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