Vanity of Vanities

I learned my insomnia from an expert. My mother would stumble out of her bedroom in her quilted housecoat and announce that she had had a bad night. I could almost hear her raw nerves scraping against each other as I watched her in the kitchen stirring the Birdseye and boiling the water for the instant Maxwell House. A bad night meant a headache and a headache meant stretching out on the couch, the cars and buses on Broadway backfiring in the distance. Late in the afternoon before it was time to empty the Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom soup into the frozen string beans, she would sometimes ask me to give her a pedicure. I would gather the supplies from the bathroom - a dusty rose towel to go under her feet, Pond's cold cream, emery boards, orange sticks and a pumice stone. In my little girl mind, the pedicure was a cross between a beauty treatment and a medical procedure and it seemed to comfort her, my listless mother, blurry from Seconal.

Mother often boasted that she had tiny feet, speaking with pride of the difficulty of finding what she called sample sizes, shoes so small they were only used for display purposes. She liked to think of herself as a slip of a thing, an Audrey Hepburn, even as she grew meatier over time, her thighs and belly oozing out of her girdle. If all else failed, she could dig out the vintage photograph of herself as a young married woman in 1940, her enviable waistline, her slender arms. In the end though, these Cinderella memories faded and all that was left were the diminutive feet, now misshapen from years of wearing fashionable pumps. I massaged the cold cream into the left one, then the right, pushing back the cuticles with the orange stick and rubbing off the callouses with the pumice. My mother rested and I nursed her. I caressed her feet.

In our family, I maintained my mother's feet and my father maintained mine. I would sit on the toilet with the lid closed and he would sit on a bathroom stool below me with one foot, then the other, on his lap. He would carefully clip the nails while I watched him attend to me. I remember this being a silent, somewhat solemn ritual. Cutting my toenails was one of two regular domestic chores that he was responsible for. The other was cracking walnuts, removing them from their shells and chopping them up for my mother's brownies and tollhouse cookies. He did not drive a car or wield a hammer, but he was handy with a nutcracker, a nail clipper and the tweezers he used to handle the stamps in his large collection. He approached the care of my feet with the same adoring concentration I saw on his face when he lifted an Algerian first day cover and placed it just so in an album. I guess you could say he had elevated fine motor skills. He caressed my feet.

My father showed no interest in his own care and feeding and I have no idea who tended to his toenails. It may have been my mother. She picked out his shirts and ties and laid them out on the bed for him each morning. On the rare occasion when she wasn't home in the evening, it was understood that he would not fix something for himself to eat. She would enlist one of her friends to invite him for dinner so he wouldn't just simply starve. No doubt, he would have relished the opportunity to eat cold baked beans straight out of the can, but that opportunity somehow never materialized. There were a great many accommodating Selmas. My father, on the other hand, had no friends of his own. No one to go to a ballgame with. No one to argue politics with. He was stuck with the husbands of the Selmas, an unappealing array of dentists and garment center functionaries.

I could tell he looked forward to trimming my toenails when they started to poke holes in my socks. I must have been in high school when I finally said, "No thanks, Daddy, I can do this myself." We were in the wallpapered hallway outside the bathroom. He didn't say a word, just turned around and headed in the opposite direction. What was there to say? By that time, I had my eyes on other boys and he would have to swallow his loss along with his meat loaf.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

Interregnum

We are in the waiting room leafing through Time, remembering Life. Wisconsin is running out of ICU beds. Harry and Meghan are renovating their new place in Santa Barbara. Everyone in her right mind is masked, of course, because not only are we waiting for some resolution to the constitutional crisis, we are also living in the midst of a pandemic with covid cases rising every day. 160,000. 177,000. It's a lot to ask. We are only human after all and require, deluded as we are, some base level of certainty. But this is the period between the MRI and the diagnosis and nothing is certain. We are waiting for a specialist, or maybe a bearded prophet, to lead us out of this wilderness and into the promised land where a safe and effective vaccine will be universally available, all pre-existing conditions will be covered, the electoral college will recede in the rearview mirror, and black Americans will not be identified for target practice. In the meanwhile, we are in limbo as we steal glimpses of redemption engineered in Georgia and try to keep the sulfurous stink of the enemies of democracy at bay.

While I am ignoring the regular texts that ask if I approve of Dr. Fauci and choking, gasping on the millenarian fumes, I introduce myself to the in-between. It's an unfamiliar territory that I've been exploring with all of my senses on high alert. I tell myself to pay attention lest this is my last apple. You girl, listen to the chanting of the Plum Village monastics over the ringing of bells. Roll the lemony linguine around in your mouth while you still can. Connect to the people you love every day to remind yourself that you have lived and nestled down into a family...and a good one at that. Learn to play chess, a contest where there is an opening and an endgame, a winner and a loser.

My niece Betsy, one of the people I turn to for clarification, tells me this period has a postpartum quality for her. Something has been born, but we're not yet sure if it has all ten of its toes. The long anticipation is now accompanied by an aftertaste of dread. It looks like the stunt of getting Republican state legislatures to appoint alternative trumpy electors won't fly, but who knows what other chicanery he has up his sleeve. We have jumped out of the plane, but the parachute has not yet opened. It's a tough place to be. Or no place at all. A time of suspended animation, outside of conventional physics.

All I can do is play small ball, commit to the daily exercise of the mindfulness muscle. I'm really on my own now that the leaves have fallen and all the cherry tomatoes have been harvested. The white butterflies that danced over the grass low to the ground are gone. The maples, red as barns, are bare. Most days, the sky withdraws into November gray. I wonder if it knows that only a few days ago it was blindingly blue or whether it just moves from one dispensation to another without judgment, without looking back. We humans are burdened with a surfeit of memory. I remember Thanksgivings weighed down by an embarrassment of food. But how much stuffing can two people eat? I remember chanukahs where the aroma of the frying oil lingered long past the eight days. Ditto how many latkes.

Now, memory has been concentrated on the present. I'm called to acknowledge this late fall morning that I'm actually alive. That may seem obvious, but it's easy to forget when your awareness is both overrun with anxiety and empty of distraction. It remains a miracle, this living and breathing. Over the last four years, our awareness of wonder has been bludgeoned by indifference, cruelty, and greed. We will have to learn to walk again and talk again like recovering stroke victims, or at any rate to walk without fear and talk without rage. It will not happen overnight. It will unfold in small ways. I'd like to go back to Rome, but I'll settle for sitting down with family and blowing out the candles on a birthday cake with carefree abandon. I'd like to wave a wand and make all the distrust disappear, but I'll settle for starting to talk to people I haven't really taken the trouble to get to know. But, first things first. While I wait for the parachute to open and solid ground to appear beneath my feet, I plan to order stamps and send postcards to Atlanta.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

Do the Math

My sister was in a Kaiser hospital in Oakland navigating a sea of numbers. Low oxygen levels, low red blood cell count, high white blood cell count. At the same time, The Clown was in Walter Reed trying to make sense of his own mathematical matrix. High fever, rapid heartbeat, antibody levels, total amount of taxes unpaid, possible no votes in the Senate. All this was taking place while the scent of Yom Kippur was still lingering in the air with its Leonard Cohen "who by fire" actuarial table clinging to my consciousness. I was furious at Trump, not only for the usual reasons of being entitled, mendacious and criminal, but also now for distracting me from my sister's medical situation. I wanted all my attention to be focused on her wellbeing. But he occupies my awareness like a ghoul on Halloween trying to frighten me with his spectral duplicity, the constant fog of suspicion surrounding him and his motives. He is stalking me in his familiar costume, his head a jack-o-lantern. Is he just saying he has the virus to distract from his dismal debate performance? Is he looking for an excuse to withdraw from a race he appears to be losing? Is he trying to cancel the election? How much more obfuscation can we tolerate?

I remember October as a time of exquisite clarity. The gold and red maples stood in the foreground against the wedgwood sky. The apples were crisp, the cider cold and tart. The arithmetic of that time cloaked in innocence involved batting averages, on-base percentages. Day after day, the great postseason dramas unfolded in places like Cincinnati and the Bronx. Now in the Time of Covid, baseball is a ghost of its former self, played without fans, without context, without the ritual of following the stats in the sports pages.

Numbers themselves have become inflated into something called metadata, ripped out of reality, as if they are bloodless straight and curved lines appearing on the screen with no beating hearts in them. We bat them around like whiffle balls. Part of our necessary work in this time of moral crisis is to re-animate the statistics so that we maintain an awareness of the real lives extinguished in the past months. Think of the 20,000 folding chairs set out in the shadow of the Washington Monument, each one representing more than ten people lost to Covid. This man from Honduras struggled to learn English working on the line in a meatpacking plant in Texas. That woman left her three kids behind in Rockaway every night to wash floors in a hospital in Flatbush. My friend and spiritual companion, Virginia, shared her faith with countless seekers before she carried it with her into the nursing home in New Jersey where the virus hunted her down.

So many lives erased, so many stories buried in the landfill. We know that Tom Seaver, who graced the field in Octobers past, died of Covid. But so did thousands of sandlot ball players, some of whom voted for The Clown in 2016 and look where that got them. It got them a front row seat at a circus where the cult of personality plays in a continuous loop day and night. Banana republic balcony speeches are televised but stimulus packages lie dormant. Doctors have become indistinguishable from used car salesmen. Terrorists plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. We are all spectators at this pageant, witnesses to grand larceny, national identity theft, and all this while the ordinary sadnesses of life continue on as before. 

My sister is home now, but it takes three people to transfer her from her bed to the recliner. Her passion for food has faded with the challenge of getting the enchilada from the plate to her mouth. She sleeps all the time and dreams about autumn days back-to-school on West End Avenue in the forties when Roosevelt's guests slept in the Lincoln bedroom. I set aside some hours, some minutes to remember her as she has been. An advocate for justice who brought refugees from El Salvador into her home. A natural musician with all of Tin  Pan Alley in her fingers. A savvy storekeeper with a big presence in the East Bay antique business. The author of All Grown Up, a book about getting along with your adult children. Mother of three, grandmother of six and my sister, with or without Donald Trump. In the quiet center of the constant clamor of numbers, electoral demographics and rates of infection, she is there. My sister. I only have one. 

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

I Know Where I'm Going

A hospice colleague once advised me to imagine that I was burying all the suffering I had encountered deep in the earth. I had no idea what she meant. I was stretched to capacity trying to be present to the depth of the pain of many patients. "Give it over to the earth," the nurse said. She, the one we call Gaia, is the greatest witness to decay, to struggle, to death. She will receive it and transform it into new life.

At the time, I was clueless. I knew nothing about the source of hope in the woodland counterpoint of the birds, the wildflowers welcoming the bees, the joy of the grass drinking the rain. The earth itself was and is increasingly under siege, of course. But since that time, I have discovered that in spite of the earth's own suffering, the briefest embrace of her extravagant generosity and resilience has the power to inform me and straighten me up when I start leaning into despair.

No choice is more defining than the choice between hope and despair. We are, in this time of orange skies over the Golden Gate and masked children learning their multiplication tables, called to make this decision every minute of every day. Should I acquiesce to the awfulness, admit defeat or should I make way for ducklings, write postcards to Michigan, take the time for my fingers to tango with a dragonfly visiting on my MacBook? It has been revelatory for me to observe how easily I cross over to the dark side. I've always thought of myself as a basically optimistic person, even posting on this blog on December 19, 2016 speculating that I inherited this tendency from my father. "I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted," I wrote. "Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe." This was six weeks after the last election, before the forecast fully clarified the velocity of the advancing storm front.

Now, I am being tested. We are all being tested, no matter how many times we're told that despair is a luxury we can't afford. I find when I'm honest with myself that I am sometimes resistant to hope. Returning to my origins again, I see that despite my well-intentioned, gentle family, I was still a child of the city, imprinted by the hard edges of the sidewalks, the racket of the subway, the fear in the dark streets. And I'm late to the party. While I was walking through the urine-soaked tunnel to transfer from the IND to the Broadway local at 59th street, catching a Godard double feature at the Thalia, the grass was trying to grow under my feet, the crickets were chattering. Understand that coming of age in Manhattan, I had no idea that the natural world existed except as a place upstate I was forced to go to on airless July weekends when it was considered salutary. The countryside was associated in my mind with polio. People went there, then as now, to escape the virus.

I didn't know it, but I was alienated from the earth. Well into my forties, I cherished a romantic image of myself as an exile in this world, complete with pallor and dark circles under my eyes. The city, for all its throbbing diversity, its art, its language, had imprisoned me. It has taken that snake a long time to shed its skin, to let go of the scales of cynicism and separation, to take up the mantle of creatureliness. Now only the insistent green of my soft, caressing late summer walk comforts me in the midst of the nightmare and greets me like my cat used to do waiting in the window for me to come home. I have received a gift late in the day. It tastes like soup and smells like babies. It sounds like the bedtime story I don't remember hearing from my mother. It gives me a glimpse of hope and offers me the grace of belonging in the world, belonging to the world.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

 

Time Out

It was poignant to re-read a blog piece I posted on May 7, 2016 entitled "Tomorrowland." It described my childhood in the fifties, a veil of unwarranted optimism draped over the reality of hunger and racism at home and colonialism in the global south. In this purdah, featuring floor wax commercials and shiny Chevrolets, we invested in the future. We ate it, snap, crackle and popping, three times a day. Our lives were predicated on progress, the belief that things would continue to get better, faster, more efficient and that we postwar kiddos would inherit a synthetic paradise that met the challenges of mid-century with a phalanx of plastic action figures. We shrugged at infectious disease and spoke in hushed, reverential tones about the miracle of antibiotics with long, musical names. Erythromycin.

Of course, that world was long gone by the spring of 2016. We had survived the harsh future-become-present of Vietnam, of Watergate, of the Reagan years, intoning the litany of the High Priest Ram Dass. We told ourselves and one another to Be Here Now. But recall that was before a pathological electorate, racing headlong down the yellow brick road, handed over the reins to a man with less courage than the Cowardly Lion, fewer brains than the Scarecrow and no heart at all. The present is an open wound. It's painful to be here now and, as for the future, some days we can't bring it into focus long enough to believe in it. Absent the present and the future, we sometimes wallow in the mud puddle of the past, but you can't live on re-runs, tempting though that may be. You have to consider the possibility of another paradigm, a new way of looking at time.

For me, it's useful to remind myself that linear time is a convention that can be sent packing and replaced by a different model. Why not? I keep two in my back pocket like spare masks. The first is the ancient idea of circularity. the eternal return. In that mindset, I'm in touch with the planetary orbits, the cycle of the seasons, the phases of the moon. Think of the profound implications of straightening the circle into a line, creating out of the sundial and even my five-and-dime analog alarm clock, the wall calendar from the auto parts store. Everything changes. Where did we get the idea that nature is calling us to march forward in military formation until we get to next year and then keep going? Why do we think time keeps pointing ahead until for some reason it doesn't? Ridiculous on the face of it like a Mickey Mouse watch, circularity gone bonkers.

My second and even more beloved paradigm imagines the past, present and future existing simultaneously. That's the understanding behind the Hebrew name of God which is the interbeing of was, is and will be. It accounts for Proust, for hallucinogenic experiences, for dreams. How else to understand the splintered grammar of dreams except to see that before and after have no inherent meaning? How much more nuanced time becomes when it interpenetrates the ground of being like water, sinking as rain and rising as vapor. I say that this paradigm imagines time — homeless and wearing its various changes of costume one on top of the other — because I can't really know if this is true. Still, I sense that there is a level of consciousness where the dance of the days and years warrants a much more complex choreography than I am normally in touch with when I say "Today is Monday, August 10, 2020 and things are not looking good."

I like the idea of options, creative ways of looking at time. Entrapment in linear time increases my anxiety and not only because mortality is the beckoning future. Linear time is the lab where regret and worry are cooked. Looking backward in this paradigm, I'm plagued by grievances that cannot be addressed, amends that cannot be made. So much hurt imposed on good people now gone, leaving its after-image in my memory. Looking forward, I'm trampled by lurid images of our leader finally getting that parade of tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue that he has been jonesing for. I cannot afford the linear paradigm. It's bad for my health. Give me a labyrinth. Give me dreams and poetry. See, I have time on my hands and tears in my eyes.

For more on new paradigms of perception, check out this interview with cultural ecologist, David Abram.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-ecology-of-perception/

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Little Tobago

Artwork by Joan Giummo

First there was Trinidad, the big island, sweltering, teeming, dangerous. You could get lost forever at the market on Frederick Street in Port-of-Spain, a warren of stalls. There, Black Caribbeans, the descendants of slaves, and Indo-Caribbeans, coming from the subcontinent as indentured servants to work the sugar cane after emancipation, stood shoulder to shoulder selling costume jewelry and transistor radios in the imperial postscript.

Then there was Tobago, the smaller island, breezy at the seaside with callaloo and steel drum. Germans, bleached and blistering from the sun, invaded the coastal villages in Lufthansa battalions. But the jungle interior was still thick with childbirth and family resentments. Brothers fought over tiny scraps of patrimony. Sisters nursed each others' babies. On steep, narrow roads winding through tropical forest people hung off the porches of broken-down shops called snackets that kept the whole place awash in rum and curry.

And finally, there was Little Tobago, a tiny dot in the sea colonized by boobies, geckos and hermit crabs. A British businessman and naturalist bought the island in 1908 to create a sanctuary for birds- of-paradise, magnificent creatures that were at risk of extinction. London milliners coveted the feathers to make hats for ladies to wear to Ascot. The naturalist engaged a man named Roberts to manage the real estate and keep an eye on the birds. He must have been lonely in his quarantine, Roberts, because one day he succumbed to an excess of rum, fell into the sea and drowned.

I didn't know this story when I traveled from Speyside at the eastern end of Tobago to its little sister some thirty years ago with Frank and our friend, Wilford, a fisherman-philosopher. Speyside had an end-of-the-world feel. It seemed as if the stain of modern life had been scrubbed out of the air, leaving a blinding, pre-industrial sparkle. Just waking in the morning at the Blue Waters Inn was astringent. It was all salt and sand and lime and glare. Off shore, the sea was Navajo turquoise and in the distance Little Tobago sat waiting for us. The local man who took us out in the boat distributed orange life vests. He suggested there was a spot out in the middle of nowhere we could try some snorkeling, see the coral and the sea urchins and the parrot fish parading across the deep.

I slathered myself with sunblock. The boatman called the sides of the boat gunwales. I held on to them with the fierce intensity of a woman in labor as the boat rocked up and down, back and forth. It wasn't far to Little Tobago, but it was far enough to entertain myriad final thoughts. I wondered if I would be swallowed by the waves and left to the mercy of the sharks. What would a watery death feel like and what would become of my body, my breasts, no longer buoyant, my mother's blue eyes? I recalled the conversation with Wilford over breakfast. We were eating cornflakes and he was cheerfully talking about death and reincarnation...how the soul moves on when the body dies, to be recycled later on for further use in someone else's body. I wasn't sure...which of us is ever sure...but I thought it sounded like a plausible plan.

In one flowing motion, I lifted the snorkeling mask up on my face, yelled some kind of theatrical battle cry like "I'm going in" and jumped feet first into the sea. For a moment, the three men looked at me in stunned silence. Then, they waved and cheered. The boat seemed to be floating away in the wrong direction, but now that I was submerged in the drink, I felt a strange calm. The only thing I knew with certainty was that the boatman would not let me drown. The sea was his language and while I was in it we spoke the same dialect. He was connected to me, the way, if we pay attention, we are all connected to one another.

I put my face in the water to see the fish, but the sandy bottom had been agitated and I couldn't see a thing, not the coral, not the promised rainbow of colors. All I could see was my life relocating to a new city.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Dragon Lady

Written while reading Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility.

"You like the girls? Vietnamese girls pretty."

The man stared into his plate of spring rolls. He didn't like to encourage her. The food in the restaurant was ok, not great but ok, and it was cheap and it wasn't pizza. He and his wife liked to eat there once a month or so, but you had to put up with the owner, a sixtyish woman who liked to talk.

"Where you stay in Vietnam?"
He thought of the jungle and the base and the GI bars and the whore houses.
"Saigon," he said, still not making eye contact. She had that high-pitched whiny voice he remembered and she always called him by name.
"You like Saigon, Frank?"

"It was ok. I was just a kid. Never been away from home. Can we order now?"
"Sure. You want rice noodles with shrimp, Frank?"

He and his wife pretended to be in deep conversation when the Dragon Lady came back with the food. He didn't call her that to her face, of course, but that was how the guys in the barracks had referred to Asian women back then and it rolled off his tongue. He watched her out of the corner of his eye in between mouthfuls. She was a worker, that was for sure. Never sat down, not once. On her feet all day, keeping up that patter with the customers coming and going, bringing the orders into the kitchen, bringing the food out, ringing up the checks. Her husband was back there steaming the rice, making the pancake. Every now and then, she would say something he couldn't understand to her grandchildren, always underfoot, glued to their video games. The restaurant was open seven days a week.

It was weird how this white bread New England town had two concentrations of Vietnamese, one in the restaurant and one in the nail salon around the corner. He'd never been inside the salon, but his wife went a few times a year when she had to look good for some special occasion. She told him she didn't like how it felt, lounging on the recliner with an Asian teenage girl sitting on the floor fondling her feet. At least in the restaurant, the Dragon Lady was the owner. Frank knew something about being a small business owner. The stress, the hours, the endless headaches with suppliers and employees. Thinking about it made his stomach tighten up around the rice noodles. He had at one time been the proprietor of a shoe store where he spent his fair share of time sitting below the demanding customer, easing a pampered foot into a boot, hoping for a good fit, a sale. He could relate to how hard she had to work, but he still wished she would shut up every so often so he could eat his dinner in peace.

"You want duck now, Frank?"

The small restaurant remained a fixture in the town for quite a few years. He watched the owner trudge back and forth to the kitchen, work the credit card machine, wipe her hands on her apron. It seemed to him she was on the old side when he first went in there, but she didn't seem to get any older. She was just out on the floor day after day and because the place was always open and she never took a day off, you could always count on her and her whiny voice to be there.

In time, the restaurant went out of business. No more spring rolls, no more rice noodles. He didn't think about it very much. The shoe store had lasted seven years. It didn't close because the business went bad. It closed because he was tired of bullshitting the customers and caressing their feet. Maybe the woman who never stopped talking went back to Vietnam. He imagined her in retirement, surrounded by sisters and cousins. He could see her going home with a fat wad of dollars to live out her remaining years in comfort.

But then one day, he had to pay a visit to a friend in the hospital. She was a little crazy, his friend, but he wanted to do the right thing. While he was sitting at the bedside, the Dragon Lady shuffled in wearing scrubs and plastic gloves. She stripped the second bed of its urine-soaked sheets and threw them in a bin. She emptied the trash and wiped down the night table and swept the floor. He watched her and held his breath, unsure of what to say.

When she had finished cleaning that room and was ready to go on to the next and then the next, she moved toward the door, turned and said to him like an old friend he'd lost touch with.

"How you doing, Frank? I always like you."


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Voice of the Prophet

A friend in high school told me that his little brother, eleven or twelve years old, sat bolt upright in bed one night and said, "The populace is exploding into bushels of wheat." I've always thought the boy must have been visited by a prophetic voice, a deep call echoing out from a mountaintop, choosing to speak through him. Why else would someone normally fixated on Sandy Koufax say something biblical like that? He was probably preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and had heard about Joseph, the Dreamer...how he predicted the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine. Still, it was an unexpected turn of phrase for a boy whose previous experience of famine had been limited to finding the cupboard bare of mallomars.

In my experience, a sure sign of a prophetic visitation is the uncanny sensation that the words coming out of your mouth must have been said by someone else first. That's how I felt when I recently heard myself say, "Mortality is the mother of compassion." It seemed that I had known this all along but had somehow forgotten it. I ran to the computer to see if that was really mine or if I had inadvertently lifted it from Emerson or Thomas Merton by way of Frank Zappa. I did not find it. Where did it come from? I knew I could not have developed that idea out of whole cloth. It was as if it were in the public domain, available to anyone who found it rummaging in the back of the coat closet. I knew it was true because it didn't surprise me. Like all wisdom teachings, it winked conspiratorially at me as if to say, "We both know this is an old joke. Feel free to use it." But I have to say that receiving a complete sentence that sounds like you would expect to read it on a scrap of white paper after gorging yourself on shrimp lo mein, that was something. It got my attention.

But what did it mean? What did I mean when that sentence flew like a bird of paradise unannounced out of my mouth and into the world? Both the word mortality and the word compassion tickle the soul. You don't hear either of these words the way you hear the words pillow or toothpaste. Just drop mortality like a stone into the lake of association and it will ripple out to remind you of your mother, of Virginia who died recently of covid-19, of yourself some day when the tremors in your hands decide to migrate to other parts of your body. Then, toss compassion into the mix and you will think back on your time working as a Hospice chaplain, to your encounter with dying and the way it changed you, working so hard to stretch yourself to meet Daniel and Regina and all the others on their way out. But that isn't it. It's something else.

It's the discovery of the universal truth of mortality, not the specific losses I've known. It has something to do with impermanence, the lifespan of a rainbow or a firefly. The miracle of a rainbow fades while I'm looking at it. A firefly lights up in the night sky in early summer for a fraction of a second, then vanishes. If I go out to the back of the house after dark where the peonies luxuriate during the heat of the day, I see June bugs leaping for joy. I witness their dancing and chattering. But fireflies and peonies and mothers don't live forever. They die and are transformed into new life deep in the earth. At Hospice, I had this gift for engaging with that transformation, for envisioning eternity.  It was sometimes comforting to the patients. I believed absolutely and still do that death is not the end and I was sometimes able to pass that along to the dying. But I was not yet filled with compassion for our impermanence. All of us, those deemed essential and those who go unnoticed. The universal, undeniable fact of it. Mortality had not yet mothered compassion in me. It had not yet nursed me in the pathos of our common fate. It has taken the pandemic to deliver the milk of the human condition to my doorstep, reminding me of what I have always known but had long forgotten.


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Jigsaw

Jigsaw puzzles have been selling like hotcakes. I'm tempted by the hotcakes, but I'd probably be better off doing a jigsaw, pandemic weight gain being what it is. I gave a one thousand piece puzzle to my son for his last birthday. This was BCV, before coronavirus, but it has since come in handy as he, like the rest of us, is looking for something soothing to occupy his mind. Jigsaws have the odor of convalescence. My father and I used to do them on a bridge table when I was fifteen home sick with hepatitis, my skin jaundiced and peeling. Daddy was a stamp collector, so he had the necessary eyesight and patience for detail. Me, I was never all that keen on looking for the straight-edged blue of the border pieces with puffy clouds that you could string together to create the sky over Paris. Now, reconstructing the broken world on a table seems all too appropriate. When the puzzle is complete, I can see the horse-chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysee. I can reassemble the fragments into one satisfying whole. In what other world does everything fit together so perfectly?

Each of us is a part of the puzzle. The little rounded male of us inserts itself into the gaping female of the adjoining piece. Now the picture is somewhat more complete. This is what I'm learning from the pandemic. Each person brings an essential quality, a color, a shape to the complex weave of the corona carpet. Without the person furiously baking pecan pies, the picture would not be complete. Without the person swimming in disinfectant, the picture would not be complete. And without the person sitting in perfect stillness, the picture would not be complete. We are all essential workers laboring in spirit together, crafting our own offerings out of vigilance and lovingkindness. As Pope Francis has written, "rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit."

This morning, I was thinking in particular about my friend Virginia, a precious piece of the puzzle. I haven't seen her since she moved to an assisted living facility in New Jersey about eighteen months ago. In 1998, when I first met Virginia, an irreverent Irish Catholic spiritual director, I was lost in the wilderness. She seduced me with her street-wise, almost belligerent style, inviting me into an encounter with the sacred that was as honest and direct as she was. Virginia and I began looking for God together, turning over rocks and searching high in the branches of flowering trees. We dug down into family stories, meeting every few weeks for more than fifteen years to talk about the inner life. I was born into a secular Jewish household and initially found the subject unfamiliar and embarrassing. We did not do God where I come from. But Virginia was matter-of-fact. God was an old friend she wanted to introduce me to, to make a shidduch, an arranged marriage. She was not at all like a proselytizing zealot. More like someone extending an invitation to the best party in town. I couldn't get enough of her.

Months ago Virginia, now 88, stopped picking up the phone in her room. I would connect to the nurse's station and they would wheel her out to take the call. I knew that was no longer possible in the time of corona, but I hoped they had a phone they could bring in to her this morning. The nurse said no, I needed to call the family for information. I said, I wasn't really looking for information. I just wanted to say hello and tell my dear friend that I love her. Again she turned me down and added ominously that Virginia wasn't there. Virginia, her daughter later explained, had tested positive for covid-19. She is in the ER, all alone, blind and bewildered. There is nothing anyone can do.

The puzzle feels incomplete without Virginia's audacity and grit, her capacity for making common cause with a person like me. So different, so unlikely. She marched out of Easthampton, Mass., a mill town studded with churches for the Irish, churches for the French, and embraced me, a Jew from New York. She said I was a natural. We shared an understanding that was outside of history.

Once years ago, I brought her to a Jewish Renewal shabbat service in Manhattan attended by 800 people. Afterwards, inspired by the sight of all the davveners swaying in their talitot, the men and women sitting together, she went up to Reb Zalman of blessed memory and said in a voice right out of Fenway "you made one Irish Catholic girl very happy." And Zalman said in his cozy shtetl-inflected diction, "sometimes it heppens."


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Take Heart

Some of us see a dark future or no future, a lunar wasteland replacing the paradise we have only recently come to notice. Some of us see a renaissance, a flowering of art and justice replicating itself in all directions and dimensions like a hall of mirrors. And some of us can't make up our minds. We have good days when we inhale in common with the Chinese their freshly laundered air. And we have bad days when we're no longer certain where good retreats and bad advances. We have days that unfold in the paradigm of science - what little we understand - and days that unfold in the paradigm of metaphor, a more familiar territory. These are not points of view so much as personality types that come and go, even within the consciousness of one person. I can wake up a virologist and go to bed a metaphysician. In between, I scavenge for disinfectant. Some days, I vacillate wildly between thinking it's all random and knowing for an undeniable fact that it's my fault. I have eaten my fair share of BLTs.

Of all the words written since the beginning of the pandemic or, to be more honest, since the scourge, in a Marco Polo u-turn, reached St. Mark's square and the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the remarks of the Pope have given me the most comfort. Francis says, anticipating an end to the crisis..."Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street....Every second will be precious. Swims at sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together." I appreciate especially "return to the street." Francis, despite his clerical costume, has a novelist's love for the world.

Every day that the virus claimed more lives, new flowers appeared in Berkeley. I was there making my annual March pilgrimage to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and my sister, this year turning 85. There were California poppies the color of tangerines. Enormous bushes of rosemary smelling like leg of lamb and bursting with purple blossoms. Jasmine and camellias. My sister sat in her recliner and took it all in. On St. Patrick's Day, she and I performed our own arrangement of "Danny Boy," until we were undone by the Irish tenor high notes. We fortified ourselves with cashews. We did our trademark imaginary tour of upper Broadway, seeing if we could remember all the stores and all the shopkeepers from the fifties. Every morning, my sister read the dire headlines in the Chronicle. We explained that there was a virus like a wildfire in the Sierras spreading out of control all over the world and she nodded. You couldn't tell if it registered, if it meant anything. But then again what did it mean to us? No more Thai food? No more browsing and people-watching at the bookstore? It's not like a terrorist attack. It dawns on you slowly, this new day.

At first, I kissed her forehead each time I entered her room and each time I left, marking the coming and going as if my sister were a mezuzah holding a sacred text. And maybe she is and maybe I am and maybe you are. But in the last days of the trip, I was no longer kissing my people. We were communicating our love for one another virtually, sometimes in words, but more often in chaste adoring glances like shy Victorians. I put my hand to my heart and she put her hand to her heart. When I sat opposite her on the final day before heading to the airport in Sacramento with my N95 mask and my supply of blue plastic gloves, she was leaning back in her chair under a wool blanket. She reached out from under the weight of it and grabbed my pinky finger with her pinky finger. We made a pinky promise, the way schoolgirls do, and despite the potential contagion of her skin touching my skin, we promised to love one another no matter the wreckage of this broken world.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by commenting here or writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Twentysomething

When in doubt, tell stories.


There they were, round and puffed up in their winter coats, standing in her doorway around the corner from Barney Greengrass, her mother and father. She often spent Sunday mornings in Barney's lox and bagel establishment, doing the puzzle, reading the wedding notices with a rich mixture of envy and contempt. Delaying the time when she'd have to return to the empty apartment. She fought tooth and nail for this, this barely furnished, drafty studio, four blocks from the slipcovers and cushy carpeting of the family home. Now, she was stuck with it, its provisional feel, the high ceiling echo of its loneliness. Backpedaling was not an option.

The shaming and blaming went on for weeks. They weren't a screaming family. Too decorous. They were more of a sulking family. When things got really bad, her mother would take to her bed with a Victorian lack of amusement. Her father made it clear he didn't think she could manage living alone, paying the rent, that he couldn't understand why she wanted to live three blocks north and one block east when she had a perfectly good room with a matching maple headboard, dresser and desk at home. In the end, she hung in and moved out, her greatest adult accomplishment to date.

When she was small, she liked to bury her face in her mother's fur coat, an unexpected encounter between otherwise unacquainted mammals. She'd seen seals, sleek and dripping, sunning themselves on the rocks overlooking their pool at the Central Park zoo. But the coat, though dead, was more approachable. In the doorway, however, her mother was not wearing the Alaskan seal and this was noteworthy given the bone-shattering cold of the February day. Her mother was more modestly dressed in a gray cloth coat with no color at the neck. Funereal, Randy thought, bordering on churchy. Her father wore his signature fedora, but that didn't mean anything since he never left home without it. She'd been dusting the New York soot off her bookshelves and wasn't expecting them. Damn, it looked serious. Grandma was already dead so it wasn't that kind of emergency. But it was clearly something.

What do you say when you're twenty-two and your parents appear unannounced at your door? Surely not "can I get you something," since Randy didn't have a thing to offer. Her fridge was stocked with the remains of last night's mushroom pizza, an ancient, shriveled grapefruit and a jar of stuffed olives. She looked at the two of them and they looked at her, not even taking off their coats. They had something to say and, apparently, they were going to say it.

Randy's mother and father sat down on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in some muddy brown synthetic material and settled their swollen feet on the orange-lollipop colored rug she bought at Macy's. Her friend, Joanne, wondered why she'd bought a rug when she wasn't even married.

"We got a call," her mother launched in with a blank expression on her face. "From someone named Leila Weiss. We don't know her. We had no idea who she was. She said she was getting divorced," and here her father chimed in so that the words came out in stereo. "She's naming you as the co-respondent in her divorce case."

Randy didn't know what a co-respondent was. It sounded like something you were responsible for learning about in high school, in algebra class or English, maybe a part of speech. Randy didn't know Leila Weiss either, had never met her. But the name registered, rang a carillon of bells. It was clear that the call had come from Mark's wife. Mark was her boyfriend.

She met him in the elevator of the office building downtown where she was working as the intake person for civil cases at the Legal Aid Society, the next best thing to finishing law school. She had high hopes for law school, how she'd eventually be sitting behind an enormous desk with a great many telephones. But law school was a fucking nightmare. Four women in an advancing battalion of male faces, the professor calling on them randomly to analyze cases. Property. Contracts. She tried to make herself even smaller than she was, willing herself invisible and it must have worked because in the six sleepless weeks she was there at BU she never got called on. Not once. She didn't exist.

At Legal Aid, she had an alcove at the front with a desk, not enormous, but all hers. Clients would come in and sit opposite her and she got to ask them all sorts of personal questions about their income, their domestic arrangements, the installments remaining on their kitchen appliances. Mostly, it was landlord-tenant or slip and fall. People were either being evicted for being in arrears on their rent or they were trying to sue the city for failing to repair the sidewalk outside the building where they weren't paying their rent, so that they could get enough money together to pay their rent. She was six months out of college and it was her first real job. She loved it. For some reason, it was a slow season for family law so she wasn't up on the pertinent legal jargon. Had never run across a client who was being named as a co-respondent. This was virgin territory although that ship had sailed a number of years back.

Mark was a forty year old married accountant, but kind of good looking. Jeez. They were both standing in the elevator holding cups of scalding, undistinguished coffee. He caught her eye and gave Randy a sheepish smile that felt empowering. She was needing that bad after she had to drag her father up to Boston to bail her out of BU back in October. The two of them were ushered into an office wallpapered with framed diplomas for an expensive and mortifying negotiation. The dean noted that women weren't really cut out for the law. He and her father didn't seem at all surprised that she was packing up and going home. Expectations fulfilled.

Her parents had only met Mark once. It was New Year's Eve. The two of them had planned a big night, dinner out then maybe some music. But on the thirtieth, Randy woke up with a toothache so over-the-top that it dwarfed everything else in the world. There was only the toothache. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out immediately. If the dentist hadn't been her father's cousin, a grizzled person with medieval dental equipment, she never would have gotten an appointment right before the holiday. She probably would have been forced to kill herself. As it was, she had the thing extracted and crawled back to her parent's apartment, crushed, defeated and stoned on Percocet.

Mark came by at around eight with a dozen purple roses. Her mother was extremely impressed. He had taken off his wedding ring and just looked like an attractive Columbia graduate, which he was. A tad old, true, but charming and solicitous. Randy was lying on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in gold brocade. She was close to suffocating under a pile of blankets. Through the narcotic fog, she saw the two of them, Mark falling in age precisely between her and her mother. The scent of the roses mixed with the smell of her own unwashed body nauseated her. She mumbled a weak thank you and turned away.

Now, her father was looking at the orange rug. Randy could see that he was trying to make eye contact with her, but couldn't quite pull it off. "Just tell him you can't see him anymore," he suggested, sighing with weariness and resignation.

"Of course, we know it isn't true," her mother added, tight-lipped. "What this awful woman said. It's unthinkable that this Leila Weiss would lay this in our lap. Call us and say you were involved with her husband. Involved in that way," she added with emphasis. "Your father and I know you'd never do anything like that."

And Randy thought, I can't get credit for anything. Not even being a half-way decent bad girl.



Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Cotton Candy for Breakfast

One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. This was a no-brainer for the author of Ecclesiastes but for us, forever has lost its distinction, its credibility. We can't count on it. It's become unreliable like snow in January. Forever, it turns out, is a scoundrel, a womanizer, an over-hyped Hollywood romcom. To say goodbye to this central illusion is to fall into a sinkhole. These days in New England, it sometimes snows in honor of Dr. King's birthday, but sometimes nothing falls out of the sky but freezing rain, daring me to walk down the treacherous steps to the driveway to scrape the frost off the windshield. And sometimes, it's sixty degrees in January and I get to wallow in the guilt of enjoying what I know isn't a good thing. Cotton candy for breakfast.

The loss of forever casts a dark, elongated shadow. It puts greater pressure on the present. It demands that I look reality in the eye in a way that I resent and resist. I can't expect anything going forward. I can't count on a damn thing. Neither good health, nor wisteria, tumbling purple over a fence, nor witnesses, standing red-faced before the Senate. All I have is now, sitting on a deck in Panama, one more gringo in Paradise, letting the winter do whatever it's doing back home while I hide from it. All I have is the company of words to encourage me when I fear for the future. Words are my friends. They make nice to me. They graciously allow me to twist them into unexpected shapes like animals made from balloons at children's birthday parties and bounce them around like ice in a cocktail shaker at parties for grownups. Even so, in my writing I am aware, that I long to skate backwards into a time that feels reassuringly less like a horror movie. This may be another flavor of cotton candy, another sticky confection designed to sugarcoat reality.

I remember how my mother looked lying in her nursing home bed with the railings raised, her eyes unfocused, her cheeks hollowed out. She would not allow me to tell her she was beautiful, shaking her wobbly head vehemently from side to side and tsk tsking. She didn't remember much by then, but she remembered beautiful. How she could weaponize her crossed legs and fluttering eyelashes to get things done. How it had been decades since she was that person. But I refused to see it that way. When I looked at her, I saw the grace of her earlobes and her narrow wrists and I thought this will go on from here to eternity. I embraced the illusion of forever even though she died five days later. If it's true, as I read recently, that a writer is someone who plays with the body of his [sic] mother, I must be Shakespeare's second cousin. I am avid for her, for her long life that appeared to go on and on and the stories I continue to tell about it.

It's curious that I'm pondering endtimes here on the southern edge of the continent, dense with jungle vegetation, an opera of birds singing, a nearby creek whispering. It may be the long days absent errands, appointments with the auto mechanic, the skin doctor. It may be the burnt faces of the indigenous farm workers descending the hillsides at the end of the day, exhausted. I can't tell if they are registering any variation in the anxious stink pouring off the American body politic. These people, the Ngobe, have harvested the coffee since pre-Columbian times. Every barista at every Starbucks in Seattle owes her job to them. This ancient way of life could vanish, a victim of climate change. What if there's not enough rain? Or too much?

As a hedge against extinction, I buy a bag covered in a geometric design made by the Kuna people from the San Blas Islands in Caribbean Panama. Later, online, I learn that the islands may be rendered uninhabitable from sea level rise later in the century. For everything there is a season, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote. This is the season of disbelief and the season of denial. As the sun revolves around the earth, there may come a time when spring will not follow winter or when all the seasons become confused and forget the natural order of things as we perhaps already have.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Lost and Found

Anna, second from the right in first row
Photograph taken in Iasi, Romania in the 1880s

In the backward glance of time travel, grandmother Anna is reaching up to put her veiled straw hat on a shelf above her dark, crepey dresses. The bedroom in the back of our apartment fills with the acrid smell of camphor, her winter coat packed in mothballs at the rear of the closet. Anna has just returned from breathing her own allotted share of toxic fumes. She's been gossiping on the bench in the middle of four lanes of Broadway traffic. The whale-size Pontiacs and chubby Checker cabs drive by northbound towards Harlem and southbound towards the diamond district. Mrs. Mandelbaum's grandson has graduated from law school. Mrs. Ziegler's husband is at Mt. Sinai for his gall bladder. In the kitchen, mother is working on her beef Stroganoff. Mixing the sour cream into the flank steak remains a liberation. She has held her ground against Anna, insisting on certain expansions of the family diet, but agreeing to eat the mouthwatering outlier foods only at Shanghai Palace.

Further back, mother is a small girl with a piece of chalk and a key playing potsy in Mt. Morris Park on 105th street. Boys are marching out of the tenements, boarding ships sailing east to France. Mrs. Mandelbaum's mother has died very young of influenza. Anna is tasting the soup she prepared for her husband. It might be too salty. Louis doesn't like salty. But it might not have enough flavor. He wants it to have flavor. He wants this and he wants that. Anna tries hard to get it right. If she doesn't get it right, Louis becomes sullen, frightens her little daughter. He doesn't smack them around, but still they cower when he comes into the room. He leaves a sour taste. Louis is not the man Anna thought she would marry.

I can almost see her before she makes the crossing from Romania, the city of Iasi, where hoodlum Jew-haters threw rocks in their windows. Mrs. Ziegler's father has been attacked in the street. It's suddenly clear that this has gone beyond the usual threat. Everyone has to pack up and leave in a hurry, sailing west to New York. Anna has a suitor in Iasi, Chaim Greenstein. He plays the clarinet and speaks flowery, literary Yiddish. Long before she dies in the nursing home on Long Island opposite the woman who lies awake at night making shadow puppets on the wall, something dies inside Anna when she says goodbye to him, Chaim. Something gets left behind. This remnant struggles to breathe. It reaches for me, for my son and his sons. It wants us to love one another extravagantly to compensate for the love lost in transit, blown off the deck of the ship into the Black Sea. It wants us to create openings for love.

But these boys, my grandsons, are growing up so fast. They never get to meet Anna's daughter, let alone Anna. In Minnesota, all they have from long ago and far away is me when I visit, weak tea no longer served hot in a glass. They are wallowing deep in America, kayaking down the Red Cedar river, running the bases on humid upper midwest summer nights. I want to gift them with the old stories. Make them some good soup, not too salty. I want to say to them, look, here is this little girl in Romania studying French and here is her daughter skipping rope in the gutter uptown. Here is your great great-grandfather Louis, a sad sack, a sorry case. See him glowering in a corner, empty pockets, emphysema. Maybe they can take his mind off his troubles. In some back-to-the future science fiction, Louis is walking with the two of them down to one of their favorite fishing spots on the big river, the Mississippi. It reminds him of the Danube, one summer outing when his mother laid out a picnic of cold chicken and pickled beets while he and his father dug for worms. He overhears his mother singing and clapping her hands. There is his Anna the day he fell in love with her in the English for immigrants class downtown, her blue eyes, her hair swept high off her lovely neck. Louis looks these boys up and down. He's bewildered by the noise and lights flashing around them, all the things they've accumulated in their short lives. But somewhere under the commotion of their America, he recognizes them. They belong to him.

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"The young and the old are linked in one long breath."....Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com