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.