Saturday, December 26, 2009
memory #9
It was like he was underwater for the first time, opening and closing his mouth, shocked that he couldn’t breathe. His face looked the way babies’ faces do when they’re struggling to communicate. That same ever-flowing bewilderment, feelings washing over like a stream over rocks. His eyes would be wide, his mouth working for sounds, like he was searching for words without knowing words existed.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Update.
I've been applying to some grad programs, and for the past four months I've been obsessed with that process. It's finally (mainly) over. The most immediate benefit of all of it, disregarding what future results may or may not occur, is that I've polished three pieces - most of which I've already posted here in rougher forms. I figured I'd share the final ('final'?) versions.
Number One:
"The glad years come"
On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.
We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.
Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: Mia with the lumpy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, I mean) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing its tag for the first time and suddenly understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird into her 80s), when I find the suitcase.
It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, nestled in the shadows between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.
“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by a ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip. Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.
The lining of the suitcase is a shiny, shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I open. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and Mia, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. A woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his.
On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944.
They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her fitted skirt-suits and dramatic heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.
And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out like Chinese lanterns behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet.
But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth, balancing Nana on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a white suit, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.
The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated, wealthy Italian family, and Nana, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard as an opera singer, was a typist. Poor. Despite his family’s disapproval, they had the wedding – big, Catholic – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the tropical honeymoon; they moved into a house and had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together; she is plunked in his lap on the beach, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. The sand around them is a bleached white, the ocean a blanched grey. He is grimacing.
A month after Philip’s death, his father died, and his mother’s health plummeted. While she was bedridden (in the process of a two-month decline that would end in her death), her daughter, Philip’s sister, began to visit her. The family money to which Philip had claim had not been distributed to Nana yet, and Philip’s sister didn’t think it should be. ‘We barely know the woman,’ she reportedly told her mother, sitting by her bed and speaking in hushed tones. ‘How do we know she’ll look after those girls?’ (The information was passed on to Nana by the family’s housekeeper, who at one point promised to act as Nana’s witness in court, but rescinded when the family threatened to fire her.) The story is complicated, with many disappointments, but the short of it is, Nana never saw Philip’s inheritance. His mother changed the will to leave it in Philip’s sister’s name, and after that, all communication ended. Nana and the girls were set adrift.
Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.
The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even begun, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the President.”
Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she supplemented his small veteran’s pension by working as a secretary and, at night, managing her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, that she had what would today be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, but was then called “nervous breakdowns,” and was sporadically hospitalized for it. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.
Mia reads:
November 14, 1961
The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC
My Dear Mr. President,
I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.
We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I am, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated.
What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from his estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas as her requests grow more frequent: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”
Were they really so desperate? My mother has always been mute on the subject. Like a mole, she tunneled through her childhood cautiously, seeking comfort in dark, safe spaces (the bedroom she shared with her sisters, caves found under table tops and other sturdy furniture). Put another way, she doesn’t remember much from those years; she says she’s not sure that she imprinted memories as they were occurring; something about trauma and children, a handy defense mechanism some brains employ to protect their young owners.
Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read Nana’s situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954 (Andrew the Greek, who was prone to jealous rages and smoked cigars with the windows rolled up), she attempts to get her widow’s benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third of her previous payments.
In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.
Her letter to Ribicoff five years later reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”
I imagine her sucking in air as she sits up straight to start typing, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair. Intent on making him see the gravity, the epic disaster, lurking in her petty details. She never received a response, of course.
As abruptly as Mia and I made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture and white enamel necklaces we assume were Nana’s.
The next morning, I offer to show my mother the suitcase; she has never seen it, she says, and doesn’t know where it came from, and I imagine she’ll be eager. But she declines. Slouched in the kitchen watching the kettle for signs of steam, she looks tired.
I have less than an hour to catch my bus back to Brooklyn, and she thinks it’s all just too much to drudge up so quickly. I can understand that. But I was hoping for additional insight from her, an insider’s elaboration, and it’s clear, suddenly, that I won’t get it.
The accounts I’ve heard from my mother about her childhood are patchy at best, a half-made collage: bringing hot bags of donuts for the black boys who worked in the back of bowling alley retrieving and resetting pins; being pulled from bed and rained with slaps late at night by Nana when she didn’t clean the house; hiding under her bed in the morning because she was scared of the nuns at school, who used metal-edged rulers as punishment; her grandmother’s fried dough balls, drizzled in honey; buckets of thrashing eels for Christmas dinner. In her memories, it is mainly the scenery that is vivid.
I feel like I’ve inherited the same blindness. Holding Nana’s necklaces, it’s still hard to picture her. She remains a phantasm, the voluptuous dictator with tiny feet who smiled only in photos. I can easily conjure the traditional image I’ve had of her – Nana as The Great Potential Wasted, a singing voice that could shatter glass (supposedly), a whistle like a warbling songbird. But these are just family lore, old china patterns to stare at wistfully, fragments that helped me imagine where I came from.
It must have been hard, being a widow, and then a divorcee, in a small town like Catskill. If the nuns at school instructed the children not to play with my mother and her sisters, it must have been worse for Nana. I have never heard, for instance, a story involving one of her friends. To be proud is a hard thing, a pebble to suck on, but to be proud and powerless, proud and friendless, well.
Even so, she remained vain; always dressed up, matching hat and purse, marching to her job at her soon-to-be third husband’s office, marching to the bowling alley afterwards, and finally, well past midnight with swollen, pinched feet, home.
Cancer took her, finally; not in her eye, like Philip, but in her famous breasts. She was living in McLean, Virginia by then with her third husband. The house was modest but comfortable; a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and astroturfed front steps. This husband was not faithful, but he loved her in his way. I would not, based on stories of their life together, describe her as happy at the end, but I would not call her unhappy either, not necessarily.
This petering out, this tapering of a tragic story to a moderately slim end, is for some reason hard to reconcile. As though it can’t be the whole story. As though the mundanity, the layered ordinariness of her final years is an injustice to her, that a Hollywood ending where she died destitute, alone, or made a breathtaking comeback, haloed in light and a final great love, would have been somehow better. Surely she thought the same, squirreling away her own scraps of the past, her thwarted future.
Instead of a righteous conclusion, we have mementos: her pill bottles and reading glasses, which were left by her husband in their medicine cabinet for decades after her death, even lasting through his next marriage; we find her forgotten suitcase and take from it photos and jewelry. After everything, what we are left with gnaws steadily away inside us, hiding but never dormant for long: the stubborn, impotent reluctance to let things go.
Number One:
"The glad years come"
On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.
We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.
Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: Mia with the lumpy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, I mean) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing its tag for the first time and suddenly understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird into her 80s), when I find the suitcase.
It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, nestled in the shadows between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.
“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by a ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip. Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.
The lining of the suitcase is a shiny, shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I open. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and Mia, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. A woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his.
On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944.
They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her fitted skirt-suits and dramatic heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.
And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out like Chinese lanterns behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet.
But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth, balancing Nana on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a white suit, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.
The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated, wealthy Italian family, and Nana, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard as an opera singer, was a typist. Poor. Despite his family’s disapproval, they had the wedding – big, Catholic – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the tropical honeymoon; they moved into a house and had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together; she is plunked in his lap on the beach, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. The sand around them is a bleached white, the ocean a blanched grey. He is grimacing.
A month after Philip’s death, his father died, and his mother’s health plummeted. While she was bedridden (in the process of a two-month decline that would end in her death), her daughter, Philip’s sister, began to visit her. The family money to which Philip had claim had not been distributed to Nana yet, and Philip’s sister didn’t think it should be. ‘We barely know the woman,’ she reportedly told her mother, sitting by her bed and speaking in hushed tones. ‘How do we know she’ll look after those girls?’ (The information was passed on to Nana by the family’s housekeeper, who at one point promised to act as Nana’s witness in court, but rescinded when the family threatened to fire her.) The story is complicated, with many disappointments, but the short of it is, Nana never saw Philip’s inheritance. His mother changed the will to leave it in Philip’s sister’s name, and after that, all communication ended. Nana and the girls were set adrift.
Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.
The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even begun, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the President.”
Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she supplemented his small veteran’s pension by working as a secretary and, at night, managing her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, that she had what would today be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, but was then called “nervous breakdowns,” and was sporadically hospitalized for it. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.
Mia reads:
November 14, 1961
The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC
My Dear Mr. President,
I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.
We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I am, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated.
What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from his estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas as her requests grow more frequent: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”
Were they really so desperate? My mother has always been mute on the subject. Like a mole, she tunneled through her childhood cautiously, seeking comfort in dark, safe spaces (the bedroom she shared with her sisters, caves found under table tops and other sturdy furniture). Put another way, she doesn’t remember much from those years; she says she’s not sure that she imprinted memories as they were occurring; something about trauma and children, a handy defense mechanism some brains employ to protect their young owners.
Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read Nana’s situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954 (Andrew the Greek, who was prone to jealous rages and smoked cigars with the windows rolled up), she attempts to get her widow’s benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third of her previous payments.
In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.
Her letter to Ribicoff five years later reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”
I imagine her sucking in air as she sits up straight to start typing, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair. Intent on making him see the gravity, the epic disaster, lurking in her petty details. She never received a response, of course.
As abruptly as Mia and I made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture and white enamel necklaces we assume were Nana’s.
The next morning, I offer to show my mother the suitcase; she has never seen it, she says, and doesn’t know where it came from, and I imagine she’ll be eager. But she declines. Slouched in the kitchen watching the kettle for signs of steam, she looks tired.
I have less than an hour to catch my bus back to Brooklyn, and she thinks it’s all just too much to drudge up so quickly. I can understand that. But I was hoping for additional insight from her, an insider’s elaboration, and it’s clear, suddenly, that I won’t get it.
The accounts I’ve heard from my mother about her childhood are patchy at best, a half-made collage: bringing hot bags of donuts for the black boys who worked in the back of bowling alley retrieving and resetting pins; being pulled from bed and rained with slaps late at night by Nana when she didn’t clean the house; hiding under her bed in the morning because she was scared of the nuns at school, who used metal-edged rulers as punishment; her grandmother’s fried dough balls, drizzled in honey; buckets of thrashing eels for Christmas dinner. In her memories, it is mainly the scenery that is vivid.
I feel like I’ve inherited the same blindness. Holding Nana’s necklaces, it’s still hard to picture her. She remains a phantasm, the voluptuous dictator with tiny feet who smiled only in photos. I can easily conjure the traditional image I’ve had of her – Nana as The Great Potential Wasted, a singing voice that could shatter glass (supposedly), a whistle like a warbling songbird. But these are just family lore, old china patterns to stare at wistfully, fragments that helped me imagine where I came from.
It must have been hard, being a widow, and then a divorcee, in a small town like Catskill. If the nuns at school instructed the children not to play with my mother and her sisters, it must have been worse for Nana. I have never heard, for instance, a story involving one of her friends. To be proud is a hard thing, a pebble to suck on, but to be proud and powerless, proud and friendless, well.
Even so, she remained vain; always dressed up, matching hat and purse, marching to her job at her soon-to-be third husband’s office, marching to the bowling alley afterwards, and finally, well past midnight with swollen, pinched feet, home.
Cancer took her, finally; not in her eye, like Philip, but in her famous breasts. She was living in McLean, Virginia by then with her third husband. The house was modest but comfortable; a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and astroturfed front steps. This husband was not faithful, but he loved her in his way. I would not, based on stories of their life together, describe her as happy at the end, but I would not call her unhappy either, not necessarily.
This petering out, this tapering of a tragic story to a moderately slim end, is for some reason hard to reconcile. As though it can’t be the whole story. As though the mundanity, the layered ordinariness of her final years is an injustice to her, that a Hollywood ending where she died destitute, alone, or made a breathtaking comeback, haloed in light and a final great love, would have been somehow better. Surely she thought the same, squirreling away her own scraps of the past, her thwarted future.
Instead of a righteous conclusion, we have mementos: her pill bottles and reading glasses, which were left by her husband in their medicine cabinet for decades after her death, even lasting through his next marriage; we find her forgotten suitcase and take from it photos and jewelry. After everything, what we are left with gnaws steadily away inside us, hiding but never dormant for long: the stubborn, impotent reluctance to let things go.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Timesheets
“You should just say it’s your grandmother,” Marie says, leaning over the cubicle wall so that her perfume drifts down into our area and, beneath it, a whiff of the Capri she just smoked. She is speaking to Becca, whose aunt died last week, and who just discovered that the day she took off for the funeral didn’t fall under ‘bereavement’ time, was instead deducted by the company as a vacation day. Aunts, apparently, don’t count.
Becca is annoyed. She doesn’t want to have to use one of her paid vacation days, and she thinks it’s wrong that deaths of brothers-in-law (she keeps stressing the indignity of this) are somehow classified as greater losses than that of her father’s sister. She’s writing an email to Accounting.
“Should I talk to Eleanor before I send this?” she asks me. Eleanor is one of the principals, and Becca will need her approval to submit a petition to have her hours changed.
“Definitely,” I say, “She likes you. She’ll totally understand.”
Marie shrugs, walks off.
*
It’s early Monday morning, a few weeks after Becca’s aunt’s funeral, and I’m catching up on email. Because I wasn’t in on Friday, my inbox is spilling over, a daunting tower of unopened subject lines. I squint, frown.
Toni interrupts me. She bursts out of her glass-walled office, planting herself in front of my desk, cocking her hip out. Her wooden bracelets clink against each other. Her skin is gleaming, her teeth impossibly white as she flashes them. She is smooth and polished as a piece of obsidian.
“Friday was crazy, I’m telling you girl.” Someone sent her a box from Tiffany’s, and inside was a charm bracelet with the inscription, “Happy Birthday Beeyotch!” She didn’t know who it was from; she had no idea, isn’t that crazy?
Her enthusiasm is infectious; I find myself raising my eyebrows, giving a titillated smile; my emails can wait. Becca is nodding conspiratorially. Thursday night, she’d drunkenly kissed someone in front of the man she’s seeing, and so Friday for her was a march of penance via Blackberry messages. “It was a scene here,” Toni continues, “The bracelet, Becca, and then John Brill, it was insane.”
John Brill. John Brill was our coworker, our senior mechanical engineer. I scan my emails, and there it is, his eulogy. He passed away on Friday after a three-year struggle with bone marrow cancer. The last we’d seen him, a bit before Christmas, he’d been bald and frail, an ancient eagle, smiling sardonically as he filled his coffee in the kitchen. The bracelet, Becca and John Brill. Right.
*
In order to change her hours from PTO (Paid Time Off, which is the accounting category for vacation and sick days) to the desired funeral category, Becca will need to edit her timesheet, entering the number 50003.00 next to the 8 hours she wishes to change. 50003.00 stands for Bereavement, and also for Jury Duty.
*
I sound vapid when I advise Becca about obtaining Eleanor’s signature. I say words like ‘totally’ and ‘for sure.’ As if we are discussing whether the shoes she wants to buy are ‘okay’ or ‘hot.’ I should sound more somber, more respectful somehow. But how else are we to talk about it? What we are talking about, accounting and HR rules, are dry and flat as the stacks of forms that record them.
The company has to keep track of hours. I know that. Someone, at some point, has to make somehow-objective decisions regarding familial closeness, what will likely necessitate time off for mental health, and what is more...acceptable. Words like cost-effective and bottom line bob on the surface of my thoughts. But I wonder. Maybe the person who decided what merits the special bereavement category for time off did not particularly like his aunt, or know her. Uch, Aunt Lucy, he thought with a shudder. Mothballs and lipstick marks.
*
When Vincent, the managing principal of our company, was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, we didn’t know. We still don’t know, officially, but have pieced his diagnosis together over the course of months, sifting through various bits of evidence and pasting them into a plausible shape.
He was here one week, and the next he was gone on a two-month hiatus, without access to email or phone. I had met with him just days before his departure and made plans for our meeting on Monday. It was strange, in retrospect, that he’d spoken of his involvement so convincingly. I re-read the email from Eleanor informing us of his absence, over and over.
After a couple weeks, people started murmuring. People whispered about brain cancer, mostly, but when he came back he still had a full, thick head of hair; so we decided that wasn’t it. We were half-baked detectives.
*
No one ever told us about John’s illness, either. He left in the beginning of the past summer to have “surgery on his knee,” and then he never came back – or at least, not fully, and not until winter.
We were assured during his absence that he’d be back soon, next month, which then changed to the following month when the promised month failed to materialize him, and I continued to track his accounts, updating his references and typing in his initials for him. “Updated 9/20/08, J. Brill.”
In October, he and his wife organized a benefit dinner to raise funds for their three children and the debt the family was accruing due to his hospital bills. There was a detailed, heart-stopping flyer with the specifics of his illness, an invitation to please attend and contribute, if possible. Almost no one in our company saw it. Vincent got it, but he never distributed it.
I finally received it the day of the event from an old coworker, who was wondering if I’d attend. That was how I found out the truth about what was happening to John. It was like stumbling upon a letter addressed to me, addressed to all of us, which had been squirreled away in a desk drawer. Holding it to the light and noticing how the seal had already been torn open.
I forwarded the invitation to a coworker or two. Would we go? Were we not supposed to? It was late to make arrangements in any case, and so we didn’t. I comforted myself with the lame hope that those who knew him better had been informed earlier, maybe (implausibly, I admit) by Vincent himself.
In the weeks that followed, I sat in Vincent’s office and watched him: busy, intent on his work, witty, stressed as usual. He seems like a good man, I thought. I pictured him with his family in Long Island on the weekends, sighing and pocketing his Blackberry and joining them by the pool. Smiling at his wife. Sweet smoke from the grill and a plate of upturned hamburger buns.
*
Vincent wrote the beautiful eulogy for John, the one I received in my inbox. As the head of our office, Vincent spent years working with John and held access to stories that many of us didn’t. In the eulogy, he referenced a joke John told him once, that his job was making him tear his hair out (he lost his hair to chemotherapy), and how it helped Vincent put his own troubles (cancer, I could hear the office collectively breathe) into perspective.
I wonder what that means. I wonder why he never gave us the opportunity to help John, if he felt so strongly.
Asking Vincent, of course, is out of the question; there are thick cords of privacy and policy and discretion here, growing up and up and into each other like vines absorbed by a tree trunk. Our office culture does not permit open dialogue between different seniority levels.
*
I decide Toni didn’t mean to dismiss the weight of John’s death by lumping it in with her Tiffany’s mystery and Becca’s relationship drama. Toni believes in God and God’s benevolence, and maybe she imagines John at peace now, with all his luxurious, silver hair back in place. Maybe death is not so terrifying to her.
Then again, Toni is the head of HR, and maybe she’s trained not to betray emotion so that we can enjoy a crisp, peaceful work environment. But that’s not the effect she has.
*
I was right. Eleanor does like Becca, and she does understand. She purses her lips with impatience while Becca describes the accounting policy, and waves a manicured hand. “That’s ridiculous – just give it to me, I’ll sign it.” Becca is relieved, and the thin thread of tension that’s been pulled between us all morning suddenly goes slack.
*
Becca never cries about her aunt in the office. She bickers with her brother about shiva, clucking like a mother whose patience is being tried. “No, Joel. Joel. You have to go. Yes, of course. Just be there.”
We sit next to each other, and so we have windows into each other’s worlds. We pretend not to eavesdrop when our phone conversations seem especially private, but it’s a farce, because when they’re light-hearted or gossip-based, we ask each other about them.
Obviously, I don’t ask Becca now.
*
The coffee machine hisses in the kitchen as it steams a single serving into someone’s mug. Becca’s phone chirps. I spill salad dressing on my chair and blot the stain with a napkin. The piles on my desk have been growing recently.
Becca signs her emails Kind Regards, and I sign mine Best Regards, Sincerely.
Becca is annoyed. She doesn’t want to have to use one of her paid vacation days, and she thinks it’s wrong that deaths of brothers-in-law (she keeps stressing the indignity of this) are somehow classified as greater losses than that of her father’s sister. She’s writing an email to Accounting.
“Should I talk to Eleanor before I send this?” she asks me. Eleanor is one of the principals, and Becca will need her approval to submit a petition to have her hours changed.
“Definitely,” I say, “She likes you. She’ll totally understand.”
Marie shrugs, walks off.
*
It’s early Monday morning, a few weeks after Becca’s aunt’s funeral, and I’m catching up on email. Because I wasn’t in on Friday, my inbox is spilling over, a daunting tower of unopened subject lines. I squint, frown.
Toni interrupts me. She bursts out of her glass-walled office, planting herself in front of my desk, cocking her hip out. Her wooden bracelets clink against each other. Her skin is gleaming, her teeth impossibly white as she flashes them. She is smooth and polished as a piece of obsidian.
“Friday was crazy, I’m telling you girl.” Someone sent her a box from Tiffany’s, and inside was a charm bracelet with the inscription, “Happy Birthday Beeyotch!” She didn’t know who it was from; she had no idea, isn’t that crazy?
Her enthusiasm is infectious; I find myself raising my eyebrows, giving a titillated smile; my emails can wait. Becca is nodding conspiratorially. Thursday night, she’d drunkenly kissed someone in front of the man she’s seeing, and so Friday for her was a march of penance via Blackberry messages. “It was a scene here,” Toni continues, “The bracelet, Becca, and then John Brill, it was insane.”
John Brill. John Brill was our coworker, our senior mechanical engineer. I scan my emails, and there it is, his eulogy. He passed away on Friday after a three-year struggle with bone marrow cancer. The last we’d seen him, a bit before Christmas, he’d been bald and frail, an ancient eagle, smiling sardonically as he filled his coffee in the kitchen. The bracelet, Becca and John Brill. Right.
*
In order to change her hours from PTO (Paid Time Off, which is the accounting category for vacation and sick days) to the desired funeral category, Becca will need to edit her timesheet, entering the number 50003.00 next to the 8 hours she wishes to change. 50003.00 stands for Bereavement, and also for Jury Duty.
*
I sound vapid when I advise Becca about obtaining Eleanor’s signature. I say words like ‘totally’ and ‘for sure.’ As if we are discussing whether the shoes she wants to buy are ‘okay’ or ‘hot.’ I should sound more somber, more respectful somehow. But how else are we to talk about it? What we are talking about, accounting and HR rules, are dry and flat as the stacks of forms that record them.
The company has to keep track of hours. I know that. Someone, at some point, has to make somehow-objective decisions regarding familial closeness, what will likely necessitate time off for mental health, and what is more...acceptable. Words like cost-effective and bottom line bob on the surface of my thoughts. But I wonder. Maybe the person who decided what merits the special bereavement category for time off did not particularly like his aunt, or know her. Uch, Aunt Lucy, he thought with a shudder. Mothballs and lipstick marks.
*
When Vincent, the managing principal of our company, was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, we didn’t know. We still don’t know, officially, but have pieced his diagnosis together over the course of months, sifting through various bits of evidence and pasting them into a plausible shape.
He was here one week, and the next he was gone on a two-month hiatus, without access to email or phone. I had met with him just days before his departure and made plans for our meeting on Monday. It was strange, in retrospect, that he’d spoken of his involvement so convincingly. I re-read the email from Eleanor informing us of his absence, over and over.
After a couple weeks, people started murmuring. People whispered about brain cancer, mostly, but when he came back he still had a full, thick head of hair; so we decided that wasn’t it. We were half-baked detectives.
*
No one ever told us about John’s illness, either. He left in the beginning of the past summer to have “surgery on his knee,” and then he never came back – or at least, not fully, and not until winter.
We were assured during his absence that he’d be back soon, next month, which then changed to the following month when the promised month failed to materialize him, and I continued to track his accounts, updating his references and typing in his initials for him. “Updated 9/20/08, J. Brill.”
In October, he and his wife organized a benefit dinner to raise funds for their three children and the debt the family was accruing due to his hospital bills. There was a detailed, heart-stopping flyer with the specifics of his illness, an invitation to please attend and contribute, if possible. Almost no one in our company saw it. Vincent got it, but he never distributed it.
I finally received it the day of the event from an old coworker, who was wondering if I’d attend. That was how I found out the truth about what was happening to John. It was like stumbling upon a letter addressed to me, addressed to all of us, which had been squirreled away in a desk drawer. Holding it to the light and noticing how the seal had already been torn open.
I forwarded the invitation to a coworker or two. Would we go? Were we not supposed to? It was late to make arrangements in any case, and so we didn’t. I comforted myself with the lame hope that those who knew him better had been informed earlier, maybe (implausibly, I admit) by Vincent himself.
In the weeks that followed, I sat in Vincent’s office and watched him: busy, intent on his work, witty, stressed as usual. He seems like a good man, I thought. I pictured him with his family in Long Island on the weekends, sighing and pocketing his Blackberry and joining them by the pool. Smiling at his wife. Sweet smoke from the grill and a plate of upturned hamburger buns.
*
Vincent wrote the beautiful eulogy for John, the one I received in my inbox. As the head of our office, Vincent spent years working with John and held access to stories that many of us didn’t. In the eulogy, he referenced a joke John told him once, that his job was making him tear his hair out (he lost his hair to chemotherapy), and how it helped Vincent put his own troubles (cancer, I could hear the office collectively breathe) into perspective.
I wonder what that means. I wonder why he never gave us the opportunity to help John, if he felt so strongly.
Asking Vincent, of course, is out of the question; there are thick cords of privacy and policy and discretion here, growing up and up and into each other like vines absorbed by a tree trunk. Our office culture does not permit open dialogue between different seniority levels.
*
I decide Toni didn’t mean to dismiss the weight of John’s death by lumping it in with her Tiffany’s mystery and Becca’s relationship drama. Toni believes in God and God’s benevolence, and maybe she imagines John at peace now, with all his luxurious, silver hair back in place. Maybe death is not so terrifying to her.
Then again, Toni is the head of HR, and maybe she’s trained not to betray emotion so that we can enjoy a crisp, peaceful work environment. But that’s not the effect she has.
*
I was right. Eleanor does like Becca, and she does understand. She purses her lips with impatience while Becca describes the accounting policy, and waves a manicured hand. “That’s ridiculous – just give it to me, I’ll sign it.” Becca is relieved, and the thin thread of tension that’s been pulled between us all morning suddenly goes slack.
*
Becca never cries about her aunt in the office. She bickers with her brother about shiva, clucking like a mother whose patience is being tried. “No, Joel. Joel. You have to go. Yes, of course. Just be there.”
We sit next to each other, and so we have windows into each other’s worlds. We pretend not to eavesdrop when our phone conversations seem especially private, but it’s a farce, because when they’re light-hearted or gossip-based, we ask each other about them.
Obviously, I don’t ask Becca now.
*
The coffee machine hisses in the kitchen as it steams a single serving into someone’s mug. Becca’s phone chirps. I spill salad dressing on my chair and blot the stain with a napkin. The piles on my desk have been growing recently.
Becca signs her emails Kind Regards, and I sign mine Best Regards, Sincerely.
Song Writer at Home
This is the long version of the story on Larry Bonk I published in the Voice this summer:
"Song Writer at Home"
Larry Bonk has invited me over to his apartment, a rare occurrence in our friendship. He's slippery usually, hard to track down and slick with excuses when you finally manage to get him, but lately he's been downright accessible.
Until recently, he suffered from a writer’s block so systemic it dictated his life. He hid inside his apartment, disengaged from his friends, his career, and most of all, his music. Around the time we met in 2004, though, he'd been working obsessively on fifteen songs for two years, convinced he could create the perfect album. It never materialized; shortly after he relocated to New York to record, Larry's bandmate stole and pawned all of his equipment before fleeing the city. When Larry found out, he was so crushed that he destroyed their reels. After that, he produced virtually nothing for five years until January 1st, 2009, when he made a grandiose resolution: every day for the next year, he'd write and record a song. So far, he's made good on his pledge – over three hundred songs and counting.
The main reason he’s overcome his social reluctance this Sunday night is because I’ve expressed interest in his newest project, and Larry never, ever turns down press. I’m glad to have the excuse – in person he’s warm, charming, the guest celebrity who shows up late to parties and ends up holding court on the back deck till 4am, whose evasiveness makes his presence all the more desirable.
Things are going well for him so far; he’s been churning out haunting, lo-fi pop gems that belie the short amount of time he’s able to spend on them (he posts them daily to his website, anotherdayonearth.net, for free). He’s been featured on BBC and had two flippant-but-flattering features in wincingly ‘cool’ Vice Magazine, and as is typical with Larry some of his interviewers have become attached to him. He has a way of disarming people, sidestepping into their hearts after just a few conversations. Aly Carr, the host of an indie radio show, became so enamored she created an Another Day on Earth twitter page for him and bubbled over in emails to me about his honesty and soulfulness, his “creative, progressive and brave” music. Still, he’s struggling to keep up with his bills, and so there’s a subtle urgency to my visit; he’s got high hopes for this interview.
The sun is just setting when I arrive at his apartment, the basement of a brownstone in Park Slope. He opens the door fresh from the shower, damp and sockless, his dark hair frizzing into a shape not unlike a small shrub. A little self-conscious, he leads me down the dark hallway to his bedroom. It’s a windowless square, pretty dismal, littered with keyboards and guitars and flotsam – a worn sock here, a crumpled receipt there. His bed, which I sit on, is unmade and dotted with bits of dirt, as though he hasn’t thought to change the sheets in a while. The walls are plastered with topographic maps that are coming untaped, peeling and folding over one another like a shedding lizard skin.
He roots around in the corner, shrugging on a Michelin Man-style puffy parka that makes him look endearingly cartoonish in preparation for a trip to the bodega. Watching me scribble in my notebook, he rolls his eyes. “Oh geez,” he says, “is it depressing?”
When I first met Larry five years ago, he was still living in Tallahassee, Florida, writing music with his best friend Adam Perry. He’d played in bands before and achieved mild success in Plastic Mastery – a European tour, credibility in the (admittedly tiny) indie pop scene – but he had more lofty ambitions this time around. He and Adam were building a studio in what used to be a skate shop in downtown Tallahassee, dissatisfied with the spare bedroom that, up until then, they’d been renting as practice/recording space. Larry was amassing an ungodly amount of equipment with inheritance money he’d received after his grandmother’s recent death, and they’d run out of room for it all.
He and Adam were driving all over the country to score rare pieces, like an enormous mixing console they bought in Louisiana from Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers singer Michael McDonald (whom Larry never met, actually, because he passed out in the van and missed the transaction). After about a year and a half of acquiring and writing and playing, they had the beginnings of fifteen tracks recorded. Larry figured they were a little more than halfway there, and that as soon as the studio was done they would work in earnest to finish the songs. But over the course of just a few days, Adam announced he was moving to New York to live with his girlfriend, packed some bags and left Florida. The studio, which he and Larry had just finished building, sat unused.
Larry stewed for months. He couldn’t really finish the tracks without Adam, so the studio was defunct. Eventually, with Adam’s encouragement, he decided to move to New York, bringing a truck full of his best equipment and selling the rest to finance the trip. He decided they would find a studio in the city, barter the use of the equipment for recording time and finish the album there. And at first it all went fine; Larry’s aunt let him stay with her in New Jersey while he looked for work and got settled; Adam and some friends lent space in their apartments to house the equipment; he found a cooperative studio in Chinatown and planned to start moving everything over shortly. Then everything unraveled.
Adam had relapsed into a sizeable heroin addiction during their months apart and been secretly pawning Larry’s equipment to finance it ever since he arrived in New York. Because everyone knew they were working together, no one questioned Adam when he dropped in to pick up an instrument or two. No one knew there was anything strange happening at all until Larry stopped by one of the lofts and balked at the empty space. By that point, the damage was very thoroughly done; the only pieces remaining were the ones that had been too heavy to move, and Adam was gone, first to a halfway house upstate, then shipped up to rehab in Michigan by his parents, unreachable. Larry halfheartedly called some local pawnshops, but he never found the missing instruments.
The experience with Adam is still difficult for Larry to address. “So I found out I didn’t have any equipment anymore,” he says in summary, shifting uncomfortably. “Which, uh, obviously reneged the deal with [the studio in Chinatown], because there’s no reason for me to be there if I don’t have the equipment. So that went away, and that was also the end of the recording of that album, because it was half Adam’s... And then I couldn’t even think about it anymore. As a matter of fact, I threw most of the reels away and burned one of them. I just didn’t care. I knew I wasn’t going to finish it. I didn’t even listen to them.”
Still, he’s hesitant to classify it as a betrayal. He never pressed charges, and he and Adam have long since reconciled. Larry’s actually protective of Adam; he won’t tolerate any kind of talk he considers slanderous toward him. When pushed for a comment, he says, simply, “I’m really private, and he was the only person I let in for the music. And that’s kind of the reason that this [project] is the opposite, because I’m letting everyone in, warts and all, from the beginning.”
Today Adam is living in West Palm Beach, and says he’s been clean – finally, fully – for a year and a half; he’s finishing his BFA in painting and plans to teach art one day. For now, he’s working at Costco.
“I’d like to say that I wasn’t like an animal, but there I was, just like an animal,” he admits to me late one night, after one of his shifts. He says he’s been through years of therapy and treatment programs since then, and it shows in his language: “It was like air to breathe, so I needed it more than my relationship with Larry.” He wants to pay Larry back eventually. It is hard, he says, to pick up a guitar anymore, because it reminds him of what he stole.
No one, least of all Larry, understands fully why it took him so long to be able to make music again, or why New Year’s Day this year was the moment he chose to emerge from his shell. His friends have (not unjustly) tended to blame Adam, but Another Day on Earth illuminates an older, deeper issue – Larry has always been obsessive in ways that are difficult to maintain. Even when he was writing every day, he never knew when he was done with a song. In the span of an average night, he would sometimes write four new parts, each of which could conceivably work as the beginnings of new songs – great songs – but most of which were scrapped due to indecision.
It’s not that Larry’s music is inherently different or ‘evolved’ now; there is the same commingling of graceful sadness and relentlessly catchy hooks, as if Neil Young and an aging Brian Wilson sat down for dinner and Teenage Fanclub crashed in with a case of beer. It’s that forcing himself to publish imperfect songs on an unyielding schedule has had a galvanizing effect – he no longer second-guesses himself or makes excuses to avoid finishing a song (or creating in the first place).
He hasn’t really solved his inability to make final decisions but rather constructed a framework in which he doesn’t have to. He sings repeatedly about “growing sideways,” and maybe that’s what he’s doing: figuring out a system that works with his pathologies instead against them. “I’m not always brilliant enough to think of the right thing at the right time; some things need to gestate,” he says. “But it’s good because a lot of things I probably would have doubted away if I had time.” And it is a good thing, because some of my favorite songs on his site, like February 2nd’s “Seesaw Rhythm,” never would have been heard by anyone otherwise; he admits that it wasn’t finished when the clock struck midnight, and so he posted it even though his “musical carriage turned into a rotten ole pumpkin.”
Ultimately, he says that he’s not sure if the fifteen lost songs were really any better than what he’s produced since January; he just kept going over them again and again, never satisfied, too close to the material to have any objective sense of them.
Though he occasionally invites guest singers/collaborators, he works largely alone now, relying on guitar, keyboard, bass and a combination of electronic beats and loops. Sometimes he favors jangly guitar and fuzzy vocals, at other times blaring, drum-machine driven pop anthems; the common thread is his voice – honest, personal and humanist.
“I just can’t find the door,” he sings on January 14 in a twangy, ambling song called “We’re Just Floating Away.” “I don’t know what I want anymore/But I just know for sure /That I want it.../When I look at the mail in my box/Will I always rip it up?/But I want it.” (That last line isn’t analogy – I mailed him a full Metrocard once to help him out in a tight spot, but he didn’t know what it was, and so he never opened it.) He's singing about self-defeat, chronic little failures that he can't overcome despite his desire to, yet his tone is carefree. Larry loves to do this: temper dark revelations with nonchalance and humor. "I've thought of a couple of hazards regarding this project," he notes in the description below the song. "Deafness and obesity."
On January 23rd he describes what he calls a “sorta boring life” – his attempt to write about regular life, he tells me. “Fold up some clothes/And unfold other clothes/Now I’m home/They don’t smell clean…/Lying in bed I hear noises/But nothing’s going on/I have dreams I’m so glad that I’m home/But I don’t recall them.” There’s a quiet sadness humming along under the surface of these lyrics, in the chords and harmonies he chooses. Yet in describing this song, he writes, “A sorta boring life. There’s nothing really wrong with it. We can start a nice garden.” The tension between his admissions of loneliness and subsequent disavowal of his problems is what makes his work relatable – he’s simultaneously self-indulgent and self-effacing in a way that rings true to anyone who’s ever felt isolated or, well, depressed.
He’s not misanthropic, but he loves to poke fun at the futility of peoples’ efforts in life (mainly his own). In a photo accompanying his February 9th song “Traded in a dream for another dream,” a banner flaps against the side of a tract home (or modest community church – it’s hard to tell), proclaiming in proud letters, “The secret of happiness is t–”
The rest of the banner has been torn away.
Shortly after our initial interview, his roommates ask him to stop playing, and rather than compromise the project, he moves to a back room in a sympathetic friend’s apartment. At this point, aside from the ten hours or so he devotes daily to his music, he’s not working much; he squeaks by on a weekend gig installing computers at the UN and the occasional donation to his website. At times, the financial stress makes him deeply unhappy.
“This is my year to be a total scumbag,” he says to me late one night, absently stealing a sip of my tea. He wants to be sure I realize this, that I note it in my piece, as if it will absolve him of some perceived judgment for being so immersed, for skipping friends’ weddings because he can’t afford a weekend away. “When I finish this year, I’ll either somehow make ends meet making music, or just be a regular Joe with a regular job.”
He doesn’t meditate on the likelihood of the latter. Even though he wakes up miserable each morning with the day’s impossible deadline looming over his head, and ends the day manic, high from having created something (“it’s very bipolar,” he says), it may be the only system for him, someone who gravitates forever towards extremes. Everything exposed, or nothing at all. Every day, for a year.
He says it has a ring to it.
"Song Writer at Home"
Larry Bonk has invited me over to his apartment, a rare occurrence in our friendship. He's slippery usually, hard to track down and slick with excuses when you finally manage to get him, but lately he's been downright accessible.
Until recently, he suffered from a writer’s block so systemic it dictated his life. He hid inside his apartment, disengaged from his friends, his career, and most of all, his music. Around the time we met in 2004, though, he'd been working obsessively on fifteen songs for two years, convinced he could create the perfect album. It never materialized; shortly after he relocated to New York to record, Larry's bandmate stole and pawned all of his equipment before fleeing the city. When Larry found out, he was so crushed that he destroyed their reels. After that, he produced virtually nothing for five years until January 1st, 2009, when he made a grandiose resolution: every day for the next year, he'd write and record a song. So far, he's made good on his pledge – over three hundred songs and counting.
The main reason he’s overcome his social reluctance this Sunday night is because I’ve expressed interest in his newest project, and Larry never, ever turns down press. I’m glad to have the excuse – in person he’s warm, charming, the guest celebrity who shows up late to parties and ends up holding court on the back deck till 4am, whose evasiveness makes his presence all the more desirable.
Things are going well for him so far; he’s been churning out haunting, lo-fi pop gems that belie the short amount of time he’s able to spend on them (he posts them daily to his website, anotherdayonearth.net, for free). He’s been featured on BBC and had two flippant-but-flattering features in wincingly ‘cool’ Vice Magazine, and as is typical with Larry some of his interviewers have become attached to him. He has a way of disarming people, sidestepping into their hearts after just a few conversations. Aly Carr, the host of an indie radio show, became so enamored she created an Another Day on Earth twitter page for him and bubbled over in emails to me about his honesty and soulfulness, his “creative, progressive and brave” music. Still, he’s struggling to keep up with his bills, and so there’s a subtle urgency to my visit; he’s got high hopes for this interview.
The sun is just setting when I arrive at his apartment, the basement of a brownstone in Park Slope. He opens the door fresh from the shower, damp and sockless, his dark hair frizzing into a shape not unlike a small shrub. A little self-conscious, he leads me down the dark hallway to his bedroom. It’s a windowless square, pretty dismal, littered with keyboards and guitars and flotsam – a worn sock here, a crumpled receipt there. His bed, which I sit on, is unmade and dotted with bits of dirt, as though he hasn’t thought to change the sheets in a while. The walls are plastered with topographic maps that are coming untaped, peeling and folding over one another like a shedding lizard skin.
He roots around in the corner, shrugging on a Michelin Man-style puffy parka that makes him look endearingly cartoonish in preparation for a trip to the bodega. Watching me scribble in my notebook, he rolls his eyes. “Oh geez,” he says, “is it depressing?”
When I first met Larry five years ago, he was still living in Tallahassee, Florida, writing music with his best friend Adam Perry. He’d played in bands before and achieved mild success in Plastic Mastery – a European tour, credibility in the (admittedly tiny) indie pop scene – but he had more lofty ambitions this time around. He and Adam were building a studio in what used to be a skate shop in downtown Tallahassee, dissatisfied with the spare bedroom that, up until then, they’d been renting as practice/recording space. Larry was amassing an ungodly amount of equipment with inheritance money he’d received after his grandmother’s recent death, and they’d run out of room for it all.
He and Adam were driving all over the country to score rare pieces, like an enormous mixing console they bought in Louisiana from Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers singer Michael McDonald (whom Larry never met, actually, because he passed out in the van and missed the transaction). After about a year and a half of acquiring and writing and playing, they had the beginnings of fifteen tracks recorded. Larry figured they were a little more than halfway there, and that as soon as the studio was done they would work in earnest to finish the songs. But over the course of just a few days, Adam announced he was moving to New York to live with his girlfriend, packed some bags and left Florida. The studio, which he and Larry had just finished building, sat unused.
Larry stewed for months. He couldn’t really finish the tracks without Adam, so the studio was defunct. Eventually, with Adam’s encouragement, he decided to move to New York, bringing a truck full of his best equipment and selling the rest to finance the trip. He decided they would find a studio in the city, barter the use of the equipment for recording time and finish the album there. And at first it all went fine; Larry’s aunt let him stay with her in New Jersey while he looked for work and got settled; Adam and some friends lent space in their apartments to house the equipment; he found a cooperative studio in Chinatown and planned to start moving everything over shortly. Then everything unraveled.
Adam had relapsed into a sizeable heroin addiction during their months apart and been secretly pawning Larry’s equipment to finance it ever since he arrived in New York. Because everyone knew they were working together, no one questioned Adam when he dropped in to pick up an instrument or two. No one knew there was anything strange happening at all until Larry stopped by one of the lofts and balked at the empty space. By that point, the damage was very thoroughly done; the only pieces remaining were the ones that had been too heavy to move, and Adam was gone, first to a halfway house upstate, then shipped up to rehab in Michigan by his parents, unreachable. Larry halfheartedly called some local pawnshops, but he never found the missing instruments.
The experience with Adam is still difficult for Larry to address. “So I found out I didn’t have any equipment anymore,” he says in summary, shifting uncomfortably. “Which, uh, obviously reneged the deal with [the studio in Chinatown], because there’s no reason for me to be there if I don’t have the equipment. So that went away, and that was also the end of the recording of that album, because it was half Adam’s... And then I couldn’t even think about it anymore. As a matter of fact, I threw most of the reels away and burned one of them. I just didn’t care. I knew I wasn’t going to finish it. I didn’t even listen to them.”
Still, he’s hesitant to classify it as a betrayal. He never pressed charges, and he and Adam have long since reconciled. Larry’s actually protective of Adam; he won’t tolerate any kind of talk he considers slanderous toward him. When pushed for a comment, he says, simply, “I’m really private, and he was the only person I let in for the music. And that’s kind of the reason that this [project] is the opposite, because I’m letting everyone in, warts and all, from the beginning.”
Today Adam is living in West Palm Beach, and says he’s been clean – finally, fully – for a year and a half; he’s finishing his BFA in painting and plans to teach art one day. For now, he’s working at Costco.
“I’d like to say that I wasn’t like an animal, but there I was, just like an animal,” he admits to me late one night, after one of his shifts. He says he’s been through years of therapy and treatment programs since then, and it shows in his language: “It was like air to breathe, so I needed it more than my relationship with Larry.” He wants to pay Larry back eventually. It is hard, he says, to pick up a guitar anymore, because it reminds him of what he stole.
No one, least of all Larry, understands fully why it took him so long to be able to make music again, or why New Year’s Day this year was the moment he chose to emerge from his shell. His friends have (not unjustly) tended to blame Adam, but Another Day on Earth illuminates an older, deeper issue – Larry has always been obsessive in ways that are difficult to maintain. Even when he was writing every day, he never knew when he was done with a song. In the span of an average night, he would sometimes write four new parts, each of which could conceivably work as the beginnings of new songs – great songs – but most of which were scrapped due to indecision.
It’s not that Larry’s music is inherently different or ‘evolved’ now; there is the same commingling of graceful sadness and relentlessly catchy hooks, as if Neil Young and an aging Brian Wilson sat down for dinner and Teenage Fanclub crashed in with a case of beer. It’s that forcing himself to publish imperfect songs on an unyielding schedule has had a galvanizing effect – he no longer second-guesses himself or makes excuses to avoid finishing a song (or creating in the first place).
He hasn’t really solved his inability to make final decisions but rather constructed a framework in which he doesn’t have to. He sings repeatedly about “growing sideways,” and maybe that’s what he’s doing: figuring out a system that works with his pathologies instead against them. “I’m not always brilliant enough to think of the right thing at the right time; some things need to gestate,” he says. “But it’s good because a lot of things I probably would have doubted away if I had time.” And it is a good thing, because some of my favorite songs on his site, like February 2nd’s “Seesaw Rhythm,” never would have been heard by anyone otherwise; he admits that it wasn’t finished when the clock struck midnight, and so he posted it even though his “musical carriage turned into a rotten ole pumpkin.”
Ultimately, he says that he’s not sure if the fifteen lost songs were really any better than what he’s produced since January; he just kept going over them again and again, never satisfied, too close to the material to have any objective sense of them.
Though he occasionally invites guest singers/collaborators, he works largely alone now, relying on guitar, keyboard, bass and a combination of electronic beats and loops. Sometimes he favors jangly guitar and fuzzy vocals, at other times blaring, drum-machine driven pop anthems; the common thread is his voice – honest, personal and humanist.
“I just can’t find the door,” he sings on January 14 in a twangy, ambling song called “We’re Just Floating Away.” “I don’t know what I want anymore/But I just know for sure /That I want it.../When I look at the mail in my box/Will I always rip it up?/But I want it.” (That last line isn’t analogy – I mailed him a full Metrocard once to help him out in a tight spot, but he didn’t know what it was, and so he never opened it.) He's singing about self-defeat, chronic little failures that he can't overcome despite his desire to, yet his tone is carefree. Larry loves to do this: temper dark revelations with nonchalance and humor. "I've thought of a couple of hazards regarding this project," he notes in the description below the song. "Deafness and obesity."
On January 23rd he describes what he calls a “sorta boring life” – his attempt to write about regular life, he tells me. “Fold up some clothes/And unfold other clothes/Now I’m home/They don’t smell clean…/Lying in bed I hear noises/But nothing’s going on/I have dreams I’m so glad that I’m home/But I don’t recall them.” There’s a quiet sadness humming along under the surface of these lyrics, in the chords and harmonies he chooses. Yet in describing this song, he writes, “A sorta boring life. There’s nothing really wrong with it. We can start a nice garden.” The tension between his admissions of loneliness and subsequent disavowal of his problems is what makes his work relatable – he’s simultaneously self-indulgent and self-effacing in a way that rings true to anyone who’s ever felt isolated or, well, depressed.
He’s not misanthropic, but he loves to poke fun at the futility of peoples’ efforts in life (mainly his own). In a photo accompanying his February 9th song “Traded in a dream for another dream,” a banner flaps against the side of a tract home (or modest community church – it’s hard to tell), proclaiming in proud letters, “The secret of happiness is t–”
The rest of the banner has been torn away.
Shortly after our initial interview, his roommates ask him to stop playing, and rather than compromise the project, he moves to a back room in a sympathetic friend’s apartment. At this point, aside from the ten hours or so he devotes daily to his music, he’s not working much; he squeaks by on a weekend gig installing computers at the UN and the occasional donation to his website. At times, the financial stress makes him deeply unhappy.
“This is my year to be a total scumbag,” he says to me late one night, absently stealing a sip of my tea. He wants to be sure I realize this, that I note it in my piece, as if it will absolve him of some perceived judgment for being so immersed, for skipping friends’ weddings because he can’t afford a weekend away. “When I finish this year, I’ll either somehow make ends meet making music, or just be a regular Joe with a regular job.”
He doesn’t meditate on the likelihood of the latter. Even though he wakes up miserable each morning with the day’s impossible deadline looming over his head, and ends the day manic, high from having created something (“it’s very bipolar,” he says), it may be the only system for him, someone who gravitates forever towards extremes. Everything exposed, or nothing at all. Every day, for a year.
He says it has a ring to it.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
More Wallpaper
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http://www.osborneandlittle.com/nina-campbell/sylvana-wallpaper/wallpapers/gilty/
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http://www.osborneandlittle.com/nina-campbell/lombardia-wallpapers/wallpapers/amati/
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http://www.osborneandlittle.com/osborne-&-little/pompadour-wallpapers/wallpapers/du-barry/
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http://www.osborneandlittle.com/osborne-&-little/hothouse-by-suzy-hoodless/wallpapers/foxglove/
http://www.fermlivingshop.us/wallpaper/fairyflower_gold.html
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wallpaper
http://www.osborneandlittle.com/osborne-&-little/hothouse-by-suzy-hoodless/wallpapers/foxglove/
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http://www.osborneandlittle.com/nina-campbell/giverny-wallpapers/wallpapers/delphine/
http://www.osborneandlittle.com/nina-campbell/lombardia-wallpapers/wallpapers/stradivari/
http://www.osborneandlittle.com/osborne-&-little/folia-wallpaper/wallpapers/allerdale/
http://www.walnutwallpaper.com/wallpapers.php?filter=designer&type=3&name=Cole+%26+Son&paperID=379
http://www.cavernhome.com/wallpaper/wallpaper.php?colorway=cavalry-carob
http://www.grahambrown.com/us/product/17624/Vivid+%3A+Brown+Wallpaper/75?show
http://www.grahambrown.com/us/product/57216/Darcy+%3A+Purple+Wallpaper/71?show
http://raptureandwright.co.uk/wallpapers/aurora/
http://www.cole-and-son.com/collection_detail.asp?collectionid=108
http://www.cole-and-son.com/home.asp
oh my god...my eyes are falling out of my head. more later.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Helpless
Pern's head smells like fish when I kiss it, dribbles of wet food stuck there from our feedings. She's sick, really sick, and for a week (two weeks?) I've been force-feeding her with a syringe. She will not eat on her own.
We have a routine; I plunge the syringe into the wet food, food that stinks like fish and fermented bird and is the consistency of baby food, and I pull. Pockets of air jet in and I have to hold it upright, tap it with my finger, let the food settle and then push out the excess air. Plunge and try again, and again, until it's full.
I find her wherever she is and squat behind her, cooing to her and petting her head as I grip it in my palm. Come on now, good girl, yes, gooood girrrrl, I say as I prod her toothless mouth open with plastic. She jerks her head in protest. We're getting better at it, though, the feedings. She hacks and gums it down, miserably licking her chops. We're getting better at the routine, yes, but she's not getting better.
I'm guessing that anyone who doesn't care for an animal will not be interested in this. That she lies listless on my bed with eyes at half mast, curls against me not for affection but for comfort. On the one hand I'm numbly methodical about it all, following doctors' orders, stolidly confident they will eventually turn out to be useful because one morning she'll be bright-eyed and chirpy. On the other hand I'm so panicked I can't stand it. That sentence is lazy because I can't pry the lid off.
I thought I had more to say.
We have a routine; I plunge the syringe into the wet food, food that stinks like fish and fermented bird and is the consistency of baby food, and I pull. Pockets of air jet in and I have to hold it upright, tap it with my finger, let the food settle and then push out the excess air. Plunge and try again, and again, until it's full.
I find her wherever she is and squat behind her, cooing to her and petting her head as I grip it in my palm. Come on now, good girl, yes, gooood girrrrl, I say as I prod her toothless mouth open with plastic. She jerks her head in protest. We're getting better at it, though, the feedings. She hacks and gums it down, miserably licking her chops. We're getting better at the routine, yes, but she's not getting better.
I'm guessing that anyone who doesn't care for an animal will not be interested in this. That she lies listless on my bed with eyes at half mast, curls against me not for affection but for comfort. On the one hand I'm numbly methodical about it all, following doctors' orders, stolidly confident they will eventually turn out to be useful because one morning she'll be bright-eyed and chirpy. On the other hand I'm so panicked I can't stand it. That sentence is lazy because I can't pry the lid off.
I thought I had more to say.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Baptisms
Did I ever tell you about the baptisms we used to host, the church congregation spreading blankets on our hill leading down to the murky pond, John the pastor standing waist deep and dunking the saved. My dad would man the grill, charcoal smoke and blistered meat swelling the air, a table with plastic cloth set up adjacent, topped with mustard, ketchup, buns. John would preach in the water, wearing a Hanes white tee-shirt, now green and brown with algae. He would hold the saved person’s head and dip them backwards, submerge them, hold them under and then haul them up sputtering. The congregation cheered and sang; we prayed. Once someone said they saw a scorpion in the grass.
I knew the way into the water was squelchy, the concrete bottom furred with algae and water plants. There were fish in there and snapping turtles, too.
My dad would give us turns on the tire swing, heaving us so high that we were parallel with the ground before he launched us, not swinging but sweeping through the air, so close to crashing into tree branches on the other side but pulled back by gravity, saved, at the last second. We would shriek and shriek, again.
I never wanted to be baptized in the pond, or by John, with all those people watching. But I loved those annual picnics at our house, Our House, in our water.
I knew the way into the water was squelchy, the concrete bottom furred with algae and water plants. There were fish in there and snapping turtles, too.
My dad would give us turns on the tire swing, heaving us so high that we were parallel with the ground before he launched us, not swinging but sweeping through the air, so close to crashing into tree branches on the other side but pulled back by gravity, saved, at the last second. We would shriek and shriek, again.
I never wanted to be baptized in the pond, or by John, with all those people watching. But I loved those annual picnics at our house, Our House, in our water.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Saturday morning phone call
After small talk and updates and respective plans for the weekend:
"Oh, that phlegmatic bunch of blubber!"
"Obese, that's not even the word for her, what is it now? ("Morbidly obese?")
Yes, morbidly obese! That'd probably be a good thing for her, actually, if she just died!"
- My father, on my sister's cat Ellie
"Oh, that phlegmatic bunch of blubber!"
"Obese, that's not even the word for her, what is it now? ("Morbidly obese?")
Yes, morbidly obese! That'd probably be a good thing for her, actually, if she just died!"
- My father, on my sister's cat Ellie
Saturday, July 18, 2009
As much as I like to pride myself in being unique and strong-willed, the truth is I'm really malleable. A piece of silly putty in a cheap plastic egg. I know this because of vacations I've taken.
When I leave New York, I decide I hate it. Wherever I am, Silver Lake or Vermont, I decide I've stumbled upon the life I should be living, the life I'm too afraid to reach out and grab. God, I think, what have I been doing with the last years of my youth?
But how can that be true? How can I be meant to live in a bungalow in the Los Angeles hills and hike in the desert and be part of a freer, lighter existence, light as the bright dry air there, and also be meant to birth babies in the Vermont mountains and take up yoga and own a canoe? The contradictions don't diminish my conviction when I'm there, however.
When I come home, back to New York, I feel glum. It's so dirty, and frenetic, and old, and stuffy, and stressful, and tiring, how long can I hump groceries home on swollen feet that ache from walking up and down, up and down stairs in heels, all over the city, all day? How long can I go without smelling grass and leaves?
And then I stay put for a few weeks. Back to work and my emails and my bed that's too small for both Billy and me, and my cats who greet me at the door when I come home, and all my little objects that I've carefully collected and to which I'm so attached, and I forget.
I don't really want kids, I think, and LA is so far away... There are other things to do and worry about, and I forget. Will I never leave? Will I stay until life ('Life') intervenes and I'm forced to change course? Is that unevolved, lazy, cowardly? Is it fine?
I should admit right here that when I worked at a small telecommunications firm briefly, two years ago, I started to think I wanted breast implants because so many of the women there had them.
I mean, seriously.
When I leave New York, I decide I hate it. Wherever I am, Silver Lake or Vermont, I decide I've stumbled upon the life I should be living, the life I'm too afraid to reach out and grab. God, I think, what have I been doing with the last years of my youth?
But how can that be true? How can I be meant to live in a bungalow in the Los Angeles hills and hike in the desert and be part of a freer, lighter existence, light as the bright dry air there, and also be meant to birth babies in the Vermont mountains and take up yoga and own a canoe? The contradictions don't diminish my conviction when I'm there, however.
When I come home, back to New York, I feel glum. It's so dirty, and frenetic, and old, and stuffy, and stressful, and tiring, how long can I hump groceries home on swollen feet that ache from walking up and down, up and down stairs in heels, all over the city, all day? How long can I go without smelling grass and leaves?
And then I stay put for a few weeks. Back to work and my emails and my bed that's too small for both Billy and me, and my cats who greet me at the door when I come home, and all my little objects that I've carefully collected and to which I'm so attached, and I forget.
I don't really want kids, I think, and LA is so far away... There are other things to do and worry about, and I forget. Will I never leave? Will I stay until life ('Life') intervenes and I'm forced to change course? Is that unevolved, lazy, cowardly? Is it fine?
I should admit right here that when I worked at a small telecommunications firm briefly, two years ago, I started to think I wanted breast implants because so many of the women there had them.
I mean, seriously.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Babies
A few years ago, I discovered mommy blogs. I was working at a small, inconsequential publishing house, and I didn't have much work to do, and I was very bored all day. I was transfixed as soon as I found them. I'd scooch closer to the computer screen, kicking my pinchy flats back under my chair and resting on my elbows, reading about 5am feedings, bleeding nipples, fresh baby smell and postpartum depression. Dooce. Finslippy. Breed 'Em and Weep. These absurd website names.
The thing is, I never wanted children when I was little. Some girls play with dolls, and play house and pretend to be mommies? I scoured the woods for perfectly smooth sticks to use as swords, and tried to convince my nephews that the tire swing was a time machine that could shoot them back to the age of the dinosaurs.... If a girl coerced me into playing house, I chose the dad, or the 'cool brother.' I didn't give a shit about babies.
When I started reading mommy blogs, I thought that maybe I was turning some subtle corner. That a secret part of me was unfurling, opening like a small flower towards a hidden maternal light. Because seriously, I loved these blogs; loved hearing about what it was like to give birth and take care of a tiny helpless human, to be so suddenly alone in the world, home with this unknowable squalling being, the old life gone and with it the old friends, just the new mother with her sore breasts, stranger's body.
I've thought a lot about having kids, and as I've gotten up in years - I'm 28, as of a few days ago - I thought, well maybe. Maybe. But something happened: I spent a night with a child. Not a child brought to light by its mother's words, on paper, but a real one, a two-year-old girl, daughter of my boyfriend's cousin. She didn't speak much English, this girl, mostly Korean, and she sat placidly at the table with us one night a couple weeks ago, occassionally slurping on a noodle, twisting around to take her shoe off, putting her shoe on her head. The usual. And as I sat there and watched her, I wanted to feel something for this girl, this little one. I wanted to feel, I don't know, SOMETHING. And I did. You know what I felt?
Bored.
Hanging out with the child was boring. We had to pay constant attention to her, to make sure she didn't fall or grab something dangerous or put something dirty in her motuh. We cajolled her into accepting two spoonfuls of yogurt; I absently petted her hair and accepted a handful of napkins when she solemly gave them to me. These small moments were sweet enough, I guess, but mostly they were kind of tedious. I wanted to drift off into my own thoughts, but something about being in her proximity prohibited that - something inside of me prohibited that. I had to be on guard, on alert, for the tiniest trivial nothings. With little kids, the little nothings have to mean everything.
I felt wistful walking down the street afterwards, eyeing all the young pretty girls smoking their cigarettes, balancing on one foot as they adjusted their heel straps. They gathered in small packs, soft dresses and pinned-up hair, laughing on the sidewalks of New York. I thought what it would be like to be So-Jun, pushing her daughter in the stroller, pausing periodically to pick up the stuffed fish she kept jettisoning over the edge. It didn't seem romantic, like the way I'd pictured it all these years. It seemed sad.
When I read the blogs, even at their darkest moments, the lives of the mothers seemed intensely immediate. Worth it. They'd discovered a secret world the rest of us childless ones can only wonder at and, depending on our worldview, dismiss or pine for. But there I was, suddenly thrust in the midst of the real deal, and basically, I wanted to get away.
I think that motherhood might be just be another world I've conjured up for myself. Another imagination game I've been playing. When I was little, finishing a good book sometimes felt profoundly heartbreaking - I'd mope around afterwards, casting about for some replacement of that lost world. I don't feel entirely like that now, but I wonder. It's not entirely dissimilar.
I'm 28, and suddenly I feel so far from ready, so far from ever feeling ready. I'd like to wait another 10 years or so before considering it. Maybe 20. In my next life. The one after this one.
I don't want to give up the possibility, to let go of the dream of a family, because sometimes I still think I'd be good at it - that it'd be good for me. My own little world, my own little people. But they wouldn't me mine, would they? And then I think about my life, and my life not being my life anymore, and I just...
I don't know.
The thing is, I never wanted children when I was little. Some girls play with dolls, and play house and pretend to be mommies? I scoured the woods for perfectly smooth sticks to use as swords, and tried to convince my nephews that the tire swing was a time machine that could shoot them back to the age of the dinosaurs.... If a girl coerced me into playing house, I chose the dad, or the 'cool brother.' I didn't give a shit about babies.
When I started reading mommy blogs, I thought that maybe I was turning some subtle corner. That a secret part of me was unfurling, opening like a small flower towards a hidden maternal light. Because seriously, I loved these blogs; loved hearing about what it was like to give birth and take care of a tiny helpless human, to be so suddenly alone in the world, home with this unknowable squalling being, the old life gone and with it the old friends, just the new mother with her sore breasts, stranger's body.
I've thought a lot about having kids, and as I've gotten up in years - I'm 28, as of a few days ago - I thought, well maybe. Maybe. But something happened: I spent a night with a child. Not a child brought to light by its mother's words, on paper, but a real one, a two-year-old girl, daughter of my boyfriend's cousin. She didn't speak much English, this girl, mostly Korean, and she sat placidly at the table with us one night a couple weeks ago, occassionally slurping on a noodle, twisting around to take her shoe off, putting her shoe on her head. The usual. And as I sat there and watched her, I wanted to feel something for this girl, this little one. I wanted to feel, I don't know, SOMETHING. And I did. You know what I felt?
Bored.
Hanging out with the child was boring. We had to pay constant attention to her, to make sure she didn't fall or grab something dangerous or put something dirty in her motuh. We cajolled her into accepting two spoonfuls of yogurt; I absently petted her hair and accepted a handful of napkins when she solemly gave them to me. These small moments were sweet enough, I guess, but mostly they were kind of tedious. I wanted to drift off into my own thoughts, but something about being in her proximity prohibited that - something inside of me prohibited that. I had to be on guard, on alert, for the tiniest trivial nothings. With little kids, the little nothings have to mean everything.
I felt wistful walking down the street afterwards, eyeing all the young pretty girls smoking their cigarettes, balancing on one foot as they adjusted their heel straps. They gathered in small packs, soft dresses and pinned-up hair, laughing on the sidewalks of New York. I thought what it would be like to be So-Jun, pushing her daughter in the stroller, pausing periodically to pick up the stuffed fish she kept jettisoning over the edge. It didn't seem romantic, like the way I'd pictured it all these years. It seemed sad.
When I read the blogs, even at their darkest moments, the lives of the mothers seemed intensely immediate. Worth it. They'd discovered a secret world the rest of us childless ones can only wonder at and, depending on our worldview, dismiss or pine for. But there I was, suddenly thrust in the midst of the real deal, and basically, I wanted to get away.
I think that motherhood might be just be another world I've conjured up for myself. Another imagination game I've been playing. When I was little, finishing a good book sometimes felt profoundly heartbreaking - I'd mope around afterwards, casting about for some replacement of that lost world. I don't feel entirely like that now, but I wonder. It's not entirely dissimilar.
I'm 28, and suddenly I feel so far from ready, so far from ever feeling ready. I'd like to wait another 10 years or so before considering it. Maybe 20. In my next life. The one after this one.
I don't want to give up the possibility, to let go of the dream of a family, because sometimes I still think I'd be good at it - that it'd be good for me. My own little world, my own little people. But they wouldn't me mine, would they? And then I think about my life, and my life not being my life anymore, and I just...
I don't know.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I’m soggy. I wish someone could pick me up, wring me out, give me a good shake and hang me up on a clothesline to dry. I need the bleaching power of the sun.
My birthday was last week, and James was in town, and it’s seemed like every night was a reason to celebrate. I also just love birthdays, love the absurdity of it, all that attention. I was trotting around all night on Friday telling people it was my wedding night. I am now so full of sake, champagne and beer that I am likely still drunk.
*
Edit – I’m now back from several meetings and feeling less thick-headed. I don’t have much to say here, but I’m feeling bad about neglecting ‘my writing’ since the program ended and am determined to get back in shape. Consider this me wheezing on the Stairmaster.
I’ve been trying to be productive. An easy way to do that is to pay my bills, which I’ve now almost completely done. Electric, Gas, Vet, done! Sailing out the door. I love the crispness of it, the thick bold lines of a check mark. Done.
Next week I leave for LA. Will I be productive, sitting side by side with James on our laptops as the bright California sun streams in through the windows? Will we pick oranges and wear sunglasses and take photos next to palm trees? Will we drive around in his VW and play all our old favorite songs? I’m already imagining the trip in retrospect, as a series of photographs I’ll upload to my flickr and stare at wistfully years from now. That’s one of my problems, I think. I’m always anticipating things in past tense.
My birthday was last week, and James was in town, and it’s seemed like every night was a reason to celebrate. I also just love birthdays, love the absurdity of it, all that attention. I was trotting around all night on Friday telling people it was my wedding night. I am now so full of sake, champagne and beer that I am likely still drunk.
*
Edit – I’m now back from several meetings and feeling less thick-headed. I don’t have much to say here, but I’m feeling bad about neglecting ‘my writing’ since the program ended and am determined to get back in shape. Consider this me wheezing on the Stairmaster.
I’ve been trying to be productive. An easy way to do that is to pay my bills, which I’ve now almost completely done. Electric, Gas, Vet, done! Sailing out the door. I love the crispness of it, the thick bold lines of a check mark. Done.
Next week I leave for LA. Will I be productive, sitting side by side with James on our laptops as the bright California sun streams in through the windows? Will we pick oranges and wear sunglasses and take photos next to palm trees? Will we drive around in his VW and play all our old favorite songs? I’m already imagining the trip in retrospect, as a series of photographs I’ll upload to my flickr and stare at wistfully years from now. That’s one of my problems, I think. I’m always anticipating things in past tense.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Simplicity
The rain started falling in a steady grey mist while I sat inside the courthouse at Livingston Street. We watched a video about the significance of jury duty, complete with no-name actors dressed up as Europeans, and then I cozied into my chair and typed. Once or twice, I checked email. It was nice to be inside, knowing no one around me, knowing no one would talk to me for a long time. Occasionally a woman entered the room and called the names of people who were going to be interviewed and, most likely, selected for a trial. My name wasn’t called.
Then, she said we could go. “Ladies and Gentleman, you may all leave; the judge doesn’t need you. You are done for eight years.” She gave a rueful smile and thumped a stack of papers on the desk in front of her to organize them into a perfect pile. We could leave! There was a satisfied murmuring throughout the room as folks started gathering their coats, stuffing paperbacks into pockets and purses.
Ben and I waved at each other. I opened my umbrella and crossed the street towards him, and we walked up Smith Street together. This place, or that place? We read menus and deliberated. We had nowhere to be and decided to drink beer. We stuffed ourselves on French fries and sandwiches, slurped cold beer, gossiped. It was delicious. When I stood up, I stumbled into him and then tripped on my way into the bathroom. I realized with some embarrassment that I was drunk – or if not drunk, then on my way. But I couldn’t stop giggling.
We decided to “do work.” We walked in the rain for long minutes, our toes getting damp, complaining about the chill in the air, until we found a nice coffee shop. Ben complained about the way the girl made my English Breakfast tea. There was no internet service. We discussed Ben’s book and I tinkered with the piece I’m writing, a maudlin account of how death is handled in offices. It was supposed to be funny, originally, but as is typical, I became too serious about everything. Now I don’t know what to do with it.
Our stomachs were starting to turn uneasily from the bulky combination of beer, grease, meat and caffeine. We found an ice cream parlor with internet access, and observed the groups of children and their mothers who were sitting in the back. It was very quiet. The rain kept falling and the children squealed while the mothers spoke in low, soft tones. The children pulled on rain boots and touched the flowers in vases that were sitting on the tables. Goodbye, said some of the women cheerfully, leading their children by the hands out the door; Goodbye, waved the others, who were still sitting at their tables, sipping chai lattes and helping their children spoon strawberry ice cream into their mouths.
The rain stopped and we had no more work to do or emails to send, or if we did, we had given up the pretense of caring about any of it, so we went for a walk. Back up Smith Street, past the apartment he and Mark shared, the bars they used to frequent, and as we walked we reminisced about those years, and I tried to think of happy memories from that time period with Mark but couldn’t. We thought that was funny, that I had no happy memories, and giggled about it. It felt nice to be able to joke about it without much of a twinge at all, no twinge really, a healthy handful of years later. We said goodbye to Smith Street and walked uphill.
We found a small bar, a tiny bar, with fresh local beers on tap and a row of flavored bitters for various whiskey drinks. A few people came in, settled into tables, and Ben and I sat at the bar. The door was open and the breeze was cold. We sat with our coats on and complimented the beer. It was very crisp and delicious. Everyone at my office thought I’d spent the entire day at jury duty, and that knowledge was deeply satisfying. It was getting later, darker, but I wasn’t very tired or drunk. I had plans and so I had to leave, but I could have stayed longer. It was one of those days that came out of nowhere and pulled me along. It was one of the best days I’d ever had.
Then, she said we could go. “Ladies and Gentleman, you may all leave; the judge doesn’t need you. You are done for eight years.” She gave a rueful smile and thumped a stack of papers on the desk in front of her to organize them into a perfect pile. We could leave! There was a satisfied murmuring throughout the room as folks started gathering their coats, stuffing paperbacks into pockets and purses.
Ben and I waved at each other. I opened my umbrella and crossed the street towards him, and we walked up Smith Street together. This place, or that place? We read menus and deliberated. We had nowhere to be and decided to drink beer. We stuffed ourselves on French fries and sandwiches, slurped cold beer, gossiped. It was delicious. When I stood up, I stumbled into him and then tripped on my way into the bathroom. I realized with some embarrassment that I was drunk – or if not drunk, then on my way. But I couldn’t stop giggling.
We decided to “do work.” We walked in the rain for long minutes, our toes getting damp, complaining about the chill in the air, until we found a nice coffee shop. Ben complained about the way the girl made my English Breakfast tea. There was no internet service. We discussed Ben’s book and I tinkered with the piece I’m writing, a maudlin account of how death is handled in offices. It was supposed to be funny, originally, but as is typical, I became too serious about everything. Now I don’t know what to do with it.
Our stomachs were starting to turn uneasily from the bulky combination of beer, grease, meat and caffeine. We found an ice cream parlor with internet access, and observed the groups of children and their mothers who were sitting in the back. It was very quiet. The rain kept falling and the children squealed while the mothers spoke in low, soft tones. The children pulled on rain boots and touched the flowers in vases that were sitting on the tables. Goodbye, said some of the women cheerfully, leading their children by the hands out the door; Goodbye, waved the others, who were still sitting at their tables, sipping chai lattes and helping their children spoon strawberry ice cream into their mouths.
The rain stopped and we had no more work to do or emails to send, or if we did, we had given up the pretense of caring about any of it, so we went for a walk. Back up Smith Street, past the apartment he and Mark shared, the bars they used to frequent, and as we walked we reminisced about those years, and I tried to think of happy memories from that time period with Mark but couldn’t. We thought that was funny, that I had no happy memories, and giggled about it. It felt nice to be able to joke about it without much of a twinge at all, no twinge really, a healthy handful of years later. We said goodbye to Smith Street and walked uphill.
We found a small bar, a tiny bar, with fresh local beers on tap and a row of flavored bitters for various whiskey drinks. A few people came in, settled into tables, and Ben and I sat at the bar. The door was open and the breeze was cold. We sat with our coats on and complimented the beer. It was very crisp and delicious. Everyone at my office thought I’d spent the entire day at jury duty, and that knowledge was deeply satisfying. It was getting later, darker, but I wasn’t very tired or drunk. I had plans and so I had to leave, but I could have stayed longer. It was one of those days that came out of nowhere and pulled me along. It was one of the best days I’d ever had.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Stonington leaves
I keep thinking about my cat, who was put to sleep yesterday. I post pictures of him on the internet and update my facebook status to commemorate him. It is ridiculous. Someone listen, someone listen, I seem to be saying. I had a cat, and he was my childhood, and now he's gone. He's gone and my childhood's gone.
It is a layered sadness. I am sad, simply, because he was wonderful and I loved him. I am sad because I nursed him to health as a baby, and then kept him alive as an elderly cat, tempting him once with formula and later with tuna. I am sad because I got this cat when I was 13, turning the corner from childhood to adolescence, cognizance, angst, and he died when I was 27, turning the corner from outlived adolescence and young adulthood into plain, pragmatic adulthood. What I'm trying to say is that he was my steward into adulthood.
I don't know, what does one say about this? He was my cat, and I loved him. He purred constantly, at all times, while eating and sitting and walking. We called him Little Purrbox. He was outgoing and sweet and simple. Always hungry, always happy, an easy friend.
Over the past few years I've watched my father grow old, get sick, and I've been trying to come to terms with his impending death, my certain future loss of him. My cat's death feels horribly like a harbinger. Don't go, don't go, I want to say to them. Please don't leave. Please, stop leaving.
You can't get them to listen, you know.
My parents are moving houses and boxing their belongings and this will surely be the last place they live, or one of them lives, or one of the last places. I can't shake the feeling that we're rounding the final bend.
It is a layered sadness. I am sad, simply, because he was wonderful and I loved him. I am sad because I nursed him to health as a baby, and then kept him alive as an elderly cat, tempting him once with formula and later with tuna. I am sad because I got this cat when I was 13, turning the corner from childhood to adolescence, cognizance, angst, and he died when I was 27, turning the corner from outlived adolescence and young adulthood into plain, pragmatic adulthood. What I'm trying to say is that he was my steward into adulthood.
I don't know, what does one say about this? He was my cat, and I loved him. He purred constantly, at all times, while eating and sitting and walking. We called him Little Purrbox. He was outgoing and sweet and simple. Always hungry, always happy, an easy friend.
Over the past few years I've watched my father grow old, get sick, and I've been trying to come to terms with his impending death, my certain future loss of him. My cat's death feels horribly like a harbinger. Don't go, don't go, I want to say to them. Please don't leave. Please, stop leaving.
You can't get them to listen, you know.
My parents are moving houses and boxing their belongings and this will surely be the last place they live, or one of them lives, or one of the last places. I can't shake the feeling that we're rounding the final bend.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The glad years come
This is a personal essay I've been working on for a couple weeks. I'll likely revise it, at which point I'll post it again, but for now, here it is:
"The glad years come"
Megan Foley
On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.
We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical, as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and faded pillows, a lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.
Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: her with the lumpy navy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, that is) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing, for the first time, its tag, finally understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird well into her 80s), when I find the suitcase. The suitcase; the point of this essay.
It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, sitting in the shadows nestled between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.
“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting down awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip; Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.
The lining of the suitcase is a very shiny pink, a shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I have opened and begun exploring. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and my sister, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. An illustrated woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his. The attic has suddenly been electrified.
On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her red lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on top of her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944. They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her skirt-suits and teetering heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.
And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet. But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth with Nana, balancing her on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a beige suit in Brooklyn, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.
The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated Italian family, and Nana was poor. His father was a doctor, he was a lawyer, and she, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard for opera, was a typist. His family didn’t approve, but they nevertheless had the big catholic wedding – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the honeymoon, they moved into a house, they had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together, on the beach; she is plunked in his lap, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. He’s frowning too.
In his will, he specified that Nana would be named the ‘executress’ of his estate, unless she died or were unable to care for the children. In that case, the money would go to his father, and then his mother. But one month after his death, his father died; and two months later, so did his mother. His brother Hector (and here the tone of the telling darkens, grows nefarious) went to court and claimed that Nana was unfit to manage the estate, petitioned to be named the executor, and won. The story tends to get wrapped up in a stark black bow: Hector kept all the money to himself, and Nana and the girls were set adrift.
Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.
The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even had a chance to begin, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the president.”
Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she worked as a secretary and, at night, managed her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, a little, that she had bipolar disorder and was sporadically hospitalized. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.
Mia reads:
“November 14, 1961
The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC
My Dear Mr. President [this would have been Kennedy],
I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.”
We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I was, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated and desperate.
What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from the estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”
Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read her situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954, she attempts to get her benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third – $22 a month – of her previous payments. She’s essentially gone from receiving $568 to $168 a month, and I don’t know why, but the numbers fascinate me.
In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, this time trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.
Her letter to Ribicoff, five years later, reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”
I imagine her drawing herself up as she sits to type it, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair, chest high. Of course she never received a response.
And then, as abruptly as we made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture of him and Nana, and white enamel deco necklaces, which we assume were Nana’s. I am pleased but agitated. For the first time, I have heard Philip’s voice, her voice, but my access to them is finite.
Four hours later, I am at a cocktail party with my older brother holding a sticky glass of pink champagne punch. We are surrounded by bowls of Hershey’s kisses and platters dressed with mediocre cheese, and I watch as a caterer pulls two bags of dumplings and mini quiche out of the freezer and shakes them onto trays, to warm in the oven and then circulate. (I feel like I’ve seen behind the curtain, and my anticipation of trying them correspondingly diminishes.)
“What was Nana like?” I ask. Duncan’s attention has shifted to the raffle the hostess is announcing from the top of her dining room table, and he takes an annoyingly long time to answer.
“She was Mom and Aunt Roberta and Aunt Jill,” he says, “she was all three of them.”
It is a pat answer, too easy, and I am dissatisfied. Which part of them? When? “But what was she like,” I prod.
“She was full of life.” He describes how our oldest brother used to make fun of the way she walked, encased in a pencil skirt and tottering on four-inch heels; he stands rigid and pokes his butt out, taking small tiptoe steps to demonstrate.
It is funny, and it is not enough. Why has he picked a juvenile joke to recount, out of all his memories of her? Why did she, for that matter, save a refrigerator receipt, out of all the things Philip gave her? I am playing an impossible game, I know, trying to piece together a coherent picture out of fragments, to ascribe my own narrative to others’ memories.
The next day, hungover from sugar and champagne, I find my mom in the kitchen and ask if she’d like to see the suitcase. I have an hour before I have to head into Washington to catch my bus, and though I’m tired, I feel a small thrill at the idea of witnessing her reaction to the items. But she declines. Next time you come down, she says.
And so I go back to Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for five years (not so far, ultimately, from where they lived), hanging Nana’s necklaces on my wall, propping up the small photobooth photo on my shelf.
Friends stop in, stay for dinner, and sometimes I take the objects out. These were hers, I say, proffering the necklaces, this was him. See how pretty? Wasn’t he pretty? I never knew them.
"The glad years come"
Megan Foley
On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.
We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical, as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and faded pillows, a lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.
Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: her with the lumpy navy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, that is) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing, for the first time, its tag, finally understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird well into her 80s), when I find the suitcase. The suitcase; the point of this essay.
It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, sitting in the shadows nestled between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.
“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting down awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip; Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.
The lining of the suitcase is a very shiny pink, a shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I have opened and begun exploring. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and my sister, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. An illustrated woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his. The attic has suddenly been electrified.
On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her red lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on top of her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944. They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her skirt-suits and teetering heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.
And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet. But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth with Nana, balancing her on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a beige suit in Brooklyn, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.
The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated Italian family, and Nana was poor. His father was a doctor, he was a lawyer, and she, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard for opera, was a typist. His family didn’t approve, but they nevertheless had the big catholic wedding – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the honeymoon, they moved into a house, they had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together, on the beach; she is plunked in his lap, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. He’s frowning too.
In his will, he specified that Nana would be named the ‘executress’ of his estate, unless she died or were unable to care for the children. In that case, the money would go to his father, and then his mother. But one month after his death, his father died; and two months later, so did his mother. His brother Hector (and here the tone of the telling darkens, grows nefarious) went to court and claimed that Nana was unfit to manage the estate, petitioned to be named the executor, and won. The story tends to get wrapped up in a stark black bow: Hector kept all the money to himself, and Nana and the girls were set adrift.
Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.
The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even had a chance to begin, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the president.”
Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she worked as a secretary and, at night, managed her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, a little, that she had bipolar disorder and was sporadically hospitalized. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.
Mia reads:
“November 14, 1961
The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC
My Dear Mr. President [this would have been Kennedy],
I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.”
We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I was, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated and desperate.
What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from the estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”
Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read her situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954, she attempts to get her benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third – $22 a month – of her previous payments. She’s essentially gone from receiving $568 to $168 a month, and I don’t know why, but the numbers fascinate me.
In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, this time trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.
Her letter to Ribicoff, five years later, reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”
I imagine her drawing herself up as she sits to type it, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair, chest high. Of course she never received a response.
And then, as abruptly as we made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture of him and Nana, and white enamel deco necklaces, which we assume were Nana’s. I am pleased but agitated. For the first time, I have heard Philip’s voice, her voice, but my access to them is finite.
Four hours later, I am at a cocktail party with my older brother holding a sticky glass of pink champagne punch. We are surrounded by bowls of Hershey’s kisses and platters dressed with mediocre cheese, and I watch as a caterer pulls two bags of dumplings and mini quiche out of the freezer and shakes them onto trays, to warm in the oven and then circulate. (I feel like I’ve seen behind the curtain, and my anticipation of trying them correspondingly diminishes.)
“What was Nana like?” I ask. Duncan’s attention has shifted to the raffle the hostess is announcing from the top of her dining room table, and he takes an annoyingly long time to answer.
“She was Mom and Aunt Roberta and Aunt Jill,” he says, “she was all three of them.”
It is a pat answer, too easy, and I am dissatisfied. Which part of them? When? “But what was she like,” I prod.
“She was full of life.” He describes how our oldest brother used to make fun of the way she walked, encased in a pencil skirt and tottering on four-inch heels; he stands rigid and pokes his butt out, taking small tiptoe steps to demonstrate.
It is funny, and it is not enough. Why has he picked a juvenile joke to recount, out of all his memories of her? Why did she, for that matter, save a refrigerator receipt, out of all the things Philip gave her? I am playing an impossible game, I know, trying to piece together a coherent picture out of fragments, to ascribe my own narrative to others’ memories.
The next day, hungover from sugar and champagne, I find my mom in the kitchen and ask if she’d like to see the suitcase. I have an hour before I have to head into Washington to catch my bus, and though I’m tired, I feel a small thrill at the idea of witnessing her reaction to the items. But she declines. Next time you come down, she says.
And so I go back to Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for five years (not so far, ultimately, from where they lived), hanging Nana’s necklaces on my wall, propping up the small photobooth photo on my shelf.
Friends stop in, stay for dinner, and sometimes I take the objects out. These were hers, I say, proffering the necklaces, this was him. See how pretty? Wasn’t he pretty? I never knew them.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Wait wait don't tell me
Baby's newest game is hunting down my packaged food and ripping it open. Not to eat, apparently; for sport. This morning it was the brand new bag of coffee beans, hermetically sealed in thick metallic something-or-other, some durable air-proof material, which i found behind the counter, shredded. Why? Usually it's crackers, cookies, carby treats that she maybe craves since she only eats grain-free expensive blah blah. She pushes those off the counter and then Pern, the big fat one, who really does have a carb addiction, goes to town. But what use could Pern or Baby have for coffee beans? It's cruel.
Anyway, possibly this is boring to you. Possibly you're thinking, why should I care about this woman's cats? I've got no answer, except that right now the big one is spooning my hip, and it's damn cute.
Basically, I'm procrastinating starting my real work. I pinched a nerve yawning, that's how my morning's been. That and watching a Westminster judge appraise mutts on The View. Fucking A. Time to start.
Anyway, possibly this is boring to you. Possibly you're thinking, why should I care about this woman's cats? I've got no answer, except that right now the big one is spooning my hip, and it's damn cute.
Basically, I'm procrastinating starting my real work. I pinched a nerve yawning, that's how my morning's been. That and watching a Westminster judge appraise mutts on The View. Fucking A. Time to start.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
High school stalker
Guys, because it's Valentine's Day, I've prepared something really special for you. I hope you like it. Love is in the air!
For much of my life I attended a lot of church; evangelical ‘bible’ church, to be specific, which preached a literal interpretation of the bible. As you can imagine, this led to some backwards (and contradictory, if you cared to actually read) beliefs, but more interestingly, attracted some unsavory individuals.
One such individual was a brain-damaged (I think) man that the youth group pastor inexplicably put on staff. He had a history of violence, having hit another church member in the head with a hammer when they were both kids (this was common knowledge, since the victim was the sister of another kid in the youth group), and basically, he was creepy as fuck. He was very tall, and very large, bald; he used to drive a beat-up muscle car and skulk around the parking lot staring at girls. At some point he developed a crush on me and took to following me around the halls of the church. It seemed somewhat innocuous, because there were usually people around, but still.
Eventually I dropped out of youth group (a different story, for another day) and pretty much cut ties with everyone there, but one day, a year later, I ran into him. I can’t remember the circumstances, but apparently (as per the letter) I was with a couple of my guy friends. I do also remember him showing up at my high school, but whether that happened before or after the email, well, I have no idea.
The following is the email he sent to me – I just found the print-out of it in my parents’ attic, and retyped it. (I’m home helping them organize our old storage crap in preparation for their impending move to McLean.) Anyway, it’s really a masterpiece. Once I found it I knew I had to preserve it for posterity or whatever. I quote:
Subj: MEGAN,LISTEN CLOSELY AND FOLLOW CAREFULLY!!!
Date: 3/29/99 1:31:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: tiny@[redacted] (MS SWAN)
To: Nutmeg520@aol.Com
Megan,Megan,Megan.I will say ,Lst night,it was cool seeing U,Even though U didn’t say anything to me after I said HI. I understand,But just think back and remember what type of Guy I really am. 1 Remember the first day I met U, I talked to U and U were soooo nice,It was summer of 97 and U were about to become a sophomore in highschool. I thought I had met an awesome Gal and had just made a new friend,Anyways,2 The summer of 98,U were getting ready to go on a missions trip and when they asked for people to put hands on people,While praying for them,Who stepped up and realy cared for U.Me,and As my hand went on youre bare shoulder, You thought, WHAT’S going on and What is he going to do to me? [!!!] I was gentle to U,Never thought once about something bad happening to ya.ACCULLY ,For a slit second it soo quite I could hear your heart beating and tell and really tell what was going on in your head.U have been blessed 1000 times over,Wheather it’s inside or out.It’s time to live life more serious and grow up. God loves U [oh boy.]
Megan and he want’s U to step out on the lim.FEAR NOT,For he has ahold of U and he won’t let U fall.Have more faith and do what GOD wants U to do and not what MEGAN wants to do.I encourage U to put God 1st.And for those Guys you date,U can get better then that. I mean Christian guys at least [He’s all, ‘I mean, really. Have some class, please.’].
Now about last night,If your boyfriend or his INDIAN FREAK [I do believe he means Viranda!] has any problem with me,Or if they wanna talk trash or call me names, Tell them to say it in my face.MAN TO MAN.Especially that Indian freak .Tell him that, The next time he talks trash to me,I’ll come up to him like I did last night,When he least exspects me,And it won’t be a sight as pretty as U.MEGAN, U surly don’t want me to show up @ LANGLEY and embarris him infront of U or others, Do U? NO! Your saying to yourself in the back of your head. I know U to good megan. Well if this type of B.S. happens again,I promise I will show up when U or they least exspect me. I might even show up @ your house, SOOOOOOOO TELL then NOT to play with fire,Becauase I will burn like a MOTHER.Well hope U and your Family are doing well and I want U to know I’m still praying for U daily. Oh how’s MIA doing? [This part made me LOL – like, ‘I’m gonna eat your dog and fry it up with your cunt, you bitch! Oh, by the way, do you prefer sausage or pepperoni?’] Well hopefully next time U get a letter from me,I’ll be to for better reasons. YOURS TRULY,
MATT.
PS HOPE U ARE ABLE TO MAKE THE RIGHT DESITIONS [he really can't let this one go] 4 YOUR LIFE AND FOR MEGAN NEEDS AND NOT WHAT OTHERS WANT.PUT GOD 1ST IN EVERYTHING.I REALLY DO CARE MEGAN AND DON’T EVER FORGET THAT.
For much of my life I attended a lot of church; evangelical ‘bible’ church, to be specific, which preached a literal interpretation of the bible. As you can imagine, this led to some backwards (and contradictory, if you cared to actually read) beliefs, but more interestingly, attracted some unsavory individuals.
One such individual was a brain-damaged (I think) man that the youth group pastor inexplicably put on staff. He had a history of violence, having hit another church member in the head with a hammer when they were both kids (this was common knowledge, since the victim was the sister of another kid in the youth group), and basically, he was creepy as fuck. He was very tall, and very large, bald; he used to drive a beat-up muscle car and skulk around the parking lot staring at girls. At some point he developed a crush on me and took to following me around the halls of the church. It seemed somewhat innocuous, because there were usually people around, but still.
Eventually I dropped out of youth group (a different story, for another day) and pretty much cut ties with everyone there, but one day, a year later, I ran into him. I can’t remember the circumstances, but apparently (as per the letter) I was with a couple of my guy friends. I do also remember him showing up at my high school, but whether that happened before or after the email, well, I have no idea.
The following is the email he sent to me – I just found the print-out of it in my parents’ attic, and retyped it. (I’m home helping them organize our old storage crap in preparation for their impending move to McLean.) Anyway, it’s really a masterpiece. Once I found it I knew I had to preserve it for posterity or whatever. I quote:
Subj: MEGAN,LISTEN CLOSELY AND FOLLOW CAREFULLY!!!
Date: 3/29/99 1:31:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: tiny@[redacted] (MS SWAN)
To: Nutmeg520@aol.Com
Megan,Megan,Megan.I will say ,Lst night,it was cool seeing U,Even though U didn’t say anything to me after I said HI. I understand,But just think back and remember what type of Guy I really am. 1 Remember the first day I met U, I talked to U and U were soooo nice,It was summer of 97 and U were about to become a sophomore in highschool. I thought I had met an awesome Gal and had just made a new friend,Anyways,2 The summer of 98,U were getting ready to go on a missions trip and when they asked for people to put hands on people,While praying for them,Who stepped up and realy cared for U.Me,and As my hand went on youre bare shoulder, You thought, WHAT’S going on and What is he going to do to me? [!!!] I was gentle to U,Never thought once about something bad happening to ya.ACCULLY ,For a slit second it soo quite I could hear your heart beating and tell and really tell what was going on in your head.U have been blessed 1000 times over,Wheather it’s inside or out.It’s time to live life more serious and grow up. God loves U [oh boy.]
Megan and he want’s U to step out on the lim.FEAR NOT,For he has ahold of U and he won’t let U fall.Have more faith and do what GOD wants U to do and not what MEGAN wants to do.I encourage U to put God 1st.And for those Guys you date,U can get better then that. I mean Christian guys at least [He’s all, ‘I mean, really. Have some class, please.’].
Now about last night,If your boyfriend or his INDIAN FREAK [I do believe he means Viranda!] has any problem with me,Or if they wanna talk trash or call me names, Tell them to say it in my face.MAN TO MAN.Especially that Indian freak .Tell him that, The next time he talks trash to me,I’ll come up to him like I did last night,When he least exspects me,And it won’t be a sight as pretty as U.MEGAN, U surly don’t want me to show up @ LANGLEY and embarris him infront of U or others, Do U? NO! Your saying to yourself in the back of your head. I know U to good megan. Well if this type of B.S. happens again,I promise I will show up when U or they least exspect me. I might even show up @ your house, SOOOOOOOO TELL then NOT to play with fire,Becauase I will burn like a MOTHER.Well hope U and your Family are doing well and I want U to know I’m still praying for U daily. Oh how’s MIA doing? [This part made me LOL – like, ‘I’m gonna eat your dog and fry it up with your cunt, you bitch! Oh, by the way, do you prefer sausage or pepperoni?’] Well hopefully next time U get a letter from me,I’ll be to for better reasons. YOURS TRULY,
MATT.
PS HOPE U ARE ABLE TO MAKE THE RIGHT DESITIONS [he really can't let this one go] 4 YOUR LIFE AND FOR MEGAN NEEDS AND NOT WHAT OTHERS WANT.PUT GOD 1ST IN EVERYTHING.I REALLY DO CARE MEGAN AND DON’T EVER FORGET THAT.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
How to miss a friend
James has been gone for two weeks, and today the weather is balmy. When I walked out this morning, neutral gusts of wind puffed my coat out and made me duck my head. It’s grey and warm, my favorite weather.
I miss him, I do. But already I feel that certain portioning that happens when someone you love is no longer accessible. It’s like running a long distance, accepting the slowed-down, difficult pace. You measure in months, not days or weeks. Vacations, not weekends. And the time in between gets filled somehow. Not by him or by anyone like him, but by yourself. Your brain fills up with different thoughts, essays and books you’re reading, snide comments people have said, the way your cat chirps hello when you come home. And home is still home, remarkably. The couch is the same couch, although it seems a little forlorn, waiting for your friend to come and admire it and its surroundings, to relax into it like he’s supposed to, like it’s meant for. The sconces you bought don’t seem as special without him there to obligingly flatter them, and the white wine you bought weeks ago, before he left, is still in the fridge. That’s the way you miss a friend, I think. By looking at the objects he used to look at and seeing a little less magic in them, without him.
I miss him, I do. But already I feel that certain portioning that happens when someone you love is no longer accessible. It’s like running a long distance, accepting the slowed-down, difficult pace. You measure in months, not days or weeks. Vacations, not weekends. And the time in between gets filled somehow. Not by him or by anyone like him, but by yourself. Your brain fills up with different thoughts, essays and books you’re reading, snide comments people have said, the way your cat chirps hello when you come home. And home is still home, remarkably. The couch is the same couch, although it seems a little forlorn, waiting for your friend to come and admire it and its surroundings, to relax into it like he’s supposed to, like it’s meant for. The sconces you bought don’t seem as special without him there to obligingly flatter them, and the white wine you bought weeks ago, before he left, is still in the fridge. That’s the way you miss a friend, I think. By looking at the objects he used to look at and seeing a little less magic in them, without him.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Oh well, okay.
The horrible feeling has settled in again, the one I thought I’d shaken this morning when I left my apartment and it was warm outside, the one I thought I’d slept off when I found myself able to get out of bed, shower and dress with relative ease. But the horrible feeling is back, seeping through my bones, water-logging and weighing me down. I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad. It’s not about any one thing, or one event, or one person, or one action, it’s about the impermanence of everything. Of my home, both my sense of it and my physical place of dwelling, of my constructed and biological families, my feelings of safety and satisfaction. All impermanent. All shaky. Is this what depression was like? It’s been so long since I toyed with that word, put it on my plate and poked it with a fork. I’m not interested in trying it again. But I’m so tired. I’m so damn tired. It will get better, I tell myself. Here are the things you can do: you can wait, and be patient. You can eat nutritious foods and sip only tea at night. You can sleep. You can walk, and walk, and walk. You’ll find clarity. Well please let it come. Please let it come.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Poor cats.
Do you remember the blizzard four years ago, when I stayed at Mark's house? We stayed up all night with Melanie and her boyfriend drinking beers and yelling at the TV, and we had a great time. The next day, there was a foot of snow on the ground, and I had to get home wearing cowboy boots to feed my cat. The boots acted, more or less, like sleds. It was a treacherous walk, and I slipped many times. When I got home, the cat was starving. She was frantic, skittering around in circles by her food bowl and meowing. I guess I'd been gone for over 24 hours.
This morning I've woken up and drank the coffee that Billy made before he left, and I've observed the cats (I have two now) sitting hopefully by their bowls. There's no food in the house for them. In general, I like to think I'm a good owner, a talented nurturer, but I have to tell you that I can be totally selfish sometimes. I have no plans of going to the store. Let them starve, I think uncharitably as I drink my coffee. Of COURSE I'll get them fed eventually, but you have to understand, what I'm trying to say, is that I'm not motivated. I think there's something a little wrong with that.
This morning I've woken up and drank the coffee that Billy made before he left, and I've observed the cats (I have two now) sitting hopefully by their bowls. There's no food in the house for them. In general, I like to think I'm a good owner, a talented nurturer, but I have to tell you that I can be totally selfish sometimes. I have no plans of going to the store. Let them starve, I think uncharitably as I drink my coffee. Of COURSE I'll get them fed eventually, but you have to understand, what I'm trying to say, is that I'm not motivated. I think there's something a little wrong with that.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
First try.
It's been a difficult year. Not the worst I'll see or that you've seen, but harder than most of its predecessors. It's been a hard week, crying on the subway and, embarrassingly, to Bette Midler while sitting in a crowded room. It was supposed to be a joke - Jamie put it on at his going away party, and I was laughing at first and then I wasn't. I sat there and just...cried. I wiped my face again and again. Peony looked at me like I was making her uncomfortable. Who cries to 'Wind Beneath My Wings'? Well, me, I guess. It's alright, it was funny. We can all laugh.
Then, tonight I cried at the bar over an expensive Earl Grey-infused gin martini (real raw egg [white], can you believe it). James held my hands and I cried, and then we left and I got on the subway and cried, and then I got off the subway and wandered into the overpriced organic supermarket and looked at chocolate bars and cried.
So. I'm thinking that I will feel sad for a while. Most people don't understand what's so heartbreaking about a friend moving to the other side of the country. It's a bummer - that's what it's supposed to be. A major bummer. Something that 'sucks'. Buuuuut it feels more like heartbreak to me. I may as well say it. I took half a pill and drank some week-old shiraz, and no, this isn't going to be a chronicle of drug abuse and avoidance of emotions through blah blah blah, I'm just being honest. And fuck it, I thnk drinking week-old wine is funny. It's a little desperate, and I like desperate things. (When they're not truly desperate, just a little desperate, just a [safe] taste.)
Ehhhh, I feel alone. (Welcome to the world, sweetie!) - I just imagined some old Maxine-type character hacking that at me through a phlegmy smoker's throat. Welcome, indeed. Day one. Of how many.
Then, tonight I cried at the bar over an expensive Earl Grey-infused gin martini (real raw egg [white], can you believe it). James held my hands and I cried, and then we left and I got on the subway and cried, and then I got off the subway and wandered into the overpriced organic supermarket and looked at chocolate bars and cried.
So. I'm thinking that I will feel sad for a while. Most people don't understand what's so heartbreaking about a friend moving to the other side of the country. It's a bummer - that's what it's supposed to be. A major bummer. Something that 'sucks'. Buuuuut it feels more like heartbreak to me. I may as well say it. I took half a pill and drank some week-old shiraz, and no, this isn't going to be a chronicle of drug abuse and avoidance of emotions through blah blah blah, I'm just being honest. And fuck it, I thnk drinking week-old wine is funny. It's a little desperate, and I like desperate things. (When they're not truly desperate, just a little desperate, just a [safe] taste.)
Ehhhh, I feel alone. (Welcome to the world, sweetie!) - I just imagined some old Maxine-type character hacking that at me through a phlegmy smoker's throat. Welcome, indeed. Day one. Of how many.
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