory building next door, the roofline of which you can see through the winter-bared trees out your kitchen window?

This was beginning to feel eerie. And then I walked into her studio, and gasped. Emily Dickinson, herself one of the rarest of the rare--the true artist--said she knew something was poetry "if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off." I felt my skull rising skyward as I saw the beautifully strange works hanging there. And then I caught sight of the small office space off to one side of the studio.

The walls were papered with show ribbons, a solid quilt of blue and red. Her dogs. Agility champs. Turns out she is also a dog trainer, and she knows more about positive reinforcement training than any nonprofessional I've ever met. This--the artist, to bring me back to what had fed me for a long time in a past life, and the dog training theorist, to bring me back to a project long stalled and now barking to get free again--feels like I've stepped into a moment of preordination. By way of a very nice dinner, a friend who knows more than he knows, and the lines converging on a map.

Let's go now.

Apocalypse Then

2012-01-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

It’s an arbitrary construct, the “new year.” It gives us false hope—which becomes real—of rebirth. Yet it is of course made of pieces of the real, the revolution of this planet we are on, its revolutions around a solar system in turn. We can’t get off even if we want to! Instead, we can leave it only by being buried a few feet into it.

Think about that for a moment.

I am doing so right now, as I sit by the fire, with R.E.M., a dead band, revolving on the turntable. It all goes around and around, the years and the records both. Music is just a construct too, but made of real bits of mathematics and resonances and neurology. Perhaps it could never not have been conceived. It is that much a part of who we are. I feel that way about movies. I feel I can never see enough. I feel that we were just waiting all our history for 1895 and the coming of the movie.

On Christmas Day, we sat in three seats in the second row, a crappy vantage in any theater. But it was opening day, and across the land, those of us unmoored from a family feast were looking forward to being transported by an epic vision, followed by the requisite Chinese food (or, in our cases, Indian). This is what is known as “Jewish Christmas.”The boy has long been wondering, in his preternaturally smart way that frequently dumbfounds me, why World War I is relatively infrequently considered. After a little thought and a little reading, we discussed the probability that such unspeakable destruction, based on a lie that then gave rise to another horrific multinational bloodletting, was simply too hard to look in the face. Better to bury it, and hope it does not rise again. But of course it does; the world turns always anew in revolutions of willful forgetfulness.

After the happy chocolates in the stocking and the strewn wrapping paper and ribbons of youthful fiction—Santa came!—I strongly suspected that a movie scheduled to open wide on December 25, even if based on that unfathomable episode, would not partake too much of truth: nothing won; so much promise, contorted in frozen pain in the mud. No, in the malls of America, one must be certain of a happy end. Certainly there would be moments of fear, but they would be quickly relieved in a spreading pool of corn syrup, our national food. Children’s movies now permit death to come to only peripheral characters in whom we have invested ten minutes or less. I knew thus at least one War Horse would survive. Even if none of his real-life counterparts ever did. Over eight million horses died in varying levels of agony in the war. Those that managed to survive got a trip to the slaughterhouse as a medal.

What has happened to Steven Spielberg? Has he completely given up? On the evidence of this movie, apparently it is he who has laid down and died. There is no heart even in his conventions, of which “War Horse” is a cryonically sealed package full. There is not an original moment, or a true and human word, in the full 146 minutes. Yet there is a performance of toweringly noble proportions, though the actor speaks no line. The horse, with four white socks and a white star, says in his silent appraisal of this foolish world of men all that could possibly be said.

Otherwise, two scenes, and two scenes only, rouse the viewer. The tracking shot of the first cavalry charge, through the wheatfield, is a moment that widescreen film is made for (only a construct,--but also all that we can make of this inscrutable life). The movement, the rhythm of the editing, the vantage given to us even in the second row, work simultaneously on eye, brain, and heart, and it is thrilling, as it must always be when the recipe’s measurements are followed precisely. Yet it leads necessarily, given the particular plodding mission Spielberg has set himself, to pedantry: in the next moment, we are lectured on historical fact. Cavalry is retroactively rendered anachronistic by machine guns. They do not belong in the same place at the same time. War is an awful place to discover the mistake.

The second time the emotions rise, though duly bidden by cinematic manipulation that feels awfully familiar, is when the horse is in danger. In terrible, potent danger. The type that an actual horse could never survive for a fraction of this time, not enough to wind us into the frenzy of sickening dismay that a fictionally extended run through razor wire does. I longed for the larger shoulder in which to bury my face. Instead, I used my own coat. And when I looked again, he was there, bowed but unbroken (and barely bleeding!), ready for his own Christmas Truce made by wire cutters.

As I had suspected, our appetite for samosas was undiminished by the ending, a happy reunion and the promise of endless fields of emerald green. Not that I wanted to cry. But then, I do. When I go into the dark theater, I want to feel something, life and its awful beauties compressed like poetry, by the revolution of the spools and what is made by a simple turn.

Swimming to Reality

2011-12-31T06:31:00.000-08:00

When I first get in, it's a shock. It's cold, and I think, What am I doing? And then I begin to swim.

A hundred yards of freestyle. A hundred yards of breaststroke (aka reststroke). Fifty yards of freestyle kick. Then another round of all. At the end, fifty yards of freestyle, as fast as I can go. It erases everything in my brain, except for the thought: You can do it. You can do anything, as long as you know there is an end, eventually. Then I see it, under the moving blue, the line that tells me there are just two more revolutions of the arms. Finally, I touch the wall.

Actually, I hit the wall before I in fact hit the wall. At some point, there will be the place where swimming and thought merge. Where skin and outside temperature have no boundary. Then, there is realization.

Last week at the Y, I realized something that had been there all along, something that had underlay my entire life up to that point. There are things we think that are as the concrete foundation under the house, unseen but holding it up nonetheless. As usual, the sudden realization hit me in a fully formed sentence, words to an assumption that had never been spoken, all these years. If only I had been born with a perfect body, I would find someone to love.

I almost laughed underwater (not a good idea in a public pool) at the absurd idea. A perfect example of magical thinking. But yet it is what I believed. All my troubles, all my life, in fearing that I might never find the perfect union, had been about my imperfect genetics. If only I had been one of those women with lithe and shapely legs, there never would have been any of that heartache. There never would have been those years of dearth, those thousands of nights alone in city apartments, wondering if there was anyone, ever, who would lie beside me, take my hand, say the simple words I thought would mean the end of loneliness.

Now I know that wasn't the problem. Or perhaps it just complicated the problem for me. Because, according to the cover story in this month's The Atlantic, the problem is men. Or rather, economics, imbalanced numbers, and the freefall that ensues.

The author of the piece is pictured on the cover, as if to prove a point: She's very attractive. And she's obviously smart. She just didn't quite know what she was dealing with. So she's alone now, on the sharp edge of forty.

She was attracted to the same sort that I was at her age: the dark artist. The poet, or the painter. The kind who goes out with you for six months, then announces: Uh, not yet. I'm not ready.

Turns out they're never ready, until they're fifty-five or so, at which point they're ready . . . for a thirty-five-year-old. So they get it all--decades of banging scores of beautiful women (see, here's where my realization really hit: many of them do have perfect bodies, and see where it gets them?), and then, just under the wire, "commitment." And a family. Their old girlfriends, all the six-month wonders? They get to spend their fifties coming to terms with what it means to be well and truly alone, to know that they will never experience the touch of another again, and to feel the empty pride of knowing they are capable enough to be able to go out in the middle of the night while a freezing windstorm rages and get the generator in the garage started and hook it up so the basement doesn't flood. Quite a feeling of accomplishment.

There are not enough men, and always enough women twenty years younger. So there's always a lost generation of women who put their fine educations to use in constructing justifications: Hey, I've got my friends. My work. My hobbies. That's so much!

And indeed it is. Gratitude abounds. But what of the creeping bitterness? The little nagging hatefulness that comes on at nine on a Friday night, just you and the newspaper and a glass of wine? What to do with the wish, just once, for someone with whom to talk over the wisdom of this car over that, saying this to your child instead of that, staying in for dinner or going out? Well, you shouldn't feel it.

Usually, the people who tell you this with such conviction are those who are paired. (And the notion of pairing: It just feels so natural, so like the summer rain; all of those millions of us in our separate households, with our separate bills, might be excused for a primitive wail into the silence: Isn't this stupid?) They usually tell you, a little too quickly, how sick they are of their husbands' neediness, their selfishness, their bursts of critical unhappiness. At least you don't have to deal with that. But I tried to explain it to one of them once like this. If you get a flat tire, who's the first person you call? And if you find a fifty-dollar bill on the sidewalk, who's the first person you call? It's the same person, isn't it? Well, some of us have no one to call. We share it with no one. The frustration and the happiness both. A closed system of one.

The author of the piece, after explaining the causes for this state of affairs, ends at the same place as the apologists of the single lifestyle. Isn't it wonderful to be in the company of other lonely women?

She never contends with the simple, central issue--what to do about the primate, its inborn needs and its skin? You can't talk that away. Flowers, a ring. Another. You can't think that away. You can only swim.

These Too Are Gifts

2011-12-24T06:39:00.000-08:00

We went down to the city of the past and the present. We rode the bus. One of the aims, besides encountering the serendipities a visit to the place always provides, was to see the bonsai collection at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; the boy has become fascinated with these frozen moments, these living paintings. One thing led to another. We arrived a half hour before closing time, in a foggy gray drizzle. Only it wasn't a half hour before closing, it turned out. We walked past the windows, through which we could see people standing in the room of miniatures, gazing in silence, and when we reached the door we found it locked. A guard stood on the other side, shaking his head.

Because I had, for inscrutable and unfortunate reasons, seen the tree at Rockefeller Center by myself while the boy was still downtown, and I was saddened that he had not had the experience, I was now determined he should not miss another thing. He would especially not miss this, for which we had spent hours of travel time. I stood there and gestured, with what I hoped was a pleasant but pleading look on my face. "We're closed," he said as he cracked open the door.

I won't retail all that I said, but it was a lot. And, though he hesitated--"If I get in trouble for letting you in . . ."; "Then I'll tell them that it was all my fault," now that my foot was almost literally in the door--he relented. "Thank you. You've made a child very happy."

And indeed he had. The quiet beauty of the trees resisted time. Amazing us. Yet only five minutes had passed. On our way out, I touched the guard's arm. "You are a good man. Merry Christmas."

We walked down the street, entered the museum next. After we had wandered through four floors, just aimless and seeing what we felt like seeing, not talking too much, we went back down and sat for a moment in front of a temporary piece in the atrium. "Movable Garden," it was titled: a long brick trough of dirt in which hundreds of variously colored roses had been stuck. If you took one, the placard instructed, the thing to do was to pass it along to a stranger.

I called Tony on my phone. This was another aim of the trip: to say goodbye to Fannie, Tony's dog and my god-dog. Fourteen years before, we had found her as a puppy wandering alone in Prospect Park. She found us within five minutes of each other, almost simultaneously, even though we were not aware at the time, being on other ends of the park, and she further bound us together. She had always been one of those extraordinary beings, a spirit dog. We loved her with everything we had. And now she was dying.

Tony picked us up in his van. We didn't have long before we had to get on the subway again, to make our bus home. Fannie had lost so much weight. Her bones stuck out, and her fur was coming out in clumps. I am not sure if she recognized me. The boy put his arms around her; he loved dogs almost as if he were one. He gave Tony the white rose he had selected.

While the boy ate some pizza at a table indoors, I finished mine outside on the sidewalk while Tony and I tried hard not to cry. I do not like goodbyes. He said Fannie would barely eat. Not even pizza, or cheese? No, not even that. But I held out a piece of crust; her eyes had been distant, but now she took it gingerly in her mouth. And chewed.

To a passerby with a dog who stopped to chat, Tony recited from memory the inscription on a stone in Greenwood Cemetery. Underneath the aged soil rested a dog, the only one in this graveyard. She had belonged to Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. Tony had named his dog after Howe's. Fannie.

Only a dog, do you say, Sir Critic?
Only a dog, but as truth I prize
The truest love I have won in living
Lay in the deeps of her limpid eyes

Frosts of the winters, nor heat of the summer
Could make her fail if my footsteps led
And memory holds in its treasure casket
The name of my darling who lieth dead

Tony could not see me at that moment, but hearing him was my goodbye. And tears fell then.

Soon we were on the bus north, to home. The boy fell asleep against my shoulder, and all was as it was supposed to be. Beginnings, endings, and in between the gifts.

Tony, right; Jupiter, in Santa's lap; Fannie, center. Prospect Park, 2009.

Oh! Tanenbaum

2011-12-17T06:23:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid in the city (of course, I never was a kid in the city, but 24 looks sufficiently childlike at this remove, when I thought I was an adult but I was living instead in that netherworld between youth and adulthood, walking a swaying bridge between the two), I always celebrated my birthday the same way. I gave myself a tree.

Out I would venture in the dark to some otherwise barren quarter of Hoboken, where a December tree seller had set up shop on a street corner. The trees had appeared in the nighttime bringing with them the scent of elsewhere, the perfume of a place I called nature. Breathe deep; close the eyes. The animals of the woodland creep closer. Inhale the piney freedom. Then open the eyes. Hoboken's wildlife--rats, chihuahuas on leash, and teenage boys bearing boomboxes as big as steamer trunks on their shoulders--reappears. Oh well.

Inside my railroad flat the tree would unleash its smell, and I would get busy decorating. Some of the ornaments had been made by friends, and delivered to a tree-trimming party that was probably the smallest gathering the world has ever known, as my apartment was something like two hundred square feet. The tree--even the smallest one I could find, from the $15 rack--now occupied one-fourth of the available real estate.

No matter. I proudly, happily, placed dead center my favorite friend-made ornament: the logo from a Ritz cracker box, a bit of red yarn glued to it, and to that a small caption: "Robert Venturi is God!" Can you guess the profession of its maker? Three and two don't count. Yes, architect.

Oh, and the other tree-trimming tradition: "Messiah" pouring from the stereo. Good thing I was alone, because I sang along. Always. Loudly.

Christmas trees date back some five hundred years, to eastern Europe. At first, people would sing around a tree in the public square, then light it on fire. Later, this would sometimes happen in people's living rooms, as evergreens were decorated with live candles. But that almost seemed worth the danger to me; although I only ever got as far as white mini-bulbs, I envied the few friends who braved the risk for an incomparable, transporting vision of a green tree alight with dancing flames.

My tree this year, as ever since I moved here, comes from the advancing woods retaking the open fields. A giveback, then. And even more of one to me, since all this land is now owned by New York City. I'm sure they wouldn't mind, right? The tree is always lopsided, having grown toward the sun on its own terms, with two crowns.

We just finished reading a book on the Christmas truce of 1914, my boy and me. What a cheering, and depressing, story. The former, because it proves that when we come to know one another as men, as friends, we no longer wish to kill. The "enemy" is destroyed, when he is no longer the vilified unknown, when he is just like you--sick and tired of senseless slaughter. And it is the latter, because in the true story, the officers outlawed friendship. Finally, after months of pressure later, the men were convinced to kill again. The enemy was restored.

But for a brief while, lighted trees stood on the ground of No Man's Land, bringing peace.

Occupy Their Shoes

2011-12-10T06:25:00.000-08:00

Why did it take so long? Why were we not in the streets, with our placards and our anguished shouts, before this? It took nearly a fifth of us out of work--no hope of it returning, either, because it had been slipped out of our pockets while we were watching the parade, entertained by today's official clowns (ever more team sports to show us how to be mindless followers, happy pills that simultaneously pacify us and put billions in the coffers of Big Pharma, brilliant!, the little screens in all our hands giving the illusion of Connection to Friends, jobs disappearing incrementally into automation)--before we thought to rise up. What the encampments will bring, no one yet knows. Change, one hopes. But hopes are sometimes dashed.

My coat, anyway, now sports the button I had been long wishing someone would stamp and a million wear: "I want Roosevelt again." Or at least someone with the courage to do what is necessary, no matter how unpopular, and then to proclaim (as in 1936): "They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred." Only bravery like this, and a willingness to put the country before a desire to be liked, aka reelected, can effect the change we need now. Because, truly, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little" (second inaugural).

I was in the presence of a few who seemed to have too much, on Saturday evening. The venue was the grand new luxury hotel built by the man who has brought high-stakes horse shows to the banks of the Hudson; he had to build the hotel, he explained to a magazine reporter, because there was no place in these parts that offered the kind of lodgings the extremely well-heeled horsey set demands as a matter of right. And so he built a place that exudes the right sort of silky anonymity, with high thread-count sheets and turn-down service, that is expected by the one percent. He is also the parent of children in my son's new school, and that is why I was seated near the fireplace at a large table at the lavish buffet in his hotel's two-story banquet room, for the school's annual fundraising auction.

The items bid upon ranged from gift baskets prepared by every class (the seventh grade's was a game basket, for which I'd bought Scrabble and a dictionary), a chance to be headmaster for a day, a custom-made dining table (value, $9000), a Cape Cod house for a week (value, $2700), lunch with Entrepreneur of the Year (value, priceless), and a "dream car tour," enabling one to take for a spin, one after the other, a Lamborghini, Bentley, Aston Martin, Maserati, and Mercedes. The one I wished for, though, was "Fighter Pilot for a Day," at the controls of an Italian light attack fighter. Then I could die, feeling complete.

The paddles were raised all around the room, blinking on and off like explosions in a video game war. And indeed it was a game, only played with real money (we had given our credit card coordinates before being seated). I noted the frequent bidders always sat back in their chairs, as if resting while servants (volunteers with clipboards and fast pens) recorded their thousands tossed off with an insouciant flick of the wrist. They seemed to enjoy it. The next thing I knew, auction fever spiked my temperature for a brief, hysterical moment, and in a single flash of my paddle--wait, who did that?--I had given away money I didn't have, so that the kids might have a weather station with Mac and six iPads and dock. Then I came to my senses. I went back for some paella and put the paddle safely into my bag so no more temptations would call me out of my place firmly with the 99 percent. Those who had no access to an open bar and chocolate-covered cheesecake slices.

For one night, I stood in their shoes. And I knew why they didn't want to give this up. But I also knew why we must fight so that they will.

Greener Grass

2011-12-03T06:01:00.000-08:00

I finally found peace. Or at least for the duration of the eight-CD set I did. As soon as I switched on the ignition, for those many and dreaded car trips that always split the day into shards, the car was flooded with the very substance of peace. It came in the form of the milky, sober intonations of Eckhart Tolle's voice reading the absolute sense and logic of his hybrid Buddhism.

It is simple to judge a book by its cover, and his books had previously seemed to be that most loathsome and easy to ridicule variety, "self-help," that at which the intellect police snort before tossing onto the garbage heap along with chick lit and Snow Falling on Cedars. But I had been wrong. Of course. As wrong as the ignorant always are before being hit with the force of truth. Now I know that contained in his credo--Now is the only time there is--was the only thing that could matter. I wish I could let you hear it now ("the eh-go-ick self," that trickster wretch who leads us astray again and again--half-whispered in a Germanic accent). It makes you feel good about life, just settling into the calming air filling the interior of the car. It makes you feel good about all that you lack--because you really lack nothing.

It took a while to go through all of them, during the multiple twenty-minute trips to the dump, the library, the bus stop. And while the discs were with me (for too long, no doubt angering the lengthening list of library patrons who had put holds on the New Earth set while I drove all over Ulster County with them) I was able to conquer my persistent, strenuous wishing. Every time something upset me, whether my child losing something, my dog running away, my possessions breaking or tearing, my prospects dwindling (that one always seems permanent to me: there's never going to be another chance! my egoic child cries, though it's funny that it never seems to work in reverse, where I believe my enlarging prospects will remain better forever), I said to myself: That's okay! They don't matter. They are not me. They are not my life's purpose. My ego wants me to believe they're important, and I mustn't give in to that damaging whiner.

Although I knew dear Eckhart would have been disappointed in me, I secretly felt a little proud when I did so. I could let go of so much! And in such a short time! My, what a quick study. Full enlightenment seemed only weeks away--why, just a little more practice, and I will be there! I would no longer care about anything. I would never again be imprisoned by worry. Not about the years reeling by, pulling me by the hair; not about the want of things, which are never quite good enough so that I must want more.

The thought occurred that I should buy my own set: I was doing well so long as I kept listening. But I worried that finally I might tune my teacher out, after so many replays. I would become bored, on the seventh hearing, with having to think so hard about sorting out the real feeling from the egoic feeling. Right from wrong; right from wrong, like those boxes we give to babies so that they might put the plastic triangle into the triangular hole, where only it will fit. So much to correct! And I might just want to listen to some classic rock on WDST instead.

Then, they went back to the library. Back, to go to the next eager student, the next vaguely unhappy person wanting more--not more stuff, at last, but more peace. And while they were getting happier, I--I was going back.

I went back to where I was. Back, and back, through the years, to my original packaging: dissatisfied. Oh, happy in bursts, certainly: grateful for them, the ability to feel happinesses and even to call them by name. I still made lists, on an almost daily basis, of all the gratitudes I felt. But then I dreamed.

I was walking through the front hall of the house I grew up in, the only place I think of as "home." I passed from the door of the kitchen (first going by the powder room, off a short hall onto which the back staircase also let) into the heart of the house. It was a place of passage, naturally. One did not linger there, for it was transitional. See, house as metaphor. There I glanced at the nineteenth-century portrait in a gilt frame of some English personage in uniform whose name on the plate was spelled "Peirson." Underneath the painting was a three-drawer chest in which we stored family pictures, baby books (mine blank after the first page, testimony to tired parents and second-child status). I looked left, up the staircase. Then right, to the leaded-glass door of the library. Beyond, the living room. And in my dream, I heard myself think: There will never be a place as perfect to me as this.

My longing returned anew, CDs a vapor carried away by the wind. When I had company over last week, and there was no place to sit for drinks, we stood awkwardly since there had been no room to put a table near the couch in this imperfect house. Two days earlier, the sump pump had broken, followed quickly by the furnace (again) and then the fireplace door's glass, irreplaceable because old and painted in a way that gave this place one of its few touches of charm.

I realize only now that the pattern on the glass reminded me of the diamond-shaped leading in the windows of that other, lost, house. It was like losing it all over again.

Desire is the problem. It is the devil, urging us to walk into the fire that will consume us. The rocks that will splinter the hull, while the Sirens sing on.

I put in my request last night. Whenever they are returned to the library, another CD set will be laid aside for me, my name on a slip of paper stuck between the discs that, when played in the car as I drive, will teach me that the loss, too, is not as I had feared.

Not a Theme

2011-11-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

For the boy, it's become All Weapons, All the Time. While his mother dreams about how to make it All Motorcycles, All the Time (but will never really succeed, and, to tell the truth, doesn't actually want to: there are so many other alluring pursuits devised by man and nature, she never wants there to be only one).

The boy is the product of a mother who is repelled by war, yet also fascinated by its abundant detail, not only the parade-clean, gold-braid variety of detail, either. (To the point of thinking about writing a book about this strange love.) She believes war is a treatable insanity.

The boy is the product of a mother who has been vegetarian for thirty-six years, and who winces every time mid-November rolls around again. That is when she encounters the bow hunters walking into the woods, and it is all she can do to print a tight smile on her face and return a small hello as they pass. She averts her eye from what they carry, horrific instruments of pain and eventual death. (Anyone who says pshaw might volunteer to have an arrow fired into their soft tissue at 300 fps, then walk around for a day or two like that. All in the interests of science.) She sees no beauty there, no pleasure. And if there is pleasure, for the shooter, she does not want to examine it very deeply.

The boy is a gentle sort, who loves all dogs. He would not, as the saying goes, hurt a fly (though he draws the line at mosquitoes). But the boy is a boy. Therefore he is besotted with weapons. He studies them, draws them, discusses them, and possibly dreams of them. He suffers a deep sense of personal offense when a popular boy's book discusses one sort of machine gun but then illustrates it with another. What an affront!

Finally, the boy is the product of a mother who also loves guns. She feels like a terrible hypocrite, the hater of all voluntary killing and the lover of that which arose from the purpose; the beauty of guns is a terrible beauty, a powerful one because of their true purpose. She sees them in the same class as all mechanisms that combine functionality and art: architecture, motorcycles, certain cars, the martial arts. She has a gut feeling that Frank Gehry would design deeply ugly guns, because for one thing they would fall apart very easily and have a lot of gewgaws on them that didn't relate to any practical purpose.

Can a committed pacifist love the instruments of death without apology?

I would like the answer to that question. Meanwhile, I listen to the dinnertime disquisitions on armaments and their designers. I realize that, for my boy, they represent what motorcycles do to me: a focus, history and experience wrapped up in one complex yet also simple object, a pleasure, a way in and a way out. Meanwhile, I borrow the Airsoft pistol when no one is watching, and I feel something when the pellet hits the can, square in the heart of the target.

Where in the World

2011-11-19T07:17:00.000-08:00

You could have lived anywhere. And chances are, you have lived several places. Your forebears came from yet other places which you may never have visited, and never will.

Our nomadism is inside us. It is indubitably linked to the hope that also is inside us. Our species moves and wishes to move.

I think a lot now about where I'd like to live. Not in the way I did decades ago: with the certainty that I would eventually live in every place that attached itself to my daydreams. Then, I had many lifetimes; some of them would be spent in California, in Italy, and perhaps somewhere in the Southwest. (In 1985, I put a thumbtack in the map on the dot called Taos, New Mexico, having determined that moving there would solve each and every one of my multiplicitous problems. I arranged interviews, talked to friends of friends, rented a motel room and flew there, only to be struck full force in the head the first night there with the doom of an even more certain truth: that the place I lived was not the originary point of my problems; I was. Back I went to home, and into the terrible beauties of psychotherapy.)

Even now I am questioning the wisdom of rural living, gorgeous though it is: having to drive everywhere--twelve miles to an affordable grocery, seven miles to the library, six miles to decent coffee, and (most desperate of all) very little in the way of takeout.

Of course, there is the fact that the solution to the current economic fix, one that is not going away because the system that gave rise to it is untenable, fully broken now, and that has caused actual unemployment upwards of seventeen percent (per the government's own figures), is the erasure of a hundred years. By that I mean a return to the employment structure of pre - industrial revolution times: small farming. I'll need a new house, though, or else a tiller to take care of the lawn and a chainsaw to take care of the neighboring forest. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the city recently with friends who had also retreated northward at the same time and for the same reasons I did eleven years ago, I asked R. if he missed living in the city. "Nope, done that. This town belongs to others now. But we do think about where we'll go for the next chapter. When the kids are grown, maybe another city, like Portland or Austin. Where you can walk to the coffee shop."

I am not the only one, then. At some point we'll pack our bags again. We'll feel that mixture of quivering fear and hopeful possibility: a new life! We will colonize our dreams. Then, at some other point, later on, we will start thinking again. Where will it be better? Where in the world will we go next?

Be My Guest

2011-11-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

Writing poetry is hard. (Writing good poetry is even harder.) Writing about bikes is hard. Writing good poetry about bikes is impossible.

Yet I have found one man who can do the impossible.

Ed Milich, gearhead and vintage racer, specializes in deliciously complex endeavors: bringing back the ghosts of dead and superannuated Italian bikes and making them screamingly alive on the track; collecting bits of what others might call "junk" but are to certain blessed individuals "Just what I needed to make life complete!" He parts out bikes, and he parts out himself, as a writer for a collection of motorcycle publications. He is also the mastermind of GuzziTech.com. But what he does that that amazes me most is write poetry about what he does--poetry that is the real thing. Do you know how hard that is? Impossible. It is an amazing thing to watch a mortal do the impossible, which is why we watch vintage racing in the first place. And which is why I asked Ed to be my first guest blogger.

If the two poems below affect you--and you would not be made of metal-loving flesh if they don't--do yourself a favor and lay hold of his two books, Wrenched (free verse) and Fueled (containing both poems and self-described "short stories about the passions and madness of racing: rusted motorcycles, crusted men, and how Milich won a race at Daytona on a $600 Moto Guzzi").

****

two poems by Ed Milich

PARTS COUNTER

Some people think he is just
a sour old man
with a limp
and a limitless supply of curses
which he shouts generously
at the mechanic
and the parts manager.

But I know why
the man behind the counter
at the motorcycle shop
is such a dour old firecracker.

For years he has stockpiled parts
one at a time
from wrecks that show up at the shop.
He has
for many afternoons
screwed with carburetors
and ignition advance units
and breathed the gray, sooty filth
that spews from exhaust pipes of bikes
that haven't run in years
but under his magic touch come alive
with only a few hours of work.

I know why.

The old man used to race,
the Catalina Grand Prix
and at Steamboat
and Riverside
and Daytona
and the bowls of his old tarnished trophies
carry a haphazard baggage of bolts
and rubber bands
and slightly used spark plugs,
and dust.
He never speaks of his racing career.

This man has tasted glory at the racetrack.
and he has acquired the skills
to tune Triumph motors to sing like
twin sopranos.
But you still need a to make a buck,
so he sits in this motorcycle shop
from 9 to 5 Tuesday through Saturday
and there is always some tightwad
who offers $17 instead of $20
for a starter solenoid.
Asshole.

For these reasons and more
one should carefully consider
before forming an opinion
about the old man
behind the parts counter.

--------------------------

DAYTONA 2008

After twenty hours of fussing and fighting with clearances
and turning wrenches
and cutting down pistons
on the twelve inch swing lathe at my workplace,
and stuffing the new motor in the machine,
and two thousand dollars in parts bills,
I was able to dyno test the bike.
To my amazement, it was up 9 horsepower.
That's 20% higher than stock.
My surprise transformed to cunning
as I imagined my competitive advantage.

On the first day of racing at Daytona,
I got the hole shot
and went forward into turn 1
with a snaking trail of racers behind me.
I led for three laps
until Craig on his Ascot
made his move in Turn 4 and passed me.
I caught him on the banking and surpassed him in Turn 1.
We did this dance for two more laps
and then on the last lap, he led
and would not let go.
I drafted his wake, and made an attempt to catch him,
but at the line I was still three feet behind him,
so I took a second place.

On the second day at Daytona,
I again got the hole shot
I focused hard and rode swiftly for three laps.
when I looked back, I saw nothing but
the sun bleached Daytona asphalt,
so I continued for two more laps
until I crossed the finish line alone
and in first place.

And where was Craig? Had he faltered or crashed, or had he merely geared wrong?
I do not know and don't care to ask,
for first place means
not having to burden one's mind
with such thoughts.

Arranged

2011-11-05T06:33:00.000-07:00

You know who this is, right? Yes. It's the person we all want to be. It's the fictional me: the one who has it all under control. Nancy Drew, stand-in for master of the known universe.

In the space of twenty chapters, all of which end with a cliffhanger, she met with trouble, grappled with it, and sent it back into the exile of the impenetrable. The sun emerged from behind the clouds to bathe the world of River Heights in light. At least until the next book. Beginning, middle, end. Contained, and curbed. The first in the series, The Secret of the Old Clock, written by Carolyn Keene (no such person existed, although she continues to write the series, all the way from 1930 to now), gets right down to business in the first sentence: "Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible." Four short paragraphs later, still on the first page, " . . . she gasped in horror."

My first stay in summer camp, at the outset of which I was miserable with homesickness, and at the end of which I couldn't bear to go home and be separated from my new friends (not to mention the horses), the counselor read out loud to our cabin of girls one chapter every night of a Nancy Drew Mystery Story. It was intolerable: we all groaned when she reached the last line--"The next moment she heard a piercing scream!" was typical--and said, "Lights out." Even though we knew she would get out of every scrape, we didn't know it. We could all imagine ourselves an attractive girl of eighteen. And we all wanted a convertible roadster, and to look dashingly pretty as we drove it. Perhaps growing up, that mysterious passage we longed for so hard it hurt, would provide such things to us.

Later, I was married. Well past Nancy Drew now. Then, they started to come: bizarre panics in which my heart would race, my skin crawl, a terrible fear from nowhere like stones falling, falling on my head without cease. There seemed no remedy. Sometimes I would write in a journal, the words racing too, trying to talk myself out of a deep hole. Whole nights, sitting on the couch in the dark living room, watching the Brooklyn skyline out the window as if its yellow lights might offer some answer. It never did. But one night I found something that helped, Xanax in literary form. An old Nancy Drew (Mystery at the Ski Jump, I have a feeling it was). Suddenly, reading it in the cold hours while around me eight million slept their contented sleeps, everything that was in question ordered itself, fell into categories with neatly typed labels. This will happen, then this, followed by this. There will be a chapter (really!) titled "Happy Finale."

I discovered that reading Nancy Drew made me feel all right. Everything always fell into place, because she had her dad, lawyer Carson Drew, and her pals. She had her roadster, and Ned. She had her slender form and her hair was never out of place, even when she had been blindfolded and dragged into a cupboard (from which she was guaranteed to emerge in the next chapter). She had her wits about her. That which I seemed to lack.

So I borrowed them from her. On a weekend visit to friends' in the country, the sun shining and everyone enjoying themselves, the darkness came over me and I started to sweat, to tremble. Excuse me, I said with a smile I hoped no one could see through; I'm not feeling well. I think I'll go lie down for a minute.

Into the bedroom, draw the curtain. Lie down on the bed, every cell zinging. "Why is this happening to me? What do I do?" the voice inside repeated, in a sort of frenzy. Then my eye fell on the bookshelf across the room: there was a lemon-yellow spine with royal blue type. At that moment the ripcord pulled, and I was pulled back up into space: the chute had deployed and my fall was slowing. Nancy Drew was here. She turned up in the most astonishing places, always at the very last second. That much was assured.

It took an hour to read. And when I rose from the bed, my smile was real. She had put everything to rights. For the time that I was between those covers, I felt as though I would prevail. My fictional self had untied the knots of a fictional misery. How could I be frightened, if Nancy Drew never was? Out I walked, into my own River Heights. I lived there for a little while, until the next mystery hit me from behind. There were over thirty books in the series.

Revealed

2011-10-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

Only today did it finally show itself to me.

I had walked this portion of the rail trail over twenty times, I estimate. And only today did it give me a tangible prize. Maybe that is why we return again and again to the places we have come to love: the promise of something more, something that lay hidden, that will finally give itself to us. The views, the fall of the light, the smell of spring; all these wait for the patient watcher.

On the way back, after going down, then up (and up, then down) the river cut that was once spanned by a bridge whose ghost piers allow me to imagine it--train rumbling slowly through the woods, by the edges of farms--did I finally see what was there all along. A glint of glass. I could see immediately that it was broken. But beside it, emerging again from the leaf mold of decades, there was another bottle (patent medicine, probably) that was intact. These make nice bud vases for the bathroom sink. Or little things to fill the shelves.

I scrambled up the bank of the lost railroad, and I see it's a goldmine: a huge spill of a farm dump, probably from the fifties. Old rusty oil cans, broken tea cups, shards of milk glass, endless buckets with the bottoms eaten through. Oh, the things you can find in a farm dump. When you find something intact in one, it's like a gift from the universe; but it's really a gift from the past, from someone long dead who is reaching down through the years: "Here. I knew you would like this. See? It's usable. Go on."

I once found a bucket (this one unrusted) stamped "NY Water Supply," from a dump tumbling down the ravine of a little creek feeding the Ashokan Reservoir. I once found an enameled pie plate half buried in the stony dirt of an old farm I once owned, and it's made many pies for me since. I can't even remember all the other things I've brought home, stuffed with mud, to either give away again or place among my most beloved possessions. Uh, after a wash in the sink.

I don't quite know what drew me to scrape away a layer of leaves over something dully gleaming among the glass and rust. But there it was. The barrel of a toy gun. I pulled it out. Broken, without its grip. But wait. There's something next to it. The white-plastic grip (or something that was once white). A cowboy-hatted man in relief on it; Kit Carson. I carefully fitted the grip back over the handle, and there it was, except for one piece that contained the grommet that held it on the other side.

In the car later, waiting for the school bus, I absently picked it up off the floor. A stream of tiny ants moved from the inside of the grip, where they had found a tidy home, and up my wrist. And then I saw it: the other bit of plastic that had broken off, neatly stowed inside.

When it dries, I will try to make it whole again. If I do, I can look upon it anytime I wish, and wonder why it was that, today of all days, I found a prize from some boy's past, waiting in the woods.

Las Vegas Living Room

2011-10-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

It feels like what is taking shape may well be the battle of my life. It's a classic war, with a new twist: the digital-age takeback of a child's mind by a parent who Knows Better (and parents always know better, as you well know).

One Sunday evening, when my son was still swimming around inside me gills and tail intact, we went to the local inn for its old-fashioned smorgasbord (I confess to filching roast beef scraps--after all, I wasn't eating them but I was allowed to have all I wanted--and taking them out in a napkin to the border collie waiting in our car). Across the dining room was a long table at which was seated what I took to be an extended family, some twelve or fourteen people straddling the ages. But there was something strange about their seating arrangement. One of them was standing. Throughout the entire meal. Facing the wall.

The little boy had his back to his family, his hands furiously working the buttons of his Gameboy. He was in a world of his own, and I imagined it was a very small world indeed. He seemed on the verge of being sucked inside the small black device, and I bet he surely wished he could.

The image printed and framed itself in my mind in that instant. The subject was alienation, addiction, and a sad situation. I titled it: "Never."

I was never going to let this become my child, and for a long time I was able to fend it off, more or less. Of course, we watched movies on screen, and we looked for things, and we occasionally played games. But I never felt I might lose my child to the sirens inside a microchip, until now.

He received a netbook as a gift before starting a new school, and the first day came home and announced that it was good he had one, because all the students were "required" to have one. This was the first, uh, untruth to be attached to the instrument. There were more to come; an alarming direction in a child who rarely if ever lied.

Certainly, the computer is helping. It helps overcome what is for him the laboriousness of handwriting, so that his written work becomes fuller and richer when he employs a keyboard. His science teacher uses a site to pass on homework and allow the kids to communicate with each other on their answers. After lunch, however, the seventh-grade boys eschew the outdoors, where they might run around, throw a Frisbee, wander, or talk, and head to the library to bend their heads over their solitary computers and play video games. When I learned this, my blood ran a little cold.

Every day I would ask if he'd gone outdoors at all, and the answer was always no, even on those bright glorious days of fall: the campus has a drop-dead view of the mountains. Then again, so does the town dump; sublime views are cheap around here.

At the school's annual Harvest Dinner, on the lawn in full view of the aforesaid picturesque vista, I bumped paper cups with the student body ombudsman. We loved everything about the school, I allowed, except for this one little problem . . . my son the addict. What should I do? I'd tried the 45-minute rule, the one-day-a-week-without-screens, the threats and the positive reinforcement. "Yes, Mom. I'm turning it off." Fifteen minutes later, I go upstairs to check, and there's the hasty click of the laptop closing, the furtive face looking up. "You don't trust me!" I take it away, and I get "You're stealing my property!" And, as he sees his mother the addict boot up the computer ("boot up" for both heroin and the Dell, yes, very interesting), he calls me on the carpet for my hypocrisy. Even I know that "I use this computer for my work!" isn't the only truth.

The fellow at school tells me he knows, and he agrees: he's concerned too. "Last year we had to do an intervention on a student. We came and ripped the computer out of his wall. He lay there on the couch, twitching and crying." The Sunday paper's Parade supplement coincidentally contains a "special report": "Born to Be Wired: Being connected 24/7 is changing how our kids live, and it may even be altering their brains." Great. But I know this already. ("The prefrontal cortex . . . is not fully developed until the early 20s"; "When kids play video games, that little pleasure chemical dopamine also kicks in. The intermittent reinforcement that games provide is similar to gambling, and for some kids, just as addictive." Most at risk? Loner boys.)

Perhaps I could have seen this coming from decades ago, in Poughkeepsie, at the bar across the street from campus. Every night the last semester of school, we closed it down, a few friends from the art history/philosophy major sector. Every night, we stood in front of the Galaga console, its pinging-whooshing constant and exhilarating. If the barkeep hadn't thrown us out at 2 a.m., we might have stood there all night, our beer glasses sweating on the table behind us as we bathed in the black glow from the pleasure dome before us. If only I had known. But I was powerless to stop.

I Know I'll Get There Somehow

2011-10-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

I am looking forward to the road in the way that one looks forward to standing under a long, hot shower after a chilly fall day stacking wood. Soothing, sensual, and--of pertinent interest to me right now--alone.

I haven't been riding much lately; this must be what happens when you publish a book about motorcycling. You have no time to motorcycle. The interims between readings and promotional trips are devoted to the kid, his haircuts and bus schedule and school meetings, as well as the forgotten assignment (whoops!) and the filth that builds up in the house while you aren't looking. Then there's the dwindling supply of clean underwear. But for once, in this long month of rehashing what is already finished to me, and meeting scores of fascinating people and talking with all of them, I will get to be alone on a motorcycle on a long road. I expect it to provide its certain sustenance intravenously, going straight to the bloodstream without intermediary actions. It's just there, feeding you.

After the first leg of this ride, I will again feel restored and happy to shake hands and hear others' stories of their rides, and how they found motorcycles, and how motorcycles keep them anchored to life. When that is over, the meeting of friends and the dinners and the socializing, I will once again put my leg over the Rockster and wave goodbye to where I've been. I will face the calm aloneness of hours on the highway, and the possibility of figuring some new things out. (It appears that I am never to be without something I badly need the road's help in decoding.)

I am a little bit tired and a little bit discouraged and a lot confused. I may think that this is new, but I have to remember that it is not. I will always need the road again and again and again, for different reasons and the same reasons. Ride, rinse, repeat. That is life's image, the revolution of the wheel. Need, and relief. Need, and relief. I map my destination with a combination of care and faith.

***

I would like to reiterate my apology to a group of people who command my highest respect. Through
unconsidered misspeaking, I have harmed and angered them. I am deeply sorry for what I did. Since I cannot unspeak
it, I can only regret it, learn from it, and ask for forgiveness. The intention to honor their pursuits remains, as it was in the
beginning, the only thing in my mind.

There Are the Dead

2011-10-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

A final resting place is also a good temporary resting place. Do you recall the old burying grounds you have chanced upon on your walks out in the country? The timeless calm, as if an intaken breath was captive forever. As if life merely entered another state and was now going on, in the air around you. The breezes touch the headstones, then touch you.

On a childhood visit to Vermont, I was introduced to the notion of the graveyard as picnic ground. Those buried here had certainly seen it all, having lain in the ground for a hundred fifty years or more; I had the feeling, even then, that they welcomed the sensation of youthful feet on their heads and arms. The farms that had once been their homes were now vanished, and so it seemed they had been forgotten, untied and left to float away on this boat of land.

Still, for a child, it is not easy to shake a deep fear of the afterlife. And when I saw what looked like a white branch from a tree, though no tree was in sight in the hillside pasture, lying on a grave, panic gripped me. A bone. It was a message. Or perhaps a warning.

Indeed: This is what you will become.

I couldn't stand the idea then; now it bothers me far less, which is good, since I ought to get familiar with something that will soon get familiar with me.

It was the hip bone of a cow.

Twenty-five years ago a friend and I were working on a book proposal we called Where the Dead Are. It was going to be a guide to beautiful, picnic-worthy, eerie, strange, notable cemeteries. The kind you happen on, the surprise beyond the old hedgerow, the orchard-side collection of leaning, lichen-stained, heaved-up or sunken-in plots that give a frisson of happy-sad. The full circle that is really impossible to grasp, though you want to try, at least here, in the sweet outdoors.

Where Nelly and I went walking this morning, a trail in the wide valley between mountains, we pass a tiny split-rail-encircled family burying ground with four graves. The stones tell a brief story of the Winne family, whose named, misspelled, is borne on a road sign a mile away. Their tale is that they lived here, farmed here, died here; the paterfamilias went off to war, then returned. There is no more, although at one time there was.

On the other side of the loop trail is a modern cemetery, in which interments still occur. The lawn is mowed, and the stones stand upright and white. This kind of rigorous order is more frightening to me than the lost, weather-beaten act of reclamation by larger nature that is evident in the forgotten burying grounds of the past. It speaks of a resistance to the inevitable that is deeply creepy. On some of the graves I see colored glass tubes on stakes; these had always puzzled me as a child, when imagining can be a terrible thing. What were they? I had thought of ashes, of spirits, of the incense that the Greek Orthodox priest had shaken into the air at my great-uncle's funeral, the first dead body I had ever seen. That odor sometimes recurs--I get a whiff of something just like it sometimes, out in the open, and then I think: Death. Death is about to visit.

These tubes, I now know, are everlasting lights. You can currently get them in solar- or battery-powered versions. Candles are more appropriate, I think; they too go out with the wind. Things are not supposed to last. We do well to remember it. And to visit it, on lovely peaceful days when we are out walking, and stumble on a peaceful scene with just enough edge to make us feel alive.

The Ugly Truth

2011-10-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

Where in America do we now get our truth? Since newspapers have eliminated reporters and cut budgets for news-gathering, there's little of substance in them anymore--they figure AP and the unquestioning reprinting of press releases oughta be good enough for the American people, who aren't even watching.

The documentary film, I would submit, has taken the place of investigative journalism in this time when we basically don't know shit about what's really happening (to our freedoms, to our soldiers, to our economy, or to the earth, to name a few areas of concern) and by whom. These independently produced documentaries are delivering coverage of otherwise undiscussed issues in unparalleled depth. In color, with soundtracks, too!

The problem is that these films are not made of material that can be loaded into street boxes and bought with loose change. They need to be shown in theaters. And there are only a handful of theaters in the U.S. that will show them; these are not going to be playing at the local Cinema One Two Many, up against Iron Man 2 and The Last Airbender. (Which exemplify truth of a different, possibly more disturbing, sort, but we don't have time to go into that here.) Moreover, the few art-house theaters that do screen documentaries tend to be located in towns where the homogenous population forms a choir already predisposed toward the preacher.

Too bad, because one documentary every American should see is The Last Mountain. It details the reprehensible, almost unbelievable practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining, which is laying waste to the timeless Appalachian range. It is greed in motion. It permanently destroys landscapes, woods, waterways, the homes of people and other animals, for such short-sighted and ultimately small gain it makes your head spin. Say you wanted to have a piece of toast. But first you had to burn down a forest. That's pretty much the size of it.

In truth, any time we unthinkingly switch on the lights, we drive the bulldozer. The movie gives us some facts:

Almost half of the electricity produced in the U.S. comes from the burning of coal.
Sixteen pounds of coal is burned each day for every man woman and child in the US.
Thirty percent of that coal comes from the mountains of Appalachia.

It doesn't take deep thought to wonder how much longer we can do this--how much longer the coal will last, not to mention how much longer we can last, given the greenhouse effect driven hotter by burning coal, and the health problems associated with it. We are so smart--we can make a Facebook; we can make a guided missile--but we can't figure out how to power our appliances without massive destruction of everything and everyone?

What the movie does so well, though--what documentaries can do that no other medium can--is to put the insanity in front of your eyes in large format, no explanation required other than the ugly truth. Take one of the most beautiful places on the planet, emerald green hills rising up from hollows through which run clear streams like lifeblood, and first tear down the forests, then scrape off the top of prehistory's own geography, then dump it down to bury the water until it no longer runs. (Into the bargain, flood the people who live in the hollows, when rain pours and it has nowhere else now to go.) It is breathtaking. In a bad way, I mean. When you are shown what the coal company terms "reclamation," you want to laugh, then cry, finally scream. Or perhaps some other order will occur to you. In one scene, water tumbles down from the pristine hills in its ageless bed; in the next, the green is erased by gray as far as the eye can see, blazing under the sun, and the streambed is a dry spill of carefully placed rocks. They might call their replacement a "river," but this is the most cynical use of the English language I think I've ever encountered. (Well, next to "enhanced coercive interrogation technique" and its ilk.)

But words can be changed up so long as you create a diversion, then slip a new one into a law somewhere. Bingo! Now what was drafted to protect us suddenly protects a business interest, and we can all go to hell. Or wait--they'll bring it to us. You just sit right there.

That's what this movie shows, literally (a word disappears from a document before our eyes and another is dropped in), and a more dispiriting moment in cinema I have rarely seen.

Happier, though still depressing because it needed to be caused in the first place, is the visual evidence that people are taking to the streets in protest. That is really our only hope, and the greatest of our freedoms. If only everyone could see The Last Mountain, the protests might become big enough to stop something very bad. First, we need to see the ugly truth.

Up in the Air

2011-09-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

Where does it come from, trust, and what is its use? Does it exist only to give you courage to do things you shouldn't? Such as love?

I've been thinking lately about this amorphous thing. It is not made of substance, yet it is the very foundation on which you build things of great substance. Your life and all it contains, for instance. Where does it come from--childish hope?

I refer not to love which is given: that is always its own reward. And I refer not to the love we offer so joyously to our children, to our friends, and to our dogs, who alone may be counted on to never change suddenly in midstream: I just decided I don't love you anymore, so I'll see you later. The trust in a dog's return of affection is never misplaced. If anyone is looking for the primary reason we choose as companions domestic canines by the million, there you go.

(I was recently sent--by a fellow dog person, of course--the Mad TV skit in which a man stands on a ledge outside his apartment, ready to end it all, while his wife tries to talk him down. She gets sidetracked by her pets, though, a dozen ankle-biters who get cooed at, wovey-dovey, while he gets readier by the minute to jump. She finally thinks to ask him why--it's because she loves the dogs more than him, of course.)

One cannot always know what children are thinking.
Children are hard to understand, especially when
careful training has accustomed them to obedience
and experience has made them cautious in conversation
with their teachers. Will you not draw from that
fine maxim that one should not scold children too
much but should make them trustful, so that they
will not conceal their stupidities from us?

These are the words, written in 1776, of Catherine the Great of Russia. They illustrate, to devious ends, how trust leads to openness, and openness to the fullest experience of relationships in which nothing needs to be hidden. In this utopia made of trust, the energy one would otherwise devote to manipulation need never be expended. It may be spent in happier ways.

Recently I had cause to write in a notebook: "Insecure people are inherently untrustworthy." And so it is that trust is the chicken-or-egg question rolling endlessly from one side of a life to the other. Being unable to trust one's primary caretaker makes one insecure; then one turns around and later proves himself unworthy of trust.

We have all heard of people who exemplify the sad craziness of falling in love with those who are transparent liars and cheats, but who nonetheless elicit trust from their victim. "He told me he was never going to [fill in the blank] again!" "And you believed him?" "Yes! He promised!"

Oy.

But how can any of us really know? We go on our merry way, trusting in all sorts of things--the electric light that will go on when we flip the switch, the sun that rises every morning (so far!), the honesty of our elected officials, the promise and the vow and the kiss. Is it all a big craps shoot? Maybe someday we will be able to determine the logarithm of trust, that which will render heartbreak a thing of the past--the princess telephone of emotion.

Out There

2011-09-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went on a date with my dog.

The sun, which I'd feared had spun off into the farther universe never to return again, finally came out. It had rained for weeks, it seemed. We hadn't had a decent walk in a long time. It was Friday evening; I was feeling too restless to stay at home. Besides, I was curious about what had happened to the small town of Phoenicia in the floods. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do: walk up the side of a mountain just outside town, then take Nelly out for a nice dinner. Even if I would be the one eating it.

It would be my first dinner out alone in so many years I can't count. I never liked it back then, fearing I wore the visible badge of the pathetic. I usually armed myself with a book. I wanted to be braver than that now, but I have to admit I wasn't: I brought a pad of paper on which to write. Just in case the muse visited, you know.

Phoenicia has always been a magnet to me. I love the way the mountains cup it; I love the fact that Main Street is two blocks long, then vanishes into the formidable green. I wanted to buy a house there. Now I'm glad I didn't: Phoenicia is sort of cursed.

Their library burned a few months ago. And every time it rains, now, the town is flooded.

There were piles of food and supplies in Rotary park, left for anyone who needs them. There was a board for posting help needed/help offered. The streets were coated with silt and mud, and huge piles of dirt that had been
scraped up stood everywhere.

I watched two women, one maybe a young sixty, come out of Mama's Boy across the street from where Nelly & I were dining. They were eating ice cream cones. They walked over to the restaurant, where they spied someone they knew on the patio behind me. I heard the older woman say, "Did you see my house? It collapsed just yesterday." She then reached down to pet Nelly, and tell me she was just like the dog she'd wanted to get a while ago. Now, she said, she was glad she didn't. But I said, "Do--for when you rebuild." She smiled and said, "Yes, that can be my reward."

I felt bad for every moment I've ever spent pitying myself. This woman, who'd lost everything, could smile, and hope for a dog.

Disbelief

2011-09-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

The traditional gift for a tenth anniversary is made of tin.

Perhaps that is why the tenth anniversary of the terrible, momentous events of September 11 are bringing out the conspiracy theories again. Apparently nothing got the doubters going quite like the structural damage of the Pentagon, which seemed to them impossible to square with a commercial jetliner going into the side of this building. They don't see airplane debris (or if they do, it was what was surreptitiously brought there later, no matter that it would be hard to hide such maneuvers in the hours following one of the most well-publicized and photographed events of the century). Every picture of this site has been scrutinized, stared at until it's a miracle the photos themselves didn't burn, and reposted online overlaid with impressive-looking lines, arrows, and angles supposedly pointing out the fact that there is something being hidden from us.

Of course there is something hidden: the answer why. Not the complex, distant historical answer; political theorists have plenty of explanations, most of which make sense and most of which none of us have any use for. But the answer why destruction and death rained suddenly one beautiful blue-sky day, and made us wonder: God, why?

According to the experts who have considered the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wake of large and effectively incomprehensible events, it is more comforting to believe not that we are random targets but rather are worthy of elaborate, careful constructions of huge scope intended to dupe us. We are prized. And the long unraveling--the deceptions never fully unreeled, they are that big--keeps the thing from ever having an end. We can study it forever. It is never over; "over" is the point at which you bury the dead.

It is as impossible to describe what was truly felt that day as to catch the tail of a kite, line cut, that becomes smaller and smaller against the white of a large sun. Everyone has their story, every detail etched with acid on the memory's plate. You remember exactly where you were when you heard. Or, for so many of my friends, where they watched the black smoke billowing into the sky, which building roof or avenue they stood on as they watched a tall tower sink to the ground like a poleaxed animal. That sight was impossible to fully grasp either with eye or emotion. The gray ash fell everywhere over the city, and then our world.

I know exactly where I was, and why. My child's second birthday. The parents visiting. The phone call, bizarrely from across the ocean, the voice asking in French: Are you all right?

As we sat eating breakfast outdoors on the patio, the planes must have gone directly overhead; they followed the line of the Hudson River south to reach their objectives.

Later, the first time I revisited the city that had been like my second parents, the city that raised me to adulthood, the bus came around the spiral of roadway pouring us into the Lincoln Tunnel. I saw that great cityscape, but now with something missing that had seemed it would always be there (the Twin Towers were how I, directionally challenged, oriented myself when emerging from the subway: ah, there--that's south, then). The gasp undid me.

When people hear that September 11 is my son's birth date, they for a moment look stunned, as if they don't know how to respond. Is it a tragedy? No, not for me. It allows the happiness of hopeful new life to pull on the other end of the line that is pulling back with eternal sadness. I don't know why, either.

This week, as if on cue, the leaves started falling from the trees.

These Thoughts (After a Storm)

2011-09-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

Twice a day, empty sixteen-wheelers roll past my house. They are going to the factory next door. When they roll past again, the other way, they are loaded with silent wind chimes. These will someday hang outside of homes all over the world, where they will make sonorous sounds. When the wind kicks up, they will bang and cry.

The first fortune cookie that cracked open, empty, brought forth a nervous laugh. It went sort of like "uh-ha-ar-a-aah." But the second one, a week later, caused nothing outward. Just a sudden cold inside. I am to have no future? Or, maybe: I am to write my own future. That came from the brave little imp who lives inside me. He is very perverse.

Drinking a gin & tonic right now from a purple glass. I bought the set because on the box it said "Happy."

Children love ghost stories because they get scared. Then they get scared.

The term "glacial erratics" sounds like a poem.

He kept opening the basement door to shine a light down on the strange sight of two and a half feet of water, just sitting there.

In the woods, nothing looked different. In our yards, the devastation was breathtaking. This is the difference between nature and domestication.

Friday night, and where is everyone?

While the rain fell, I read out loud from a set of booklets that had brought magic into my childhood, and sent me out into the woods to see what evidence of fairies there I could find, as had the photographer and author, Ellen Fenlon. Each book cost 29 cents. A Woodland Circus. Signs of the Fairies. The Fairy Church in the Woods. In the pictures, things looked like other things. "We saw some little mayapple umbrellas stuck in the ground because it had been raining earlier." "The bloodroot shows each fairy just how to wrap a leaf around himself to make a nice warm coat." There are many, many orchids pictured--all of them, all of these wonders of nature, photographed in the woods of northeastern Ohio. I don't think there are many orchids left. On the final page, the author's biography: "Ellen Fenlon lives at 945 Hessel Drive in Akron, Ohio. She is helping to save the woods from being cut down so that all the little animals and plants won't be chased out of their homes. That way your children and grandchildren will have a place where they can go and visit them." The year was 1962. I go visit them in these books now.

The days when the electricity was out had more hours in them.

The Night Road

2011-08-27T05:59:00.000-07:00

Riding north on the Thruway late last night. The entire rest of the world save myself and the steady breathing of the engine--well, maybe every once in a while the cold fingers of the air pressing on my neck, and maybe a sudden awareness of my hands on the grips, the right one starting to cramp--was merely a suggestion. The world reduced to Might exist; might not. And That's not my concern anyway.

There was only me in a large blackness. This led to a long riff on the nature of riding as ideal metaphor: We are all essentially alone; we glance off substances, and we occasionally sense others as well as the ether around us, but we're always riding alone.

Actually, this thought did not occur to me, true though puerile. That's because I was busy doing it. There was no time to think about it.

Here's what I was really thinking: Thank god you got off Long Island intact--those freaking urban drivers are maniacs. I love feeling the risk of an Infiniti taking off my footpeg at 85, don't you? And man, my taillight must look so small they won't know what exactly it is until they hit it. I wonder how well the reflective tape on my jacket and helmet is doing? And does 287 really turn into 87, or do I have to exit? Wait--that was a deer crossing sign: Pay attention! Do not forget!

Does my high beam suck too much power? Is it okay to run it against oncoming traffic?

I can't see the watch I velcroed onto the dash; you know, I thought it had a luminous dial. Oh well. The tach's gone, too, broken; the only thing I have to gauge my passage the speedo, and the wheels and dials (so lightly calibrated! so meticulous in all they measure!) inside of me. That's how we really know we're going, no need for anything else really. I have the sensation of being here. It's small enough and big enough all at once.

Actually, the metaphor is apt. I am going through it alone. My dear friend, the one who has always been there for me, in times of trouble and of happiness but mainly the former, which is why he is so dear, is once again counseling me. "Until you see that being alone is not lonely, Melissa, until you are able to embrace solitude and being with yourself, you will not be happy."

The ride alone last night was composed of solitude, and I could see exactly what Tony meant. I felt it. I've had rides that were lonely, so that's how I knew. This felt different. Full and rich: simple, just a straight shot up the highway on a late summer evening, but sufficient unto itself. I was attentive to the risks, but not their prisoner; I knew I would be home in two hours, but I was happy I was not there yet; I trusted the thousands parts of the little Guzzi valiant underneath me, every working piece (every clap of the tappets audible in their millions when I listened--the amazement of it!) put together with love, in love, and loved in return, which is how she runs.

There have been moments recently, I regret to report, that have caused a lump of self-pity in my throat: Why do I have to handle all this alone? Just a little help. That's all I want!

I know the response this will call forth from my friends, but they can save their energy: I've already excoriated myself for it. Now I would like to report some new knowledge. I can turn anything around, at least in my mind, even if it doesn't stack the firewood or fight with the school district or repair the broken shower. That's because those aren't the real problems, I now see; feeling that they are is the problem. All our big battles are always fought alone, whether our armies contain one, or two. The victories, too, belong to each in isolation. So I can keep the phillips-head screwdriver in the bathroom, and that takes care of that. The rest is just like that ride on the night road: done, and everything.

Girls on Motorcycles

2011-08-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

{The piece that follows was written for the Women Who Ride seminar at the 2011 national BMW rally, in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, on a July weekend that was the hottest I've ever endured. Reference is made to that in the third paragraph below. This short piece, I realized, encapsulates my past four years. And it points to the future.}

***

In a profound and complex way, motorcycles have given me a life. They have brought love, both for an object and with other people; after making it once, I don’t think I’ll ever make the mistake again of finding myself paired with a man who doesn’t ride. But more important even than that, motorcycles have given me a subject.

For in the deepest part of me, I am a writer (as well as a rider) and I don’t know that I would be one without motorcycles. It was the intense, jumping-up-and-down, collaring-strangers-in-the-street passion I felt for them that gave me an idea I could not let go of until I had exhausted many pens, a tree and a half, and a prototype laptop. The result, although I did not know it when I began scribbling simply because I had too many thoughts in my head and they were going to cause it to explode if I didn’t offload them, was my first book.

Although I didn’t conceive it as something I was writing as a woman for women, the fact is (last time I checked) I am a woman and that colors every nuance of how one looks at the world and its phenomena. Men and women, even in the pursuit of a common passion, necessarily experience it differently. We literally have different brains. Then there is the fact that we are perceived differently by the rest of the world—but I have to tell you that, despite what they think, I have never ridden while wearing a bikini, with the sole exception of the ride here, but at least it was under my Aerostich—while we too perceive things differently. My pride in the long history of my sisters who rode—a history as long as that of this machine—was equal parts “Hey, see here! We can do it too, and well!” and pure human joy. It was not the whole story, just as men do not own it all either, but I did not want it excised. I wanted it there, emphatically.

I wanted everything there. I thought I had put it all there, everything I could possibly say about bikes, and then I closed the cover. Done.

But what we believe about what we are doing is not always what is in actuality what really happens.

After a long period during which the aforementioned mistake was practiced at length, I faced the same crisis so many of us do—fifty percent of the population, I am given to understand. This has a way of unmooring you from all that is familiar, all you thought was stable and permanent. For a while afterward, you just float. For me, it was motorcycles that reappeared to provide an anchor in choppy waters.

Or rather, it was motorcycles as delivered by one person. A very, very persistent person by the name of John Ryan. At first I just thought he was one of those messianic boosters that our sport occasionally creates. But no. As I slowly learned, he is sui generis—no one lives or thinks as he does about bikes, and no one does what he does on them.

It was a blessing not only to be riding again, but also to have a puzzle to ponder: briefly, in the case of John, it was “W. T. F.??” I had known about the Iron Butt Rally, certainly, in what I was beginning to refer to as my First Motorcycle Life, but then I’d just figured they were a tiny group of fringe fanatics who were so deep into something ungraspable by the rest of us that they were merely a footnote. I’d already written that footnote; I think I took care of them in a sentence. Done.

Then my brain started chewing again on the subject of motorcycles—ever various, I now know—and what in particular extreme long-distance riders like John were doing. And lo and behold, I had a new subject. A new bike, and a new book.

New friends. New destinations. New life. If a woman ever needed these, it was me. If a machine can ever give such gifts, it is the motorcycle.

Art Persists

2011-08-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

With pretty much everything sliding into the crapper--my personal life, London, the stock market, and new power to the Tea Party front for the corporate interests that won't stop until they've sucked us dry like the world's freaking biggest mosquito, the government having run out of repellent--it didn't look like there was any bright spot anywhere in my vicinity. Until my son and I leaned back last night and gave ourselves up to a film.

Last Christmas I had gravely disconcerted him. We needed something new for the top of the tree. When I stumbled on the image of the dove of peace, above--sporting flak vest and a laser target on his chest--I knew I'd found the perfect thing. So Today. (Unfortunately, also so Yesterday and Tomorrow.) I printed it and tied it on with a silk ribbon. I then had my very own Banksy for the tree; my son, thankfully not yet attuned to the sad ironies of the grownup world, was disturbed. I told him I found it oddly hopeful: at least someone was watching, and speaking the truth. With the keen succinctness of art.

Banksy is a British street artist whose work is subversive, haunting, poignant, knife-sharp, humorous and/or disturbing. It's unrelentingly smart. And--though this seems painfully obvious, even if to me it is the point--he has always done it because he had to, not because he was making things to sell. A lot of it was precisely observant of the institution of commerce, in fact, though one cannot really blame him for the eventuality that its very success in this endeavor has lately made it hugely valuable in the buy-and-sell art world.

The art world makes me want to vomit, actually, not only because it is filled with reprehensible characters who position their impossibly fashionable selves at the sharp pinnacle of the food chain, but because they eat artists whole and spit out their bones on the sidewalk. I had a taste of this (um, not an artist) working in a gallery in the eighties, and dating an artist. And now I know brilliant artists who can't get the time of day from a gallery; thus they are in despair almost to the point of giving up their work.

Don't give up--take it to the streets! That, in part, is the message of hope in Banksy's marvelous, surprising movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. It is a window on the life of the enlivening world of street art (aka graffiti, in some sense, but a full bloomed, legitimate genre of its own). And it is a subtle, wise discussion of commerce, the necessity of persisting against difficulties, and true art vs. simulacra produced for the purpose of selling--and the fact that the public is often so stupid they can't tell the difference.

I needed to watch this, right now, at this very moment, it seems. Giving up, in every particular, had been looking like the informed choice. But now I don't think I should. Nor should any of us. We need to take to the streets, because that is what is left to us now. There, we can make people wonder. Make people see. Make art, and persist.

Just a Wee Tiny Despair

2011-08-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

Here at the swimming hole, Nelly is tied on a long line. She ventures out--freedom is mine!--and then she hits the end and feels the implacable rigor of The Tree. She is tethered, an unusual state for this free-ranging dog, because there are people here with food. (And where, I submit, are there people in America who don't sally forth without food anymore? I know we're hardwired as animals to eat whatever food is available, but hasn't this gotten ridiculous? What meal is it that these people are eating at 3:30 in the afternoon--tea? With submarine sandwiches?)

Nelly too is wired, programmed, habituated, reinforced, and possibly drawn by supernatural beings to obtain food. Now--and here is the secret that many people don't get--some dogs are born like this, and some aren't. It's not a moral thing, though that's the gloss one hears over and over: "My dog is a good dog. He won't steal food." Ahem. To a dog, as long as there aren't bared fangs in the proximity, anything is fair game. On a plate or not. What is a plate?

Until someone can give me a plausibly logical explanation of how a member of another species learns the concept of ownership--something that's messed us up, for sure, and leads to taxes, wars, partisan fighting, and the whole Housewives franchise, to mention a few of the pits dogs have not fallen into--I won't buy it. Just as I no longer believe in the tooth fairy, having been the tooth fairy for some nine years now.

Which brings me to my small despair. No, not that after said nine years, I have pretty much run out of ideas for what to put under the pillow, before he has run out of teeth. And no, not that Nelly is driving (has driven?) me nuts with her incessant vocalizations--why didn't I get one of those good dogs, one of the quiet ones?

(I say, like a mantra, what trainer Kim told me long ago, when I had also reached the end of my rope: "You get the dog you need," meaning the struggle to overcome her problems will somehow lead me directly to the problems I must struggle with inside myself.) My companionable despair has to do with how dogs are treated--and the book I feel I must write about it.

Five years now, and I've been spinning my wheels. The way in has not shown itself. No subject has seemed as big, or as impenetrable. I don't know how to say what I know I want to say--desperately want to say--in a way that will yield better results than it has at any number of parties.

Take one last week. The chitchat turned to dogs, and to trainers. As always, there was murmured approval for one of the telegenic proponents of old-fashioned German military thread of training (developed by Konrad Most at the turn of the last century). William Koehler popularized the style, though if you have a drop of genuine love for animals in you, you might want to spare yourself the nausea that follows on studying his methodology. He is alive and well (though he himself is dead) in the trainers that people today adore. They look stricken if you dissent: I literally cannot count the times I got into conversations at parties in the past six years--yes, flirtations that were going quite well, thank you, with smiles and deep eye-locks and all the rest--when such a dissent from me caused the immediate dynamiting of good feeling and turned it to rubble. So quickly. But I can't not say what I know: that our sad, sick love of domination because it makes us feel good to hurt, to make others fear us, is harming the animals we purport to love. And do. The myth of dominance in regards to dogs--just Google it--has been put to rest by scientists with knowledge far greater than mine. (Hence a seed of the despair.) And the way of hope--an obedient dog, as well as a happy one, who has been taught without pain or fear--is readily available. But people don't want it. Why? The despair grows.

It bloomed full open, when a guest, a gentle young woman, revealed that a movie had been made about the local trainer I call The Nazi (I've seen him teach his clients to kick their dogs, and his prime arsenal consists of neck injury by collar pops and repetitive yelling, which nonetheless don't work all too well, witness the time I walked by his class with Nelly in a perfect heel, while his students' dogs were breaking all over the place). And she smiled as she declared herself a fan of the guy after seeing it.

Why are we so attracted to punishment? Why do we fear, and belittle, kindness? Moreover, kindness that works, because it is scientifically grounded in how mammals learn? A law, rather than a myth. Why? Why the persistence and valorization of methods that hurt, and that don't even work? Why our blindness?

Why the demonization of a treat? Please, folks, it's just food. It's just what the dog is programmed to want more than just about anything, although in their time, water, freedom, the door opening, a tennis ball, can be more desired, and hence should be used. The one thing it's silly to think a dog wants--though people do it all the time--is praise. Hello? Words in English? Where do those appear in canid evolution, pray tell?

If my life depended on a dog doing what it has been taught, then I will find a dog who has been clicker trained. (My clumsy shorthand for operant conditioning.) It is what the Navy realized, when it was placing people's lives on the line when it was training dolphins for top-secret work. They hired a man named Bob Bailey, who in 1962 became the Director of Animal Training for the Navy. This is not an outfit that has any place for sentimentality; they must know that something works, and they must be damn sure of it. And Bailey found that only operant conditioning could give that level of reliability. In his illustrious career as an animal trainer--across 140 different species, and thousands of individual animals--he has proved beyond a doubt that what works is positive reinforcement. It is also, just coincidentally, humane. He has said that if aversives worked, he would have certainly used them; but the uncontrollable fallout from their use is too dangerous when lives are at stake. He meant the lives of humans. But he could as well have meant those of our companion animals, whose troublesome behaviors are often exacerbated by punishment-based training to the point where euthanasia is required.

It is possible, if one searches, to find the trainers who have been called in to mop up the messes created by our beloved television personality, the one who gives us permission to frighten, hurt, and dominate our dogs--and smile while he is doing so. He tells us it is right, and we happily believe.

My despair crystallized in the deeply dismayed gazes of the dinner guests whose paeans to the local trainer were not seconded by me. The conversation froze. I froze too, thinking, How? How can I say what I know in my heart and in my mind?

If I cannot get it across to some friends gathered around the cheese plate on the kitchen counter, and if I cannot get it across to some guy who was already leaning toward "Maybe I could give you a call sometime?", how the hell can I write a book about it?

Oh, it's a good thing my despair is so small.

Connected

2011-07-30T05:53:00.000-07:00

As the years wind on--given the fact that this summer is going by in about three minutes, I predict I'll be checking in to the assisted living center sometime late fall--I try to stay healthy. I'm not real good at that, though, because evil temptations unveil themselves before my inability to resist like buff young men, winking their dark brown eyes from under locks of curling hair. So my longevity plan consists largely of friends.

Being connected to others socially and familially is one of the best predictors of a healthy longer life. Besides the fact that a life without friends isn't really worth living.

But there is a special type of friend: the girlfriend. It may come as a surprise to some (and it's possible that I'm aberrant in this, being aberrant in so much else), but there is a point in a young girl's life when she desires a girlfriend more than she desires any boy ever made, or even conceived of by Hollywood's fabulist machine or author of transporting fiction. There's an intensity and excitement to the friendship that is all-consuming, like a four-story fire.

The first girl I ever fell in love with (for it was that, love: blinding, filled with craving for her presence) was Beth. It was high school. She was a fabric artist, dark and yearning, moody and fun. She took me horseback riding on her family's farm. She was the Older Girl (one year) and I was breathless with the news that she apparently considered me a friend. One night we put Joni Mitchell's Blue on the record player in her room. In the morning, it was still turning round and round. Nine hours, and every song on the A side is now permanently burned into my soul.

Several years ago I heard that Beth had died. The thought that a chunk of life--time, energy, blood, discovery, everything that is ever is or will be--had been cut out and then pushed through the side of the universe to leave such a hole (the way an eye is cut out of a pumpkin, leaving only absence) was impossible to hold in the brain. It actually hurt the neurons.

In college, freshman year, I met Beatrice. Corner room across from mine. Abstract painter, beauty. We sometimes walked the campus hand in hand. I posed for a life-size portrait. She posed for my Yashica and its Plus-X film. The next three years we joined forces with other girls, other tight friends, to live in on-campus housing. After that, she found us an apartment together in Hoboken, and we launched ourselves, together, though also increasingly separately, toward bigger life. She showed me her New York, the one she had grown up in, all the places that became my own.

Nearly thirty years later, today, her voice on the phone, buoying me. She knows me, and loves me, I think, and cares for me. And I her.

Someday, maybe, we will shop for our canes together. I hope so. They will be stylish, unusual, and she will make a joke and laugh with that quick knowing laugh of hers. I think we will always be friends, until the bitter end, which will be sweet therefore. Because she's mine.

Rally Round

2011-07-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

They come from all over. They've packed up to depart at first light. It might take them two or three days. There's that moment--crystalline, kept forever in the small jewel box of such images--when they take the last turn of a thousand, and then they have arrived. Spread before them is a sacred ground. The movable nation.

The call of the rally is the motorcyclist's muezzin--the ritual call to prayer. It is what the summer is made for, unless you are truly hardcore. Unless difficulties make you smile, and party all the better. Unless you are up to camping in Bavaria in winter (above) at the Elefanten rally. Actually, this looks like a ton of fun to me.

Because there is something about gathering with your tribe. Strange as you may be, there are at least a hundred others just like you. What a relief.

I am one of those people who rarely turns down an invitation. If I have to break the speed limit to get to two parties on the same night at opposite sides of the county, well, so be it. I love gathering.

But there is nothing like a motorcycle gathering. I'll stand on my head and balance a chair on my foot, metaphorically speaking, to rearrange the calendar to get to the one or two rallies that are most important to me. And why are they important?

Well. For one thing, there's that crystalline moment. What--a split second of a vision? That's what you go for? A day or two of riding, so many gallons of precious fossil fuel?

No, not exactly. For the expectation of that moment, something even more ephemeral.

It is the same expectation that precedes the party. Plan what you will wear (lay out the gear). Take pleasure in arranging the conveyance (the straps cinched down just so on the camping equipment, clicked together as neatly as the pieces of a puzzle). The route taken is the embarkation on a slowly building crescendo of anticipation (the backroads map placed in the map pocket, highlighted). All of it drives toward the moment of arrival.

So tonight the bike is washed (after a fashion; my scattershot approach to everything, including washing, shows on my bike, which actually looked worse after it dried than it did before I first turned the hose on it). Tire pressure checked, oil checked. The clothes are folded on the chair upstairs, ready to be packed, while on the kitchen counter sits a bag of miscellaneous foodstuffs (hey, it's possible that when you get to the motel, the thing you'll want more than anything is a plastic cup of pinot grigio from a paper carton and some salt-and-pepper cashews, so it's best to bring these along for the eventuality).

One thing I know. I will not know what will happen this weekend. I could meet my new best friend. I could meet a thousand of them. I am prepared. I am even prepared to take a jaded view of the religiosity of this particular event, an industrial-strength meeting of the tightest and (some might say) most sanctimonious of all marques. I have to tweak them, just a little bit. So I had a sticker made to put on my bag lest anyone have any doubts about my true allegiance: "My other bike is a Moto Guzzi." Still, I quiver with excitement. I do not know what might happen. But I know what I hope.

A couple of weekends ago, I was found at another gathering that has taken its place on my calendar as one that I will not miss. It was local, so I didn't have to pack, or release all that much greenhouse gas. But there was the flutter of excitement that to me will always accompany meetings of motorcyclists. For most who had pulled in to the parking lot at the lodge for an hour of tire-kicking before a show ride to lunch, this was merely a pleasant way to pass a Sunday in July. But for me, it was and will remain something far greater. Two years ago, this vintage ride out of Woodstock was the place where, as I now assign its true importance, life began again for me. There were people to talk to again. New hope. New affiliations. A new purpose. And a new date on the calendar, every year. Where we get together, and I arrive.

Concern File

2011-07-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

What is important?

It depends on where you sit and what moment you ask the question.

If you are struggling with something--and who isn't struggling with something; I used to believe everyone else was happy and confident, but now that I'm older and wiser, I know that anxiety is pretty much everyone's little companion--it's hard for the worry du jour not to become the world. The front page of the paper is just that: paper, thin, and replaced in twenty-four hours by another sheet with grisly color photos taken in some other world. One so terrible it can't be believed.

The most powerful biological urge in the undamaged psyche is the care of one's offspring: it is this way for you, for me, and for the milk cow whose calf is taken from her and for whom the anguish is vocal, and complete. It is the same for all parents.

The Somali people are stumbling toward Dadaab, Kenya, on journeys of more than a month, to reach what is now the world's largest refugee camp. They are trying to escape drought-induced starvation, and their children are falling by the wayside. Can you imagine this? Your small child, malnourished, thirsty, forced to walk day after day until he can go no farther, and he drops. The reversal of nature's order turns the universe on its side, and everything falls off into clattering ruin.

The magnitude, and the raw agony, of such a situation makes the privileged feel paralyzed, at least for a moment. A little while ago, it was Japan: and we couldn't wrap our brains around that, either. Although there were a lot of benefit concerts to aid that ravaged country. I haven't heard much about Japan recently. I also haven't heard about many charity art auctions for Somalia. Maybe it's too big. It's been going on for too long. It's too far away.

First their animals starved. You can do an image search--"Somalia drought" is all you need to type in, and 628,000 results later you are drowning in the horror. Small children whose bloated bellies over spindly legs and empty eyes define the word "wrong." The adults who know what's coming for them, unstoppable, and they show it in fearful faces. Goats and camels, skeletons with hair, some still walking, most only a few minutes away from the final groan, the drop to the knees that will be their last. The people, the people, ground down to bare life. Nothing more.

I will not point out the awful disparity between our lives, even those Americans who are struggling in this economy that assures so much to so few, and tells the rest to go to hell, and people who are dying by the million because they have no water and no food. It's a cliche to mention that I just bought whatever I felt like buying (watermelon, bread, strawberries, olives) at the grocery store, and still I have worries that keep me awake some nights. What is wrong with us? Do we not do anything because we don't care? Or do we not care because we can't do anything?

It's a messed-up world where those who have too much can't even reach those who have nothing. And are about to fall over the edge.

Yesterday at the farmer's market (the line for felafel sandwiches, $8 each, was about twenty-five people long), I ran into an acquaintance I hadn't seen in a year or so. A brilliant writer. She smiled and told me I looked wonderful: "It's so nice to see you. How are you?" I told the truth: really well. But the question returned caused a strange look to pass over her face, even though she said, "I'm pretty well." Maybe it was the half-beat pause before the adjective. "Pretty well?" I asked. "But not great, right?" All of a sudden her visage collapsed, the happy-to-see-you mask. "My daughter's just been diagnosed with cancer."

The universe is tilting for her, and things are beginning to slide to one side, precedent to falling off. We would do anything for our children. It is an imperative written into our cells. Their survival is our concern. The only one that matters.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-07-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Birds do it, bees do it.

Be Here Now

2011-07-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

I live in history. I live in a place that is not the place you think. That is to say, I live in Woodstock. (All right, near Woodstock: the town that I live in is no town at all now, being located on the barren rocky floor of a New York City reservoir.) It has long called to artists; the picture here was taken in 1924, at one of the annual Maverick festivals held on social activist Hervey White's farm, to which he invited all sorts of outcasts and Greenwich Village "bohemians," who scandalized the local farmers.

It was just a place to which they came. They hardly knew, or chose, where exactly it was. It could have been a little farther into the Catskills, say Fleischmanns, for all they cared (it was not; later, that place would call to the Hasidim, who likewise scandalized the locals, but for different reasons). But it was a good place--the perfect place. All an artist needs is endless green views, miles of woods, a few hard hills to climb, and stuff to make costumes. Then bring on the wine.

Years later, and the musicians came. Notable among them was Bob Dylan, who brought mystery to Woodstock.

He was becoming famous, as was his destiny, if not his plan. He was often seen zipping around town, from and to his house in the Byrdcliffe artists colony, on his '64 Triumph T100. In July of 1966, he either did or did not crash said bike on Streibel Road. It's certainly a crashable road: it climbs steeply up from 212, Woodstock's main street, nearly opposite the Bearsville complex that housed Dylan manager Albert Grossman's recording studio, then Todd Rundgren's Utopia studio, and now a theater, radio station, and fancypants eatery at which all Woodstock society (read: New York City expatriates) comes to see and be seen. History rolls on, from the past directly into the present, merely changing casts.

The bike wreck may or may not have occurred; some have speculated it was a publicity ploy. At any rate, it didn't hurt Dylan much, even if it did crack a vertebra. He got famouser and famouser. Then he left Woodstock.

And then Woodstock left Woodstock. The famous music festival that bears its name was supposed to have happened here, but wasn't; it was about 66 miles distant. Perhaps this has saved the real Woodstock. Or perhaps not, since there probably wouldn't be this new generation of stoners hanging out on the village green, or shops selling tie-dye and candles and pipes (not to mention triple-milled soaps and cashmere sweaters) if the mistake weren't rather easy to make.

There aren't a whole lot of mavericks, or artists, in Woodstock anymore; it's too expensive. There are film people, and music industry people, and industry industry people, and their gorgeous modern houses up in the woods, or their gorgeous old farmhouses with beautiful and vast gardens in the valleys between peaks.

But it's become my town too, by accident. Or fortune. These are the same things, I believe. The town park is the ground that Nelly and I love best, of all places. There will never be a day, I hope, that I don't walk into the meadow and gasp at the sight of the mountains rising up on the other side of town, magisterial, implacable, eloquent in their silence. Then we turn and go into the woods. We are refreshed by the water of the creek; me, by its permanent flux, Nelly by the cool wet of it on her long tongue.

Woodstock is not my home--home is the place that grew me, the place that sent its minerals into my sap through the roots, the place that will never leave me though I have left it. It is always there, underneath, bedrock anchoring me. It is the place that I start breaking the speed limit as I approach on return, eager to see: as if I might turn the corner in my old neighborhood to catch sight of myself, riding fast down a brick-paved hill on Delaware Avenue on a green Raleigh, the English racer that long ago disappeared from the stairwell in another home, Brooklyn. It is the place that visits me, strangely, as I lie on my back on the sticky mat in yoga as the teacher intones "Peace in your hearts . . . " I see Ohio then. I feel Ohio then.

Woodstock is temporary. I walk its sidewalks in the footsteps of the departed, Dylan, and Hervey White before him, and a hundred others who have come and gone. It is home, for now. Maybe it will visit me, too, in years hence when I am told to not hold on to anything, to let it all go.

Going into town: this is a way of saying "rejoining society." When I need the feeling that I belong somewhere, to the strange tribe that has gathered to make something of our lives, I go now to Woodstock. It is a fine place. It is what I have been given.

Somewhere Up There

2011-07-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Abby runs a repeating theme in her column (and yes, I am a devoted reader: where else can one simultaneously gloat over others' extraordinary bad behavior, and be chastened about one's own?) titled "Pennies from Heaven." In it, people recount their experiences with what they believe are messages from their dear departed. In an uncharitable mood, I might retitle it "Wishful Thinking"; it's such a bald case of desire remaking reality in its own image. (The intense version of what we do all the time, in so many ways, count them.)

But my smugness vanishes when I simply imagine the cold thump in the chest when the eye lands on what it believes it sees. What could be realer than the slow dawning of a sensation that eclipses every other sensation? The sensation that someone is back.

Apparently pennies are worth more as melted copper than they are as currency. People throw them away. If you feel a twinge of unrightness every time you see this, then you are officially Old. Sorry. There are signs.

We have thus all become accustomed to finding them everywhere, including our sock drawers. But in the past several days, they've been leaping at me in such numbers I started noticing, then puzzling, finally feeling a bit alarmed. My opinion on the existence of a Higher Power in the Great Beyond has been tiresomely documented here, so I don't need to repeat that. And yet . . . (The great hallelujah in life: the opportunity to say "And yet . . . ")

Someone is trying to tell me something. And either that someone is a masterful magician, or else I am wrong in my scientific suppositions. Then again, that someone might well be in me. Perhaps I am trying to tell myself something. But how'd I get all those pennies to appear?

On the seat of my car. At a table in a restaurant. In my pocket. In the tankbag of my bike. On my bedside table. On the kitchen counter. Underneath my desk. Yesterday, at Trader Joe's, I heard a clatter, and a penny was rolling toward my foot. It stopped right in front of me. I looked up, but everyone was busy perusing the organic lemonade and sea salt potato chips.

Was I about to get lucky? You have no idea how much I need it, right now. Or so I think. I am aware this has dangers: Luck is not delivered. It is made.

(My brother-in-law, a crack backgammon player, was once smearing me all over the floor in a game. He threw doubles after doubles, racing around the board while I stayed still, taking the hits. "You are so lucky!" I exclaimed after he threw double 5s, again. "A good player makes the dice look lucky," he replied, and I heard this with the unmistakable press of truth. Look: I'm retailing the story twenty years later, so it made an impression.)

In a moment of despair, questioning everything but getting stony silence for answers, I phone a friend. Well, at least there's one thing that's right in my life right now: wonderful friends I can call when in despair. Finally, I tell her about this . . . this weird occurrence. The plethora of pennies suddenly coming to me. I feel strange as all get-out relating it. But I know she won't laugh.

Instead, she assists me in crawling toward the first answer I've had in a while: maybe, she says, it's my way of reminding myself that in order for something good to happen, the initial step is realizing how much good I already have. The anguish re-frames itself in that moment: Maybe things are going to be all right after all! I take my hands from the iron railing of the figurative high bridge over the hard gray river. I turn and start to walk again. To the other side.

At that moment, holding the phone against my ear, my eye stops roving--over the roofline, the sight of the chimney cut out against the sooty clouds, the branches of the pine swaying. It is drawn downward. I am still laughing about the pennies from heaven. That is when I see it. A penny, right under the footstool of the deck chair I am sitting on. I am saying the word, and here is the thing.

Yes, here is the thing.

Not-So-Total Control

2011-06-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, I drove my son back to the school he had left on the bus four hours earlier. Now, though, it was a transformed place: no longer just a place of boredom, occasional interest, even more occasional tears. It was the place where a milestone has now been planted deep in the earth, the place of the First Dance.

In the car we approached the cafeteria door, my son wearing the jeans he had worn all day but with the addition of a button-down shirt, not tucked in though (fashion-immune, my son nonetheless had a small moment of panic a half hour before we left: "Oh, I wish I'd asked somebody else what they were wearing!"). The door of a car before us opened, and from it emerged a . . . a what? A girl-woman, in high-heeled silver sandals. A slinky dress. And blonde hair arranged as if by paintbrush into a multitude of glistening arcs, each held by a rhinestoned clip. I had a sudden understanding why none of the boys I liked when I was this age liked me back: we were living in different countries, in different centuries too, that's why. My boy, who still plays with Legos and is in his All Weapons, All the Time phase, does not exist in the same space-time continuum as these girls. (I now saw a gaggle of them crowded around the door, pointing to their friend; they were nervous as all get-out yet dressed to thrill).

He grimly opened the door of the car--I know he would have pled with me to keep driving and take him home, but for the fact that those six girls had spied him, too--and without a word of goodbye got out. As if there were a noose hanging from the disco ball in the decorated cafeteria, just waiting for him.

I know the anxiety. It doesn't just disappear all at once, when we leave sixth grade behind. ("Oh, I've mastered all that. I'll never again care what others think of me so much it keeps me awake all night. I'm done!")

I still have it, if in slightly reduced form, when I go to a party where there are strangers. I still have it, when I get up to read in front of an audience. I still have it, when I feel judged by an editor or the panel of a prize committee. But nothing ratchets it up quite like publishing a book. That is where I am at. Every step along the way--getting back the edited manuscript (I let it sit, in its unopened FedEx envelope, on my office floor for two weeks before I mustered the courage to open it); seeing the first jacket designs, like the prom dress you will wear on what feels like the most important night of your life, and then the fights where you implore your publisher to take off the frilly sleeves and remake it in something other than scratchy polyester; the interminable wait while a list of eminent writers decide whether or not your brand-new baby is worthy of a read and a comment for use as a hook on the back of the jacket (in today's new publishing world, apparently not, I've learned).

There's more. Much more to make my stomach lurch in the coming months.

The day after the dance found me in Troy, New York, in a blazing hot parking lot. I was there to take a Total Control riding clinic, the culmination of a dream first dreamed two years ago when I witnessed one at the BMW MOA rally in Tennessee: Is it possible that I could ever ride like that? I wondered as I saw riders inscribing small but precise circles at even speed, inside knee kissing the tar.

I worked hard. I tried hard. My clothes stuck to me as if they had been painted with glue, and my helmet was damp whenever I put it back on. I hope I learned; I felt as though I didn't, but the instructor insured me I would realize later that I had. I will try to treat it as a fun game, as they taught; I will not let my anxiety turn my frontal lobes off while it consumes the primitive brain stem. I will control my out-of-control fears about not doing well enough, not writing well enough, not looking cool enough at the dance.

One student in our class stood high above the others. One student moved elegantly, precisely, an instant master of every exercise. At the end of the day, I turned to her. "I want to tell you that you are the prettiest rider here--both out on the course, and when you take your helmet off." She smiled widely. She was indeed pretty; what I envied most, though, was her skill on the bike.

"What's your secret?" I asked conspiratorially. But I didn't really expect her to be able to tell me such a thing. It had to be too big to voice.

It turned out not to be.

Her smile widened as if to light the whole world. "A life lived in joy!" she explained.

There is no question to which this is not the appropriate answer. I left there thinking on this all the way home. A week later, and it is still in my mind. When it's my turn to go to the prom, I hope I can remember. But better than that, I hope it's soaked all the way down. So that it's everywhere, in me and all the potentially lost moments of this life.

Copilot

2011-06-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

It took a while. It always takes a while for the road to run through you, so you can run through the memories of the road. These come back, not strangely at all, as you ride the current road. This is how you know what that trip really meant, by visiting other landscapes (which will in their own time be recalled at a distance). I never wrote about that monumental trip of last year, because until now I did not know what it was about. I know what it felt like. But it did not have a story to tell, until I put my son on the back of the bike again last week.

I remember one moment of terror, out west last August. My child, the most precious, necessary thing in the world--without whom, I am lost--is sitting behind me. Most of the time, he squirms. If our riding partner is behind us, my son turns suddenly, shifting his weight near disastrously, to make certain he is back there. (No matter how many times I have told him I will always keep our friend in my rearview mirrors, and will stop immediately if something happens. No matter how many times I have told him he must not move around, especially when we are moving slowly through narrow gaps in traffic--yoicks!) He suddenly decides he needs to look at the ground under the left side of the rear tire, throwing all his weight left as we approach a stop sign; I have lost track of how many times I was this far from that mercuric white panic: S**t, we're going down!

But the particular moment I was recalling had in fact been preceded by a long, long period of calm happiness. It was so pure, in fact, I was not aware of anything at all: I was completely inside it, riding-happiness, thick and creamy and sweet. Then, suddenly, I was aware of it, which means I was aware of something wrong. By way of something right: I had been riding along for many miles not feeling anything but the machine propelling me through air and time. There was no demented sprite of the ether pulling the bike to right or left, no brief gasps or injections of adrenaline.

My child! He fell off the bike ten miles ago!

I thrust my hand behind me and felt his leg there. Oouhh. Jesus H. Christ. That was scary.

He had just been . . . quiet. Perhaps he too had entered that whipped-cream cloud, riding-through-peacefulness.

Now, in central New York, on our way to a seminal destination, one I had been thinking of taking him for several years and was here en route at last, I was back on the roads of what has passed into my own history, the thousands of miles that traced our manifest destiny. I looked and saw again what I had seen then. A sight that moved me so profoundly I never found words for it: the vision, in the mirror, of how he was occupying himself back there behind me, so close and yet so far. He was testing the air, arm out. He was flying along, to wherever I would take him. Seeing his hand held against the air, a tender wing, called up in me so many different emotions I could not count them all. It resisted, just slightly, the pressure of the wind. And I realized then: the pressure of youth, of years, of himself versus all else.

That is what he did last year, too. That is what I remember. Only now it is a story, not just a sight.

We parked the bike and walked up and down the main street of the quaint and lovely town. We got sandwiches--"the second best grilled cheese I've ever had, Mom!" [do you remember the other?]--and walked down toward water's edge of a glistening lake. I took my feet out of my riding boots and cooled them in the grass as we ate, at the foot of the statue of an Indian, in James Fennimore Cooper territory. As we headed back to the bike, ice cream was promised for later (as it always must). In a few more minutes, we were there.

Up the circular drive, to sit idling under the portico. Sliding glass doors, nurses entering and leaving, checking their watches. An empty wheelchair waits. I turn to my boy. "Through these doors we came, eleven years ago, and you breathed your first breath of the outside air." I could see it all suddenly then: the trepidatious mother, hand tight on the car seat in which her baby was strapped, watching through the glass for the arrival of the gray Toyota. And then . . . outdoors, into our new life.

It was as if it were yesterday, but also someone else's life I had watched in a movie. O strange disjunction of time and events!

My son did not feel all these things last Friday, as he of course could not. They were mine alone, because they were his. The road had not yet moved all the way through him. Someday it would, and this moment in this land would finally come to have a story. That is when he will remember.

We pulled out of town. In a little while we were in the place I wished I could tell him about, the place we had lived before and after his birth, the place where every road was known, every byway had something to tell me about who I had been, and who I was not now.

If Wishes Were Horses

2011-06-11T06:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you'd wish something so hard it felt as if something inside you might break. As if wishing it would bring it into being, changing all of history behind you. And you, sitting on the fulcrum of this world, could change the years to come because you changed yourself.

That is the way it was with me, in the days I wished I was an Indian.

I looked into the mirror, at my shiny dark hair. Hey, that could mean I'm an Indian! I looked at my family, and decided that since they didn't "understand" me (who could?), it meant I was adopted. Oh, how I wanted to be adopted! That would explain everything, and also give me the hope of what I wanted to believe: that I bore in my veins the blood of the noble, true people. I wandered the woods collecting things of the woods; I spent hours alone there, imagining being captured, or capturing in return. I walked with my toes in, as I was informed the Indians did, in order to move silently through the woods.

All summer long--oh idyllic Ohio summer!--I went barefoot. (Do children still do this today, or is it another sensuality lost, the heat on the sole, the gravel ouch, the cooling grass?) And when I came home, my parents called me Melissa Blackfoot.

Did they know how much I wanted this to be true? Their joke was my dearest hope.

The Blackfoot people, of the area that is Montana and Alberta, Canada, were the "Indian" Indians--they were the ones with the tepees. They used dogs to pull travois, until they were introduced to horses in the early eighteenth century. These they called "elk dogs."

The Blackfeet had the honor of becoming the first natives killed by the encroachers who called themselves Americans, but were not. At first trusting of the Europeans, they soon realized, as did all their confreres, the trust was misplaced. When they learned the men of the Lewis & Clark expedition had traded guns to their enemy tribes, the Shoshone and Nez Perce, they attempted to steal the guns back. One warrior was killed.

They believed that each day, it was a perfectly new sun that climbed over the eastern horizon. How profound a philosophy, how purifying a therapy, this is has only dawned on me now.

I did not know any of it when I was a child who wanted to be an Indian, but was merely a little savage. Indeed, if I had, the flames of desire to be one of them would no doubt have burned hotter. Murder and injustice--now there was something I could really have wrapped my imagination around.

Digressive

2011-06-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

For twenty-five years, reading the New York Times every day was as close as I got to religious observance. Usually by the time the coffee pot was empty, the last page had been turned.

Sometime in the dawn light it had been thrown against the apartment house door--thwap--in the blue plastic bag that found second use as the ideal urban dog waste bag. The contents of every street-corner garbage can in the city was at least half composed of knotted blue bags.

Then we moved to the sticks, and had to drive to get the paper. So we did. Every day of the week. Sometimes it was sold out, so we just drove farther until we found it. When we moved to a more civilized part of the sticks, it was again delivered, to the end of a long drive, but still before we woke. I had a small child by then, therefore I couldn't read it in the morning. And so it became the pre-bedtime ritual. As with all rituals, it served many masters: desire, need, addiction. I sort of knew what was going on in the world then; I felt the need to know. Not that the Times is everything: it has a smarmy self-congratulatory residue all over it; its idea of "balanced" journalism is to counterpose obvious truths against fringe lunatic views, just so there are opposites presented; it is clearly in thrall to its advertisers (one is never going to read an expose of fur farming or diamond mining in its pages). It made me mad as hell. But I was used to mainlining it. I had to go to the Guardian to find out what was really going on in the world--it was astonishing to read in its pages stuff, even stuff our own country was doing, that never reached the paper of record.

I don't read it anymore. The paper version is not delivered in my neighborhood (jeez, moved again), and I simply can't read it online. I haven't got the hang. The paper does not crinkle in my fingers; the sections don't look the same. My ritual has been deconsecrated.

But people still send me links, because they're still reading that paper. The one I got the other day was to Jonathan Franzen's op-ed piece about loving and technology. Or maybe it was about life's pain and the horror of blind consumerism. Then again, maybe it was about sadness and narrative. I wasn't entirely certain, by the time I got through. But I was clear on one thing: Like the bags the paper came in, the piece had been recycled (it was written as a college commencement address). A writer of his stature is simply not going to get paid once for a piece. Not when he can double- or even triple-dip.

Although it never said so directly, that is what I suspected about his recent essay in The New Yorker. It was about the death of his friend David Foster Wallace. It was also about revisiting the site upon which Robinson Crusoe was based, as a way to discuss the novel. Oh, and it was about loneliness and, tangentially, stupidity. Also about birdwatching as a way to order the world. (I didn't believe for a moment, though, that he "just went" to the island to get away and get his head straight: a writer of his stature doesn't do anything without intending, first and foremost, to write about it. What do you want to bet he'd inked the contract with the magazine well before he started looking for flights? That was the one thing--perhaps the only subject of central importance--that didn't make it into the article, though it hung over the entire thing for me.) He cycled around all manner of material. And when he was through, he double-dipped. Yes, folks, he sold the movie rights.

I am not griping here about Franzen. I do not find it a problem when writers recycle their blue bags. I never bought the idea (as you can certainly tell) that one piece of writing should contain only one idea. Instead, I know all too well that when you set out on one track, the cars sometimes get switched onto another track. That is, quite literally, life. I started in one place, then moved to another, and another, and another. (How many of us are still living in the same place we were born, much less living in the same head?) I think one thought, and it takes me to another, and another, and another. Sometimes I return to my starting point, sometimes I have no interest in going back there at all, because I've been drawn to something far more interesting.

Digressions are life. Or maybe life is digressive. Let me think about which. For now, I return to the beginning, though not the beginning of this--I'm no longer thinking about the New York Times. Writing takes you on a one-way track to elsewhere; the only problem I had with Franzen's essays, I realize now, is that he tried to tie it all back up into a single subject, which felt to me a bit like pandering. Profound ideas will not be circumscribed, even if they will cohere.

Years ago, I started writing here about one subject. But then life came along and threw a firecracker on top of my head, and blew the one idea to bits. Those are still widely scattered. Now, I've decided I like them that way. I can follow their trail, which takes me away from the place I began.

Chance Brings Us Here

2011-05-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

There was the sense of flying: air uplifting, lightening the weight of the body, and wings given by the engine below, just forward of the seat. And I wasn't really in the seat, or even on it. It was just a suggestion of a support. For a moment it was only me, a body detached, flying through the air of the Berkshires. Cresting a rise in the road, a voice cried from within: You are so lucky!

Lucky to be riding roads through a world still so beautiful as this one, lucky to be in this company, lucky to be at the endpoint of a thousand events (man's creating, odds after odds after odds, a machine such as this; three hundred years of English expatriates and their succeeding lineage grooming this landscape; all of history meeting in one impossible moment of a spring Sunday with me sitting at its very peak).

How I came to meet these people--a friend from twenty years and two lives ago; a new friend met by chance two years before, because a mention and a moment seized (and not that other one, or for that matter any of the dozens of possible others); another new friend who, though rarely seen because of distance and whatnot, still feels ineffably close--is either impossible to calculate, or is the only thing that could have happened.

***

Just because unexplainable things happen does not mean we need to find an unexplainable cause to explain them.

***

Lately I have been having conversations with several girlfriends who are desperately unhappy with their situations. Money troubles press in, or else money is not a problem, but there seems to be no time in the day, in the week, for anything but taking care of houses and children and husbands--Did I get a degree in English in order to make endless grilled cheese sandwiches and deal with car repairs and home renovations and arguments over how long he needs to be away for work? My only response to this unanswerable lament came a few weeks ago, when I found myself riding through a small backwater near here, one that oppressed me for the entire length of the red light during which I was trapped in it, when I realized, "Hey, I should remind them we could have been born in Wawarsing. We'd never have gotten out alive." There would have been no regrets that we could have done something with our fancy-college degrees, because that would have never presented itself as an option. Like our parents and grandparents before us, we would have graduated high school with a couple of babies already, and no chance to climb the stairs to see above the low roofs of our small place in life.

I could have been born in Wawarsing. But I wasn't.

To what do I owe the extraordinary luck of being born where I was, into a life that was nothing but an ever-rising staircase? Born into the extraordinary way the dice fell, clattering on the tabletop: doubles.

It would be more seemly to post here the results of my 2010 tax return, or my preferences in horizontal activities, than to delineate my beliefs on the existence of any higher power, but thinking on the vagaries of life does not make me feel entirely polite. So, the stone atheist finds herself sometimes bemused to the point of exasperation when she thinks in private on this subject. The only thing that gives pause to the forward march of her certainty is the fact that many people of far greater intelligence are equally convinced that she is wrong. She must be missing something, because it all seems quite simple to her. Anything that can think, will, or conceive must needs have a brain. A brain is a physical entity that evolved in vertebrates and some invertebrates. It is composed of cells. Although the universe is more filled with mysteries of which we know nothing than of discoveries we comprehend, it still seems impossible that a nameless something, even as great a one as god, could express a motive without having a brainstem. Where might this all-powerful mind be hiding its neurons? They would have to be very large.

Yet to me the mind-blowing complexity of everything is easily explained by a single phenomenon, one that does not require physicality: chance. Beautiful, awe-inspiring chance. It was by grace of this supreme mechanism that my particular conglomeration of flesh, will, and bones was poised atop a hideously complicated machine of German origin on this particular day in the company of others who came together by such an elaborate series of luck that it defies everything, or nothing.

***

A friend's daughter was occupying herself with a book in the Where's Waldo series. In these books, each spread is an intricate, impossibly detailed eye-twister of an illustration. In each, you are supposed to find the little figure of Waldo, but he is so well hidden sometimes you never do. You have to give up, or go mad. "I couldn't find Waldo on this page at all," she tells me. "I mean, look at it!" Indeed, there is no way to find Waldo among the many hundreds of Waldo simulacra peppering the page. "So I turned away. And then when I turned back, guess what? I had put my thumb right on him."

***

At a gas stop, while we briefly shared (helmets off to talk) the separate but combined experience that is the group ride--such luck as this!--I heard my phone ringing. It was another new friend, at the end of his own ride in the same state but for another, far more epic, purpose. Riding has many, many purposes. He had attained a difficult and hard-won goal, well over a thousand miles in under twenty hours. He told me of another rider, on a similar but possibly more difficult quest during the same day and night (a twenty-four-hour rally) who had hit two deer at different times in the same ride. On hitting the first, he stayed up. Only to then hit the second, which brought him down. What were the chances of that? And he was able to get to the awards ceremony, so he was lucky. But he hit the deer, so he was unlucky. Both at once.

There would be no way for me to comprehensively explain how it was that I came to be sitting at a picnic table outside The Creamery in Cummington, Massachusetts, with a collection of old and new friends on a collection of old and new bikes at two in the afternoon on May 22, 2011. I could have been in Wawarsing, watching my great-grandkids. I could have been in Delhi (India, not New York), bent over a washbasin. I could have been an amoeba. But for one thing: luck. Incredible, inconceivable, inexplicable, beautiful luck. In the absence of anything else, I'll take it. I have to. Because the world hadn't ended the day before.

This World

2011-05-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten about them. Until they sent their beams out to my eye, and caught it fast. The wild columbine is blooming at the edges of the woods. One would almost think (would love to believe) that they are there, within easy reach of our too-limited sight, for our surprise: a remembrance that beauty persists. Or so we can only pray.

As Nelly ran on, toward the siren call of a scent hidden at the base of some bushes--the terrible rictus of some dead beast greeted me, sharp teeth smiling from a mat of brown fur, in which my dog was joyfully rolling to daub herself with that inimitable perfume of rottenness--I was thinking about the impossibility of flowers. It suddenly came to me: Do we deserve flowers?

Just as quickly, the other part of my brain (the one that answers dumb rhetorical questions with a sneer) answered, They're not for us, silly. We are merely collateral beneficiaries. Their existence, and all their strange, complex gorgeousness, is for themselves.

As I walked farther down the road, having enticed (ok, pulled her by the collar away) Nelly from her particular Chanel No. 5, I found myself spiraling down into a pretty awful funk. I had recently seen world population projections for 2050, and a flash of angry red blinded me for a moment. It was a selfish anger, of course: I would likely not be around then, to witness the final shovelful of earth hitting the coffin of the world I had known and loved--but my child would be. In fact, he will be the same age I am now. And therefore he will not have the chance to walk down a road, near his own house, so lightly traveled that his dog can run ahead, so lightly used that he might go a mile without the scent of exhaust in his nostrils, and the mean wind whipped by a speeding greedmobile. (I know: yes, I own one. We all do, because we have constructed a society in which it's nearly impossible to live without one. No matter how much one hates them.) He will not have the wild columbine (translucent rose shading to yellow, a gilded crown for wood nymphs to wear in their revels at dusk), because there will be no woods left. Here, a mere two hours from one of the world's greatest metropolises, the fields and streams and forested hills will be stripped of all they are. To become a continuation of a single suburb, wall to wall with us.

Lately I've been dipping into a fascinating book on the science of love and romance, and from it it's clear that we possess one highly complex and powerful apparatus to ensure our survival. The tip of the iceberg is the plumage of the female of our species, done up in bustiers and what are appropriately known as f**k-me shoes. Everything we are drives to one thing, and one thing only. It's highly successful, and it puts to shame the intent of the flowers: pollinate me, they whisper to the birds and the bees, with their come-hither colors and alluring shapes. We will beat those flowers yet.

My hypocrisy knows no bounds other than the one that ends at the tip of my nose. After all, I procreated too, as I was made to do.

I turned to walk back home, after greeting the fuzzy darlings of the Canada geese, waddling yellowly after mom and dad (another success story in the population wars), and then I thought: We are running out of road. (That is in fact the title of the informative environmental website of a friend of mine; it is irredeemably true, but the scary thing is, none of us--from Malthus to Al Gore--knows exactly when. We are somewhere in the middle of a horror movie, but we don't know the moment at which the killer is going to burst through the basement door.) This road, the one I am on. And that road, the one that takes us all to the end.

Girl Cave

2011-05-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

The concept of the man cave is one I get. I really, really get it. Indeed, I even appreciate it: it's pretty funny. It pokes gently at the core truth of those simple, primitive desires of many men--all I need, mate, is my machines, a pretty calendar to lay my eyes on every now and again the kind with nice headlights if you know what I mean, the calming scent of gas in the air, and enough time to work on my grease manicure--at the same time it's bizarrely pre-feminist, and a touch repellent for that. It posits women as the enemy, the perennial naggers who need to be escaped.

I am here to tell you, though, it's women who need a girl cave. Upstairs or down, there's nowhere to run: the dust bunnies mock you (they have a particularly wheedling voice, too), the Lego-strewn boy's room weeps, the stovetop begs, the stack of permission slips, applications, bills, and plans looks dourly on: I bet you're not going to deal with me today, either? I thought so.

No, we're going to the Girl Cave, where we can escape into a world of relative order (admittedly because there is simply less stuff than in the main house) and where there's supposed to be dirt, so we don't ever feel a duty-shirker here. Some kitty litter on the oil stains, a quick broom, et voila. Peace, quiet, and motorcycles. Oh, and whatever's playing on the college radio station. It comes in on the radio in the Girl Cave, though not in the house. Magic, eh?

This is my secret world. There's the Lario on the right and the Teutonic Hornet on the left, ready for an oil change. (Unseen behind them, under its black shroud, is a friend's old Kawasaki, awaiting resurrection after two years--oh, what a day that will be, anticipation growing with each new arrival of parts in envelopes and boxes.) I love my small collection of parts and tools and fluids; I love that they stand at attention on the shelves, patiently waiting for their moment. I rarely get rid of anything so long as it has once belonged in, around, or on a motorcycle. This is therefore a museum of my own making, of my particular history. (To throw a piece of it away would be like, say, disposing of a letter my father wrote me when I was away at school. Never. A part of him, and of us.) Also, you never know when something might come in handy. The weirdest odds and bits can be just the things you need--they are comforts for the future. Who, for instance, would have thought that I'd ever have a Lario again? Certainly not me. But in the bottom of the toolbox I find some bolts and sockets that fit only her.

This is where I escape--from the place that would hold me back, on a Sisyphean slope where the same household tasks, done, must be redone upon the morrow. This is where I escape--to the place of wishful dreaming and forward motion.

How can you tell this is a girl cave? Here's a hint: see the chandelier?

More and More

2011-05-07T07:31:00.000-07:00

Why is it that I don't exactly feel gleeful about a death this week?

I am aware that no one, including me, wants an outline of my half-baked opinions on the subject of the most notable death of recent days. For one thing, the evidence speaks for itself--and when we read between the lines, we find there a strong comment on the disingenuousness of the official statement. Of course; it's an official statement. That's its nature, eliding and eluding the exact truth. (A "firefight"? Not the word I'd use.)

For another, I don't know half enough to expound knowledgeably on this subject. I understand that a million other bloggers have already endlessly discussed the proper way to react to this news--with joy? With regret? With some manufactured, thoughtful admixture thereof?

I only know that right now I feel something a little sick and uncertain. About what has really happened, and about where it will lead us. It is a vague echo of the way I felt, exponentially more powerfully, on September 11, 2001: extremely sick, and lost in an ocean of uncertainty.

The night after the most recent event, I was talking to Mom. I found myself saying, without really knowing whereof I spoke, with some degree of belligerence: "This all began a long time ago, several wars before, so that Americans can unquestioningly continue to drive their bloody Ford Explorers." That sure ended the conversation. The very next morning, I happened to be driving behind a car on whose back windshield was written in large white letters: Thank you Navy SEALs! He is dead!!!

It happened to be a Ford Explorer.

Loving can be seen as functionally analogous to killing. Give away your love, and it comes back and back. Kill, and it too returns, more and more.

Last night, I chanced to go to yoga at a new place. The instructor ended the class with a prayer. In light of the event last week, the words sent a chill, as if from beating wings, through the air. Then we went out, my son and I, to walk a labyrinth in the churchyard. Around and around we walked, toward the center somehow.

Buddhist Prayer

If anyone has hurt me knowingly or unknowingly in thought, word, or deed,
I freely forgive them.
And I ask forgiveness if I have hurt anyone knowingly or unknowingly
in thought, word, or deed.

May I be happy
May I be peaceful
May I be free

May my friends be happy
May my friends be happy
May my friends be free

May my enemies be happy
May my enemies be peaceful
May my friends be free

May all beings be happy
May all beings be peaceful
May all beings be free

It's Your Country

2011-04-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

Last week found me wandering around the nation's capital, two small boys in tow, throwing coins into every fountain I came across. As the ceremonial font of all that we aspire to be, Washington, D.C., is replete with fountains: every building and monument is approached over some regal body of water. The better to see you, my dear. Or possibly it was all one big pool of Narcissus, appropriate for the launching pad of Manifest Destiny. Every time I threw a penny or a dime, I wished a different wish. (Covering all my bases.) I discovered I have many wishes; I had thought myself a simple person, a sort of emotional broken record, but it turns out there are many, many different hopes buried within.

Today, one of them actually came true. I wish I could remember which fountain it was that I had used for this particular wish: I would get right back on Amtrak, because there are some more unfulfilled desires I could really use fulfilled about now.

There is something spooky, unsettling, and moving all at once about the seat of our government. It is too clean, for one thing. It is too tasteful, for another. The sense of a showpiece, lavishly painted and pasted thinly on top of a huge ugly mess raked up to hide beneath, is a little disturbing. There are the parterre gardens outside the Smithsonian castle--breathtaking, so European!--and then there are, a short metro ride away, lumpy gray blankets the size of humans scattered under the entryways of commercial buildings. I walked by a guy standing stone-faced outside Chipotle holding up bumper stickers for sale: "Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution," and was on the bus to the Mall before I realized I wanted one. Moreover, I wanted the guts to do what it says. If ever we needed some flintlock muskets and the will to do what's right, it's now. It's going to be too late soon, guys. I'm not talking about dumping fictitious tea into 2011's harbor, either: How DARE they co-opt the symbol of a just revolt against a tyrannical monarchy for their own selfish, imbecilic, racist, capitalistic, wasteful, ruinous ends? It's a mockery of every dead boy left in the frozen mud of the colonies. Don't get me started.

There was a different sort of discomfiture brought on by visiting the new National Museum of the American Indian. Come, let us celebrate the marvelous culture of the people we exterminated! There's an implacable sadness in the pride and beauty of the place. The original Americans exist now in statues and symbolic corn sheafs carved of limestone, and it doesn't bother us all that much. "We are Americans." We are? I'm half Greek and half English/Irish--how about you? Then again, the cafeteria in the basement of the museum is the Mall's best-kept secret, though it was out to several hundred people by the time we stumbled on it, serving what I took to be interpretive native cuisine. My son said, "Put the world's best grilled cheese sandwich next to this one and it will taste like garbage," of the Navajo frybread grilled cheese. It was damn good, but I wondered about how the Navajo might have made cheese. With difficulty, maybe.

Yet there was, pervading it all, a thrill in the air. This belongs to us. This represents us, or at least our higher selves. The unimaginable greatness of so much collected history, art, books. The grand monuments to true democracy--something we could hope for the return of, if only we could overthrow the current government, whose form might best be called corporate dictatorship.

Through a fifty-degree rain we walked, past the ever-moving Vietnam memorial. This complete and potent monument, the foot of which was laid with wet and wilting carnations, the occasional plasticized photograph of smiling boy in fatigues taped over an etched name, achingly sad, shows us ourselves. Literally: we look into the infinite blackness of its polished face, at thousands of names, and we see them printed over the image of our own reflections. We are them. They are us. Down we walk, into the earth, into a grave; then up we go again, out of the earth, away.

Through the rain we continued, to what feels to me the greatest of all that is great in our history. Up the many steps; it is a hard walk up to the Lincoln Memorial, as it should be. It should be work to get here. You should feel it in your bones, muscle. Then there he sits, as big as he was in life. Monumental. This same little boy I'd brought to this same place five or six years ago. Then, I took him by the hand and walked to the side, where what is etched on the walls has never, in the history of words, been exceeded. I started to read to him the Gettysburg Address. I made it as far as "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here--" and there I stopped. The tears were rolling down my cheeks, and something squeezed my throat tight. This time, I did not bother. I read it to myself, and the tears fell inward. Meanwhile, the boys stared up at the gigantic marble man. They took pictures, they laughed, they ran. They were free.

Reading, Writing, and Resurrection

2011-04-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

Recently I read the new book by Francisco Goldman, Say Her Name, a remembrance of his young wife, taken by a freak swimming accident in Mexico in her thirtieth year, and only a couple of years into their marriage. It is a hypnotic work, both because of the raw mastery of the writer, and also because of the morbid fascination such a thing exerts on the reader. We can only imagine it happening to us, such monumental loss, and we also think just reading it might perform some sort of voodoo to keep us safe from a similar terrible event ever visiting us.

But since we live and love, we are never safe. And this we know, as we read from outside of such shredding emotions that they can only truly be experienced from inside. It's all a big egg of paradoxes: happiness cracks open to reveal pain; "having" releases the possibilities of "losing."

Mentioning this on a certain social networking site that shall remain nameless started an interesting, if anxiety-provoking, dialogue among people who have never met one another. Unbeknownst to me, one of my interlocutors, whom I do not know personally, responded that he had lost his wife recently, his partner of decades. Uh-oh. Why should I even presume to say a word on subjects I know nothing of? --Because someone who knows much, much better is going to mow me down, with overpowering experience.

I recognized in his words--sent out to strangers--the undercurrent of anger, of wanting to collar anyone who chances by so that they might listen. Then to cry, "But you cannot know!" (And indeed we can't.) I recognized the offerings of despair--I drink too much; I fear I will never feel happiness again--as if to simultaneously say, "I need you to understand . . . you will never understand." I recognized the oversharing in a public place, because this is all you can do. You are alone; you don't want to be alone; your aloneness defines your grief, and may not be taken away.

We both know it will come and deny that it ever could. It is just too big. And we are faced with it daily, now that we have all these inputs, all these immediate yet distant ways of viewing the death of others on our little screens. Stalin understood (did he understand anything? yes, and no) when he famously said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." We have millions of deaths coming at us from the radio and the television while we prepare our dinners in the cocooning warmth of our kitchens, the heart of the home that is to preserve us in eternity of course.

And then it comes. Out of nowhere. Or the somewhere that is the life that we never asked for, but once it is here, we cannot imagine our way out of.

It is interesting that for some of us, life is a succession of partners. One after the other, jettisoned for some reason or another, even the "Till death do us part" as meaningless as the speed limit on a stretch of desert highway. Multiples of multiples. And for others, there is only one. What is spoken means everything: Forsaking all others. The binding of two into one not only through love (something I do not truly comprehend, the more I try), but finally in heartbeats, long years together of something heard in the other room and assumed to be there forever, since it is your heart as well.

How many times in a life can you say, "I love you" to different people before it becomes as diluted as those water drinks with which I try to trick my child into believing he's been given juice? "They don't taste like anything, Mom." How many times before the wheel of hope turns down toward disillusionment, abandonment, then back up into another new hope before we wish to take off the axle nut once and for all?

I remember, shortly after the rupture of the life that I had too blithely assumed was going to go on and on and on (the disappearing point in my own life, way off in the distance), a vision one lonesome night at the grocery store. Ahead of me, an ancient couple stood at the end of the checkout. Silently, slowly, with enormous concentration, they bagged their food. Together. He would pick up a package, hand it to her. She would reach over to hold up a handle of a bag in order to help him. I watched, rapt, stunned. It seemed the summation of partnership, and it was a sharp knife touching my throat. This is what I will never have. This is what I have lost! Or it was like falling and hitting my head against the ice. I watched with tears running down my face, the sudden slap of loss stinging and stinging.

A few days ago I wondered, aloud in type, about the obviously imperative need of a writer upon suffering the loss of a spouse to write about it. When this is your lot in life, to create things out of words, it is also your fate to re-create things out of them. To go over the details, to offer them up; in reciting the narrative of the past, to make it present again. The pain is never assuaged this way, but it is presented to us. We make of it what we will; the writer is a bit of a god, bringing momentarily back to life that which he lost. We see her there suddenly, alive, until the last page is turned.

The Bad Seed

2011-04-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

B. F. Skinner, who was an English major before he was a psychologist, came up with the lovely term "superstitious learning" for a phenomenon he witnessed when working with pigeons. It is something all higher animals, including ourselves, are prone to:*

The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing–-or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

I wonder if there are even closer examples to Skinner's original, with humans and food. (One from my own life concerns a certain borscht made by a college roommate; I had some just prior to a virulent flu making its appearance and laying me low. To this day, the sight of a beet makes me want to puke.)

There are evil demons abroad. They shape-shift: they visit us in their earthly form as allergies. I don't mean the kind of allergies that send one to the hospital with hives, gasping for breath. I mean the ones we decide are allergies. I mean the superstitious ones.

An early classmate of my son was known as allergic to dairy. It's pretty amazing how much of our food contains milk or butter; this little girl was carefully guarded from all of it. Her teeth had turned brown, but she was otherwise safe. At a birthday party once I was seated next to the mother. Curious, I asked how the allergy had first manifested itself in her daughter. She related how, when her baby was first given solid food--cereal mixed with milk--she developed terrible constipation.

You mean that was it? I wanted to say (but didn't). Because I instantly recalled the constipation that had made my own baby cry after he first ate solid food. In the kind of panic only a new mother can feel--and did, on a daily basis--I raced him again to the doctor. "What can be done for him?" I breathlessly demanded. "Have you ever heard of . . . . prunes?" he asked as if he were talking to a moron. Which he was.

It is not possible for me to count the number of people I know who have gone off wheat. Perhaps many of them suffer from celiac disease. Perhaps many of them do not. All of them report that they feel "better."

We are searching. For safety in a world that, for all its fences and airbags and margins, still feels unsafe. Because we are going to leave it at last. We are right to be frightened, somewhat, of the water, the air, the poisons that seep in and around. But if we can give a name to just one, drawn a cordon around it and banish it forever, we may control all the dangers by proxy. It is superstitious, but it is understandable.

I too want to be washed clean of sin, reborn. But evil hides, swirling in vaporous ether all around. It has no corporeal form; I cannot see it in order to expunge it. Maybe the toast will have to be sacrificed instead. I drive a bullet through its glutenous heart. I feel better already.

*One example, from the dog world, is an unfortunate one: Say a dog is wearing an e-collar because he is enclosed by an invisible fence. He comes too close, gets zapped, just at the moment a child goes by on a bicycle. He imputes a causal relation to the two events, even though there is none. One only has to imagine what might happen the next time a kid on a bike visits the household.

Nightworld

2011-04-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been trying to catalogue my dreams. In the Dewey Decimal System I have devised, there are only three main categories:

100. - 199.89: I have left my purse, containing wallet, out on a street somewhere and I must get back to it before it's taken, through labyrinthine obstacle courses over great distance accompanied by feelings of increasing panic and hopelessness.

200. - 298.738: I'm on a motorcycle, not mine, or mine strangely configured, with bars too long or too short or made of rubber, or else I am riding through landscapes bizarre and elongated and dark and I don't know if I can get home.

300. - 347.992: houses and more houses. They are either magically grand and out of the pages of Dwell, and they make me think suspicious thoughts like "Finally you have it [slyly spreading smile]. But do you really have it [sinking knowledge it will disappear]?" Or they are like apartments I have in fact inhabited--dark, ugly, dirty, and minuscule--but now underneath or behind closet doors in which appear grand spaces containing swimming pools or velvet-curtained palatial dining rooms that I discover in wonder.

That's it. Three subjects--loss of valuables, loss of way, loss of hopes--but all distilled into one, anxiety.

No one has ever figured out what dreams are really for. What do they represent? Random electric impulses in the brain? A subliminal method of problem-solving? The lost key to the psyche? Hidden meaning, if only you can figure out what the hell they mean?

I recall, as a child, sometimes having dreams of such impossible tastiness, that when I woke I desired nothing but to go back there again. Sometimes I could will myself, in fact, to do so; I had the same dream again. I thought of them as movies I made for myself, that I could play again for myself at will. Then again, sometimes they were so terrifying--running from indistinct figures in the night, or armies of giant robots advancing down the street, never to be escaped--that I would end tied tightly by the bedclothes and sweaty at the foot of the bed, crying for my parents to come save me. They did.

Then, for a period of fifteen years, I had a savage recurrent dream: that someone I loved was going to betray me. I woke sobbing from these nightmares, to be consoled by the actual person who was in the dream. And one day, it happened. In every detail just as it had in the dream.

Was this foreordination? Did it happen because I dreamed it? Or did I dream it because it was bound to happen?

I do not know. I know only that now I have been freed, forever, from those particular dreams. I think, as time goes on, my dreams are in general less imperative; there seem to be fewer of them, anyway. Less vibrant. Perhaps dreams are the products of hormones after all.

But occasionally I still wake from one so strange, and so strangely real, that I write it down. Not for any reason particularly. But reading the account later, I can bring it up in my head again. So perhaps they persist. Perhaps they are all there, all the way back down the years. The dream of charm and happiness you had when you were six is still there. I can in fact remember some of those even though I did not write them down: the epic dreams, the few that were so deeply charged I can still remember: I woke up, in that bed, with that bedspread, with this feeling. Do you remember any of yours?

Dream, night of 12/2/10

I was riding some sort of red sportbike. In my tennis shoes, no jacket or gloves or helmet.

Nelly was with me.

The bike had a set of shelves attached, where a topcase would be.

I parked somewhere, got involved in something occult--I think the place was a train station--and then I heard my phone ringing, but I couldn't answer properly. It was Mark and I heard him saying, "Where are you? If I can't find you, I'm going to head back without you." When I tried to phone him back, I couldn't find the phone function--there were all sorts of other pictures, including Santa, when I opened the phone. No one could help me, so I couldn't reach him.

That's when I realized I would be riding back in the dark, Nelly following, and I felt certain she would be killed on the road at night. I said in bemusement, "This is the first time I've ridden without gear."

Then I was riding down County Route 2. I pulled in at Lynn's house. Dave had made their small fountain pond into a veritable tropical wonderland, and there were all sorts of fantastic creatures mating. [!] Busloads of people started arriving, to have their weddings there. Where'd they hear about it? "Chandra, I guess," said Lynn.

Dreams are the classic case of "I guess you had to be there." Dreams are impulses, emotions, "day residue" (lovely term), images. None cohere with reality, yet are more real than reality. You would have to know things: that Mark and I once got separated when riding in Massachusetts; we had traded bikes, and he had his phone as well as mine, which was in my tankbag, as was my wallet (thank goodness I always carry a credit card in my jacket pocket, because I had to gas up to get back to New York); that Lynn is one of my best friends, someone I think of as a haven, and that her husband Dave is a naturalist and a gardener who can make magic, though perhaps not quite to the extent that I saw in my dream; that buses pulling up to their farmhouse on County Route 2 is beyond strange, and why would I ever dream that; that Chandra is a beautiful friend who moved to Texas but who still exerts a pull on me, and always will; that Nelly is my anxiety as well as my love, and to think of her running down dark roads is the greatest fear of all.

You never know what is there, in the air about you while you sleep, or in the mind, which is always there but made strange in the night. Why. I wonder why.

Columbia v. Yale

2011-04-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

All the decisions I made in my twenties were well-considered, wise, and based on long-range vision into what I knew my future should bring.

Yeah. Well, I tried. You too?

What in our evolutionary history made us such Monkey See, Monkey Do creatures in our youths? Is this really necessary? In sixth grade, as I see now in close-up every time my son comes home from school with another stunning tale of kids' inhumanity to kids, children are learning that to be different, to stick out even a quarter of an inch from the edge of the norm, is to invite assassination. No, really. It's a psychic death that is visited on the hapless different, but it plays out in the physical realm: look different, act different, and get ostracized--no one sits with you at lunch; distasteful glances are hurled your way as you are passed by on the playground.

So you learn, very quickly learn, to follow the leader.

I imprinted on my friends, as the gosling does on whatever is near at that tender age that can stand in for mother, and followed them wherever they led. Not that they weren't going to the ideal places, thank goodness. But if they should have decided to head for Sioux City after graduation instead of New York, I suppose I should have followed them there.

Now, the love of literature was something I arrived at all by myself. (Surely it had nothing to do with the fact that my mother was a writer manque or my father declaimed Shakespeare all the time, right.) I got a job in publishing right after college only because I couldn't find one in retail or advertising, but I assume it was my subconscious leading me to where I really ought to have been, so I'll claim this development as my own, too. And falling in love--bam, all in one moment, just as they write about in books--with the new editorial assistant who joined our ranks was another step on my very own, unique path. That he and I wrote poetry obsessively, sending it to one another through inter-office mail (little did the mail boy suspect what was in his silver cart, hidden in dirty yellow envelopes with long series of scratched-out names: typed pages lyrical, yearning, obtuse), was either a happy accident or foreordained by the universe.

But when he decided to go back to school, leave publishing in order to pursue a purer form of living with literature, I regressed. All the way back to the gosling years. I decided I must do exactly the same thing.

Only we were going to be doing it in different cities, because he got into Yale and I didn't. The shame of it--Columbia instead! Too, he had gotten a scholarship while I didn't, which felt like the final insult. Until I started visiting on weekends, and then I got the rest of the slap in the face.

What a lush place Yale was, insulated, warm and providing all. We would sit in the graduate student lounge in blond-wood booths, drinking coffee and discussing hermeneutics with other comp lit students. We would go to the library, and there on the reserve shelves I would find, lined up like steadfast tin soldiers, twelve copies of the book I desperately needed, while Columbia's single copy had been taken out of Butler Library by a faculty member three years before and never replaced. It was tough luck at Columbia. They didn't even have a decent place to sit until all hours discussing imperative b.s. The campus was the most off-putting place I've ever been, and I was always a stranger. I rode the subway two hours a day to be desperately lonely there. And I went ten thousand dollars in debt. I did make one--count 'em, one--friend the whole year. He turned out to be one of the best friends in life I'll ever have, though, so that is not a complaint. Not really.

Yet what I remember most about visiting New Haven has nothing to do with studying. It has to do with place, and the contrast between two places that are as emotively different as two places can be.

Or could this be about how I experienced myself then, always second-best? I will leave that question hanging in the air, and return to the concrete. It is safer there, with ground under the feet.

I remember (even now, remember the look and feel and taste) of the grilled cheese sandwich off the grill at the lunch counter a few blocks off campus. It had not changed since 1946, I think. (The lunch spot, I mean, though this might well be the case with the sandwich, too.) I remember his apartment, white and spare and light-filled, with a rooftop extending out from under one window, where I imagined come summer we would put a couple of lawn chairs and some potted flowers. We did not. I remember the green barette I bought at a little store filled with small objects of luxury and cool, each and every one of which I wanted. The barette surfaces every few years only to go missing again, much like these memories. I remember sitting in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, marveling at the walls of translucent marble through which a milky light seeped. I especially remember walking through Louis Kahn's British art gallery, a building that remains to my mind one of the most perfect examples of the art of architecture I've ever seen.

At the end of the year, I left Columbia. I left the notion of a career in academe forever: perhaps this marked the end of my need to follow others, too. It had not been a well-considered decision, after all. It was probably the competition between Columbia and Yale that convinced me of this. Although maybe if I had gotten in to Yale, the course of my life would have been different. I cannot know that now. Something, I am not sure what, led me out and away. I can only hope I was, and have been ever since, following someone else. Maybe that person is me.

Wishful Thinking

2011-03-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

What would I give.

Sometimes the mind slides an updated picture over what is actually in front of the eye, and so it was yesterday--the day before the snow that is now whitening the view out the window--at the place called Big Deep.

Nelly and I walked through the woods along the creek, following it all the way to the elbow bend where the water is caught in a great cup of rock, and there it collects, deep and green. One perfect giant of a tree is poised at the very edge of this C's midpoint, and on one of its strong arms, held out high over the water as in benediction, a thick rope has been tossed and secured. The big knot tied at the end is the place where bare feet press together, once airborne, then let go when the farthest reach has been attained--and splash. Into the swimming hole that suddenly is before me, a vision of August here in March.

There are dozens and dozens of people here. Towels are spread on the soft dark sand--bequeathed thoughtfully by early-spring floods--under tall pines. Nylon chairs are set in the shallows, and teenage girls cool their heels (and ankles) while chatting at the same time they listen to the radio that sits on top of an ice chest; a multitasking talent of young ladies who could also add painting their nails and making life decisions into the mix without a carefully combed hair escaping their braids. Dogs wade (Nelly looks for unwatched picnics). Children line up for their turn on the rope. It is the community swimming hole 2010, but its pleasures are essentially unchanged from the swimming hole 1910.

The only thing that's different, apart from the portable radios, is the concentration of people. It's ten times greater, because so is our population. But there is a bigger factor: there are vastly fewer swimming holes these days. People are rapidly shutting off access to spots people have been using to battle the summertime heat for generations. Perhaps someone can explain to me what changed somewhere around 1990 to make litigation the number-one threat to what remains of our steadily diminishing commons. There simply had to have been some legislation, or consolidation of power, that got slipped onto the books around then. Someone can explain to me, and then I'll feel simultaneously sad and mad, which is the state into which modern society puts anyone who is awake enough to notice what is being lost.

And so, if you possess any knowledge of a great swimming hole--one that feels practically yours alone--guard it closely. It may be taken, and what then would you do on a long hot summer afternoon?

It has been a few years since I last visited the gem of my private collection of swimming holes (yes, I'll share them, if you are very, very nice to me and/or help work on my motorcycles). It sits at the apex of the crown because it is not one, but rather six, ponds in which to float solitary, swimming among the clouds that have photographically printed themselves on the flat surface of the water. This was as far as the developer got: six gravel drives to six ponds at six homesites. But no homes. And no one around. Oh, and a secondary benefit of disturbing the soil to build those drives: the thickest concentration of blackberry canes in five counties. You can pick quart upon quart in minutes, then sit down by your very own pond--which one shall it be today, dear?--and eat all the berries you can hold before splashing back into the icy cool.

What a freaking Norman Rockwell, eh?

The earliest in my collection was practically literally painted by him, or maybe closer to the physical equivalent of inhabiting a Charles Ives symphony (most probably New England Holidays). My childhood best friend, the daughter of two artists, spent summers at the family farmhouse in Vermont. And sometimes I went there too. For an image to complement the description, refer to the Charles Sheeler photograph previously posted. Shaker austerity. The very paucity of any raucous amusements--mainly, we went outside with our sketch pads, or went blueberry picking up the mountain, or collected fresh fir balsam to stuff sachets, or played Scrabble at night and assembled puzzles when it rained; that was about it--is exactly what made these vacations seem unspeakably rich to my young mind. And then there was the swimming hole. A concrete dam had been built on the brook rolling down the hillside from some cold origin, and the water backed up nine feet deep. We threw ourselves, again and again, screaming at the shock, into the numbing water. I will never forget that time and that place: it is an immersing memory of a private place that seemed there for us alone. The essence of summer, and the fullness of a wet joy. I hope you remember your own. Better yet, I hope you have it still.

photo: O. Winston Link,
"Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole,
Luray, Virginia," 1956

10 Pictures

2011-03-19T04:27:00.000-07:00

It is a Palace of Democracy. What is inside was made for kings, pharaohs, generals, dictators, thieves, and the wealthy, who are all of those things. Yet here I was, and now all of it was mine--only temporarily but hey--for the price of a dollar ("Suggested admission: $28" ["Pay what you wish" in type almost too small to see, or that was their hope]). The plunder of nations and the ages, all collected in one lavish, epically scaled building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I like entering by the grand staircase of what appears to be a thousand steps: one should sweat a little for prizes like these. Into the immense white hall, with its sprays of fresh flowers the size of a football player. (They are replaced once a week, year round, under the terms of an endowment to the museum expressly for this purpose.) The Great Hall functions as a mountain: reminding us how small we are.

This day, we let the two boys, clutching their drawing pads, rush ahead into the Greek wing. They hunkered down on the floor, blending into yet another group of art students, clustered at the feet of ancient heroes, with their offerings of sketchpad and charcoal. I was drawn, not to the heroic, but to the impossible: a small case containing glass. From Rome. Whole, unchipped. It spoke of miracles. Maybe they were small ones, but those are the ones we can grasp.

After the sculpture, the boys intended to visit (of course) the swords. Then the samurai armor; it always frightens me. But them--it makes them dream. Of being frightening. That which the male of our species hopes for, while the female yearns to attract the warrior so he will take off the frightening armor, frightened of her. We wear it in different places, that's all.

The ladies decamped to the more intimate spaces upstairs, to see some photography. I wasn't much interested in the show of Steiglitz, Steichen, Strand--it is hard to see these grandaddies with a fresh eye, just as it is hard to look at the Mona Lisa and see anything but a thousand parodies--but I was interested in a show titled "Our Future Is in the Air: Photographs from the 1910s." It got me thinking of the photographs I love, that always look new to me, and I felt like mounting my own exhibition, an intimate chronology of the art, starting with two from the aforementioned show.

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Tadeus Langnier

Anton Giulio Bragaglia, The Typist

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bichonnade Leaping

Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House--the Stove

Robert Frank, Charleston, South Carolina

Garry Winogrand, New Mexico

John Pfahl, Trojan Nuclear Power Plant

Lewis Baltz, from Park City

Richard Misrach, Desert Fire #249

I tried to figure out what linked these images, and for a long time I could not--apart from the fact that I love them especially, for they each appear to me nearly perfect. They are from different traditions and visions: futurist, formalist, snapshot, the "ruined landscape," the age of Manifest Destiny. Then I realized: they are all linked by their dedication to surprise, to opening the eye to what has been unseen in what is always seen. They are new, even if they are old.

Genesis

2011-03-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

I had it; now I had to make it mine. That is, I had to get it registered--in New Jersey, the state that presents its problems.

The first was figuring out how to break into a closed circle, viciously constructed of sticky red tape: I could not ride it until I was licensed, and I could not get licensed until it was registered, and it could not get registered until it was inspected. By someone riding it with a license. This is where strangers on the street come in.

I saw someone down the block leaning over a motorcycle. Desperation is good medicine for shyness. I approached.

Sure! He'd be happy to take it for inspection. His buddy would follow, driving me in his car. That is how I came to be sitting on a Saturday morning at the inspection station behind my new old motorcycle, watching in growing agitation as we . . . sat there. And sat. (New Jersey, Land of the Eternal Wait.) I realized that the fellow did not know, or appreciate, the fact that this was an air-cooled machine, and idling in the close summer air was cooling exactly nothing. After a while, fighting with my impulse to not upset the boat, to not second-guess people who obviously knew better (A Man! And a Man Who Owned a Motorcycle!), my compassion for this poor machine finally propelled me like a nine-foot wave. I ran over to him. Huh? he says. Oh. Okay. And turned it off.

Later I learned it just as easily might not have started again for a long while, after such abuse. But it was a V50, my V50, and it was endlessly forgiving. It was a stalwart machine. A forever machine.

And that is how I came to be riding it through the Holland Tunnel of an evening. (When the traffic was at a standstill, I lane split, illegal though it was, reciting in my mind all the while the little speech about the needs of an air-cooled engine--never mind the rider's need for oxygen--I would give to the sympathetic gendarme.) I was heading downtown, the site of all hope and life and desire in the early eighties, in one's middle twenties.

First there would be dinner at the place in Tribeca whose name I have forgotten, along with the food. (That was forgotten about three minutes after it was eaten.) The notable thing about the place was that it may well have been the last place in New York City where artists were permitted to run a tab--a long tab. The walls were hung with paintings from those whose tabs were left open a little too long. No matter; they paid up one way or the other.

I parked on the sidewalk; that is what we did then, in the era of many latitudes. We did what made sense, in that age before parking infractions became municipal big business. The cops had better things to do. Especially in the depopulated nether regions of the city, the places where after 5 the streets were left to those relative few of us simply wandering in our search for our own kind in the dark.

After dinner I went back out, pulling on my helmet as I went. And stopped, when I saw something had been left on my seat.A half-filled pack of cigarettes, of a type I had never seen: Ducados. At a time when everything was taken as a sign, a swirling mystery (that music--is it speaking to me alone? that boy--could he be the one? ), this was a mystery indeed, and one that filled me with a shivering. Did someone know I was still yearning for the departed lover, the one who rode Ducatis?

It took me years to realize that (duh) someone passing by had simply stopped to light a smoke, perhaps chatting with a pal and using my bike as a coffee table. But this night, it had meaning. Like every vision, every minute, in New York City when every wish had yet to be fulfilled, and might be--in the very next moment.

All these memories come raining back as I read Patti Smith's Just Kids, her memoir of her life as a beginning artist in a milieu that was a stewpot for a creative soup, in this very locale only a decade before I came to it. I ate in the same places, walked the same streets, shopped the same stores. The city welcomed the hopeful, and rewarded them with food to eat: psychic food, and on occasion actual sustenance (I, too, often visited Nathan's in Coney Island, where she and Mapplethorpe ended after their ride on the F train).

I found out about a nightclub I was told I would be welcomed to, in this era of the forbidding velvet rope and stone-countenanced bouncer, so long as I arrived on a motorcycle. What luck! I had one! The proprietor was said to be a collector.

That is how I ended up at an unmarked door on an alley downtown, on St. John's Lane, between Canal and Beach. (Was it another sign that, ten years later, I would find myself living on a street named St. John's Place?) The heavy velvet curtain inside the door parted, and I was in Madame Rosa's, where DJs played the most amazing, previously unamalgamated, infectiously danceable music I'd ever heard in my life. I went there every chance I got, parking the Guzzi in a line of other unusual motorcycles. Then something happened, I don't remember what. The time of Madame Rosa's came to an end. The Mudd Club, CBGB, came to an end. The unnamed restaurant came to an end. Robert Mapplethorpe came to an end; Patti Smith is in her sixties. The time of the V50 came to an end. The New York City I knew came to a crashing, shuddering end. Youth, too.

How often I am startled by my own past, when I chance to walk past its visions, now preserved in their own discrete vitrines. Later (I must remember) what happens even now will still later appear to me, behind glass, with informative wall tags. I must remember.

It was only later that I realized there was more to come, an endless string like pearls. Nothing, yet, has come to an end. I am tired of sadness. There will be more to come. (Except the nauseousness of getting groped in crowded subway cars; those days really are gone.) So it is that memories still live, still re-form. The necklace adds to its length. I called this "Genesis." What comes to an end comes to an and.

Party Down

2011-03-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

It's a strange custom, all right.

1. Go to the store and spent a large wad on viands, wine, sweets, candles. Oh, and olives. Got to have olives.

(In days of yore, more or less the same thing: Snare rabbit; dig up potatoes; chop wood for stove.)

2. Spend the entire day rinsing, dicing, marinating, sauteeing, and baking.

3. Chance to go into downstairs bathroom; gasp. Run get broom and Comet cleanser.

4. Just after dark, make sure outdoor lights are on (insurance), switch on Pandora, put match to candles.

5. Wait to see headlights in your driveway or dog to start barking madly, whichever comes first, or simultaneously.

6. Four hours later, so tired you'd gladly fall into bed still wearing your shoes and earrings, embark on an hour and a half of continuous wineglass washing, pot scrubbing, spill wiping. Vow never to do this again. The next day, start remembering only the great things, and go get calendar to find next open Friday night.

The custom is the dinner party. How long has it been going on? How long have we been craving this admixture of preparations and anticipation, work and giving, chatter and smiles, laughter and consumption, together? Friends in the kitchen: there is nothing so deeply desired at times, and nothing so deep.

There is something in the dinner party that is both highly refined--codified, even, from the moment of entry with proffered bottle in outstretched hand at the same moment as the happy greeting, through the hour of cheese and crackers (and olives), to the first forkful and the praise--and stone primitive. It's huddling around the fire and the roasted bits of torn rodent inside the cave, washed in eons of bathwater until it comes out smelling of candlewax and chevre, martinis and chocolate mousse.

After a while I start to itch if I haven't given one, or gone to one, in some time: last weekend was a scratch-fest. On Friday, at my house; on Saturday, at others'. Of course, this means dual dinner parties both nights, as there are children aplenty. You cook first for them (Friday night, nachos; Saturday, pasta), then put them in front of a movie, where they will be held rapt so the grownups can finally move to the table, sit down and refill the wineglass. We talk, talk, talk--about what? It doesn't matter. It's connection. We are as hungry for it as for the food (menu: mixed seafood; red potatoes roasted with rosemary; spinach with feta, washed down with sparkling wine, to toast a friend who will have a solo show of art in New York next month). Some of these friends are seen only at dinner parties, so dinner parties there must be.

(Nelly, too, partied down. Or shall I say up: near the end of the evening, she figured out how to get on top of the breakfast-room table. Which is where the kids had left their many plates of half-eaten cake. Nelly was now grazing, very much like a cow or horse, moving from plate to plate. This means that forever after, I must be vigilant about pushing the chair all the way up to the table, so as not to give her a stepladder to Nirvana. Do you think I will be able to remember? Your vote counts. Well, at least she made this brilliant advance in her knowledge base after the cake had been served, rather than before.)

Every element of the ritual we have long called "dinner party" stands for something. It's like a church service. The giving of time, and trouble; the receiving of hors d'oeuvres. The hellos and goodbyes, and something in between: humanness, elemental. We state our needs outright. I need sustenance. I need you. I don't know--do you crave this too?

At the YMCA

2011-02-26T06:51:00.000-08:00

Recently, I joined the YMCA in "the big city." The term is relative: I live in a hamlet so small its sole businesses are two pizza parlors, two gas stations, one wine store, and an unspeakable "Chinese" takeout (you see where our priorities lie). The city that has vastly more gas stations, pizza parlors, liquor outlets--as well as the Y--is twenty-five minutes away.

This town is Kingston, New York, on the mighty Hudson. It is an undiscovered gem. I like the fact that parts of it feel like I alone know them--this sense of ownership of discovered things that appeared to be waiting for one for a hundred years is what made New York City in the seventies and eighties such a paradise in which to be young and poor. I also like the fact that lately a few enterprising folks have seen the promise in Kingston's situation, above the river, with unremodeled nineteenth-century buildings (and more than a few ghostly seventeenth-century stone houses, too) so that now, in uptown, we have a couple of gently hipsterish restaurants and one of the most awesome bars ever (so awesome, in fact, it renders me speechless but for teenage gibberish like "awesome"). The rest can stay undiscovered, and mine . . . now that I've got my hand-made cocktails and raw oysters.

Then there is midtown Kingston. Poor, poor midtown. The summer after I graduated from college, I went to visit friends, a couple who had taken an apartment somewhere. He (who would later become an architect in the true big city) gave me directions to a place I'd never heard of before. I simply drove, glancing down at the paper in my hand, until I got there. Later, I didn't even remember what city I had gone to, or in which direction, only that it was about an hour from the town in which we'd gone to school.

I do remember thinking I had to be lost. This, this . . .depressed landscape of ugliness, emitting hopelessness from every lopsided, peeling building, nary a tree in sight, could not possibly be where anyone--much less a couple of young bright stars just out of a very good college--would choose to live. It was the kind of place people no longer bothered to dream of getting out of; it was so bootless, and so they continued to shuffle up and down the wide avenue, their horizons ever the same, and ever gray.

Twenty years later I was talking to my friend and thought to ask, "Hey, where was that that you guys were living the summer of '80 and I came to visit you?"

"Broadway in Midtown Kingston," he replied.

"Trust me, it will never change," he added.

This is thus the perfect location for the YMCA, an institution that was founded in industrializing London, where in 1844 workers faced a bleak and filthy future. George Williams, 22, was concerned and wished to offer a farther horizon (and some Christian saving) to the men coming to the teeming city from the countryside. (In Boston in 1851 the first American Y was created, by a retired sea captain.) It now promises "strong children, strong families, strong community." Midtown Kingston needs it.

I need it, too. The Y is no-nonsense, and every single type of person makes use of it. In the parking lot you'll see Audis and Hyundais, Volvos and Scions, as well people waiting outside for a ride because they have none of their own. We'll all equal inside the walls of the Y: we're fat and thin, young and old, black and white. Signs in the teen center remind kids to be respectful of one another, no dissing allowed. People say hi with a smile, and mean it. As there are in the tumbled-tile locker rooms of a posh spa, here there are no cotton balls, Aveda hand lotion, or basket of tampons in individual protective cardboard cases (BTW, lady motorcyclists, take these when you find them: one day you'll be very glad you remembered you put one in the tankbag). Eh. Who cares. Anti-elitism is the best medium in which to grow, even if the faint odor of mildew that hangs over the pool and the strange smell that greets you when you open the door to the steam room knock you back temporarily. But then you quickly get down to business. We're here to swim, and to sweat. And occasionally to say hi, smile, and mean it.

Wakeup

2011-02-19T05:02:00.000-08:00

I am, and then I am not.

The magazines piled up on my bedside table through the winter: BMW ON, Cycle World. They had something colorful on their covers each month--what were those things? They had two wheels, and what looked to be some sort of human crouching, lizard-like, on top of it, clutching something in each outstretched hand. Huh.

The snow piled up against the garage doors. Occasionally I would beat my way to one, throw it up, to get the skis, the sleds. The garbage can, to go to the dump. Large gray-covered shapes, I was vaguely aware, were also there; I would glance over to make sure there was a glowing green diode on a small black box sitting on the floor next to one of them, attached by orange extension cord snaking toward the outlet on the wall. Then bang, the door went down again.

I was not. But now, the temperature rising bit by bit and the snow beginning to darken the pavement of the driveway with slowly expanding water, I am.

I am a motorcyclist again. I stayed up till midnight last night, suddenly possessed by the contents of one of the magazines, which I at last cracked open and could not stop reading. Here's the rally I will go to. Here are the tips for riding better, and here is the endless stream of information of all types, too much, too much to absorb. I am suddenly feeling the initiation of a turn, the downward pressure on a grip, the magical balance of weights moving places, becoming something else. I am thinking about tires again.

(How is it that, several feet distant, you can feel your tires, every molecule of their being, though you are made of different stuff?)

I had entered a fugue state, I realize now with appreciable surprise. And with the coming of spring (its warming promises), I am becoming something else too. At long last.

Finally

2011-02-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

The obituaries, although the last thing, are the first thing for some people when they open the paper. They exert some strong pull on certain readers--gratitude, perhaps, or schadenfreude, or proof that indeed life can describe a fully comprehensible arc, when laid out in 10-point type and finished off (if invisibly) with the words "The End."

I myself was never drawn to read them. It always felt like I was reading a review of a show that had already closed: what if I realized, too late, that I wanted to go?

Something has changed now (yeah, it's that view of My Obituary Time in the distant circle of the spyglass). So I find myself scanning them now with a certain mathematical interest. I calculate the average from the ages of demise on any given day: 82, 78, 85. I can't help it; it just happens, and . . . Whew. I still have a decade or two! As if the newspaper is a prognostigatory tool. As if it's all about me.

The other day, though, an obituary caught my eye and held it: "Parasailing donkey dies of heart trouble." The lede read, "Moscow.--The Russian donkey whose brays of terror while parasailing won her worldwide sympathy has died."

I'm afraid I didn't have the heart to look for the YouTube clip that got her such sympathy; I spent many years when I was younger and stronger--and apparently hopeful enough to believe that knowledge was the power behind change--looking at pictures and reading academic papers on the endemic torture of animals that seems to be a human birthright. I am too brittle now. Just reading those words, brays of terror, started a sickening loop in the auditory imagination.

The other day an image flashed on the inward screen, and it coincided with (or was precipitated by) a week in which I found myself thinking, longing, again for the touch of a horse. It's been a long time. Horses are nothing that you can break the addiction to that easily; the nicotine of the animal world.

That's when I suddenly saw myself looking once more out the bedroom window of the old house--a place I do not think much about anymore, being a resolutely forward kind of person, ha, except when I yearn for the kind of expansive summertime yard party for several dozen of kids and wine-happied parents I used to be able to have--to the tumbledown barn out back. This was to be fixed up, risen from the dead, to become itself again. It was the place to which my hopes flew like swallows. Someday, I knew, I would complete that view with some horses and donkeys. It would remain largely a view, for I would only feed them, and brush them, and spend secret moments, muzzle to muzzle, breathing sweetness from their nostrils. The rest of the time they would lead their own lives--that which was taken from them before. For they would be ex-circus, ex - carriage horse, ex-racehorse, ex - kill pen. We would grow old together, nothing ever placed on our backs again.

Just a few. Just a few of the many, the too many, who had expelled their own brays of terror, or silent prayers for surcease. A few, given some good time to help wash away the memory of what had happened before. I believe they would have forgotten easily, out there in the pasture beyond my window. Because they, like all of us, naturally face forward too.

This is because, as I have found, all heartache passes. Except for a vague residue barely felt, weightless, almost. After a time, you barely remember what caused it, or why.

The obit mentions that near the end, Anapka the donkey spent her final months on a farm outside Moscow "in luxury." She deserved it, and more, though the heart trouble she was made to suffer proved more durable than most experienced in the usual course of life. Then came the blessing that is finally offered to us all, but only, it is hoped, after uncounted mouthfuls of green grass ripped fresh from the ground.

The End.

The Revisitation

2011-02-05T05:26:00.000-08:00

I am in the peculiar position of finally rereading--not by choice, but as an editorial assignment-- a book I last read just after I wrote it over fifteen years ago, and the experience is deeply unsettling. I wish I could say this is because of the evidence of how entire large swaths of my own life have vanished from memory, though there is that bit of uncomfortableness. No matter; here they are again. The moments come right back in all their fullness: I am on the Parkway again for the first time. Now I feel that warm grass on the back of my head, while above is the impossible and great blue, with the kind of sweep and saturated color they only make in the South. Here too is a lonesome night in Germany (see? you got through that all right!), cut adrift from all that I knew. Oh, and I had forgotten ever riding through that white sleet, so surprising; and getting lost in a foreign country; and worrying about where to park, when I knew I could not afford anything to happen to a bike I simply had to sell when it was time to leave.

I am startled to meet myself again in these pages, but it is not due to forgetting so much that I had done in so many places, in so many frames of mind. The alarm comes from suddenly seeing a person I wish that I could forget: the person who wrote them. I long for the eraser that could blank out whole paragraphs, this comment or that, this smugness or that secret better left unsaid. I was like a bulldozer of experience, too sure, and wrong about so much. I misread my own life, and though I see that with a painful clarity now, there is also the awful sense that the off-kilter assessments came from some obdurate part deep inside, running my full length, that I cannot and will never change, no matter how many hours I spend sobbing (or nodding) in therapists' offices.

I keep coming full circle, again and again, to the past that is me, to the me that is past.

So many say change is simple: Just do it. Yes, just decide to change, and presto. New person. One who does not find a part of herself sheared away and watching in sadness and dismay as she does--again--what she had vowed never to repeat. It is at these times that I feel I am but a subterranean riverbed through which run the old incessant waters of my family past, back, back down the lineage, all the way to those sepia people in the old photograph on my wall, standing silently, waiting for the shutter to close, in the side yard of a farmhouse somewhere in Ohio. People I never knew, but whose stern words and angry actions and private sadnesses were passed down, hand after hand, and now lie inside me, waiting for the match to touch the fuse.

Although it seems contradictory, I am a biological determinist when it comes to the human race; but I believe absolutely in nurture over nature when it comes to the individual. A behaviorist when it comes to the formation of the personality; and a Freudian when it comes to how it all comes down. How it is remembered, and repeated.

Maybe what ones writes should never be reread. Or maybe just not when one is in a mood. These pages to me now have the feel of the communion wafer, dry and tasteless, but actually a metaphorical food, full of body and blood.

Face It

2011-01-29T06:02:00.000-08:00

In the late eighties, New York Telephone got themselves a good slogan: "We're all connected." It warmly evoked all the paradoxical longing and anxiety of the ring-and-answer dialectic. There was something a little scary in the thought. At the time, I wrote a poem to someone that conveyed the desire, and the horror too, and I think there was a line in it that went "Oh my god: we're all connected."

In a new era, now, there's something exponentially more frightening, and you use it, and I use it, and we all use it, and oh my god we're all connected by Facebook.

Frankly, it scares the wits out of me. Just as I am frightened by anything big--a rogue wave, say--coming at me whose power I do not comprehend.

The feeling is a bit like that which arose before setting out for a party when I was in my twenties: Who's going to be there? Do I look all right? Maybe no one will want to talk to me. Maybe everyone there will be smarter, prettier, funnier. Maybe I will slink home without having said a word.

On Facebook, all of that is indeed the case. I am paralyzed into silence by the shiny wit and compact humor and alchemical apercus, expressed in sentences as verbally layered as paratha bread, of so many of my friends: these are people who should have been stand-up comics or political speechwriters or, possibly, comic politicians. The day goes on and I think, I really should post something--hey, maybe this!--and when I log on, there are diamonds and rubies scattered across the screen. I'm not going to put my paste jewel from the dimestore up there next to the stuff from Cartier.

Yet this--as astonishing as it is to see bright flashes of intelligence flare and die, replaced by the next burst of wondrous light--is but the simple use to which Facebook is put. It's like the smokescreen: it's what they want you to do, so that behind our backs, while we are diverting each other, they can be doing their . . . what? That's what I don't know; that's the unknown that scares me.

I know this must be going on, because I watched David Fincher's masterful The Social Network. I know because Mark Zuckerberg, the fellow who thought this up, is so scary-smart his mind is literally impossible to fathom. (Not that you'd want to, necessarily.) It was an idea conceived of in anger--and conceived of as purely transactional. A sales catalog of women: See which one you want today!

Because its intention was veiled from the beginning, it remains so, though the number of veils increase daily. We don't really know what they're doing with all the information they're collecting on us. And indeed, I suspect they don't yet know everything they're going to do with it in the future: but there are some very, very canny minds working on that at this exact moment.

What Facebook is good for, for any of us plebeians, is also multivalent, if less empire-building. It can be used to torture yourself, for example: you can troll around your ex, or your ex's friends, if she's blocked you or you've blocked her, and you can see who's doing what. With whom. Where. You can see evidence of parties you weren't invited to. You can see who's the most popular kid in high school: Four thousand friends? Who has four thousand friends? You can have done to you the coldest form of door-closing ever conceived: Defriending. It happens without a word. Slam.

It also shows who doesn't have a life, or at least doesn't in these cold winter days. That's most of us, apparently. The other night I found myself simultaneously engaged in three chats; I felt as if I'd just had a bunch of balls thrown at me with the command "Juggle!" Juggle I did.

You can't hide on Facebook. Or maybe you can, and I just haven't found the secret setting that would allow me to hide. To be a voyeur, without being spied myself. Even at that, though, I would still be watched. Bits of me, cell scrapings, taken without my knowledge. At some point, rest assured, it will all become clear. When we wake up one day and belong to someone else. Someone who is not our friend.

Loving the One I'm With

2011-01-22T05:14:00.000-08:00

Childhood leaves a memory-world intact but hiding, waiting for the trigger in the here and now. Then a sight suddenly unfurls before you; it seems touchable in its nearness, shining with the same impossible glory that made it worthy of storage all this time.

Such was a moment today, when Grandma's house at Christmas appeared suddenly in the air I walked into. I had set out for a post - ice storm hike on a favorite rail trail. I now faced a sparkly tunnel, an archway of ice-bedecked trees glittering darkly all the way to the vanishing point. That is when it was there, the baroque fairyland of sweets that made such an open-mouthed amazement of my grandmother's at the holiday. (This was the Greek grandmother, of course, not the Presbyterian one. The former believed life was just an excuse for elaborate presentations that perfumed the house with honey and nuts, oregano and garlic, butter and more butter. The latter believed food was a necessary nuisance, and if the succotash burned, it could still fulfill its purpose.) In particular, I remembered a pile of sugared grapes, refracting light into my astonished eyes. I did not even want to eat them. I wanted to stare at them, simply trying to understand how such things could exist. They looked permanent and fragile, at once.

Nelly was resolutely in the present. She ran ahead to greet the only other walker this day: a little brindle dog that appeared to be a cross between a Basenji and a small pit bull. Or something. (Ever notice how everyone who has a shelter dog doesn't have a mash-up of twelve or sixteen different breeds; their dog is an example of some extremely rare purebred, which of course it looks just like. Sort of.) The man on the other end of the leash called out, "What is your dog?" That meant he actually did have an extremely rare purebred.

"Crazy!" I replied.

"Mine is barkless."

"Ha-ho," I couldn't help but laugh. "Mine has enough bark for forty-three dogs. I wish I could give yours some of hers."

He just smiled. A little. Then he started briskly for the parking lot, explaining as he went that his dog really couldn't stand the cold, being originally from a subtropical country.

Nelly is from her own country. She can deal with just about anything--the cold; large dogs; small prey; cross-country skiers; bones as big as her head. She just can't deal with her own emotions. They are too big for her little soul, and they cause her to erupt in screams, piercing barks, screeching whines, and (when she greets someone she loves) a special concerto of cries that is indescribable. Except to say: it hurts.

People flinch; her voice has an edge that could take the five o'clock shadow right off your face. And I don't know how to stop it. Me, the amateur student of behavior. Me, the person who is supposed to be writing a book about the virtues of positive-reinforcement training.

Actually, Nelly is rock-hard proof of one of the basic principles I hope to illuminate: that behavior that is self-reinforcing--hey, it worked! The door opened; the boogie man went away; the food appeared; that made me feel better to get that out!--becomes entrenched. There is now effectively nothing I can do about it, unless I stopped everything else (tending to my child, working for a living) and devoted all my time to retraining her. After all the years I allowed her to train herself.

So she puts me in a peculiar situation: hating something she does, while loving all of her.

Because I do. I can't tell you why. Maybe because she's here. Maybe because she looks to me. And I have come to look to her. Just the old dance.

She, like anyone we chance to fall in love with, over time has shown herself to be one of a kind. This contains a lesson for me, and it is also has its weight, one as heavy as a cross to bear. I love her, which means I accept her. In the way I too would wish to be accepted: for all that I am. My flaws, you see, rather scream too, even if silently. After all these years, someone would also have a hell of a time retraining me.

We walked as far as we were able, each step in the iced-over and heavy snow requiring the effort of three in normal conditions. The vagaries of the day had to be accepted as well. Then we too turned, back through the sugary tunnel of time. Toward home, the place where we can be as we are. Nelly slept all the way, quiet, and quietly loved.

O seasons, O castles
What soul is without flaws?
--Arthur Rimbaud, "Happiness"

Hit Send

2011-01-14T06:23:00.000-08:00

It was the sort of room in which exactly this sort of conversation would take place: genteel, old, understated, and with an oriental rug underfoot. This was the site of a memorial art exhibition at the Pen and Brush Club, in a West Village brownstone, Edith Wharton territory. Therefore we murmured. We also held glasses of prosecco
and accepted Asian-fusion hors d'oeuvres off silver trays held by semi-invisible young waiters who wished they were anywhere but here. That is when I heard something that floored me.

I had been charged, by a relative, with collecting any inside dope I could about how to get into one of New York City's most exclusive private schools. At the kindergarten level.

I found myself talking to a woman whose three children attended said school. I tried not to think of the tab--over a hundred grand, I just learned from the website--in order to gather information diligently. A crucial item, she told me, was the letter one must write after the initial school tour. She helpfully listed some things the school might like to hear, then allowed, "Of course, some people hire a ghostwriter to do this."

You could have knocked me over with a feather--one dripping borrowed ink from its quill. Jesus Christ. Hire a ghostwriter to write a letter to a school for admission to kindergarten?

Apart from my broad and general naivete about how things are done now in this world (an unknowingness that extends, on one side, to the private grooming habits of young women these days [ouch] and, on the other, to the wow of learning that Lockheed-Martin apparently wields unprecedented power over every aspect of U.S. government; in both cases, who knew?), this showed me to be a positive rube.

Ghostwritten letters had gone out, or so I thought, with the prevalent illiteracy of the last century (the last before the last, I mean: the nineteenth). Then, people who needed that one persuasive phrase, the one that might turn a head most desired, would pay a professional to craft the letter of a lifetime. For those who did command the written word, but not the ability to gather enough flowers to make a suitable literary bouquet, there existed books of templates: the thank-you, the sympathy, the employment query. There are still those books today, although the handwritten letter--on paper! in an envelope!--is going the way of the floppy disk.

I have been blessed with some extraordinary correspondents, and not just in that antediluvian time of the postbox. In fact, e-mail has allowed some incredible prose to flourish; incredibly, it has been meant for my eye alone.

The only thing the e-mailed message cannot do is what I find among the letters, every one saved, sent me by my college roommate H. They are astonishingly well-written, first. They catalog events and feelings and people otherwise forgotten, second. (Without this record, which brings them momentarily back into the present--I see things before me as I hold the unfolded note, even twenty or thirty years later. Why, they must have lived inside this shoebox of letters, feeding on these words in the dark all this time.) But third, I saved them because they are unique works of art, made for me, with collages overlayed with rubber stamps, strips of colored paper torn and pasted just so, exquisitely Japanese in their sensibility. She wrote better than she spoke, and she spoke far better than most. Letter-writing is a craft and a discovery for the reader, temporally built, like a sculpture made of words.

As I said, though, now that I no longer receive letters in the mail (except from H. occasionally, bless her; they are beautiful as ever), I am yet not bereft of greatness arriving in the mail. Something arrives that knocks me back: brilliant writing. I can do nothing but attempt to reply in kind. We will go back and forth, and I find that the smarter, the more surprising, are the letters, the better are my responses, too. I never played tennis so well as when faced with an opponent who could cream me in the first three strokes.

I hope my backup program is doing what it is supposed to be doing, and I also hope that backups themselves aren't merely talismans of mystical hope. In other words, I hope to god these virtual letters are truly saved. Although they are private, I wish some could be made public, as some of my friends have written ideas, expressions, humorous riffs, tied together in a dense and perfect whole, one that rivals anything anyone ever set down in print. Perhaps they flew so high because what they wrote was not meant to be judged; yes, I think that must be so. It was meant to convey, as a boat carries its passengers, precious cargo, to the opposite shore. The beautiful sunset glinting off the waves was just something that happened along the way.

Sometimes writing a letter confers a singular closeness between two people, writer and reader. The considered missive has a different quality than the conversation, or the dashed-off message, or the query, or the phone call. It is meant to draw together two minds, two hearts. And it does, in the hands of the best letter writer. It is something that could never be ghostwritten. Only written, just to you.

Bluish Blood

2011-01-08T05:25:00.000-08:00

Margaret Bourke-White, 1937

Let us talk for a moment about privilege.

There is the type of privilege that is simply being here, now, alive. This is the highest. Then there is the privilege of, say, owning such an amazement a dishwasher, an appliance that accepts greasy dishes and spoons and returns them new again after the mere press of a button (and the selection of a crossword puzzle's worth of interlocking processes). It also returns a bill from Central Hudson, which I guess is also something of a privilege. I try to imagine what my grandmother, with a family of five boys coming out of the Depression, might have felt having such a thing in her kitchen--either a dead faint, or the Hallelujah Chorus.

I am hugely privileged, of course, and I know it. Not only in having a dishwasher, but also, in a short list, the following: a view out my window of rough and wild mountains (only partly ruined by high-tension wires, which I'd be a sorry ass to dislike, given their gifts [such as dishwasher and bill]; trade-offs are also a form of privilege); a car in my driveway that has not failed to start every single time I have turned the key; two motorcycles in the garage that do not always do the same, but this in its own way might be considered a privilege (that of needing to engage with them fully); the dog whose happiness redoubles my own when I watch her bound ahead of me on the trail with every cell in her being on fire with exuberance; the surpassing love I feel for her in the morning, whether it's come too soon or not, Miss Bright Eyes, complicated and uncomplicated both.

It goes without saying that the privilege of having a child, healthy and smart and funny, embarking on his own path into a world of peculiar privilege entirely his own, stands as king at the head of this nation of marvelous luck.

The final privilege I wish to enumerate, though, is a little more strange: the privilege of occasionally brushing up against august privilege--that of impossible wealth and luxury. And then retreating again, to my own life of advantage. Though everything is relative, isn't it.

I have been dressed in a long gown, ready to go to a black-tie gala where I will drink champagne and eat the kind of dessert that always features thin curtains of chocolate making a cityscape on the plate, and wondered if I had enough money to pay the cabbie to get there. (Riding the subway from Brooklyn in formalwear, especially high heels, is only for the heroically brave, and I am an abject coward, apparently.) I have been to homes where I was waited on by servants--I mean, the house staff. I have partied in a home that used to be an embassy, where the walls were filled with modernist artworks that would have been in a museum had they not been bought by an individual with more money than most museums. (Imagine entering a small private library, snooping about hopefully unnoticed, and discovering that it is the Joseph Cornell room. As in, not one, but many, of his incomparable boxes. I had to pick my own jaw up from the floor.) I have been to little fetes that cost more than I earn in a year.

Then I got back into my jeans and went, once a week, to the soup kitchen at Goddard Riverside. After ladling food onto the plates of people who had parked their shopping carts containing all their worldly goods in the foyer, people who shuffled by with heads down, lost inside the private universes constructed as protection from the intrusion of the outside in lieu of four walls, I would lead them in "activities." I had no expertise--crafty I am not--but in having the privilege of all that I did, I was qualified. I proposed teaching videography. One older man who never spoke, who never joined any other group, joined mine. After a few weeks, he smiled. For the first time that anyone there ever saw. A few more weeks, and I was told by a staffer that he said he looked forward to video class. Finally, it was just him and me. And then I had to leave. To rejoin my own life of privilege, I suppose. The pain I feel on visiting this memory, of having made him briefly happy, and then leaving him alone, is nearly scorching. Twenty years later, I can still see his face in my mind: his eyes, darting up, meeting mine at last. Then dropping down. Afraid, alone, gentle. Unknowing of privilege. I could cry.

I have a friend whose worth is in the double-digit millions. I have heard her complain of things she wanted to have. But, she maintained, she didn't have enough money.

My declarable income qualifies me for food stamps, but I do not need them. I am lucky enough to buy what I like at the grocery store, and I eat out in restaurants. When it is a particularly fine one, I order the appetizer. Half the prize, but more than enough. And gaze about me at the people who get whatever they want, and only eat a bit.

The greatest privilege of my privileged life is to have been able to walk the tightrope between two galaxies, and to pretend I am home in each. But I know I am not. I am only home in mine.

Here Comes 2011

2011-01-01T05:48:00.000-08:00

For a technophobe--not to mention an unusually negative and annoyingly stodgy person--I am loving, more and more, the immensities behind the black screen of my computer. They provide places to wander endlessly, and to sometimes find luscious prizes. You rarely go straight to them; instead, as on a great trip, you follow some road that gives a hint of promise or ask a local, standing at the gas pump, to suggest a sight, and thereby get to where you should go but had no idea you were headed. This is (perhaps not uncoincidentally) also the process of love, where "one thing leads to another." Another is the best destination of all.

So it was that I was led, through the long series of happenstance that is the internet's great contribution to life's possibilities, to something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It is something small--infinitesimal, in all ways: a pop ditty, and not even a good example of the type, by the meagerly talented tween heartthrob Justin Bieber. But it has been made into something large, by someone who goes by the name of Shamantis. By applying a program (more unimaginable wizardry from the lands of technology beyond my ken, which is all of them) that slows and stretches sound by 800 percent, he has utterly transformed "U Smile" from the highly trivial to the deeply affecting.

Arbitrary transformations, accidental discoveries. There is not much more to ask for from life, is there?

That is what I wish for you, in the new year(s): strange finds, travels without maps, embrace of the unknown. And anything else that wants to come into your arms.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Duplex Me

2010-12-25T05:15:00.000-08:00

I drive south on Route 9 toward my goal. Ever since I crossed the Mid-Hudson Bridge, the vista has offered nothing but the works of man, spreading vastly to either side: one enormous monument to middlebrow consumption. Store after store after store; and lo and behold, they are exactly--down to the blueprint, up to the items' placement on the shelves--identical to stores in Akron, Ohio, and Your Town, Your State, too. Soon I will sit still by traveling all over.

I remember this road, north-south through Poughkeepsie, the place that schooled me, as a country road through farmland. But that was in ancient times.

Today I was on a secret mission, as Santa's elf, to H&M at Poughkeepsie Galleria Mall. As I turned in to the lot, it struck me right between the eyes: Jeez, is man complicated! To have made all this--and there was a heck of a lot of "this."

I should have felt slightly sick, slightly guilty. I should have boycotted the relentless commerce, the destructive commerce, the blinding, empty commerce. But I did not. Or at least, part of me did not; another part, counterposed, did. In other words, I am a stone hypocrite. I like my little luxuries, aka unnecessary stuff. I like buying presents for people who also like luxuries. I like shopping at the fancy-foods store (hey, all you really need to live perfectly fine is oatmeal), the one that grew from the seed of the primitive vegetable stand that we used to visit in college. Now it is our area's only source for triple-creme cheeses and European cookies. And instead of bemoaning the loss of an impossibly humble, genuine and real bit of history, I am pleased as punch it's here.

Last night, I went to church for Christmas Eve service. I loved seeing the candles glittering in the windows with dark night beyond, the scent of the undecorated firs flanking the altar, the choir singing and the organ vibrating the floor beneath my feet. I loved the message from the pulpit as well the place in which it was delivered--love; compassion; empathy; look past the stuff, into the heart--even though to do so was another manifestation of my hypocrisy, for I am an atheist.

For the human animal, maybe hypocrisy is a font of richness. For this particular human animal, it is the beginning of a happy dissonance, one that resonates like bells, with their sound that goes on after the metal is struck. Their sound that says, This is joy.

Celestial

2010-12-18T05:39:00.000-08:00

In August of 1741, George Frideric Handel sat down to work. He was setting to music a libretto by Charles Jennens drawn from the King James and Great versions of the Bible that narrates the idea of a messiah as interpreted by Christianity. In September, he got up, having created one of the most galvanic, powerful, and gorgeous works of music ever written. He had been in debt, and depressed. Whether or not this contributed to the brilliance of the oratorio can only be guessed; need, of which sadness is a type, is known by many artists as the most provocative of all the muses.

He wrote Messiah in twenty-four days, and a critic later commented that in that case, it was obvious that Handel spent twenty-four days in heaven.

My annual Christmastime listening--and, unfortunately, singing along to--the double-album set I've owned for years (Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Joan Sutherland, Grace Bumbry, and Kenneth McKellar) occurred not during the usual tree-trimming. I used it instead as soundtrack to my tortured revising of my book, hoping that something of the composer's genius would leach out into my own work; no freaking luck there, alas. But it did do what it always does: sweep me, as if I were before the inexorability of a twelve-foot wave in the ocean, to the sand gasping for breath. I do not believe in the particulars of what its elemental language conveys, but I believe that Handel believed. And I believe that he touched the angelic clouds of creativity.

For years I sang in choirs, and at this season was enlivened by the unparalleled experience that is being carried on the swells of the choral portions of Messiah . It is, perhaps, the only time I ever felt immortal. I both heard my voice (not a terribly good one, but adequate to singing in a choir, being generally on key its prime qualification) and heard it lost in the whole. That's the good kind of loss, by the way; a loss that magnifies.

To sing it now, at least once a year, feels like a need. It feeds a hunger. When you open your mouth to sing, with a multitude of others, "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together" and "Arise, shine, for thy light is come . . . " you are transported. Where? In, to the mysterious heart of man's yearning, and out, to the hope that we are gloriously bigger than just one. In the choir, you are. "For ever and ever," rings out, again and again: Something is going to go on, beyond our small lives. Hallelujah.

Some believe what endures is an omnipotent deity, part of which came to earth one winter in order to spend a foreshortened life here with us, before ascending home again. Some, like me, believe that the only thing there is that lives on is the works of man, yet only those that are somehow touched by an otherworldly grace. This is one of those things, born of earth, rising toward heaven. It is enough. Most certainly, enough.

Into the Fire

2010-12-11T05:56:00.000-08:00

Why does the brain hide things? It sometimes acts like the mice in my house lately. I put my foot into my shoe, and--heck! This feels funny. Whatever is in here?

Nuts!

No, I mean really: nuts are in there, hidden in the toes of my shoes. (Also in the dirt of the houseplants, and among the logs in the stack by the fireplace.) The mice have been busy in advance of the hard season. How difficult it must be, even if it is hardwired behavior: Time to get busy! A fretful, anticipatory feeling. And so I have deep misgivings on taking one of these nuts and tossing it outdoors; this is a future meal, counted on. Something in me gets deeply distressed, in particular, when I envision anyone's disappointment. It screws itself into my gut; I hate it. A vestigial memory from the childish past, of course: I have spent plenty of time in therapy, after all.

Notwithstanding the fact that I ought to be considering just where the acorn-sized holes are in the foundation of my house, I am instead thinking about the passage of time. Here we are again, time to mark the pagan hope that we will make it through the winter, just like the mice. This got translated, through the eons, into people like me squirreling away wrapped presents throughout the house. (Ironically, these are at the moment not exactly in my shoes, since they won't fit, but they are on my shoes, in the closet; please don't tell my child, as he still believes in Santa Claus. For myself, I believe in Santa Clause, as I saw it written on a firehouse signboard this morning.)

As swiftly as time is moving these days, it is fitting that it now rockets even faster through my imagination. Yesterday, I swear to god, driving through an ice-hard landscape of sparkly lights and absurd blown-up holiday figures quivering in small yards, a profoundly soul-crushing sight, I felt a premonitory wash of springtime. The smell of wet earth; the time-lapse opening of a flower bud into wide-open petals, in the space of thirty seconds.

The nuts that are hidden in my brain (no comment) are made of knowledge. Someone asks a simple question, "So, how are things going?" And then, issuing from my own mouth, is the truth that I had not been able to grasp for a long time now: "I have been trying to see around corners, know what is there before I have gotten to it. But corners are simply not to be seen through, are they? They have rocks, buildings, or trees in the way. I should not have expected myself to know what is in a place I haven't come to yet." It had been killing me, the insistence on trying to see the unseeable on the road ahead.

"Being in the present moment is difficult," replied the questioner, my yoga teacher.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Time takes away, but it leaves lessons behind, like Santa eating your cookies but leaving the gifts. (Santa as perfect life metaphor--ha! But think. We must learn to ask directly if we want something. And For everything that is taken, something is given. A child's hopeful fiction, yet--of course--full of difficult truths.)

My lessons this week include:

1. Converse; it will help you to uncover all sorts of valuable nuts that have been socked away in your mind.
2. That fizzy anticipation in your stomach? Yes, Melissa, there is a Santa, and ever will be, in your perpetual youth.
3. Men suffer silently, and women wonder why they aren't doing what they are supposed to (catering to women); each sex lives in a separate cultural and emotional paradigm, but I have come to believe that women don't appreciate this fact at all; are in fact insensible to it. Therefore they have no idea what men are up against. I have been gathering evidence lately, from a very small sample. The people I know.
4. My bikes, out in the garage, unprepared for winter storage because of my denial of the actuality of time, can make me feel very guilty. As much so as the mice, whose food I have removed from my shoes.
5. In the night I wake, and when I go into the bathroom I am arrested by an otherworldly green light pulsing from inside the garage, in the exact rhythm of a heartbeat. At first I am confused, startled. But when I shake my sleepy head and realize what it is, a new battery charger--a birthday gift of uncommon goodness--connected to the Guzzi, then I know. It is indeed a heartbeat.

Time, and much else, has been surprising me. And on it comes.

Born of Elegance

2010-12-04T05:10:00.000-08:00

Does everyone deify their parents? Or was it just me?

Back then, somewhere below my consciousness (like the concrete beneath my feet) was the certainty that the most beautiful creature on earth lived in my house. That was the little girl's belief: the power that swept all before it was my mother as she went through the door, on her way to a party. (The sensitive reader will immediately sense a shadow here, the one cast by the figure of the mother leaving, but the brilliance of the light for the moment has bedazzled the girl so she does not see anything but it, just now . . . just now.)

She was schooling me. She did not know, but she was chalking important lessons on the blackboard: Revlon lipstick in classic garnet red; a last glance in the mirror, head this way, then that (chin tilt: up). Nipped-in waist. Pretty heels. Then off--off to the place where beautiful goddesses congregated.

I had no idea what they did there (handsome demi-gods in tweed jackets alongside), but I knew it was not for me to know. It had to do with things they called cocktails, the exact contents of which were as mysterious as the print on the newspaper that was apparently so necessary to my father's regaining of his sanity every evening when he returned from the office, sitting down with it and a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts and, yes, another cocktail.

Everything left behind after would bear a ring of lipstick, the colorful ghost of a kiss: the rims of the glasses, the white butts of cigarettes. When they had a party at our house, my parents, after the furor of preparations (my mother in high snit; the purposeful need for the good china and glinting silverware to come out of their gray flannel wear and the place in the sideboard where they lived for most of the time, behind doors locked with tasseled skeleton keys), the doorbell would ring, and the smiles would come out. We girls were charged with bringing the coats upstairs to my parents' bed, a pile of deep furs and chesterfields and plaid scarves. There was tinkling--ice in glasses, laughter--and smoke. Things to eat perfectly arrayed and in great abundance (the legacy of my mother's Greek parents, and their belief that too much was never enough).

When they went away to others' parties, it was their coats carried to some other grownups' bed, I supposed. But I did not suppose much, when they went away. I only wanted them to return. This happened after epochs had passed. After I had resisted and could resist no longer the call of sleep; after I had dreamed. I usually dreamed of my mother, her beauty.

And then she was there. Bending over me in the dark, her sealskin coat still holding the cold as it brushed against me, releasing its sequential smells: perfume, cigarettes. I could fall back into the soft brown dark after that, after she retreated and the door closed. She was home.

My love for her colored her beauty, I see now. Both were towering. The utmost one can feel.

I wore, for a time, her clothes. In the city long ago, to parties and clubs. I never believed I could put on her distant beauty, though.

Now I rotate my jeans and t-shirts. Recently, I got a full-length mirror for the first time in years. I am, let's face it, a slob. We were born for different worlds: she never walked dogs in the woods after a heavy rain, jumping downhill rivulets and sometimes missing. And I no longer go to cocktail parties wearing a dress just like the one I saw in Vogue. But we are nonetheless bound. Somehow.

Deeper

2010-11-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been given to recalling how I lived not in this world but in profoundly sensed others a long time ago. The reason I now remember is that boy out there, visible through the verticality of bare trees in the woods. He is slashing his invisible enemies with swords that are transformed from sticks to glinting metal, indomitable in his hand alone. He is not playing; he is truly there, in the unearthly din of battle (only supplemented with those shkk-shkk sounds from his mouth), loacating himself at the extreme edge where death and heroism meet. Childhood fantasy is big. It is as big as Wagner and Beethoven and Jackson Pollock put together. It is not made of small things; it is the biggest thing there is. It is the only thing.

Psychologists tell us it is the way we arrive at theories, in the safety of our tender youth, of how we are to exist in this strange community of others. Fantasy is formed of pure logic, but painted with colors so vibrant they would hurt the eyes of adults. And the child is always in the very center of the maelstrom of his own making.

Sometimes these take the form of "paracosms," imaginary worlds replete with systems of economy and governance.

I do not remember having imaginary playmates; I was too desirous of real ones. Oh, the yearning for friends, fast and yearning in return to be with us, only us. But I did live inside places that fairly quivered with passion--that was where I belonged, oh boy! Blood and cries, cannonballs and bandages, horses wheeling and tattered banners whipped by the fury. Every moment a moment that tested one. I wanted to be tested. And, in my imagination, always to pass. (I was not the one with the skirts flying, by the way; I was the dirt-smeared soldier, falling to rise again and face the minie balls.)

At another point--or perhaps the same one, since that is the way it works when you're very young, no limits to simultaneity--I was utterly convinced I would one day live in the Newport mansion The Breakers. This constituted not just heroism, but heroic levels of wealth, so long as robber-baronial tendencies could be allowed in the truer world of the dream (they could). This may have coincided with the period in which I knew I would become an astronaut, visiting the moon on my way to farther reaches of the universe; this small imagining came courtesy of not just watching Lost in Space but inhabiting it. My first visit to a planetarium drove the belief deeper into the wild subconscious, where at will I could feel the loneliness hurtling by my rocketship at vast speed. How many lives did I imagine I had, in order to follow these disparate lines of work? Perhaps I would arrive home from a journey to Pluto and drop my bags in the marble hall of The Breakers, I don't know. Nothing made sense in that way, but it did make certainty.

That was it: certainty. There was a heightened sensation in these fantasies that I do not believe I could conjure today, even with drugs. I now live in a pastel world, reasoned and reasoning, with clean bathrooms. Every now and then, I mean.

Now that I am all grown up--too grown up, a very hard place especially for a woman, walking this bridge from the desirable to the . . . what? I don't know what to be, and that is the problem--does it mean I have figured it out? The theory supplanted by the pale real, no need for further questing. No more inhabiting the great hero of the mind's imagining. No living there, in the thrill of what I might call Deep Imagination. The place that echoes with cries and blurs with color, brilliant red and blue and hard grays. At least I can view it afar: through the window when he is out there, learning who he is among the trees that hide opponents, the ones to vanquish, always and soundly, vanquish.

Thanks for the Gratitudes

2010-11-20T04:03:00.000-08:00

Gratitude--the meanest and most
sniveling attribute in the world.
--Dorothy Parker

If I had a nickel for every time in the past week I’ve overheard someone saying that Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday, because it’s solely about being with others and not about buying things (though I’m waiting for the American inevitable), then I could buy my cranberry sauce with the accumulated change.. We are wired, as primates, to cooperate, to gather together, to aid and assist. At least as much as we are wired to stab each other in the back, literally and figuratively. Go on—count the wars and tribal hostilities that are currently occurring worldwide. (Here's help: Twenty-seven military conflicts at present count.)

It is difficult to pause and mentally list all the things we might feel grateful for in our present moment—as hard as it is to practice any Buddhistic mindfulness, and as mystically rewarding—but it suddenly feels necessary. A psychotherapist explained to me this week something about how it closes a circle, or maybe it was something else that did; I am not grateful to have a waning memory, though I am grateful to still be around and able to bemoan its deficits. See, nothing is perfect.

As I clambered up a rocky trail with Nelly earlier in the departing light of the day, to stop and turn, greeting the sight of the mountains wearing the diaphanous silk of mist in what others might find a depressing gray-and-dead portent of heavy winter, I organized my gratitudes. They fall into three categories: the immediate world in which I live; the people who walk alongside with me in it; the fears that I am privileged to spar with, as challenges that will either kill me (they haven’t yet, yay!) or will propel me to an as-yet unknown new spot on this weird trajectory called life. At some point I know I will fall into the ocean at the horizon, like a rocket trailing sparks. The sizzle as the fire is extinguished will be heard for a moment, then gone.

I might have been born in Afghanistan, and I would wear a burqa. It would never occur to me then, or even be possible, to engage in a small struggle with creating things out of words, because I would be busy with a great struggle to create something out of beige sand and rocks. I would be struggling to stay alive.

Instead, I live in a place that offers multitudinous possibilities every day. Which of several internal-combustion machines I will take down which road. Which sight I will see among the mountains and the small towns. Which meal I will put together out of the endless variety that spills from the cupboards and the grocery store bins. Which trail I will walk, to be alone with thoughts and leaves.

I am grateful for any opportunity, never in equal measure to what I receive, to give back to the friends who have, inexplicably, stayed with me as I walk the rocky trails I have chosen to walk. By all rights, they should have stayed at the parking lot, waving as I stumbled upward into some lonely wilderness of my own choosing. But they did not: they have remained at the end of the phone line, the email message, the opposite side of the table at bar or café, while I laid out the dilemma, the worry, the tearful expose. I am filled with gratitude for every moment in their company, and every evening they have closed with laughter that began in despair. I am grateful for every cocktail, every peanut and olive, in their sunny company.

I am grateful for the complex riches I live among—at this moment, the laptop on the floor in front of the fireplace, the glass of wine and the radio giving out the sound of music, an infusion of pure emotion mysteriously crafted from a sensual mathematics—but what they all do at base is simple. They deliver connectedness: to others, and to the temporal pleasures of living in this body, in this moment.

Luck this big is stunning. I try to grasp it, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: it shivers, alive.

That is perhaps where gratitude to strange, unnamed fears comes in. Odd as it is, from this remove, I sense I should thank those long-ago hours spent trembling on the sofa at the front of the apartment in Brooklyn, awake in the middle of the endless night, a black dog asleep but still watchful at my feet. They brought me to the very edges of life, sharp, unyielding. They gave me the chance to come out the other side, back into momentary joy, the only kind there is. The wondering, the whys, the decisions. The ephemerality of everything, tears and a brilliant taste of something delicious. None of it lasts. I have it for a moment, it all goes, and in looking back, I feel this smooth ecstasy that is being enclosed by this skin, which feels everything—the warm touch of others, the cold of aloneness too. I will be thankful for all of it, and all of you, and for smashed potatoes on Thanksgiving.

It seems strange to think of Dorothy Parker and Josef Stalin as bunkmates in the same camp, but here they are: “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs,” said Stalin. I consider the source, and would feel grateful to be a dog, so long as I was not a Russian dog in 1932.

Lessons for Arriving

2010-11-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

If you think of every disappointment as an "opportunity to learn," it goes down a lot better. You might still cry with frustration, but then you gather yourself up and give yourself a stern talking to: No, this has provided something you needed to discover. A bonus!

Besides, is any day on a motorcycle a disappointment? Even if you never reach your much-anticipated destination?

He who travels alone travels fastest. Ignoring that was my first error, on October 31, 2009. I called a riding friend when I learned, at the eleventh hour (or at 5:45 p.m., to be more precise), that the universe was giving me Part I of a multi-part gift, in the form of a friend who volunteered spontaneously to take care of the Child and the Dog the next day so I could go to a joint BMW/Guzzi meet in eastern Connecticut. I had felt so childishly frustrated: the date I'd cleared in the calendar had been moved for weather, and now I was not free, though the weather was. Then this angel (actually, a mermaid in a blond wig) appeared in the middle of the rain-soaked Woodstock Halloween parade. I could go.

At 8:15 a.m. I was ready to roll, heated jacket plugged in. The sun was breaking through the cloud cover as we headed east. Although my friend, whom I had little experience riding with, had a GPS, I led. That was my second error; not bringing a map, my favorite little traveling companion, was my third.

At the junction of 199 and 44, there were no directional signs, just "Amenia" one way, "Millbrook" another. The bike seemed to want to go one way, so that's the way I went--forgetting that my motorcycle had been perfecting its role as a crafty teacher. It was whispering questions to me, and I was neglecting to shut off the constant droning in the brain that prevented me from hearing them. It was whispering very, very quietly now.

After stopping to fumble with the GPS for a while (it was not mounted, but carried in the map pocket of the tankbag, which doesn't really work, we found), and our two sets of middle-aged eyes being unable to quite make out whether that was an "E" or a "W" on the sign behind our shoulders, I suddenly laughed out loud. "The sun! What terrible cavemen we would make. Just follow the sun!" And indeed, at 9:30 in the morning, the sun was hanging low, right over there. East. I felt both dumb and pretty smart at the same time. Away we went.

And in twenty miles, discovered we had made a large loop, and now needed to turn around.

Stoplights are suggestions. I may be the world's slowest impatient person--I still couldn't figure out how others could replace ear plugs, zip zippers, fasten buckles, and pull on gloves in a fraction of the time it took me to do the same--but once I was underway, I wanted to go. A yellow light appearing overhead in the near distance caused a warning beep in my brain: Get through! Get through! Red lights are terrible things. My riding partner did not feel the same way, however. Indeed, he felt the opposite. After a couple of times pulling over beyond the light to wait for him, I soon learned to expend some brake pads when a light was about to change. It was a hard thing.

Nutritional standards go back on the shelf for the duration of a trip. I am sincerely OK with a meal made from a cookie that was first placed in cellophane around the time of the last Bush administration. This is eaten (after the dust is quickly wiped from the package) while standing next to the pumps at the gas station. But my friend's eyes widened in horror at the idea. My dismay matched his: Egads, a sit-down breakfast? On the road? Breakfast, dammit, is a granola bar shoved into the mouth while doing the pre-ride light check before leaving home. My heart sank, but I could not tell an already slight man, who had informed me he had neglected to eat, that he needed to wait till past noon. So I found a bakery cafe that would be a bit faster, I hoped, than a New England diner on a Sunday morning.

Be satisfied with what you have. Or else, I hear my internal anxiety warning system booting up, you may lose it.

At four and a half hours later, in the Rite-Aid parking lot in East Hartford after venturing through the epicenter of the stoplight industry in the northeast, we conceded defeat. The Vanilla Bean, in Pomfret, Connecticut, was still an hour away, and I realized most people were probably already gone. I almost wanted to cry, thrash my fists. But this was the gist of adulthood: control in the face of impulsive desire. "All is change. All is change," I repeated to myself in the manner of the yoga instructor.

This is enough. We turned around and headed home. It was a pretty nice ride.

All except the stoplights.

Date with Eternity

2010-11-06T05:41:00.000-07:00

What does it feel like to know it is coming?

I mean, really coming, death. That final blankness, beyond which there is . . . nothing. Not in the way that, when you're thirty, you can sagely tell everyone within listening radius how profound you are by expounding on this brief lease we are given, or the fact that the moment we are born, we begin to die. Ye-ah, we know. You can say this in such a knowing tone because you don't really believe it at all: you are going to live forever. You are the one who's going to finally beat this bum deal.

Because it's way too enormous to actually comprehend. Know why? Because you comprehend stuff with your brain, that bowl of blood and gunk that makes your head weigh something like ten pounds. And when the blood ceases to flow, so does your comprehension.

I'm wondering if there's a moment when you can realize that you're living on borrowed time. (Borrowed from who? What's the interest rate?) Is it every moment after the median age of death for your gender, in your milieu? Hit 73, say, and from then on know that by rights you ought to be dead, so if you aren't, you're pretty happy with the world? I mean, when does denial end? Does it ever?

I am wondering this because my mother, this past week, in the words of the sister who was there to witness it, "dodged the bullet, this time." The unspoken remainder of the thought concerns the notion that, at eighty, in already fragile health, the strength it takes to keep throwing yourself sideways out of the way of speeding projectiles remains in very limited quantities. Slowly but surely--have you noticed this yourself?--you don't bounce back "like you once did." In college, remember? How you could so utterly abuse yourself, staying up all night, washing down your stimulants with soporifics, skip breakfast and go straight to dinner (for breakfast), then repeat the whole death-defying deal the next night--and still look dewy fresh. Others your age would want to have you for their next meal, and vice versa. It just didn't take it out of you. As for chronic worries of various sorts, the back troubles, the incipient arthritis--huh?

At fifty, that crap starts catching up with you. Or rather, it has outraced you, and you watch its back disappear down the track up ahead, while you, winded, limp along at half the speed in which you so easily used to do the fifty-yard dash.

I recall my stern Presbyterian grandmother, who raised five boys singlehanded after her husband died way too young (my father remembers his father going on medical calls with nothing but beer in his cancer-riddled stomach, the only sustenance he could tolerate), grasping my hand as she lay in bed in the old-age home into which she checked herself early. She did not want to be a burden on anyone, so she took it upon herself to do it while she was still mobile. She made my hand hurt in hers, the iron of her grip, as if to say: You're not going anywhere, because I have something to tell you. It is pressing. She had to pass on nothing less than the narrative of her life, then she would be ready to go. As if I was going to do something worthwhile with it. Me.

After the long, long stories that at once frightened and bored a small child--stories with morals, the most important things, which I hope I absorbed on some level, though I fear I will one day bore some other small child with something similar--she would fall back. "I am tired. Tired of living. I am ready to stop."

I wonder what she saw coming. A relief? Maybe she was tired of resisting it. Denial takes as much out of us as dancing ourselves into a salty wet mess at 2 a.m. I wonder what it would feel like to welcome it.

I know that my mother is, right now, depressed. How it must feel like it was waiting behind the basement door. She knows it's there, but she's not ready. I don't know how to be ready for it. I don't know how to watch it coming, and say, Well, come on, then.

Beloved

2010-10-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

photo: Mark Friedman

Nelly is hosting her boyfriend Playtpus the setter this week. (As my son hastens to tell everyone, Nelly has three boyfriends. He does not yet know to apply the term, but he does know that dogs are polyamorous. He believes in his gut that people are not.) Platypus is beloved--of her, of his owner, and now, of me.

I am recalling some of the wonderful, and mysterious, behaviors that emerge when two dogs live together. (There are plenty of even more mysterious behaviors that come out in humans when they live together--Can you not throw your socks into the hamper? What about that is so hard?--and if I allow my living-alone state to persist much longer, I don't know that I could ever stand to share a roof with someone else again. The years make of one a calcifying control freak, and I find myself wondering if such things as love, companionship, assistance, and warmth could ever offset the terrible difficulties engendered by discovering yet again too late the toilet seat has been left up.)

Dogs who live together send invisible (to us, that is) signals to each other. The most fascinating concerns the trade-off of empty dinner dishes: as soon as both are through, they switch places and lick out each others' bowls. This practice is invariable, from what I have experienced of multi-dog households. Another, similar, communication concerns who is to take care of that poor sot, the human, on a walk: "OK, it's my turn to stay within ten feet of her--you can go disappear for a while. But be sure to come back, because you'll have to take care of her next." Then they trade off, but I have never been able to locate the semaphore they wave in order to signal it's time.

Then they love. They love by playing at aggression and control--they roll around on the floor in the most X-rated of fashions, growling, taking hold of each others' ears and legs in fearsome-looking, but factually gentle, teeth. This is my gift, watching this pure, animal energy of affection. I could watch it for weeks.

Taking care of another person's beloved animal also brings with it a heavy weight of responsibility. You don't know this dog as you know yours--the sound of the breath, the habits of sleep, when things are just right and when they are ever so slightly off. I love Platypus, but I am on edge. I will be happy when his owner is back, and I can sigh with relief as I hand back the reins. "It was lovely having him here! [Which is true, but it's lovelier having you take him back, safe and unharmed.]"

On Monday night, though, all of it--the love, the worry, the desire for another body in the night--came together at once.

I stayed up late working; I have developed bad habits that are in part born of necessity, in part my inability to deal with things like blank pages on which I am supposed to write something partway readable. I wait. Or I am blindsided by weeks in which all at once there are school holidays, costumes to make, other assignments to do, friends' visits, social events, homework to monitor and soccer practice to go to, and the next thing I know it's 10 p.m. and I haven't started to write the chapter that was due two blown deadlines ago. So I sit down then and start. The next thing I know it's past 2 a.m., and I need to be up by 7.

I lay there in bed, awake. My heart has been hurting for weeks, my mind roiling. And now my heart is beating erratically, not only figuratively, but actually. In my chest. Ah, perfect. The literary theorist heart. It manifests its metaphors literally. And gives me something else to worry about.

In a way, I feel as though my world is breaking apart. That is how things can feel in the dark of the night at 3 a.m. when you are also wondering if you should drive yourself to the ER now, before you start getting the paralyzing pain in the left arm. I don't know what to do, in any way. That is when Platypus starts up the stairs, and I hear him fall. Finally he makes it, jumps up and curls himself up at the foot of the bed, next to his dear Nelly.

My foot feels something. He is shivering. A rhythmic, episodic shivering that gets stronger and stronger until it shakes the whole bed. Now the two of us are beyond help, lying awake in the middle of the night. I try to hold him tightly, but not too, knowing that sometimes some firm weight around us when we are frightened gives the apprehension of solidity. He is afraid of something, I am afraid of something, and now I am afraid I did something that will kill this other person's beloved. Was it the lamb bone he ate tonight? Ach, I shouldn't have given him that lamb bone. Did he break his leg on the stairs when he fell? Should I take him to the ER too? If so, which one of us should go first?

I pulled him up to one side of me, so I could curl myself around him and stroke him, to try to calm him down. Then I pulled Nelly on the other side of me, so I could stroke her to try to calm me down. I recalled that she has been with me through some of the direst nights of my life, always steady, always there. She did not know how much I needed her then, or how much I needed her now.

At some point, we fell asleep. All three of us, into whatever dream worlds were there waiting. In the morning, Platypus jumped off the bed, tail wagging. When Nelly moved to jump off too, he showed his teeth to her--Grrr! I'm fierce! You will not pass by me, you rapscallion!--which is one of those things dogs do to one another when they live together. When they share what they mean what we call love.

White Out

2010-10-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

I have lots of new experiences (even if at my age the occurrence of the truly new has slowed down a bit). For instance, at this moment, I'm listening to my absolute favorite new music, Sleigh Bells. But sometimes now, when I feel like doing something new, it's actually old: a reconnection with something that once was new, and important. Vastly important. Get-under-my-skin-like-chiggers important. For me, this is art of the sixties, seventies, and some of the eighties--the part that contained neo-geo (some of it).

I reconnected with this part of me by visiting DIA Beacon again recently. And what I encountered in the halls of this enormous ex-factory (which, should it not be currently housing seminal works of contemporary art for all to see, would actually make a splendid home and party space for me and my friends [that includes you]--all three hundred thousand square feet of it. Give or take. Will install pool and bowling alley).

It was like coming home to myself, wandering and standing, moved anew, before the works that formed me. I don't know how they did that, but I think the experience of first seeing Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, Joseph Bueys and John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, scored me right across the flesh, leaving a permanent scar. This stuff resonated with some part of me, made me feel fluttery, excited enough that I wanted to collar passersby and cry, "Do you see what's going on here? I mean, do you see this surface, this sensual, worked-over surface? This painting that appears to be only white/only black--it is not, and it . . . " Every passerby in New York City can thank their lucky stars I never actually did this. Gawd.

This post is intended to be the visual analogue to the formative-record-albums post of a while back, and which got so many people remembering what music made them (and collaring-passersby excited). But I wonder: Does everyone have formative art, in the way they have formative music?

If there was one single piece that turned me quite around, it was one by Richard Serra (well represented by other pieces at DIA Beacon). Installed at the exit of the Holland Tunnel, it was the purest expression of what sculpture is I had ever seen. It was both theory and practice at once, in a stripped-down, compressed, infinitely subtle, powerful package. It used the speed and vantage point of the car, in which the viewer sat, encountering the piece as if from inside a movie camera. That's when you got it, smoothly and fully, that sculpture becomes another sculpture every second, flowingly, as the viewer moves around it. In its immovability, it moves. Or moves you. Or something. Damn this gets me bollixed up. Always did. The head wants to burst. But I think that's the point, too.

Another revelation at DIA was re-learning that Warhol could be better, realer, than the Warhol who has been beatified in art-history texts. The installation here, Shadows, stops you cold. It is a bit of a religious experience, standing in the middle of the room (or reclining on the conveniently placed kneeling-pad, er, sofa) and being eaten alive by the slashing black and chrome-hard color.

Some have expressed the opinion that the reverence shown to this particular art, sanitized and en-altered in this rich-people's church of accepted high art, kills its intent. Yeah, I'm sure it does. (We got nailed by the black-clad guards with their little headsets, for letting our kids go and explore the art by themselves. They could take their own time, bypass what they wanted, spend time with what they wanted, say what they wanted. But no: Children must not be in the galleries unaccompanied. They might fall into the Heizer holes in the floor; they might touch a piece of glass from the pile that is Smithson's Map of Broken Glass, now immobilized in a way I can't believe Smithson ever meant. You must stay with your parents! Horrors. What would Warhol have said?)

Nonetheless, standing in front of Chamberlain's mashed-car hunks made me happy. Discovering Bruce Nauman's neon in the basement disturbed my son. He saw things in the De Maria that I didn't. This was formative for him. In the second half of life, he will reconnect with it. Or with things, unimagined by me, unseen yet by him, that will mark him. What marked you?

Kick

2010-10-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

I am watching a room full of children finding that in life which we all search for: the sense of dancing, with tightly fixed control, along the edge of the uncontrollable. I am watching my son's karate class.

Eavesdropping, as is a parent's wont, on my kid's writing essay last week, I peeked inside his private life. "'Pack every punch with focus and with life,' my karate teacher says," he wrote, and this was galvanic: for it was a global truth. A generalizable truth. (On the way to the class, my child tells me I have "a big taste for small things," in response to my sudden laughter at his lovely turn of phrase after he'd asked me to tie the knot on his red belt: he could only make a "sad knot" himself. It's a beautiful image, one that could easily support a poem built atop it. It also yielded another pleased laugh at his big-truth appraisal of what moves his mommy.)

Now the teacher is saying, of a student who wears a perpetual mysterious smile: "I want to know his secret--I want to be like this guy." The teacher who teaches the children is in turn taught by them.

What the children do not know, but I do, is that their sensei has a reason that the smile, its inner impetus, eludes him. He has lost someone. I lost her, too, a friend. But he lost much more, when the young woman he loved left the world upon which she shined, in an eclipse that left us breathless in the dark.

He is looking thin and pale these days, even as he exhorts his students to "get into it, with spirit--that's more than half the battle. Every day, apply yourself to something. Your homework, doing the dishes, your sports, whatever. If you do something, really do it."

I am learning things here, too, watching and thinking, as the late-day full sun streams through the windows at this nice school. I am thinking about going home and applying myself to something that waits for me, something I need to hit as hard, with as much "ninja spirit," as my child just hit the practice pads (thump-thud). A fleeting thought intervenes--"I wish I had enough money to send him to this nice school"--and I realize that, indeed, if I truly applied myself (thump-thud) I probably could. I think of how I miss seeing my friend's child in this class, his happy, funny presence, because now that his mother is gone, he has had to go live far away. To leave us, and start anew. To hopefully apply himself to a new life.

Most of all, I am thinking about how desperately much I still need to learn about this time I have here, however much there is left. Part of this is how to move through loss with the grace of the karate master, with application and spirit and focus and humility. At this moment, in particular, I am thinking about how you get out from under an opponent who has got you on your back, with his full weight on you and your muscles quivering with the impossibility of it. I want to know how you make the impossible possible. I want, as the sensei now observes to the children, the feeling after battle that is "kind of losing control, but in control; kind of angry, but kind of peaceful." It's a strange feeling, he says. I am thinking I would like to feel it soon.