Paris

You know we were there this summer.  To visit family, friends and the city itself.  You may also know, if you've known me for a long, long time that I am so not a Francophile.  But this attack caused a pain in my heart.  Probably one that would not have existed had I not walked Parisian streets and eaten at Parisian cafés.  As I wrote to some American friends who live there for half of each year:  This hurts in a way the Hebdo and supermarket ones did not.  There was a twisted, evil [but] understandable logic -- which in all wild murders holds only for an atomic moment.  But now that I've seen Paris, and now that it is not an abstraction, and that there were dozens of indiscriminate many ... The French republic will be brutal, dark and swift in its reprisals. I fear that the geopolitical axis has shifted towards another major war.

A blow to one of the world's great cities (and not all large cities are great cities -- Los Angeles or Dublin being cases in point) is a mortal blow to our common humanity.  I've lived in one and been to a few others and the time spent in each and every one -- whether it has been years or days -- has been a gift that has changed me.

And Then I Fell Into Max Roach's Arms ...

... which I did not actually do, at least not on purpose.  I almost did as we were being introduced.  These things happen when you are backstage at BAM and you are wearing a leather motorcycle jacket (why on why did I ever imagine I looked cool in that ridiculous armor?) that is so huge and so heavy that your center of gravity shifts to about 2 feet in front of your nose.  And you trip without someone behind you snatching your harness in time.  One recovers, not without embarrassment, and we do not speak of it again until this moment when one of us in that brief encounter is left and spending this year looking over her shoulder.

It's fall.  The new year.  It has turned cold.  For real.  And again I am not ready.  This is the season I finally come alive.  Whatever it is about my particular body chemistry and the atmosphere, I am suited, if not for the cold, the cool.  And the diffusing light.  And the V's of geese making their way to Target (or some such shopping destination).  I have been in my wonderful job for a year, and there are parts of it that I've finally grown into, parts that still catch me unawares, and many many mysteries, which is a good thing.  I have been given a reprieve in school by finally taking a course I can understand without threatening to plunge sharpened pencils into my own ears from frustration.  And having come to this study very late, I know that I don't have time enough to take more Java courses.  I will have to be satisfied with this, and like all things in the autumn of one's life (didya see how I did that!?!?!?!) the knowledge adds piquancy to my pleasure.  For instance:

public class Dispatch
{
public static void main (String [] args)
{
String partingWords = "Au revoir, mon ami, à bientôt.";
System.out.println(partingWords);
}
}

The above is about as close as I'm going to get to write poetry for a while.  It will have to do.  I get the code right and you can hear me barking and clapping like a baby seal with her first taste of squid.  And that is how I occupy my non-jobbing hours looking from the inside out as the leaves contemplate their kamikaze dive to earth.

There are things and people that I miss, plenty of them.  I miss writing.  I miss Fred.  I miss the wonder of newness when something happens or you experience someone or some place for the very first time.  And teaching.  But there are pleasures, too, as I vicariously share the ardors and joys of early parenthood, career-making, partnering, and the surplus of beauty and vigor and passion that defines the young.

In a couple weeks I will be in Seattle for a business meeting.  My first impolitic reaction was:  Seattle?  In November?  The fuck?  And then I got over myself.  At least, I thought, I may have a chance to see a dear friend that I met in my freshman year at Antioch.  (I saw my other dear friend from those days this summer.  Whoot whoot!!)  And one half of the couple that I named Daughter No. 1 after.  And maybe a friend who then, if not now, lived a mere 5 hour drive away.  (I'm hoping that a 5 hour drive to her is like a 10 minute bike ride to me.)  But, in terms of visiting with my past, I'll take what I can get and be grateful for it.  (Who was it who first said, "Everywhere I go I meet myself."?)  I haven't been there since 1990 on my way to a writer's colony on Whidbey Island, and I'm sure I won't be back any time soon.

That's how life goes and Time does, too.  I must walk to my office to retrieve my bike, and learn some more about while loops, and clean another room as if to prove that humans, not beasts live in this house.  (I'm thinking maybe I can then seal it off and forbid entry until Thanksgiving.)  Then with what is left of the day, who knows?  Au revoir, mon ami, à bientôt.

Grandma's in the House!!!

Were I really really rich I would hire a tow truck to follow me everywhere.  And during those times when I've been sitting too long, the driver would insert the meat hook in my belt loop and hoist my ass into a standing position.  I, who have a surfeit of dignity and vanity, would dust myself off and get on with the business of being an ancient college student.  Aah, yes, it's Fall, I'm in school and also on one of my perennial self-improvement missions.

You know how these things start.  You go shopping and find yourself in a dressing room about to be reflected by half a hexagon of mirrors and out of your mouth comes the immortal words:  Is that MY behind?!?!?!?@**@#&#*@!!?!

The only thing to do, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is to get thee to a gym.  So, I have.  When these fits of fitness come over me I'm lucky enough to have a class schedule to have time to work out when most of the student body doesn't want to or can't -- mid-morning.  Not so this semester.  Twice a week around 5 o'clock I share the fitness center with half the football team, and 20 year old girls bench pressing 100 lbs.  My solution is to take my glasses off, put my blinders on and think of England as I limp from machine to machine setting the pins at no more than 30 lbs. of weight to resist.

As least the boys are nice to me, although a complicated mixture of pity and snot-shooting scorn has to be gotten under control before they ask:  You usin' that?  And I look at them as if to say, You think I come in here to pick up guyz?  Can't you see the pain I'm in?  But, instead I simply say,  Yeah.  But, this'll be over real soon.  And the deal is done.

As you can imagine during every step I walk to get to the fitness center I'm running a thousand excuses not to go.  (Can you tell I'm taking a programming class?)  But, I must, because if there's anything I'm sure of it is that life goes on until it doesn't.

Happy Fall, y'all.

Women of a Certain Art: Blondell Cummings, 1944 - 2015

It's Fall.  I'm back at school.  The generational dislocation resumes as I sit in a class where my post-collegiate employment history precedes my classmates' birthdays.

Another friend and collaborator has died.  Blondell and I met in 1980.  I was hugely pregnant and uncertain about all things future.  She was in Waterloo, IA dancing with Bill and on her way to creating her masterpiece, Chicken Soup.  We became friends as women do with talk of lovers, past and present, work and life.  I eventually moved to New York and worked for her for a while when fax machines were a novelty.

We created 2 pieces together:  she commissioned my first dance libretto, Orpheus and Eurydice, and I wrote Act I of For JB (Blondell's meditation on La Josephine).  We stayed in touch although not seeing each other much.  She kept making work through thick and thin, somehow making a living and keeping herself housed and travelling around the world.  She eventually received a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her stature.

When we did chat it was sometimes about work, mostly about the this-n-that of life -- nephews, family, daughters, hair.  I sent her to Daughter No. 1 a few years back to have her hair done.  (I used to tell my friends, ask for the Dailey's Mother discount.  At least I thought it was funny.)  Dailey wasn't pleased, she finds most of my friends are too old, too indecisive, too tentative -- to make good customers.  Nevertheless, I enjoy sending her people who remember her before she could walk, talk, or make googobs of money.

So, good-bye Blondell, good-bye.

Pussycat, Pussycat Where Have You Been?

A.  to London to visit the queen
B.  burying the dead.

The answer, Dear Reader, is B.  But, not in the way you think.  In the way that I now realize is what is the long long arc of transmuting a living being to a what?  I don't even know what to call a friend now dead -- history?

As I am tired and the hour is late I'll cut and paste from an email that I sent to one who helped me pack:

We got everything out yesterday.  I always like to do a last walkthrough, even if it means opening cabinets that I’m certain were cleared.  Sure enough:  I opened the louvered shutters above Fred’s bedroom closet and there was a comforter and a bag of costumes.  So, now it’s done done.  (Mark and I just got back from the storage facility in Wallingford where we put the last things.)  Even though Fred has been gone for me for some time, I stood in each room and said “Good-bye Fred”.  The rooms were naked, shabby where the in-need-of-fresh-paint walls were exposed, and the usual damage that comes from living in a space – the dents, the stains, the marks – were apparent what with the eye not being distracted by beauty and a person’s idiosyncratic style.  He is gone, the place is someone else’s construction site now. Stripped of almost everything that made it unique to Fred.

While I understand some of the Inner Circle’s aversion to being in the space to defenestrate it, I don’t forgive them.  The work of breaking down a person’s physical space isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t bring positive attention, and it’s not about one’s soulful feelings.  It is the quotidian scutwork of life, something I’m far too proficient at doing, and I am hardwired to be thorough in my honor.  At least to this complex and eminently lovable man.

So, the page turns; a new phase begins.

The membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead has always been a fascination of mine; even as a young girl reading Orpheus and Eurydice I realized that the story was a seminal primer in the mysteries of life and death.  I wrote The Negros Burial Ground as the story of a particularly painful passage to what we Westerners who still profess some allegiance to Christian dogma call the afterlife; the journeys of Eleanor Bumpurs, Eddie Perry and Michael Griffin, African-American New Yorkers murdered by agents of the state. The afterlife is complex in African cosmology and hard to describe in a few words, but suffice it to say that there is always a price to pay for trying to live in both worlds simultaneously, and that price is always paid in grief.

When you pack up a lifetime you exist uncomfortably in two worlds.  Yet each artifact removed, discarded and boxed is an admonition:  he is not here.  Some of those artifacts have new homes, new owners, new uses, and he is not here.  And so the furniture is put on the truck.  He is not here.  The boxes leave.  He is not here.  The clothes, the shoes, the music, the art and the tchotchkes.  Not here or here or there.

But where? I ask, postmodern Christian that I am.  (One who aspired to live by the New Testament, but ignores the Old and can't square the circle of Christ's resurrection.)  I don't know.  That is a country I have yet to visit, although love has already bought me a ticket.

Women of a Certain Art: Leslie Li

My friend, Leslie Li.

We met in the 1990's, probably because we both attended Hedgebrook (a women writers' colony) and as the literature curator at The Kitchen I wanted to do an evening of Hedgebrook writers.  She had published her novel, Bittersweet which she read from that night.

Years later Leslie left NYC.  For Vermont.  During those years came Enter the Dragon, 3 adaptations for children of Chinese folk tales.

Leslie returned to NYC, her center of gravity, and published a memoir, Daughter of Heaven:  A Memoir with Earthly Recipes.

And now she is a film-maker.  Chronicling the life and career of her mother and her mother's sisters, Kim Loo Sisters:  Portrait in Four-Part Harmony, which is Leslie's meditation on the nature of America, identity, race and gender.  Her project's website:  http://kimloosisters.com/

Leslie's latest interview, with Jolin Yang, http://www.jolinyang.com/

The Kim Loo Sisters:

A Letter to My Reader (Whom I Assume is Reduced to n = 1 Because I Never Write, I Never Call ...)

Dear Reader,

Yes, it has been a long time.  I would not blame you if you thought me dead.  But, I am not.  Just dormant.  Waiting for winter to be done, the snow to stop falling, the yard to look more like something that resembles an emerald rug than the pelt of a mange-ridden piebald cat.  This is the rarest of rare days -- the middle of a 3 day weekend where I do not have to do anything for anyone else, go anywhere, or be on time for anything.  I am making the most of it -- taking my internal temperature, discerning what I need in order to get done all the things I must, and 1/3 of the things I'd like to.

I understand David Letterman has retired.  I also understand he was a fixture of the pop culture firmament for 33 years.  In that time I've maybe paid attention to him for 60 seconds.  And it simply hasn't mattered:  not for him, not to me.  Three decades is a long time to be blissfully ignorant of anything, but I am realizing every day that it is probably the rule, not the exception.

I have rounded the bend of functional youthfullness to early old age.  There are days when everything but my eyelashes hurt.  I panic as I make conversation with someone I'm certain I've met but can't remember their name or the circumstance of our meeting.  Everything that I embark on I do with hopeful optimism that I'll be around long enough to see it reach maturity or bear fruit.  I am the tired swimmer trying to make it to a far shore.

In the meantime, between the duties and obligations, between the crises and the accidents, there are the interludes of joy, frissons of creation, and weekends like this when time conspires with me in the delusion that I still have enough of it to do whatever I want.

And what I've wanted is to clean my office and my house, a cleansing ritual as I begin the last stage of dis-assembling my friend Fred Ho's life.  Last week I (and others) packed, sorted, and inherited many of his possessions, those things which embodied him.  We'll return in June to finish, as much as one can finish packing up a life, in order for the new owner of the apartment to move in.   Hundreds of decisions -- what's kept and where and for how long? what's sold?  given away? destroyed?   Only after those questions are answered will the work resume of building an organization that will carry on his professional legacy.  This is nothing I ever imagined doing I've told others -- not for him, not for any organization, not even for myself.  I've made this process a priority through the end of 2016.  Were I 40 perhaps I'd stay longer but the time I've got remaining is shrinking; and my ability to fulfill my own ambitions in this last quadrant of my life has shrunk, too.

This quadrant is one where you are acutely situated between the poles of life (grandchildren?) and death (of parents, friends, siblings) and either pole will exert its necessary and strong pull when they emerge.  And that's not even factoring in the show-stopping nature of debilitating illness.  It is hard to imagine, much less admit to oneself that the degree may not be completed, the Times may not be read, and the surplus weight which makes all physical life harder is weight that I own forever.  But, that may be what happens.  In fact, it's more likely than ever before that that is what will happen.

Which is why these indulgent weekends mean so much to me.  I am playing (slowly) my record collection.  I started with Frederick Delius, and am now listening to Taj Mahal.  Maybe I'll find Hindemith and Average White Band today.  All part of a conversation with my past.  Adieu.
  

Africa/America: Blood Drum Spirit

For your pleasure:

David Bindman, saxophone
Wes Brown, bass
royal hartigan, percussion
Art Hirahara, piano

When You Can No Longer Remember Shit ...

... make shit up.

As I see it you either turn 60 or you write a truthful memoir, but you can't do both.  Because after 60 (or after chemo and radiation or post-partum or terror or other life-changing extended sleep-depriving events) you simply don't care that much for accuracy.  You can't, it's an unattainable goal like having the body you sported at 20.

At first, this truth-bending shocked me and I would run down the street chasing some sentence that just popped out of my mouth, like, "Back in 1995 I was working for General Eclectic," hoping to tackle it and smother the inaccuracy before it embarrassed me.  And then, when my knees started barking and my hip throbbed in tune to the universe, I stopped and thought, "Who cares?"  Who cares if the year and the employer are wrong?  I'm tryin' to make a point here, people.  Whatever that was.  I don't lie with nefarious intent, I simply have decades of memory to sift through and sort out and stuff got mixed and matched in my head and if I waited for my internal fact-checker to get back to me the people I'm talking to would be gone, asleep or dead.

So, onto haiku and aphorisms, scrupulous truth be damned:

Spring in New Haven
Now that the snow has left us
bereft of complaint.

Keeping a Resolution I Swore I Wouldn't Make

Judging from the grades I make in my math classes I'm not particularly good at Logic.  Common sense I think I've got in abundance, but that other stuff (flutter of hands, rueful face...)  You see, we went to visit some friends in Poughkeepsie this weekend past.  It was combination housewarming and observance of the death of a guru, complete with meditation and a shrine and communion.

I have what I'll delicately called a perverse relationship to the spiritual arts -- I avoid them.  In posts past I confessed to years ago in Brooklyn having a yoga teacher who loved me despite the fact that I Hate Yoga.  Hate.  It.  And yeah, don't tell me it's good for me.  I know that.  What with this colossally shortened hamstring I'm sporting these days I can barely get down a flight of stairs, but you'd have to put a gun to my head to do anything about it except a few stretches and making Cuthbert drive me everywhere.  But, as I've often written, I digress.  (Embarrassment will do make you do that.)  Anyway, Dear Reader, you'd be proud of me, I meditated.  Really.  I felt things I ordinarily would not have which while not always pleasant was interesting.  All good.  We drove to the hotel to sleep.  Just before climbing into bed I ate a few apricots.

And that's where my troubles began.  I woke up the following morning with a food processor dicing chicken bones in my gut.  Not enough to deter me from eating breakfast, mind you, but enough to know that I'd better get home.  So we called our friends just to say "so long and thanks for all the hospitality" and got invited over for tea.  About 1/2 hour after arriving at their home I was pleading to lie down.  I slept and slept and slept.  Awoke, drank some herbal medicine, rattled around a bit, slept some more on the couch and then shuffled through the apartment to throw up in the toilet bowl.  Spent an extra night in Poughkeepsie in case of encore.

Here's where the un-logic comes in:  Meditation = puking your guts up.  Oh oh.

Since Sunday I've barely eaten, mostly out of fear of which end and at what velocity will the food come out.  And slept of course.  I'm sticking to bland food and juice until then.  Usually when I'm as stressed out as I am these days I'll eat anything.  Just put a piece of wet sheetrock on a plate in front of me, and it's gone.  No problem at all.  But these days I'm giving food the side eye.  Which is fine since I dropped a couple pounds that I sure don't need.  Whether I'll continue when my stress = binge eating gene reactivates is unlikely, but for now it'll do.

All this to say that I am all kinds of tired.  And the great David Carr has died.  Namaste.

In 1934 Stars Fell on Alabama

This will be short.  Last week's entry was full of typos (now corrected) and if I type more than a few lines today's post will be, too.  But I wanted to share the news that I had The Perfect Day™.

No work work or personal paperwork to do that would result in a fine or a shutoff if not submitted.
No math work (because I lost my nerve and didn't deign to find out what classes I needed until -- oh snap! -- it was too late to enroll).
No meetings.
No reason to leave the house because we had the 4 food groups:
1.  booze
2.  coffee
3.  carbohydrates and
4.  half 'n half
No visitors and no phone calls to make or receive.

But, as rare as All the Above are in my life what made it le jour juste was that I got to quilt all day and all night stopping only to eat and drink and check to see that Cuthbert hadn't electrocuted himself trying to change the light switch in his office (not that that, frankly, would have stopped me but I digress).  The day was perfect because I went into my office/studio at 9:30 in the am and didn't stop cutting, stitching and piecing until about 11 pm last night when I could neither see nor cut straight. (See Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and the concept of flow.)  Just had to share that and what, you may ask, does that have to do with stars and Alabama?

Nothing at all except at this age I'm waxing lyrical about all the wonderful things your kids do when they are young young and I am confusing my oldest with my proxy granddaughter and so for the umpteenth time I told Cuthbert about my early days of living in Brooklyn and taking the 9 year old to the library to do a social studies assignment and she, for reasons that eluded me then and now, chose the state of Alabama, and when I swept into the children's section to pick her up she was finished and wanted to read it to me and it began:  In 1934, stars fell on Alabama ....  And it is a moment like that makes your heart break and you remember why you love them so even though they cost you money and sanity and by their very existence prove that you are not invulnerable as long as there is at least one someone that you would die for.

And now I'll return to something that I gladly live for, quilting.  Adieu.

Skunk in Estrus

How I wish that the above title had the qualifier "Saturday Poetry:" in front of it.  But it doesn't, which means that what I am about to tell you has no redeeming literary value, that there are no inherent metaphors, no larger lessons to be learned.

I have a problematic relationship with animals -- those I babysit, those I eat, those I share a homestead with.  On my watch dogs and/or cats have died, gotten pregnant, become incontinent, and showed signs of severe neglect.  I've had fish burn to a crisp in my oven, baby possums walk into my kitchen, and now I am resigned to living atop of a skunk family.

This is not Pepé Le Pew and the missus I'm living with, folks.  These skunks burrowed in last year having realized that they'd found digs underneath my office, a 12' x 16' heated "cabin", not to mention that Mr. Softee next door puts tons of food out for the feral cats and so there you have it -- luxury digs and a 5-star eatery one yard over.  They hit the jackpot these skunks did, and now the female is in heat, the feral cats are getting on her nerves and about every other day, if I'm in my office long enough I hear the hiss-thunk-hiss of an interspecies battle to the death, count to 10 and then wait for that first whiff of mad skunk as it evaporates its way upward.  The office stinks.  I stink and b'leve me when I tell you that the stink sticks.

Cuthbert, lover of all things gun, has been sighting the skunks from our bedroom window which faces the back yard.  Only problem is that he's not certain the scope is set right, and I've told him not to do anything fancy, especially, particularly if I'm in the office, because godknows where the bullet will end up.  Even if he hits the skunks from 20 feet (a nice little trig problem), if he wounds and doesn't kill, well, imagine what the skunks will do.  So, then he decides to move the .22 down to the kitchen, and stand behind the curtains like he's in a skunk blind and wait for the little bastards to head out to Le Kibble, and then shoot them.  But, I suspect they just hauled a SubZero into their burrow and neither Cuthbert nor I have seen them make a nocturnal trip lately.  So, that plan's on hold.  Then someone else said, er, you should bait some fishline with meat and follow where they take it and then what?, put foam insulation or boiling water in the burrow?  Yeah, that sounds like fun -- as they drown or boil they spray like hell and then decompose underneath my office, and the next thing I know the UN Commission on Genocide is knocking on my door.  So, that plan's a non-starter.  It's time, we realized, to call in some pros.  The conversation will go something like this:

Cuthbert:  We need 2 skunks trapped before Valentine's Day which is when She Skunk starts to breed.

Skunk Trapper:  No problem.

Me:  Oh!  Do you release them in the wild so that they can live happily ever after?

Skunk Trapper:  Whatever you want, ma'am.

Cuthbert and Skunk Trapper exchange the whatevah look men exchange with each other whenever there is the opportunity to kill something.  A contract is signed.  I stipulate that it be done when I'm gone.  And as soon as these tenants are removed I'm putting barbed wire around my office.

Other than that, life's great.  Et toi?