Tomorrowland

photo by Peggy Braun
courtesy of Sohn Fine Art

Our President, the one we still have, remains audacious about hope. A few days ago, he advised the citizens of Flint, Michigan not to communicate despair to their children. This is the kind of nuanced suggestion we have come to expect from Barack Obama. It implies that he understands the anguish experienced by the people of Flint as they check in to motels in neighboring towns once a week to shower.....but that he also appreciates the corrosive effect that despair can have on young people. He knows that children need hope, even if giving it to them involves a certain amount of bearing false witness. The incident in Michigan makes me think back to the unwarranted optimism of the postwar years when confidence in the future was impressed upon me. I like to say that I was born in the last four days of the pre-nuclear age, August 2, 1945. Of course, as an infant, I was ignorant of the more than 50 million people who had just died in World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombs dropped on Japan. But it wasn't just me. Throughout grade school in the Eisenhower years, unless we were red diaper babies, we all continued to cling to a scrubbed version of reality. Where I came from, we were spoon fed progress with our Gerber's baby food. It was, as the pre-presidential General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan pointed out, our most important product.
We all wandered wide-eyed in Mr. Disney's Tomorrowland, flying to the moon, curing cancer. We were hoodwinked into believing that the epic violence at mid-century was an aberration, that the country would outgrow its racism. We watched as the new cars came off the assembly line and the women waxed their floors on TV and we held fast to the illusion of a future.

Somewhere along the line, while our contemporaries fought in Vietnam, or protested the war at home, or spent those years exiled in Sweden, we lost our innocence. Now, we are confronted with a Candidate who advertises his authenticity, his fervor for "telling it like it is," who gleefully brings the widespread simmering fear of women, people of color and immigrants to a boil. The Candidate serves up a toxic soup - promising to make America great again by playing to a nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed - seasoned with a reality show hot sauce that leaves us desperate for a cold glass of water that doesn't come from the Flint River. What goes around comes around. Some months ago, I saw a post on Facebook that featured a head shot of Hitler next to Trump with a list of characteristics common to both of them. I immediately shared it. Ten minutes later, I frantically took it down, thinking I had gone too far, crossed the line. This is the hopeful child in me, crouching under her school desk in the ludicrous belief that this posture will save me in the event of a nuclear attack. I am a grownup now and can't afford to be so naive.

But what will we tell the children? It depends on our willingness to absorb some portion of the pain of the world, even when it keeps us awake at night or causes us to burst into tears for no discernible reason. Confronting the reality makes it possible for us to know what's at stake when our children ask us difficult questions. The best answers come when we stare down the demons, let them know that we are on to them and will not allow ourselves to be deceived. If we fall for the magician's sleight of hand as my parents and teachers did in the '50s, we will lapse into habits of denial and avoidance. Children know the difference between adults who are carrying a great burden of truth, feeding it to them in digestible bites, and adults who are not paying attention. Children, if they are loved, will ask to be citizens of this fractured world in small increments and sometimes they will see things, like hungry people on street corners, that adults have become inured to. Then, they will be our teachers. We will learn from them that one answer, a first response, to the man's hunger is to give him your sandwich.

On Drowning

We used to go to Montreal for long weekends, shooting straight up the Northway from Albany and finding ourselves, four hours later, in an actual foreign country. One September, we saw Tim Raines at the end of his illustrious speed demon career hit a line drive double to right field in an Expos 4-2 win over the Phillies, play by play in French. We were delirious, despite the anemic size of the crowd and the reprehensible astroturf. That night, we ate a tajine that made us weep for joy and the following day, a Saturday, we explored the Arab quarter around Rue St. Denis and bought our own clay pot so we could recreate the flavor of North Africa in the Berkshires. Montreal felt so international, so open. In an Ethiopian diner where we went for lunch before making the return trip south, a waitress demonstrated the proper method for eating the spongy bread called injera by tearing a piece off the aluminum tray on our table with her hand and stuffing it directly into my mouth. We were lit up when we arrived home late in the evening of September 9, 2001.

Now, these neighborhoods and similar areas in London, not to mention Paris and Brussels, seem filled with threat. I am not speaking here of the low probability of being caught in the crossfire or the eurocentric concern about bombings in familiar places as against the same bombings in Iraq or Pakistan. I'm not speaking about the origins of radical Islam or the role of the West in aggravating Muslim grievances. I am speaking about that fear that has grown in us over the last several years and the fact that my sense of who I am is offended by this fear. What happened to the person who cherished and defended the idea of a common humanity? Was this person an artifact of a period when the official enemy was summed up by the vaudeville clown Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N.? The cognitive dissonance gives me a headache and the headache has gotten worse.

It was only five years ago that we spent an afternoon meandering around Brick Lane in east London, inhaling the fragrance of curry and zatar, admiring the Indian women in their pink and green silk saris and the Muslim men in their loose white kaftans and taquiahs, indistinguishable to me from the 

kippot worn in synagogue. We were such innocents abroad that we walked up to a group of these men, standing outside of a small mosque, and asked if we could go inside and look around. You know, like tourists. One man asked, "are you Muslim?"

No, I am not. I am an older American Jewish woman living in a tranquil preserve in western Massachusetts, far from the current suffering, far from the bombed out wreckage of Aleppo, far from the capsized boats crammed with smuggled refugees drowning in the Adriatic. We have seen these pictures, but we have also been assaulted by a constant barrage of fear-mongering images and rhetoric, not only from the usual suspects, but from the empire of entertainment. We have been 

homelanded.

This year, as I prepare for Passover, my teeth are on edge, filled to capacity with a volatile amalgam of anxiety and sorrow. I consider what it meant to be stranger in the land of Egypt, what it meant to be enslaved. I picture the Israelites, desperate to be free, rushing toward the sea and the sea in its turn swallowing the pursuing Egyptians. It is an accident of history that those of us gathering for seders in the carpeted comfort and apparent safety of our homes, time zones away from the bloodshed, only imagine that we are drowning in our own anguish. It could be otherwise. Sometimes, the sea doesn't part and the drowning is real.

This Passover, may we keep our heads above water so that we can be grateful for the goodness of our lives, the idle ballpark days and memorable meals and, at the same time, help one another develop the capacity to witness the terrible upheaval of humanity all over the world that understandably frightens us and rightly breaks our hearts.

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Tales Out of School

Tales Out of School

Susie Kaufman

It is not true that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Every new passageway that clears in the subterranean sludge of my brain - even if I have no idea where it's leading - just might illuminate some gritty, trash-strewn corner that's always been in the shadows. A little learning, the dawning of an unfamiliar day, is really only dangerous when I conflate the beginning, the dazzling spark of the new, with the end of learning....When I believe in my own born again expertise, and, even more so, when I delude myself into believing there actually is an end to learning. If I convince myself that I've arrived, I am in serious trouble. I have not arrived. I once got a fortune cookie that said - going straight for the jugular - pain is the privilege of the living. Arrival is the destination of the  dead.

When I open my awareness to the possibility of something new, it is a miracle in nature, like a snake sloughing its skin or the sun reappearing after a winter's half-day of darkness. Anything can happen. Stepping into the river of new learning, I wiggle my toes to determine if any rocks or spiky creatures are buried just below the surface and I wade in cautiously up to my knees, up to my belly, to get used to the chill. But, in the end, I have to be willing to be uncomfortable. There's no way around it. I have to be a beginner.

There are successes and there are failures. Studying Spanish was not the healing I had hoped for. I imagined that I could in some small way redress the grievances of all the unrecognized Puerto Rican children I went to school with uptown...All the children struggling to learn American history from deadly textbooks written in English, a history that did not include the part about sugar barons making a meal out of the island. Instead, Spanish made fun of me behind my back. Irregular verbs confounded me with their stealth discrepancies. They were like so many mosquitoes, buzzing around, evading capture. Not enough memory left to learn a foreign language. Just enough to understand how hard it was for the children I didn't make friends with in fifth grade, a learning of a different kind.

In school, we were served a cafeteria tray of the basic information food groups - spelling, arithmetic, geography - whether or not they appealed to us or satisfied any particular hunger. Now, in one of the great unheralded benefits of aging, I am old enough to decide what I want to know and what offbeat flavors I might develop a taste for. Every novice encounter in the physical world signals a deepening appreciation for the patience and devotion to practice, the willingness to stumble, that are part of becoming newly skillful. 

I want to make pie crust, don't ask me why. I want to cut the cold shortening into the flour to make that coarse meal they talk about, then add the ice water, mixing it together until it miraculously coalesces into a ball of dough. I want to cover the ball in plastic wrap and roll it out on a floured board so that it forms a large, uniform, thin circle of pastry and I want to sing Summertime while I'm cutting, mixing and rolling. You will not be called upon to sample my leaden early efforts. Eventually, the pie crusts will become lighter, flakier, easier in the making and the eating. The blueberry filling will drip down my chin and I will be saved. Until I remember that I need to bone up on compassion and gratitude, the perennial course of study. And here I will stumble, just as I did wielding the rolling pin.

One friend will entice me with another friend's shortcomings and I will fall into the despond of judgment, adding my own seasoning to the gossipy mix. I will harbor uncharitable thoughts and I will be greedy for attention. Arrogance will make a pass at me and deceit will pretend to have my best interests at heart. It can be disheartening, this serpentine process....Always slithering around on my belly in the underbrush, never moving forward in a straight line. But because I am in love with learning, because learning is the greatest aphrodisiac, I sharpen my pencils and remind myself that every moment is an opportunity, a new beginning, the terrifying, exhilarating first day of school.

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Witness

Witness

Susie Kaufman

It's like a seven layer cake, this family. When you dig in with the side of a three-tined silver fork, you get a dark glaze of ganache, a dry floury sheet, then sticky raspberry and apricot. No layer of the family story can be skipped over if the cake in its entirety is to be savored deeply. Its origins in the Balkans. Its shopkeeper livelihood uptown in the big city. The two daughters, a half generation apart. The older daughter's three children, grown to adulthood in the East Bay. One quiet, cautious. One radiant, diffuse. One wounded, craving.

"I want to talk about the family," the older sister asks the younger, visiting from back East.

"OK. Sure. Who do you want to talk about?"

"I want to know how they all died....Aunt Julie, Aunt Honey, Uncle Jerry, all of them," she demands with some urgency. She's doing research, collecting data about the end-times of relatives, none of them all that interesting when they were alive.

My big sister is celebrating her 81st birthday, not very old for most people these days, but she got old young. Vascular dementia, I think, though she doesn't seem to have a diagnosis. She naps on the couch when she's not eating and shuffles, right hand on her cane, left hand gripping the piano, the sink, when she moves around her cramped apartment in the basement of the house where she raised her children. Accumulations of twenty year old issues of The Nation and sheet music from the '40s, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, pile up on the floor, making navigation treacherous. Every year, it diminishes the tempo of her living, the square footage she is willing to move through. She will not go out to commune with the nasturtium in the sun-drenched North Berkeley back yard. She prefers the moldy, dark, familiar confines of her apartment. It suits her.

"You didn't tell me how mother died. Why didn't anyone tell me?"

As it happens, she was there when our mother took her last breath in a nursing home at the age of 99, but she doesn't remember and if you press her to respond to a question that she doesn't know the answer to, she becomes irritable.

"Do we have to talk about that now?" she grouches.

Still, I'm patting myself on the back, overflowing with self-congratulation. The kind that comes from the perception of devotion, openness and generosity to a loved one in trouble. I think...I'm the only one she can ask about family members long gone. I'm her link to the past. Without me, she can't really heal the wounds that are still festering. Me me me.

She wants to talk about her longstanding hostile feelings towards our mother. I have heard this song before, all my life, but I never really learned the lyrics. She was ten when I was born, so I missed the tone of her childhood, the key of our mother's limited interest in children. I ask her if there was anyone else she felt close to when she was young.

"Aunt Julie was always friendly," she says. "But then one day, I can remember it exactly, we were sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the living room and I was telling her how mean mother was, but she betrayed me. Aunt Julie betrayed me. She acted like she cared, but then she didn't take my side. She went and told on me. After that, mother didn't talk to me for days. She put on that Empress of All the Russias face, you know the one I mean, and just waltzed right by me playing jacks on the kitchen linoleum."

I cherish the story I've invented that my mother and sister resolved their differences at the end. I mean, I really need to believe that. Even if it's not true. Even though I know whatever my sister wants to hang on to is hers to keep, like an old shirt, stained but comfy. The heaviness of carrying that illusion around starts to interfere with my good intentions, reduces my caregiving to the lowest level of nursiness. I pick up after her. I watch her, eagle-eyed, to make sure she doesn't fall. I demand that she takes her pills when I want her to take them. 

"Yes, mother," she responds to maximum effect.

At her birthday party, we watch vintage slides on a rented carousel projector. My sister is luminous. There she is in the fall of 1958, pregnant with her first baby. She's wearing a raspberry tinted sweater, almost the identical color to the one she's wearing at the party. In the background, Ella Fitzgerald is singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." 

We lean our heads together and sing "I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering whimpering child again" and we eat cake, lots of cake.

Cold Snap

Cold Snap

Susie Kaufman

I remember a soundtrack of children with gravel-impacted wounded knees crying for their mothers in Riverside Park, games played with pink rubber balls against a counterpoint of sing-song chanting. In upper Manhattan, I could hear the cars honking and backfiring, the sirens screaming, hanging out of our living room window fourteen floors above Broadway. Workmen on scaffolding leaned over precariously the better to catcall at women in high heels wiggling by. Music punctuated the ambient noise. Girl groups, big brass sections, the wall of sound. The air was dense with radio waves, the pavements imprinted with a thousand feet trying to execute the Locomotion. In my memory, it was always hot, loud and crowded. On the IRT, our breath mingled, our bodies suffered indiscriminate intimacies. Even in winter, the hiss and percussion of the radiators made a racket and it was always sweltering inside. I did not come of age in cold and quiet.

You will understand then that when the mercury fell below zero last weekend in Stockbridge, descending to -17 Saturday night, I vowed not to leave the house, fearing for my lungs and my brittle bones. It seemed an opportune time to do some writing, to leave the overworked past and the flickering glimpses of a possible future behind and sink like a stone into the present. The trouble with trying to write about the Now on a bleak, cold day is that your blood has already gone gelid in your veins, so the words don't come to mind at their usual chirpy pace. Your thoughts are stuck on an icy road and don't have the traction to get up the hill of your brain and out onto the screen. I survived Saturday whipping up a boeuf bourguignon and baking chocolate chip cookies, reasoning correctly that the heat from the oven and the homey, nostalgic aromas would promote a feeling of wellbeing, however illusory. I also talked to myself gravely about the health benefits of consuming a lot of fat in a very cold climate like native peoples in the North eating whale blubber.

By Sunday, the novelty of camping out in the living room had worn off and the demons began to occupy. Newspapers and netflix did not furnish an adequate defense. There was too much empty space begging to be filled with regrets and anxieties. I tried to access my inner Rumi, treating each incursion from the jungle interior as if it were an unexpected visitor. "The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in," suggested the Sufi poet. I did not feel hospitable. Leave me alone! I implored. An enormous blank canvas like an overtired two year old demanded my attention. All day long, columns of recriminations advanced, gaining ground, closing off possible avenues of escape. Past moments of cruelty, insufficiencies of the heart and future imaginings of catastrophe lay in wait.

So here's the dirty little secret. I'm keen on contemplative space, emptiness, silence, when I'm in charge, when I set the parameters, when it's easy. But when I feel imprisoned by it, called to surrender to circumstances beyond my control, I'm about as contemplative as a bargain hunter on Black Friday. I want out. I want more and when I'm held against my will, I kick and scream. I'm going to need to get better at this because whether I like it or not, the space I inhabit will shrink as I age. Opportunities in the physical world, in the realm of flesh and bone, will diminish. Already, I don't drive after dark. I know who my friends are and when I allow myself to stare at reality without blinking, I understand that there will be fewer of them, not more of them, as time goes on. I can't see what's coming, but whatever it is, it will be quieter and less densely populated than the clamorous street scene of my early life. My last piece of pie may be concocted out of long years of slowing down, losing ground, or short days of living absent an awareness that life might end on any ordinary Monday morning. I listen for that song, but it's faint, in the background. When I do hear it clearly, it is strangely comforting. It settles my stomach and caresses my restlessness. It warms me whatever the weather.

Living Arrangements

Living Arrangements

Susie Kaufman

You have no interest in my mother. Why should you? She was not a headliner. She was not noteworthy outside of the family and our immediate neighborhood on the Upper West Side. There, she induced a certain energy field like minor royalty, a second cousin of a third tier baroness. Her generation long gone, there are only a handful of people left who remember her powdered face, chalk white with pink circles of rouge on her cheeks and cerulean smudges on her eyelids, the seams on her stockings almost straight. How remarkable, then, that DNA dictates that her ghost has now moved its furnishings into my body. It's an almost perfect fit, my osteoporotic spine bending to accommodate hers, my thighs expanding to make room for her ample shape. I keep my used kleenex in the waistband of my pants as she did and have recently elected to wear my hair parted on the left with a jaunty wave over my right eye. Caroline, expertly wielding the comb and scissors, comments that it has a '20s look and, sure enough, there is my mother's marcelled cut from long before I was born coming into focus in the salon mirror.

Once, about five years before she died in 2006, I broke down in tears in Great Barrington when she suffered an excruciating compression fracture far away in California. Feeling helpless and anguished, it suddenly became clear to me that she had been my first home....that there was a time in 1945 when I lived inside of her in a warm, dark, wet tenement that she carried around with her when she squeezed the melons at the fruit stand and picked out a seeded rye at the bakery on upper Broadway. Of course, being well into my fifties, I knew all about gestation. But somehow I had always given more thought to my own pregnancy, my own motherhood. This moment of recognition near the turning of the millennium was a first encounter with my deep origins in the pungent folds of my mother's flesh.

The image is like a bellows, expanding and contracting, inflaming memory. Sometimes, the fire is reduced to embers. The long years of adolescence and early adulthood when I didn't want any part of her. The bitter winter in my garden where her ashes are now resting, for the most part unattended. I thought when I buried them there that she and I would chat regularly about the anemones, about the grandchildren, about the unrelenting passage of time. But words don't seem to be the medium of our exchange. She speaks to me through my short legs and misshapen feet, my pale blue lashless eyes. She inhabits me as I inhabited her seventy years ago. And she keeps me company. She is there in every gesture. When I throw back my head to wash down a pill. When I drink my coffee out of a thin porcelain cup, never a ceramic mug. I have grown up and drink it black now, not light and sweet with non-dairy creamer and saccharine as she did. But I am still married to the aristocratic pinkie lift that I must have learned at her linen-covered dining room table.

My father was morbidly sentimental. You couldn't go to a matinee with him without the crumpled handkerchief coming out of his pants pocket to dry the tears that fell at every cinematic loss or betrayal. But my mother was ensconced in her corset and devoted to decorum. When she was hurt or angry, she would take to her bed. When she felt the need to cry, she would leave the room. She couldn't bear the exposure of open grieving or gratitude. Retreating to the kitchen while my sister's husband, only sixty, lay dying. Hiding in a dark corner of a back room while her circle of friends and family celebrated her birthday with rounds of rye and ginger. Now, traveling as she is inside of my life, wandering through my days along the highway of hyperawareness, on the far side of several personal and historical upheavals, she cries openly all the time. It is my gift to her.

Coco Loco

Coco Loco

Many years ago in Tobago, an enormous iguana fell out of a coconut palm and landed on top of me. I was looking up to see why several men were shaking the tree with great enthusiasm and determination. What was for them a hunting expedition, a business opportunity, became for me the prototype for all travel worth the price of a plane ticket. Something not listed in the brochure falls into your lap, takes you completely by surprise and turns your head around.

A relative of the Caribbean iguana seems to enjoy relaxing poolside here in Costa Rica where I have taken a trial separation from the unforgiving New England winter. The guide book says this reptile, garrobo, two feet long with ashy gray and slate blue scales, is reminiscent of dinosaurs. It is possible that the Fodor's guy spent a lonely childhood in outer borough movie theaters watching nightmare-inducing double features, but...despite the fact that I have entered my eighth decade, I have only a very dim memory of dinosaurs. As far as I know, they only live in the lurid imaginations of five year old boys.

Still, garrobo cuts an impressive figure sauntering in and out of the jungle landscaping and up and down the turquoise and white faux Spanish pool tiles. Occasionally for a change of pace, he climbs up a long flight of stairs to an upper deck and leaps into the air, crashing out of the Jurassic period and on to the tine roof of my bungalow. This is a killer just before dawn when I'm savoring the last frames of tropical dreamtime, trying to crawl back into the ooze. Garrobo goes about his pre-historic business undaunted by the hotel's intermittent water pressure and wi-fi-connection, unmoved by the young girls in thongs who ripen in the hot street like mangoes on the vine. He's been around, like me, and merits respect, a seat on the crowded bus commandeered by a fellow passenger shouting abuela! abuela! when I climb on board. Garrobo is like the aging ex-pats, mostly gay men, who gather on Saturday afternoons at Los Dos Locos in Quepos to listen to the Pura Vida Social Club. The band is playing a BB King-inflected set that pulses out into the torrid downtown from the open restaurant. Nothing separates the musicians and patrons, late of Houston and Pittsburgh and Atlanta, from the tico street life, mothers and babies, trucks unloading. The ex-pats are ebullient, demonstrative. They are all hugging each other. One seventysomething man says to another, "I heard you went up north. Is everything ok?"

The first few days in Costa Rica, I was preoccupied with parasailing. Every day at the beach, I would watch the silken material balloon up behind the person running those last few steps on land to catch up with the speedboat accelerating at a fantastic rate until suddenly she was airborne, hanging above the lukewarm ocean, and I thought si como no, why not? At night when I tried to sleep, I would be plagued by the existential dilemma, to parasail or not to parasail. Think of the post-vacation bragging rights, especially if I went up in the salmon-tinted sunset while the people on the beach were all sipping coco locos. In the end, I didn't do it and I'm glad. I just couldn't see the iguana in my lap. Only pride and vanity wrinkling my skirt. After all, the real stories, the essential stories, need time to incubate, time to hatch. They aren't the ones you can't wait to tell.