So Long for a While

Flowering of imagination in winter

Today's blog is #50. After an erratic start, I took to posting on seventysomething every second Monday two years ago and have not missed an entry. I've always been drawn to round numbers and fifty has a satisfying ring, plus today is Christmas and my son's birthday. The day screams new birth. Under the weight of all that symbolism, I have decided to make this my last official seventysomething post....at least for the time being. Never close the door, especially on a process that has fostered creativity and discovery and might just generate more learning in a future I don't even know about yet.

The self-imposed structure of silently interviewing myself every two weeks to find out what was on my mind has yielded a rich harvest. I would post on Monday, then mentally wander for ten days, just observing what language was rising to the surface of awareness. On the Wednesday of the following week, I began to write, lost in a forest of words, not really knowing where I was going or whether I would find a way out. Sometimes, I'd comment on our treading polluted water in the political cesspool. Sometimes, I'd meander through the dreamscape of faded family memories. Often, I would engage with the subjects that are most present for me....mortality, spirit, the meaning I make out of my one small life. By Monday, I delivered an essay or memoir piece, sometimes with labor, but other times like those women who give birth in the back seats of taxis on the way to the hospital. I'm wondering now what it will be like to be a writer without that structure, a human body without a skeleton to hold the gut and the heart in place. I don't know the answer to that question, but the continent of unknowing is clearly where I'm headed, which is true of many of us at seventysomething.

A very gratifying aspect of the journey to date has involved curating the art of other older writers and visual artists whose work I've been posting on Facebook. The virtual community of gifted painters, photographers, ceramicists, writers of prose and poets that has emerged, lifts me out of the slough of despond and lights the way in and out of the shadows. Many people in the last third of their lives are doing remarkable, boundary-breaking work. Thrilling work. Recently, I discovered that a friend in Boston bought a painting from an artist in Toronto she knew only from seeing the painter's work on seventysomething. I was the schadchan, the matchmaker, a new role that thoroughly energized me. In this transaction, I was in it and not in it, there and not there. It reminded me of the way it felt when I served as a hospice chaplain, when I became an intermediary between a patient and her understanding of holiness. It resonated with that self-emptying that allowed me to enter other people's lives without getting in the way. This aspect of seventysomething has been magical. Please contact me if you are or know of an older artist you'd like to introduce me to. 

When I think more deeply about self-emptying in the service of entering other people's lives, I realize that what I'm doing is tiptoeing shyly up to the gate of enchantment that leads to writing fiction. I've made some forays in the past, but this time I feel more ready. Still, I will need a good deal more spaciousness to pass through that gate, less glibness, more willingness to fail, less self-judgment. I will need to get to know the people I am conjuring up in all their quirkiness, their humor, their anxiety and courage. I will need to understand that these characters are both me and not me. The very thought of inhabiting the consciousness of someone who is in some ways not me fills me with trepidation and desire. Yet, these are the conditions we all live in, writers and non-writers alike. This is what it means to live in this world and be part of the saga of interbeing. Writing fiction might be extending that condition more intentionally, exercising the capacity for empathy, using the tools of language to carve a golem of one's own invention. Wish me safe travels. I promise to send postcards from truck stops along the way.

seventysomething has its own Facebook page. I will be posting poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists there. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, or Facebook. 

Twilight Time

Biblical hillside with telephone cable

I'm huddling in the corner of the couch wrapped in a red and black plaid blanket. The blanket is from the fourteenth century and carries a scent that hovers between cozy and offensive, the interface of coffee and skunk. Still, I like it because it's very large and creates its own toasty environment. I guess you could say it's a security blanket. Winter is coming. My mind wanders in unexpected directions out from this comfort zone. I'm in hiding from the horror and wondering how to write about it. In keeping with this season of new life generated deep underground, I'm thinking about the creation narrative in Genesis. From my wintertime womb on the couch, I'm dreaming about the birth of the world.

Here's what happened on the sixth day according to the scriptural account. The land animals and wild beasts of every kind appeared. Then, man was created in God's image, male and female, and these humans were instructed to be fertile and increase, to fill the earth and master it; to rule over the fish, the birds and the living things that creep on the earth. The animals and the fruits of all the trees were given to humans for food. For purposes of storytelling, for the opportunity to reflect on the mythos of our situation in this wrenching moment, I am suspending disbelief and entering the biblical narrative. I hope you'll understand. Let's just say it's been a very, very long day and humankind is mired in it, exhausted by it. In the course of this sixth day, lies have been told. People have betrayed and enslaved one another. Species have become extinct. Oceans of blood have been spilled and it's not over yet. We are still slogging through this fetid swamp of greed and violence. When will it end, you ask? When will we get to the seventh day, the day of rest and gratitude? Are we there yet?

To help us grapple with the story, to keep us entertained in the back seat when we are really cranky, at the end of our capacity to tolerate fatigue and hunger, Jewish tradition speaks of ten things that were given at twilight on the sixth day, afterthoughts that just made the cut like last minute items tossed in the suitcase.

The list of ten things varies depending on the rabbinic commentary. Among the possibilities are the rainbow that appeared after the flood in the Noah story, the ram in the thicket that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son, and the manna that fell from heaven to feed the Israelites during the exodus from Egypt. All three of these saving graces were created just as the light of the sixth day of creation was fading and long before they were necessary in the unfolding of the biblical narrative. When they finally appear, they come unbidden when they are least expected to remind us that wisdom and generosity, understanding and compassion are ever-present even when they aren't manifest, even when we have reached the outer limits of despair.

You don't have to be a fundamentalist or even a believer to appreciate this redemptive plot twist. I see from my own experience that the way out of the dark tunnel of rage and hurt, judgment and guilt, already exists, even if it's so well hidden that I generally walk right by it. Out of nowhere, it falls from the sky like the manna. I share a bowl of it with a person who always talks at me incessantly. I want to get as far away as possible, but then suddenly, for the very first time, I see this person painfully imprisoned. I'm still irritated by the talking, but also miraculously and gratefully empathic. The manna tastes good and feeds us both. In another instance, people I love feel wounded by one another. My first impulse is to intervene with an outpouring of words to fix the problem, to step into the already dense mix of history and competing allegiances. Then I see the ram in the thicket waiting his turn. I step back into the underbrush to make space for them, hoping I won't become the sacrifice. Every occasion of grace carries a risk.

The rainbow, especially, speaks to me in these dark times. It appears after a storm when the raindrops and the sunlight intermingle at just the right moment. Like all the rainbows before it, the color takes me by surprise, opens my eyes. It reminds me that the repair of all that is broken comes not only from my small, fitful conscious attempts to make the world a better place, but also from the hidden threads woven into the fabric of existence at twilight on the sixth day, the sacred predisposition of life to flourish.

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use.  

A Pebble of Regret

The old woman has been sleeping in her lounge chair all day. She wakes up periodically to eat cold leftover blintzes, but nods off after noshing and naps luxuriantly unless someone comes down to check on her. Her daughter, so devoted, asks if she needs something to drink, but my sister doesn't respond. She's breathing, but just stares into space and moves her mouth around. No words come out. It may be a mini-stroke. She's going to need a transfusion of new blood from charitable young people who have red blood cells to spare. She needs, as they say, a new lease on life.

I call her after the procedure to assure myself that she's still my sister, even with the blood of nameless college students and dental assistants flowing in her veins. I tell her that I'm coming to California and will see her on November 16th.

          "Do you remember what day that is?" I ask, in the infantilizing, self-satisfied tone of someone
          who already knows the answer to her own question.
          "Daddy's birthday," she blurts out with sudden alacrity.

There is something about her saying the word "Daddy" that fills me with an unaccountable joy. She is, after all, the only person in the world who can say that to me. She is the only other person in the world who had that relationship with our gentle, distracted father, almost forty years gone. It's an album of memory we share, even though we are more than ten years apart. Even though she was a Depression and War baby and I was a child of the American ascendancy. It was only after he died, during one of those long, gossipy coffee-and-danish storytelling sessions in the house of mourning, that I discovered that his father, our Budapest-born grandfather Ludwig, had died in 1935, the year my sister was born. I had always thought he died in 1945, the year I was born. I had always thought she had a grandfather I didn't have, the ultimate bigger piece of cake. But, as it turned out, we were both lost girls with no doting grandpa to buy us penny candy. There was comfort in that.

Between the two of us lay a vast windblown steppe empty of brothers and sisters, a no man's land where there was a family, but I wasn't in it. I have amnesia for a life I never experienced. I can't get a feel for it. FDR, war news, radio. Our parents young and hopeful. She in her Persian lamb jacket. He with his fedora at a jaunty angle. My sister learning her long division in the same classrooms of the same school I would much later attend. They seem to have managed just fine without me and this feeling imparts a yearning and produces a pebble of regret that precipitates out of the joy I feel when I hear "Daddy's birthday." All those birthdays before I was born. Ten years when it was just the three of them.

Some people are worriers, other people regret. Worriers are oriented towards the future and all the dangers that are lurking there, the plane crash, the diagnosis, all the catastrophes to come. We regretters are vulnerable to sadness and self-blame. We are magnetized by the past, the missed opportunities, the cruelties, all the failures already in the bank accruing interest. The man I live with is inclined towards worry. He sees possible losses driving in his direction on the wrong side of the road, coming for him. I am a regretter by trade. I encounter loss bushwacking my way through the past. He and I try to meet for morning coffee in the parlor of the present. When he gets too far out ahead of himself, I try to call him back to now. When I retreat into an unforgiving black hole of self-recrimination, he invites me back up to the fresh air of this moment before 8:24 becomes 8:25 and I miss the whole thing.

          He says, "I got my worry from my mother. Where'd you get your regret"? I say, "I found it all
          by myself in the empty space between my sister and me, the virgin terrain."

I wonder...what questions can I ask when I see her in California next week? What details can I fill in while there's still a chance? Maybe...what did you talk about at the dinner table when it was just the three of you eating the pot roast?


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. 

Melancholy, Baby

All through October, we were disappointed. The leaves seemed to be heading straight to brown without stopping to rest at flame red, burnt orange or gold. Everywhere I went for weeks, people were commiserating with one another. "It's a bad year for color," people said, evaluating the state of nature in relation to how much pleasure it gave them. Too much rain or not enough rain or the nights weren't cold enough. There was a disturbing silent subtext to these conversations. What if climate change had come in the night to wrest the spectacular reds and oranges out from under us? What if the party was over? Fall color is not just an annual reunion of maples and birches dressed to kill. We rely on it to maintain our sanity in New England, an immoderate binging before the deprivations of winter when the walls close in on us and we're stuck looking at our aging faces in the mirror.

Still, in the end what color there was came on slowly and lasted much longer than usual. Like an old friendship, it had its own faded loveliness. The whole landscape was over some hill, a woman, gone grey but still beautiful. The end of October rains came, giving it all a washed out late empire look. We didn't get the scarlet jolt we were longing for, the kind that endangers your life when you swerve off the road gawking at it. The long-anticipated peak never came. Autumnus interruptus. What we got instead was late-breaking spikes of color like flames shooting up from candles about to go out. It reminded me of America.

The country is indisputably in decline and many seventysomethings are watching in horror as the spectacle unfolds. The bridges are crumbling. Oxycontin is killing off whole towns. Torchlit armies of furious white men in Klan regalia have marched in Virginia and the stories we learned long ago in school no longer ring true. The lullabies we sang to ourselves about our great democratic institutions, checks and balances....that sort of thing....are painfully out of tune. They no longer seem to have the juice to inoculate the culture against an epidemic of pervasive, tubercular greed. They seem helpless to protect us from the grasping of the insatiable rich emboldened by the rage of the nativist
left-behinds.  Now in New England, the wind is coming, knocking the remaining color off the trees, leaving us all exposed to the approaching winter, the tax bill, the military posturing, the flood of hate speech and on top of it all, we are entering the November of our lives. If we expected a safe, rocking chair old age, no can do. We are in for a rude awakening. Just when we thought we could take a nap, we are being called to scrape off the old paint of American exceptionalism and face the unvarnished truth, the depth of the river of inequality, the omnipresence of injustice, the reality of climate change.

A friend posts on Facebook "the world is breaking my heart" and I am grateful for the invitation to go there with her, at least temporarily. This is not like me. I'm usually ashamed of despair, a weakness of character, I think. I'm attached to the spiritual imperative to rejoice in being alive. But I can't maintain the effort of hope all day every day. Not when a photogenic, grinning woman on tv is advertising portions of "delicious emergency food," a grisly new business opportunity. Not when the families of the Las Vegas victims are being accused of some kind of macabre conspiracy against gun lovers. I need a day like today, showers starting in the morning and gathering into torrential sheets of rain and wind, the better to reflect my mood of retreat.

I decide to stay close to home, reading my mail, checking my feed in a flat, diminished frame of mindlessness. After a while, I pick my MacBook up off the couch to plug it in to the charger. Out from underneath the body of my cherished writing, my love affair with self-expression, a monstrous insect crawls out of prehistory and stares up at me from the frayed seat cushion. His is an unexpected and eloquent Darwinian visitation. This insect has seen fall color come and go, the first white men descend upon the virgin continent, the rise and fall of America in the intervening centuries. This insect, who has been living under my life in language, under my alternating bouts of hope and despair, will be here long after we're all gone, a thought both terrifying and comforting.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. 

Rites of Passage

I am not yet sitting on the perimeter of the dance floor gossiping with the other old ladies while the young people party. I still have some steps left in me, but I don't last long. It's not my music anyway. Fast, insistent and very loud. But I did get up for Aretha at a recent wedding. Aretha, my contemporary, my familiar. I respect her and she respects me. We have a long history going back to my springtime in the '60s when my dancing was a self-conscious performance art. The huge sound that comes out of her reminds me of a lifetime of celebrations, many pieces of cake. I am now not so much a participant as an observer at these festivities. I am there to maintain continuity and to witness a rite of passage, to hold it in the collective memory. I am there because the groom's parents are beloved to me and we would never think of marking any occasion in our lives without including one another. Long ago, we bought tickets to ride on the same bus with some of the same other passengers and we are still chugging along that bumpy road.

A community of people who have known one another for a long time is like a telescope that scans the heavens for ripples of activity. It observes the births of stars and grandchildren, the deaths of parents and then, in the course of things, the passing of the friends themselves. It picks up the audio as well, the babytalk, the weeping, the eruptions of joy. It is greater than the sum of its parts. When someone dies or even moves away, there is a complete reconfiguration of the shape of things, as if the number six were moved down a space in one of those 4x4 plastic slide puzzles we used to play with when we were children. Everything shifts.

Einstein understood this when he taught us about relativity, the idea that it is not possible to separate an event from its observation. The fact that history is witnessed by family, by old friends, is part of the history itself, beginning with the preparations, the anticipation. And this is true at every gateway, at every crossing, graduations, weddings, baby namings, diagnoses and deaths. Once back in the '90s, my husband and I and the parents of the groom from the recent event were guests at another wedding. I remember holding my breath and experiencing a deep knowing that this was a moment of unalloyed goodness that would not happen quite the same way again. People who were now laughing would soon be silent. I saw that simultaneously from the inside of the merrymaking and from the outside, watching it at a great remove. I got the whole picture and the picture included me.

Marking the passages of life alone is at best a miscalculation, at worst a rending of the narrative fabric. The weight of memory is too great to carry without help. My first marriage took place in City Hall in lower Manhattan, the two of us arriving in the ornate chambers unaccompanied. We had to ask the people behind us on line to sign the official documents, to serve as our witnesses. It was a funny story until it wasn't. And when my mother died twelve days after I visited her in the nursing home in Berkeley on her 99th birthday, I had already returned to the east coast. She had delighted my sister and me with her trademark rendition of the Marseillaise, waving her frail, bruised arm in the air like de Gaulle at a military parade.  But then, a few days later, all three of us were incapacitated by a virulent flu. My mother's ancient respiratory system failed and I was too sick to fly back to be with her. When she was finally actively dying, I was in a parked car listening on my cell phone. My sister held the phone up to my mother's ear so that she would know I was saying goodbye, but all I could hear was the whoosh of the ventilator, the chatter of the nurses. No one should lose her mother on the phone, sitting at the wheel of a green Subaru.

Life is with people. Better to be part of it, all the unravelling messiness, the pain and the partying. Better to break the bread, fill the wine glasses and create the ceremony together again and again.

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

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. 

Tragedy in the Tropics

Last night, I found myself dreaming about Puerto Rico. I saw the cars lining up, the babies screaming, and the long, dark suffocating nights. I saw the beaches, the jungle, El Junque, the colonial architecture of San Juan and the children of the Puerto Rican diaspora I went to school with sixty-five years ago, the children my father helped with their English after school. They are homeless now, the families of these children. They are thirsty. My dreams are indistinguishable from the reporting coming in from the island. I see the catastrophe when I lie down and when I rise up.

The boundary of the Puerto Rican community on the Upper West Side of Manhattan began a few feet east of my front door off Broadway, extending all the way to Central Park and along Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, not yet gentrified. I somehow learned not to walk on those streets, past the bodegas and the places that sold cuchifritos, except in a literary emergency if I had to go to the library on 81st street. No one taught me that lesson. I learned indirectly through gestures, through facial expressions, to be afraid of Otherness, of loud dance music blaring out of transistor radios in the street, of men playing dominoes out on the stoops. In school, classrooms were as segregated as the ones in Little Rock. A handful were reserved for Us, the well-fed, whiteskinned children of the professional and business classes. The remainder of the building consisted of rooms full of Them, children being told not to speak their native Spanish. Recently, in a sorry attempt to make amends, I experimented with a reversal of fortune, trying to study Spanish at seventysomething. No dice. There is no space left in my aging brain that can accommodate verbs in the conditional. It is painful when you can't express yourself. It is painful when people don't understand you. The sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren of the people I went to school with, trapped on a tropical island dismembered by nature run amok, are hungry now and will be literally powerless for six months. I try to take it in, this bankrupting, this third-worlding of a part of America. And while I'm trying to digest it, feeling increasingly lightheaded with despair, the man reputedly in charge is tweeting away, accusing Puerto Ricans of expecting too much, of not being willing to help themselves. The catastrophe in Puerto Rico has vacuumed up all the other issues crowding my awareness. The nuclear threat is still, praise God, an abstraction, though that luxury could be shortlived. The machinations of Congress are like a drone bass, always underlying the melody no matter what music is playing. I've learned to tune it out to a degree. But these people in Ponce and Arecibo, always, of course, real to themselves, are now real to me. Fear kept me from hearing them when I was a child, but I hear them now and they are crying out for help.

All lives are finite, but now the finitude of my own life is more apparent to me than it was even ten years ago. The only way to get from today to tomorrow in one piece is by making some decisions about what's most important, performing some kind of reluctant triage. This witness demands that I filter out much of the other incoming noise, the brass band of the political circus blaring oompah music at a deafening volume, the lion tamer cracking his whip. We all need to take care of ourselves, stay connected and stay healthy. But the extent of my concern for the people around me has narrowed, even as it has deepened. I can't allow everyone in. Sometimes, mea culpa, I turn into the dogfood aisle, even though I don't have a dog, just to avoid talking to a perfectly good person I recognize in the cereal aisle. I have to work with my anxiety about the state of the world so it doesn't keep me awake at night. As a lifelong insomniac, I have several strategies for dealing with sleeplessness. Lately, I've been playing a game where I try to allow my mind to focus on two completely unrelated words or names, with the idea that the two are so incompatible that no third line of thought can possibly arise from them so you might as well go to sleep. The last time I tried it, I came up with Stalin and crackerjacks. This incongruity sent me into dreamland. But once I got there, I found that it was covered with hurricane debris and fallen coconut palms. Puerto Rico had not gone away.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Look for seventysomething on http://pbs.org/newshour/making-sense

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use.

Put on a Happy Face

the author and her sister

On the way to dinner in Minneapolis at the trendy South American restaurant, Hola Arepa, we met Donna, an ancient relic of a woman sweeping grass clippings into a dustpan in her front yard. She wore a pink pinafore and a wig that rested on her head like an affectionate cocker spaniel. Donna invited us to come into her garden, a sea of purple phlox, and even to walk behind the house where tomatoes proliferated despite the rainy summer. This woman made me smile. It was entirely involuntary and got me thinking about all the forced smiles I've pasted on my face over the years.

We seventysomethings were born into the thick of mid-century striving and compliance, every day another opportunity to be good and do good. True, we made a jailbreak in the '60s, splattering our insides Pollack-like in every direction on the blank canvas of adolescence, but the die had already been cast. You have only to look at the photographs. We were the little darlings of the post-war American middle class and we had to look the part. We had to look happy. Do the research in your own photograph albums. Not the digital ones, living untethered in the cloud of unknowing. Not even the looseleaf ones with slippery plastic sleeves. I mean the frayed chronicles of family life where pictures of varying sizes, some sepia, some polaroid, some with scalloped edges, are affixed with adhesive corners to the stiff paper and labeled, for example, "Susie's sixth birthday, 1951." You will notice that the studio shots of your grandparents are serious business. I imagine the women corsetting up, the men straightening their collars and cuffs as they get ready to pose for the photographer on the Bowery. No one is smiling. Everyone understands the gravity of the sit. It's the proof of their arrival, their material heft preserved for posterity. Check out the whipped confection hairdos, the pocket watches. Now, fast forward forty or fifty years. The photograph has become more than a recognition of accomplishment. It is now, above all, an occasion for flaunting family happiness. There is no yelling, no withdrawal of affection on the Kodak Brownie. Everyone is saying cheese.

Children sometimes defy convention and insist on authenticity. I have known them, these guerillas in pajamas, to show fierce resistance to smile-for-the-camera, contorting their faces into grimaces that will never make it onto holiday cards. It's one of their secret weapons. If you ask a monster-faced child to smile, you will get something artificial that looks like it's masking an upset stomach.

At the same time, there is an entire body of thought that turns the act of smiling into a spiritual practice. The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, writes that a true smile comes from dwelling in awareness. You don't wear it like an article of clothing and it has no utility. It won't help you ingratiate yourself with your colleagues, making up your face with the corners of your mouth pointing out towards your ears. A true smile is simply a response to noticing how remarkable it is that you're here on the planet. It conveys the sense of being alive, experiencing all at once the in here of yourself and the out there of the world, encountering the gardener in the pink pinafore.

Occasions for smiles of awareness don't arise on schedule like visits from the wedding photographer, wandering the hall from table to table, documenting the bride and groom standing in turn behind each group of overstuffed relatives. They are sometimes mixed with loss. Recently, on a September day, the grass an end-of-summer green scattered with the first fallen leaves, we ran into an old friend walking out of the cemetery in Stockbridge, an idyllic place rich in historic resonance. She wanted to know if we had visited her husband's grave. "Not recently," I admitted. "Do you think he's comfortable in there"? "I hope so," she said, with a wide open grin that spoke of her gentle love for him and invited our collective wonder at his passing. "This could be the real estate of our future," we thought out loud, standing on the sidewalk. Entering the gates then, her smile at our backs, we stopped at the grave of our friend, piled with small stones of remembrance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Look for seventysomething on http://pbs.org/newshour/making-sense

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use.

Fixing a Hole

Minneapolis message

We are fixated on fixing. When I was a hospice chaplain, I always thought I had the best job in the office. The hospice staff diverged from the medical model, devoting its best practices to keeping the patients comfortable at a point along the living-dying continuum when all the treatment options had been exhausted and none of them was working any longer. Still, there were a great many questions to ask, problems to solve. The nurse had to figure out which medication would alleviate George's intractable nerve pain and which would help him sleep when he was overwhelmed with anxiety. The social worker had to assess Margaret's caregiving team to determine if her husband and daughter were up to the challenges. I had no such agenda. I was not required to bring my laptop with me when I visited patients and their families. I was just there, doing the hard job of not fixing.

I was a chaplain from a Jewish background with no traditional credentials, no ordination. I approached people empty handed, without a communion wafer to offer, a string of rosary beads to worry. I was, to say the least, an anomaly in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a floundering mill town where there were Catholic parishes that catered to the Irish, others that drew the Polish families and still others where mass was said in French. There were additionally the usual mainstream Protestant churches and a great many storefront Pentecostal iglesias. My liturgy rose like smoke out of the fire of the stories that people told about their lives. At first, many of them would deny the importance of their experience. They would say "I don't know. I grew up in Chicopee. Went to work the night shift. Got married, wife and I had a couple of kids. That's about it." But with a little prompting, Red, a World War II vet at the Soldiers' Home, reverently described the stillness and patience he learned, waiting for a deer at the edge of the dark forest, his preferred cathedral. Daniel told me how fortunate he felt growing up on a farm where there was plenty to eat...how during the Depression he saved his apple cores to give to hungry boys at school. Mrs. Murphy spoke rapturously about Elvis, his portrait prominently displayed alongside the Blessed Virgin on the walls of her apartment. Some of the stories were tragic, parents outliving children. Some patients were so estranged from their families that no one ever came to visit them. Nurses with years of experience imparted two crucial lessons. They taught me, the novice, the greenhorn, that sometimes men who seemed charming and gregarious in old age had abused their wives and children and they taught me that I couldn't fix all the brokenness that came hobbling out of the past. I began the long study of being with people, which is a far, anguished cry from doing for people. Whatever the arc of the story, I told the hospice patients that their wanderings were sacred like Moses at the Burning Bush, like Jesus fasting in the Judaean desert. I told them the biblical figures shared their fear, their yearning and sometimes they believed me.

I am retired from hospice now and no longer have the same story-listening privileges. Still, the narrative of life is all around me and my witnessing remains essentially the same. In the supermarket, assaulted by fluorescent lights, lurid Enquirer headlines and candy in improbable colors, I find myself porous to the young women and old men on the check-out line. This one is expecting her third child in four years. That one just buried his wife. It's only the convention of separateness that restrains my instinct to make it all better. Still, when someone I love is in trouble - and when is that not the case? - I continue to feel the need to fix the hole where the rain comes in. I forget, I remember, and I forget again that deep listening is often the palliative that people are wanting and not getting, that being willing to look someone else's pain in the eye without blinking it away is, for the most part, the best I can do. In that optic embrace, in the loving appreciation we share, the two of us, the speaker and the listener, become our most fully human.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish at the bottom of the page. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.

Beyond Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a cheap street drug. When you first inhale it, you get a fierce rush - Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore East! Dylan at Gerde's Folk City! Then comes the inevitable crash and you are left weak in the knees. You find yourself in the graying present, wandering through bound albums, the images strangely diverse, an English garden of photographs not at all like the manicured files of the digital now. Everything so long ago. You look back through a reverse crystal ball at all the hoopla, sometimes not even believing you were there in that time when both you and the world around you were so raw and unfiltered. Adolescent anguish, art and sex flying in all directions, rocking and rolling off the wall like so many billiard balls. No time to sleep. No idea that you would some day grow old and no longer be the headline.

Still, here you are, Dustin Hoffman's 80th birthday just past, in a world constipated by plastics, somehow still alive despite your various transgressions. You and the world both. At a recent reunion lunch with a dear old friend, you find yourself asking, as each name from the past is wondrously conjured up....Is she alive? Is he still with us? Remarkably, all the people you ask about have survived. They are out there in Brooklyn and Boston and Berkeley, a whole generation of clocks winding down. All you can think about is the two of you and a third friend, in life an anthropologist, waiting for a bus one night in Sunnyside, Queens. The other guy said something so hysterical that the three of you laughed right up to the borderline of wetting your pants. You actually remember the joke, but you can't repeat it. Not because it's tacky or sophomoric, but because it makes no sense. It's embalmed back there in 1963.

Your friend says that seventysomethings hit the jackpot, growing up in the Howdy Doody fifties and coming of age in the hallucinogenic sixties. It's a kind of demographic exceptionalism that may or may not be true, but is probably not possible to evaluate from the inside. You only know what you know, but you're fairly sure there was more to it than tie dye. The problem with nostalgia is that it's all about yearning. It wants what it can't have. It wants to stay up till the early hours carousing even though sleep is now its bestest friend. It draws its oxygen from the treacly belief that there is such a thing as the good old days, leaving out the inconvenient Freedom Summer murders, the massacre at My Lai. It is vulnerable to commercial exploitation. Only 731 days left till the Woodstock golden anniversary! Nostalgia wants to be reassured that nothing has really changed, even though your mother and father are no longer here to advise and cajole you. Even though you are now the spirit guide.

To really cash in on the jackpot, you would need to consider its impact on the present, to recognize the cellular imprint of the raucous times you lived through on who you are now. To your simmering genetic stock, your ancestral and family history, you would need to add the peppery spice of those improbable times of your becoming,  back then before you knew anything about anything, anything about life. There was no cookbook to explain the process, no freeze-dried ingredients to reconstitute. Everything was made from scratch. Everything was improvisatory. You made it up as you went along which made you deeply foolish, but also somewhat brave. You accumulated experience and squirreled it away for possible use at a later date, going to college in 1962 barely able to find Vietnam on the map, ending up marching on the Pentagon five years later. You graduated into a vast blankness, having no idea what to do with your life, but understanding somehow that it was precious and finding yourself thirty-five years later attending the death beds of hospice patients.

You came of age in a time of expansion, of dissolving boundaries, of greater permission and this permission to wander without a plan, without a map, has made of your life one big seminar, Lenny Bruce and Dylan two of your many teachers. Learning has been the hidden paradigm, the holy book, and this gospel, this Torah, has sustained you and lifted you out of a conventional girlhood. It has carried you through loss and disbelief and will deliver you wherever it is you're going.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue. 

Breaking and Entering

Birthdays are like party crashers. They show up in your life uninvited and start making demands. More drinks, more cake, more attention. New shoes with your $5 off birthday coupon from Famous Footwear. Sometimes, you just have to invite them in and pretend you know them.

The other day, in an attempt to make friends with my 72nd birthday, I decided to treat myself to a half day at Kripalu, the yoga center. They were hosting TEDxBerkshires 2017, a program of TED talks by local luminaries accompanied by the usual gourmet vegan lunch offerings, yoga classes and meditation. I am by nature an underdeveloped consumer and almost never buy myself anything. This may be an area of self-improvement I'll want to focus on going forward. Maybe I'll make it part of my spiritual practice to indulge in some unusual self-gifting in every remaining year on or around the 2nd of August. In any case, I was terribly pleased with myself for whipping out my VISA card to make this purchase. Entering my card number filled me with a great sense of reckless abandon. So much so that I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of almonds to further feed myself. I bit down on a hard, resistant nut and immediately cracked off substantial chunks of tooth and old filling, crumbling teeth being an inadequately acknowledged aspect of aging. What are we to learn from this episode? Nuts can be bad for your teeth? Impulse buying is a sign of poor character and must be punished? The jury is out.

About four days before the Kripalu incident, I was sitting in my meditation sangha, experiencing a particular serenity. Outside the building, it was high summer in the Berkshires. Not wall-to-wall-traffic-in-Great Barrington high summer, but the lilies-blooming-and-bullfrogs-croaking kind. Inside, seven or eight people I don't know well, but feel connected to in a way I can't explain, were practicing in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Order of Interbeing. After the sit, there was walking meditation and dharma sharing. At the end of the 90 minute gathering, I went out to the parking lot in the late afternoon mid-July sunshine, got behind the wheel and backed into someone else's car. As I am in thrall to the need to uncover meaning in events, my first thought was - you better watch where you're going. My second thought was - I'm probably not as serene as I think.

Glimpses of serenity appear like weekend getaways from a pervasive underlying grind of vulnerability. No matter how many planks and bridges I execute on the gym floor, I am fragile. I am open to criminal mischief. I am human and I can be hurt. I am mortal. I will not always be here with my narrow shoulders and wide hips the way I am now. The reality is I have almost no control over anything. I can be more careful in parking lots, but sooner or later there will be damage, maybe even blood. Considered in this light, these petty larcenies are God's way of breaking and entering me, barking at me until I recognize what I am determined to resist. Nothing is forever. Serenity would be advised to learn to tolerate its noisy downstairs neighbor vulnerability.

Once, when I was 40ish, I was sitting in a restaurant in West Stockbridge with a group of friends, eating and drinking, partying in that moony, indifferent way we used to party. The table was set with burning candles. In those days, I had an unruly head of frizzy hair, my unkempt curls extending in all directions. When I leaned forward, the better to share the vodka-marinated moment with my friends, my hair caught on fire. But because the split ends were so far away from my scalp, I didn't feel the heat. I wasn't aware that I was seconds from immolation, from going up in flames like yesterday's papers, until my friend, Jimmy, himself dead only a few years later, threw his jacket over my head and extinguished the fire. I guess you could say that was a wake-up call. Now, I'm wondering, what was the common parlance for this light bulb effect before hotels offered wake-up calls and do we need a new word now that we are all responsible for our own getting woke?


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue. 

Common Sense About the Common Good

There are still some people in public life who believe in the common good, however antiquated that may sound. In spite of the libertarian, market-intoxicated invisible hand that keeps clutching the holy grail of individual rights, some people see a bigger, more nuanced picture. They're out there with legislative and regulatory graders, trying to level the field so that everyone can play. These people are accused of the sin of supporting income redistribution. They come under blistering fire for harboring gasp socialist sympathies. I call them public servants. A few such women and men remain in Washington, despite the irresistible pull of greed that motivates most of their colleagues to get out of bed in the morning. Public servants sustain a vision that struggles to calibrate the rights of individuals against the well-being of the whole. It's like marriage or parenting on a grand scale. How do I get my needs met while paying attention to your needs? Elizabeth Warren brings that vision to the Senate.

Warren cleans up good. I first saw her in 2011 at the Itam lodge in Pittsfield when she was running for office. She was smart, but seriously wonky, in keeping with her career as a Harvard professor with the snoozy specialty of bankruptcy law. She stood behind a lectern in a dark outfit and delivered a well-crafted speech on the decline and fall of the American middle class. Fast forward to earlier this month when I heard her again at a Town Hall at Berkshire Community College. Elizabeth, in an orange silk jacket that seemed to illustrate the fire she was radiating, bobbed and weaved around the stage like a featherweight prizefighter, quick, on target and lethal. At 68, she is on the brink of seventysomething and she is not taking no for an answer. Not when it comes to healthcare, student debt or any other aspect of public education currently presided over by her nemesis, Betsy De Vos. Warren has even launched a website called De Vos Watch to keep us focused and informed about the rightwing seizure of our schools and the threat to opportunities to our grandchildren. She is unapologetic in her recognition that a society that refuses to educate its children or provide healthcare for its sick, its disabled, is a society that is already writing its own eulogy.

It's a big step for me to attach to Elizabeth Warren. Much easier to identify with outsiders. The women I've most admired throughout my life have been rebels, noisemakers, people who thumbed their noses at convention. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley, who immersed themselves in political activism even as they wrote luminous and idiosyncratic poetry and prose. My Aunt Julie, who never married, had a string of lovers when that sort of thing was frowned upon, and carried her prized possessions around in a duffle-sized handbag. These were messy women, maybe even nasty, certainly not camera-ready.

Sitting in the stands yelling at the umpire, generally raising hell, is sometimes easier than occupying a seat at the table where you have to show up every day and do whatever you can to actually solve problems. In the past five years, Warren has settled into her seat and made it her business to read the weaponized fine print that those in power use to squeeze the lifeblood out of everyone else. The minutia of consumer protection, student debt, financial services reform, and now, healthcare. Through it all, she talks about the social contract, the unwritten law that constitutes the foundation of our commitment to the common good and the irrefutable evidence that the foundation is cracking.

The social contract is frayed, she says, without sugar-coating it. If we don't see ourselves in the anguished expression of the overworked single mother next door, we are not seeing either one of us. We cannot continue to drive over the same structurally compromised bridge and expect it to last forever, or collapse under the other guy's car. If we do not even believe in the common good and do not care to contribute to it, then it's a given that the air will become more toxic for everyone, the water will become less potable for everyone. More people will suffer from poor health and be less able to afford medical care. More children will grow to adulthood without the most rudimentary skills that are needed to survive in 21st century America. Hearing Elizabeth Warren speak earlier this month reassured me that belief in the common good is an ailing, but not yet endangered species. We must protect it as if our lives depended on it.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.

You Belong to Me

I have a cousin in New Jersey who is 83. He and his wife meet us for lunch in Rhinebeck once a year. Because of the age difference, my cousin went off to college when I was only seven, so I barely knew him growing up. But now, I look at him over the chicken salad and I see my mother's nephew. When it's time to say goodbye and drive home, I'm bereft. It's like losing my mother again and again.

You belong to me, I think, watching him walk to his car, and I belong to you. This yearning to connect has always been with me, lurking in the background, often unnoticed. I hardly know it's there. It was the thin air I struggled to breathe growing up on the fourteenth floor of the apartment building on 83rd street with all of the other strangers in all of the boxes stacked high off the asphalt. No neighborhood children in the yard asked me to come out to play. No paper boy tossed the funnies onto the porch steps. When the front door slammed shut on 14E, the separation was complete. It was cozy in winter when the sleet drummed against the windows and the sun went down at 4:30. But in summer, you could see people through the gauzy curtains, out on the street far below, in the lingering daylight savings twilight. You could see them strolling by eating ice cream cones and you wondered...why are they so far away, so untouchable?

It could be that the flavor of this childhood, coming-of-age in Manhattan cooped up and sorted like an advertising flier into a post office mail slot, informed my resistance to joining. On one side of the scale, the breathless desire for belonging; on the other, the fear of it. Fear of membership, of the expectations of community, of choosing an identity that somehow excluded other identities. What would it mean to be unconditionally a Jew, a woman, those weighty nouns? I have crouched low in the trenches of that battleground for almost 72 years, but now I see a new story cresting the hill, a detente between desire and fear. The new story arises out of the discovery that communities are constantly in motion, more like verbs than nouns, while the nouns themselves are mercurial, gender identities unfolding on a spectrum, spiritual traditions freely borrowing from one another.

Communities merge and diverge like the reflecting surfaces of a kaleidoscope, each of us belonging to a great many shifting configurations. Just think of the temporal and spatial axes for starters. We belong to our families, from the mothers who cut our toenails and painfully combed the knots out of our hair, all the way back to someone foraging for mushrooms in the steppe. We carry the backpack of their genetic material wherever we go. My cousin is part of that baggage of blessing. Our stories interpenetrate their stories in the white spaces between the lines of text the way every line of Torah resonates with all the interpretations of all the readers across the millennia. This awareness of belonging to the line of kinship, passing the inheritance along from generation to generation for better or for worse, is a familiar understanding, a sometimes deep, sometimes maudlin acknowledgment of origins.

My belonging to all the world in the present instant is a more recent, a more radical discovery. It turns out that the skin on my belly is a membrane somewhat arbitrarily separating what I have already known or digested from everyone and everything out there that I could come to know. Costa Ricans, horses, the sky and the surf in varying shades of blue. With so many possibilities, belonging is not an imprisonment, an irrevocable condition. Belonging is an ongoing series of decisions to cultivate curiosity and trust, a recurring dream. Children know this. Once, I walked the length of a porch with my granddaughter when she was, maybe, 18 months. At the end, we came to a big step that led to the yard. Without a word, she held out her tiny hand for help. We took the big step together just as I take the big step with my cousin every year, drawing him close then letting him go. The communities that I belong to are affiliations of the heart. The people I make art with, the people I meditate with, the people I break bread with, the food I eat and the people who harvest it. I belong to you and you belong to me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I posted this link to an article in Orion Magazine on the seventysomething Facebook page...but in case you didn't see it, please read.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue. 

Coming and Going

Blessed shall you be coming in and going out....Deut. 28:6

"London isn't what it used to be."

"Oh my word, no. People are afraid of each other," said the husband, his monstrous camera hanging from his neck. "It's wonderful here in America. Nancy and I love Cape Cod, don't we duck? I even got a good shot of a great white shark. Just the dorsal fin, of course."

Marjorie recalled that the sign had said the waters off Herring Cove were shark infested. The sharks preyed on the seals. She and Peter had seen the seals swimming parallel to the shore, very close in. They must be skittish, she thought. Like English people riding the tube late at night hemmed in by the residue of empire. She remembered how they had walked in the great city, near Piccadilly, trying to identify the languages spoken by women in saris, turbaned men talking into their phones. Urdu, Bengali, their alphabets decorative, each letter its own universe. London was like an animated atlas, the original sound cloud.

Here, at the beach, all they heard were gulls overhead, the slapping of the surf. It was such an immense space. Not a space really, more like an expanse. Behind them, the scrub and rose hips. Under, to each side and in front of them, the sand dotted with shells, salmon-colored, pale green, mother-of-pearl. Facing them, the sea, stretching to the horizon, beyond which people in pubs, black, brown and white, were drinking their pints. The sky above was the color of cornflowers, the October sun resilient and proud of itself.

Marjorie thought of the offhand remark of the English woman, casually dropping snarky social commentary into the otherwise perfect afternoon, like a pebble disturbing the glassy surface of a lake. Fear. Fear will do that. She remembered an earlier trip to Europe, before she had even met Peter. She had only just arrived from New York, her city-girl instinct for self-preservation still fine-tuned. It was early December. Traveling alone on the train from Stockholm to Uppsala, she picked up a magazine and a container of coffee and settled down in an unoccupied compartment. Doing the continental, sitting behind the closed door of a railway compartment watching the flat Swedish scenery out of the smudged window. Marjorie leaned back into a vintage movie fantasy, something Cary Grant-ish. Then the door opened and a man entered the little room. He wore a dull brown wool jacket. He was gray, not his hair which was straw-colored, but his actual lined and pocked skin. Two watery blue eyes made fleeting contact with hers. The man was carrying a brown paper bag, maybe a bottle of aquavit. Marjorie buried her head in her magazine and took a sip of coffee. After a few minutes, she felt his hand grazing her knee. The unexpected touch rampaged through her like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, and spilled the scalding coffee all over her skirt.

"Pepparkakor?," he asked, taking his hand out of the bag and offering her a ginger snap, traditionally served during the Christmas season in Sweden.

"I hate fucking tourists," Peter said, brushing the crumbs out of his beard from the sweet potato trutas they had picked up at the Portuguese Bakery. "They're the real sharks. The real invasive species."

"Look," Marjorie pointed. "There's another seal." She wondered if they would flipper up onto the beach if she and Peter weren't there, sprawled on the sand with their Kindles and their water bottles. Someone is always moving in on someone else's turf, re-defining the rules of the road.

Marjorie thought if you took the long view, all of human history, not to mention the sorry saga of our activity in nature, could be boiled down to people pushing ahead on line, elbowing each other out of the way. It was either people from somewhere else with less money moving into the neighborhood, looking dangerously different and depressing real estate values, or, alternatively, people with more money, waltzing up the produce aisle in country-weekend designer clothes, making an ordinary head of lettuce a major investment. It was either pesticides going after bees and butterflies or deer showing up in suburban supermarket parking lots.

"We're all just passing through. We're all migrants," Marjorie offered in her standard fortune cookie style. This was the wide angle lens she tended to use when considering the larger questions.

"Not me," Peter said, lying back on the towel they had lifted years ago from a hotel in the Caribbean and zooming in on the moment. "I've got my ass on the beach and my face in the sun and I'm not going anywhere."

......This story was originally read at the open mic, IWOW, in the fall of 2015. I was developing another piece on the archetype of arrivals and departures when I consulted my files and noticed that I already had a piece entitled Coming and Going. This must mean something.

......For more on migrations of individuals, species and peoples I strongly recommend Mohsin Hamid's brilliant new novel, Exit West. mohsinhamid.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.