Twilight Time

Biblical hillside with telephone cable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Pebble of Regret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Melancholy, Baby

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

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

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

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

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


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Rites of Passage

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

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

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

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

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

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Tragedy in the Tropics

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

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

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

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

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

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Put on a Happy Face

the author and her sister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fixing a Hole

Minneapolis message

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

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

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


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