First - must register shock that I never opened this blog in the year 2016. We were busy. There was the country's most vile election in history on the one hand, and on the other, production of our first feature film, an against-all-odds journey across that same country, graced by glorious sunrises, sunsets, rainbows, helpful strangers, and highway safety over 3,200+ miles.
Now we must live with the world that election wrought. Like many, I have not slept well since November, some nights barely at all since January 20th. The imagination goes to toxic rivers and air, internment for Muslims, assassinations of journalists and political opposition leaders, the dismantling of public education, and endless manufactured wars that justify a fascist coup and the end of constitutional government. Already most people I know are reconsidered their digital footprint. Will this post be used against me? Maybe.
Sooner or later, true patriotism – the heart's attachment to justice, equality before the law, enlightened stewardship of our land and honorable dealing with global neighbors, not the shallow, jingoistic macho patriotism peddled by Trump– is risky business. It turns out our generation is not exempt from this risk. This is something of a shock to our Sesame Street generation. For all the set backs we could name, we are the generation in which Science, Creativity, and Justice prevailed. We were born the year man landed on the moon; we were the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights and Women's movements; we survived the end of the Cold War, watching the Berlin wall fall – in my case on Japanese TV where I lived among my grandparents' generation's enemies; we traded francs in for Euros and traveled freely on EurRail passes. We witnessed science and public health contain the AIDS epidemic, the dot.com gold rush, the smartphone and Facebook revolutions. We elected the most dignified president ever, one of our generation and outlook, who rescued an economy in free fall, got Osama Bin Laden, made inroads on insuring millions for health care, kept us safe from terrorism for 8 years, and gave us the "No Drama Obama" model of Cool under Pressure. And yet...
I'm sure there isn't a head that hasn't being scratched in this country (and much of the world) wondering how this rapid and vicious unraveling could happen. For a time I turned off the radio, let the newspapers stack up, turned to more eternal sources – snow falling, the hills, psalms, the smell of my children's heads, the chickadees and tufted titmouse birds at the feeder, my grandmother's 100th birthday – but the mind never stops churning... Questions and more questions... What were the structural flaws in the America we were building in our time? What parts of progress came by suppression vs. change/growth in consciousness? What are the real economic and cultural dynamics that have abandoned rural America (which I witness daily here)? What are the consequences of speech unleashed on social media, and is there a path back to civil discourse? What is the role of popular culture in shaping our reality, and comedy in both outing and undermining "truth"? How do we define "the good life" or what it means to be human? What is the relationship between the health of the body politic and the individual? Where is there honor in manhood, womanhood, parenthood, citizenship now? How has the narrative failed, or, what is this crisis of meaning, and how do we remedy it? What is the role of faith, and how do we nurse so many hurting souls all around?
For 2017, I'd like to climb back on the rickety ladder to think about these questions (and many more) slowly. I appreciate you, family and friend readers, helping me think better, more clearly. I think half the evil unleashed on the world last year owed to so many trigger-fingers tweeting and Facebooking before thinking. As we try to teach the boys in our Hebrew studies together, our thoughts will be filled with all manner of ugliness; they are first drafts. But when we speak, they become real in the world, so let's take our time to measure them.
I also want to use this blog to gather some of the best articles, videos, etc. – words well chosen by others, with an aim to curate for quality (or at least significance?) over quantity. Along those lines, here are some thought-provokers for future posts:
George Packer, "Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt," The New Yorker 10/31/16
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt
Emily Nussbaum, "How Jokes Won the Election," The New Yorker 1/23/17
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/how-jokes-won-the-election
Bill Maher, "New Rule: Stop Apologizing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaC1-U8LIY0
President Barak Obama's Farewell Address
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udrKnXueTW0
Breitbart News,
http://www.breitbart.com/
Plato, The Republic
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
Valarie Kaur, Groundswell Movement
https://youtu.be/LCenwgheIBs
Theme for next time: Empathy Redistribution
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Samanthasaurus Rex
This week I discovered that I am going extinct. Leon Wieseltier ("Among the Disrupted") confirmed what I've suspected for a long time (like, at least since the iPhone 6 came out and, once again, I didn't give a hoot): My generation was the long tail of western European liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment, all of which have been rendered irrelevant, no dir, by the DIR (the Digital Information Revolution). We are officially relics.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Snow Shoes
It was a sunny Los Angeles Saturday winter morning, the kind that makes a transplanted New Englander like myself feel guilty for getting away with something (for which they'd pay later). My mother was visiting from New Hampshire. As we got out of the car en route to Shabbat services, the sun struck my shoes. My mother took note, muttering, "You are really not a New Englander any more." Shame washed over me.
This was my first public outing in the shoes. They had caused me anguish when I bought them at the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade the previous week. They were espadrille-ish, steep crepe heels, gold satin cloth, little sequins and fake crystals glued on. They were pretty, and girlish, and frivolous. They revealed the vanity of their wearer for all to see. Made in India, they would not last, like whatever fading beauty I had left. I loved those shoes, but I couldn't let myself buy them. But then I did, and I sweated all twenty-five dollars I spent on them (that should have gone to something more useful).
A New England woman, no matter what my mother says, never gets over her New England sensibilities, when it comes to footwear and all fashion. I have long lusted in secret for those strappy little patent leather Italian sandals in the J.Crew catalogue, but I know mud season would make a public mockery of my illicit desires. I restrain myself, as is the New England way.
New England women don't entirely surrender the impulse to make their feet pretty. LLBean and Merrill have come up with a few feminizing details (if you look carefully). The other day when I picked my step-mother up for a music rehearsal, I realized I'd parked her into the mud and offered to move the car first. She was wearing house shoes, a vaguely Mary Jane embellishment on the basic hiking-boot sole. "Oh, don't worry!" she replied cheerfully. "My shoes have rubber toes!"
A New England woman perusing her options in a shoe store examines the height and material of the heel for how it will stack up in snow drifts and muddy trenches. For how it will exhibit the shape of her ankles and calves? Not so much. In a baffling triumph of marketing, though, the Australian company Uggs has convinced women across the world, even those in Los Angeles with no climatic impediments to good taste, that a shapeless animal skin was high female foot fashion. I'm not a believer. But I have to give Uggs some credit. For New England women who actually need that shearling warmth but can't entirely surrender their vanity, Uggs offers sequined winter boots, in silver or pink! That is, if you can convince your mother to buy them for you. (How do you get mud out of sequins?)
There's a quick cheat in acting known as "shoe acting." Change the shoes, transform yourself. Watch the kid who slides his feet into his mother's heels for the clearest illustration of the power of the shoe. Close your eyes and try on a pair of heavy military boots. A ballet slipper. Your dad's polished leather work shoes... The other day in the locker room at the Aquatic Center, I noticed a heavy-set older woman pulling up her masculine white tube socks over bluish calves, then lacing up her hefty leather walking shoes. Who would she become if she slid on some Dolce Vita heels? I'd like to see the faces when she walked into the St. Paddy's day corned beef supper at the Volunteer Fire Department in those numbers.
This winter I'm working hard to renew my New England credentials, diminished by my 27-year sojourn in climates that degrade one's character. We picked one of history's longest coldest winters, reminding me that warmth is the urgent first priority of footwear. But just when I thought I was toughening up, sacrificing my vanity, as is my duty, proving myself a real New Englander again, I noticed a mother at the kids' school in Cornish who only ever seemed to wear flip-flops. For real? My feet, like my character (are they separable?), had been wrecked by excessive flip-flop wearing during my time away. And yet here she was, in sub-zero temperatures, bare feet in cute little preppy flip-flops. Was this a brazen display of vanity, or testament to the highest degree of New England cred -- imperviousness to cold?
"My feet just burn hot," she explained without seeking to impress. Sigh! I will never be worthy...
This was my first public outing in the shoes. They had caused me anguish when I bought them at the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade the previous week. They were espadrille-ish, steep crepe heels, gold satin cloth, little sequins and fake crystals glued on. They were pretty, and girlish, and frivolous. They revealed the vanity of their wearer for all to see. Made in India, they would not last, like whatever fading beauty I had left. I loved those shoes, but I couldn't let myself buy them. But then I did, and I sweated all twenty-five dollars I spent on them (that should have gone to something more useful).
A New England woman, no matter what my mother says, never gets over her New England sensibilities, when it comes to footwear and all fashion. I have long lusted in secret for those strappy little patent leather Italian sandals in the J.Crew catalogue, but I know mud season would make a public mockery of my illicit desires. I restrain myself, as is the New England way.
New England women don't entirely surrender the impulse to make their feet pretty. LLBean and Merrill have come up with a few feminizing details (if you look carefully). The other day when I picked my step-mother up for a music rehearsal, I realized I'd parked her into the mud and offered to move the car first. She was wearing house shoes, a vaguely Mary Jane embellishment on the basic hiking-boot sole. "Oh, don't worry!" she replied cheerfully. "My shoes have rubber toes!"
A New England woman perusing her options in a shoe store examines the height and material of the heel for how it will stack up in snow drifts and muddy trenches. For how it will exhibit the shape of her ankles and calves? Not so much. In a baffling triumph of marketing, though, the Australian company Uggs has convinced women across the world, even those in Los Angeles with no climatic impediments to good taste, that a shapeless animal skin was high female foot fashion. I'm not a believer. But I have to give Uggs some credit. For New England women who actually need that shearling warmth but can't entirely surrender their vanity, Uggs offers sequined winter boots, in silver or pink! That is, if you can convince your mother to buy them for you. (How do you get mud out of sequins?)
There's a quick cheat in acting known as "shoe acting." Change the shoes, transform yourself. Watch the kid who slides his feet into his mother's heels for the clearest illustration of the power of the shoe. Close your eyes and try on a pair of heavy military boots. A ballet slipper. Your dad's polished leather work shoes... The other day in the locker room at the Aquatic Center, I noticed a heavy-set older woman pulling up her masculine white tube socks over bluish calves, then lacing up her hefty leather walking shoes. Who would she become if she slid on some Dolce Vita heels? I'd like to see the faces when she walked into the St. Paddy's day corned beef supper at the Volunteer Fire Department in those numbers.
This winter I'm working hard to renew my New England credentials, diminished by my 27-year sojourn in climates that degrade one's character. We picked one of history's longest coldest winters, reminding me that warmth is the urgent first priority of footwear. But just when I thought I was toughening up, sacrificing my vanity, as is my duty, proving myself a real New Englander again, I noticed a mother at the kids' school in Cornish who only ever seemed to wear flip-flops. For real? My feet, like my character (are they separable?), had been wrecked by excessive flip-flop wearing during my time away. And yet here she was, in sub-zero temperatures, bare feet in cute little preppy flip-flops. Was this a brazen display of vanity, or testament to the highest degree of New England cred -- imperviousness to cold?
"My feet just burn hot," she explained without seeking to impress. Sigh! I will never be worthy...
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Birthday Boys
After years of elaborate Scooby Doo parties, haunted house parties, Harry Potter parties, etc. Jordy and I have tried for two years to host a "simple" birthday for Duncan.
Last year's simple plan: Invite a small group (5 max) of buddies to a sushi lunch in Manhattan. Last year's reality: Eight boys (=5 guests + our 3) take the first F train to pass under the East River after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel (slightly nerve-wracking) to Rockefeller Center (crowded, hectic, the usual) where frolicking and revelry at the Nintendo Store leads to frolicking and revelry at the Lego Store a leads to sushi-rolling lessons at Ruby Foo's, capped off by candy bonanza at Toys-R-Us in (shoot me now) Times Square. By Party's End, Jordy and I collapsed like sheepdogs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wall-eyed with tongues draped from the sides of our mouths.
This year's party, whatever it was, would be in one place. Duncan made the plan: Invite the 6 boys in his 3rd grade class here in Cornish, NH to a sports-themed sleepover. First, football, then chess. Dinner, presents, cake & a movie. 3 would then go home; the remainder would pull out their sleeping bags and go to sleep. Easy enough, and dirt cheap by Brooklyn standards.
In bare bones, all went according to plan and a great time was had by all. But, being 6 + our 3 boys, we contemplated trips to the Emergency Room no fewer than 5 times.
Football. For the week leading up to the party, Duncan insisted they be allowed to play tackle ball, this after he sustained a near sprain the previous weekend tackling with a buddy on the sidelines at the Dartmouth football game. Duncan's insistence grew in proportion and sophistication to my objections: Without equipment, it won't be safe, I said. So he rallied the support of his friends who play on teams to bring their gear. The conflict culminated in the near cancellation of the party over the tackle issue, at which point Duncan backed off.
But can you really stop a pack of nine-year old boys determined to tackle each other? Jordy presided over the football while I got burgers ready to grill; on my brief excursion out to take photos, I witnessed a gaggle of bodies, t-shirts off, leaping, lunging, rolling and diving, sometimes into the knotweed after the ball. Duncan came in crying at one point, upset as best I could tell by the lack of compliance with his rules (and maybe just because his own team lost). Complaints of injuries to an ankle, a leg and a hand were made in the course of events, but all limbs remained attached as we moved inside for chess.
Chess went off without bodily injury, though it came close. Littlest partier, Tucker (age 3), knocked pieces off a board at some point, I think?, raising an angry ruckus but, to their credit, the third graders restrained themselves and re-started the game.
They actually sat in their chairs, mostly, to eat -- I think they were starved and parched -- but popped up and out as soon as they'd had enough to take the edge off. We asked everyone to take a seat while Duncan opened his presents. Fat chance. They swarmed him, or else jumped on the couches, or else took off their shirts to whip each other. The presents were, in the birthday boy's summation, "totally awesome." Fire-vision Nerf football for nighttime play, basketball trinkets from the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lego sets, a Jeter Yankees t-shirt (given by a die-hard Red Sox fan, a true act of love), and -- my personal favorite -- "Sonic Distractors" -- little grenade shaped things you clip to your built, and when distraction is called for, push a red button (which then blinks) and roll into the situation, detonating a random sound effect (dog barking, fire engine, etc.).
How to focus all this energy? Cake! We presented the football field cake, with Duncan's name in one end zone and one of his friend's in the other, as they shared the day, with a rousing double chorus of Happy Birthday. By the time it was served, however, many had already popped out of their chairs again, eager to get out in the dark for FireVision Football. A few nibbles of cake were eaten and some icing licked; most of it ended up in the trash. Which was probably just as well... Did they really need more sugar?
We had to cancel FireVision football when two kids came in after a multi-boy pile-up, seeing as it was now pitch black and only 2 of the 9 had the FireVision goggles to see anything. We settled them in to watch Air Bud, the Disney classic about a boy who finds a dog with preternatural basketball skills. We had chosen the film carefully, striving for age-appropriateness with no risk of scary imagery that might keep sleepers-over awake. That morning many of the boys also had their first basketball practice, for some -- such as Duncan -- ever in their lives. And for our family, the film also touched on the dog theme, salient in the wake of Harpo's death two weeks ago and our adoption that same day of a new rescue dog. What could go wrong?
It was a total hit: The boys were remarkably focused. Our younger two were as captivated as the big boys. One of the boys was so moved by the dog that he spent most of the movie relating stories to me about his own Siberian Husky. What an inspired movie choice! I was so bloody proud of myself.
First Tucker burst into tears. Then Reeve, his sorrow silent, tears streaming down his face, sobs choked back to the point of not breathing. "Why did he yeave dat dog!?" Tucker objected. Then, "All I can think about is Harpo," Reeve whispered. And, "Why did he leave him like that?" ("Because he thought if he kept Buddy, the evil clown would come back again to get him again," I explained... "He was trying to give Buddy his freedom, even though it meant he had to give Buddy up himself too..." Narrative logic that held no sway in the hearts of our three- and six-year olds...)
We held each other tight until the State Championship game, at which point Buddy's fate is unknown and the team has to face their arch rival. So involved had our pack of nine-year olds become that nary a one could stay seated, or reclined. They stood on the bed in anticipation, leapt with the players on screen, took their shirts off once again to whip each other, screamed with each basket, roared with delight when Buddy appears again on the court to save the day, and lifted the roof off the house at the end when Buddy chooses the boy over the evil clown to be his master. Not a hint of irony in this group. Utterly delightful.
In the mayhem, one of the boys rolled off the bed, landing on another's hand with the possibility of a broken bone. Ice? Hospital? "No, I'm OK." Three of the boys went home, after which the sleepers-over headed out for one last round of FireVision football, followed by wrestling matches in the tent we had set up for sleeping in the living room.
As the clock ticked off the minutes late into the night, Jordy and I watched the outside of the tent, its walls bulged and pulsed with bodies lunging against it, trying to discern the right moment to intervene and precisely where to set the limit. The limit became clear when one of the boy's blankie turned into a whip yet again (what's up with that behavior?), almost taking out another boy's eye. Bedtime!!
We determined that sleep would never happen without surveillance, so Jordy set himself up just outside the tent like the NSA, monitoring activity and dictating silence and stillness as needed. At last, they drifted off, somewhere around 10:30pm. As we drifted off ourselves, I remarked to Jordy on our good fortune that the clocks would "fall backward" that night -- an extra hour of much needed sleep after an active evening.
But when we heard the first stirrings at 5:51am, now 4:51am, I understood the flaw in my logic. I wanted to threaten no iPad time, anything, to enforce a return to sleep, but Jordy was right -- there was no getting those genies back into their bottles. And so I closed our door, trying to keep Tucker asleep and abandoning still sleeping Reeve in the tent to his fate. They whispered, briefly, still under covers. But they couldn't help themselves. Soon their bodies rose with the noise level, until another full-on wrestling-whipping match was on, and a failure to intervene became unethical.
Solution? "FOOTBALL!!!" And so they suited up, at now 5:30am, to go out into the 28-degree perfect blackness to play football. Minutes later, Duncan comes in, limping and grasping his hip. A few minutes later, another boy comes in: "I think I have a tick on my penis." (Sure enough...) And a few minutes after him, the rest race into the house. "We saw someone out there!!! A ghost!!" Jordy and I exchange a look. Only three and a half more hours to go.
The iPad provides diversion, when not inspiring warfare over whose turn it is, and a pancake breakfast fills at least twenty minutes. As the sun rises, the boys head back out for yet another round of football, but invent instead a vertical version of the game from the deck of the treehouse to the field below, which requires the boys to ascend and descend a challenging rope ladder...
One of the boys comes screaming into the house, "Jordy! Jordy! The ladder broke!" Our blood ran cold as Jordy sprinted out to find the unfortunate fellow on his back, his eyes closed. We fought panic, brought him in for hot cocoa (no loss of consciousness of apparent inability to move), and got the story of how one of the wooden rungs had snapped and he'd landed on his butt, then back. (Not his head, he reported.) Even this hard-scrabble bunch of boys admitted later that seeing their friend fall was "super scary."
We were already on a first-name basis with the triage nurse in the ER, after consulting on the tick, and nearly went in for a personal visit this time, but the boy seemed OK and we called home instead and kept watch. He complained of a headache, which the boys all shared ("sleep deprivation," we explained), but no other clear pain. We plugged them into another movie for the remaining 90 minutes, desperate to keep them as physically inert as possible until their parents could reclaim them.
As I scanned their nine-year old faces zoning out to the movie, their ruddy cheeks still a little rounded with the last bit of baby fat, exhausted but still eager, I felt a surge of tender affection for these little men. In just ten years, they will actually be men. I imagined this party then -- and realized what we'd survived was something like the movie The Hangover, nine-year-old style. What a privilege to ride the wild bronco of little boys' birthdays -- no matter how close they bring us to a nervous breakdown.
Last year's simple plan: Invite a small group (5 max) of buddies to a sushi lunch in Manhattan. Last year's reality: Eight boys (=5 guests + our 3) take the first F train to pass under the East River after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel (slightly nerve-wracking) to Rockefeller Center (crowded, hectic, the usual) where frolicking and revelry at the Nintendo Store leads to frolicking and revelry at the Lego Store a leads to sushi-rolling lessons at Ruby Foo's, capped off by candy bonanza at Toys-R-Us in (shoot me now) Times Square. By Party's End, Jordy and I collapsed like sheepdogs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wall-eyed with tongues draped from the sides of our mouths.
This year's party, whatever it was, would be in one place. Duncan made the plan: Invite the 6 boys in his 3rd grade class here in Cornish, NH to a sports-themed sleepover. First, football, then chess. Dinner, presents, cake & a movie. 3 would then go home; the remainder would pull out their sleeping bags and go to sleep. Easy enough, and dirt cheap by Brooklyn standards.
In bare bones, all went according to plan and a great time was had by all. But, being 6 + our 3 boys, we contemplated trips to the Emergency Room no fewer than 5 times.
Football. For the week leading up to the party, Duncan insisted they be allowed to play tackle ball, this after he sustained a near sprain the previous weekend tackling with a buddy on the sidelines at the Dartmouth football game. Duncan's insistence grew in proportion and sophistication to my objections: Without equipment, it won't be safe, I said. So he rallied the support of his friends who play on teams to bring their gear. The conflict culminated in the near cancellation of the party over the tackle issue, at which point Duncan backed off.
But can you really stop a pack of nine-year old boys determined to tackle each other? Jordy presided over the football while I got burgers ready to grill; on my brief excursion out to take photos, I witnessed a gaggle of bodies, t-shirts off, leaping, lunging, rolling and diving, sometimes into the knotweed after the ball. Duncan came in crying at one point, upset as best I could tell by the lack of compliance with his rules (and maybe just because his own team lost). Complaints of injuries to an ankle, a leg and a hand were made in the course of events, but all limbs remained attached as we moved inside for chess.
Chess went off without bodily injury, though it came close. Littlest partier, Tucker (age 3), knocked pieces off a board at some point, I think?, raising an angry ruckus but, to their credit, the third graders restrained themselves and re-started the game.
They actually sat in their chairs, mostly, to eat -- I think they were starved and parched -- but popped up and out as soon as they'd had enough to take the edge off. We asked everyone to take a seat while Duncan opened his presents. Fat chance. They swarmed him, or else jumped on the couches, or else took off their shirts to whip each other. The presents were, in the birthday boy's summation, "totally awesome." Fire-vision Nerf football for nighttime play, basketball trinkets from the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lego sets, a Jeter Yankees t-shirt (given by a die-hard Red Sox fan, a true act of love), and -- my personal favorite -- "Sonic Distractors" -- little grenade shaped things you clip to your built, and when distraction is called for, push a red button (which then blinks) and roll into the situation, detonating a random sound effect (dog barking, fire engine, etc.).
How to focus all this energy? Cake! We presented the football field cake, with Duncan's name in one end zone and one of his friend's in the other, as they shared the day, with a rousing double chorus of Happy Birthday. By the time it was served, however, many had already popped out of their chairs again, eager to get out in the dark for FireVision Football. A few nibbles of cake were eaten and some icing licked; most of it ended up in the trash. Which was probably just as well... Did they really need more sugar?
We had to cancel FireVision football when two kids came in after a multi-boy pile-up, seeing as it was now pitch black and only 2 of the 9 had the FireVision goggles to see anything. We settled them in to watch Air Bud, the Disney classic about a boy who finds a dog with preternatural basketball skills. We had chosen the film carefully, striving for age-appropriateness with no risk of scary imagery that might keep sleepers-over awake. That morning many of the boys also had their first basketball practice, for some -- such as Duncan -- ever in their lives. And for our family, the film also touched on the dog theme, salient in the wake of Harpo's death two weeks ago and our adoption that same day of a new rescue dog. What could go wrong?
It was a total hit: The boys were remarkably focused. Our younger two were as captivated as the big boys. One of the boys was so moved by the dog that he spent most of the movie relating stories to me about his own Siberian Husky. What an inspired movie choice! I was so bloody proud of myself.
First Tucker burst into tears. Then Reeve, his sorrow silent, tears streaming down his face, sobs choked back to the point of not breathing. "Why did he yeave dat dog!?" Tucker objected. Then, "All I can think about is Harpo," Reeve whispered. And, "Why did he leave him like that?" ("Because he thought if he kept Buddy, the evil clown would come back again to get him again," I explained... "He was trying to give Buddy his freedom, even though it meant he had to give Buddy up himself too..." Narrative logic that held no sway in the hearts of our three- and six-year olds...)
We held each other tight until the State Championship game, at which point Buddy's fate is unknown and the team has to face their arch rival. So involved had our pack of nine-year olds become that nary a one could stay seated, or reclined. They stood on the bed in anticipation, leapt with the players on screen, took their shirts off once again to whip each other, screamed with each basket, roared with delight when Buddy appears again on the court to save the day, and lifted the roof off the house at the end when Buddy chooses the boy over the evil clown to be his master. Not a hint of irony in this group. Utterly delightful.
In the mayhem, one of the boys rolled off the bed, landing on another's hand with the possibility of a broken bone. Ice? Hospital? "No, I'm OK." Three of the boys went home, after which the sleepers-over headed out for one last round of FireVision football, followed by wrestling matches in the tent we had set up for sleeping in the living room.
As the clock ticked off the minutes late into the night, Jordy and I watched the outside of the tent, its walls bulged and pulsed with bodies lunging against it, trying to discern the right moment to intervene and precisely where to set the limit. The limit became clear when one of the boy's blankie turned into a whip yet again (what's up with that behavior?), almost taking out another boy's eye. Bedtime!!
We determined that sleep would never happen without surveillance, so Jordy set himself up just outside the tent like the NSA, monitoring activity and dictating silence and stillness as needed. At last, they drifted off, somewhere around 10:30pm. As we drifted off ourselves, I remarked to Jordy on our good fortune that the clocks would "fall backward" that night -- an extra hour of much needed sleep after an active evening.
But when we heard the first stirrings at 5:51am, now 4:51am, I understood the flaw in my logic. I wanted to threaten no iPad time, anything, to enforce a return to sleep, but Jordy was right -- there was no getting those genies back into their bottles. And so I closed our door, trying to keep Tucker asleep and abandoning still sleeping Reeve in the tent to his fate. They whispered, briefly, still under covers. But they couldn't help themselves. Soon their bodies rose with the noise level, until another full-on wrestling-whipping match was on, and a failure to intervene became unethical.
Solution? "FOOTBALL!!!" And so they suited up, at now 5:30am, to go out into the 28-degree perfect blackness to play football. Minutes later, Duncan comes in, limping and grasping his hip. A few minutes later, another boy comes in: "I think I have a tick on my penis." (Sure enough...) And a few minutes after him, the rest race into the house. "We saw someone out there!!! A ghost!!" Jordy and I exchange a look. Only three and a half more hours to go.
The iPad provides diversion, when not inspiring warfare over whose turn it is, and a pancake breakfast fills at least twenty minutes. As the sun rises, the boys head back out for yet another round of football, but invent instead a vertical version of the game from the deck of the treehouse to the field below, which requires the boys to ascend and descend a challenging rope ladder...
One of the boys comes screaming into the house, "Jordy! Jordy! The ladder broke!" Our blood ran cold as Jordy sprinted out to find the unfortunate fellow on his back, his eyes closed. We fought panic, brought him in for hot cocoa (no loss of consciousness of apparent inability to move), and got the story of how one of the wooden rungs had snapped and he'd landed on his butt, then back. (Not his head, he reported.) Even this hard-scrabble bunch of boys admitted later that seeing their friend fall was "super scary."
We were already on a first-name basis with the triage nurse in the ER, after consulting on the tick, and nearly went in for a personal visit this time, but the boy seemed OK and we called home instead and kept watch. He complained of a headache, which the boys all shared ("sleep deprivation," we explained), but no other clear pain. We plugged them into another movie for the remaining 90 minutes, desperate to keep them as physically inert as possible until their parents could reclaim them.
As I scanned their nine-year old faces zoning out to the movie, their ruddy cheeks still a little rounded with the last bit of baby fat, exhausted but still eager, I felt a surge of tender affection for these little men. In just ten years, they will actually be men. I imagined this party then -- and realized what we'd survived was something like the movie The Hangover, nine-year-old style. What a privilege to ride the wild bronco of little boys' birthdays -- no matter how close they bring us to a nervous breakdown.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Sojourners
I've had a recurring dream for years: I am going through airport security when, inexplicably, my life's possessions spring free from their baggage, an endless stream of toothbrushes, underwear, boots, books, diapers and what-nots subjected to individual x-ray surveillance, an ungovernable mess on the other side as fellow travelers look on with impatience mounting toward rage. Toddlers (mine) break loose on the periphery of dream consciousness as I make a futile effort to re-dress myself and gather everything.
In the latest version, sometime recently, we are on a bus en route to an airport, or other terminal, when a kindly bus driver offers an infinite supply of Legos to our boys. Soon the floor of the bus is littered with millions of Lego pieces sliding this way and that as the bus careens around corners. Without warning, the driver announces our arrival at the terminal. We must collect all the pieces and get off this very minute, or miss our connection. Outside, horns bear down on our delay.
This is not going according to plan. After months of painstaking design after years of waiting to renovate, it seems we are selling our Brooklyn house instead, on the road once more. And so my dream returns with an updated vengeance. (We had not yet entered the Lego Stage of life when the dream first appeared in Los Angeles years ago!) My sister informs me that we are perfect candidates for an HGTV reality show entitled "Love It or Leave It." Is there a category for both -- love it and leave it?
It is an economic decision, my left brain states with Republican certainty. It is a leap into the unknown, my right brain whispers with Democratic honesty. My grandfather said decisions about your home should be kept separate from investment decisions. He lived in an era when many people with 30-year mortgages actually paid them off while still living in the house. But he would also say (with Republican certainty) that it's time to move on, that our growing boys need room to stretch. My grandfather was a master of timing, largely because he looked the future straight in the eye without flinching and planned accordingly. I need to study his example now.
A warm little body crawled into my bed sometime in the madrugada this morning. My half-lit brain began to play back images of our life on Howard Place, flickering like an 8mm movie. Walking into the picture were two strangers. They already love it, or the idea of what it will be, as I loved it on first sight seven years ago. They are planning the paint they will use to cover our crazy murals everywhere, erasing us. I happened to hear Garrison Keeler read this poem on the Writers' Almanac this morning:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked in white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
- Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"
The sudden about-face to sell happened during the festival of Sukkot, when our rickety huts are meant to remind us of the harvest bounty, in spirit as much as from the earth, even -- or maybe especially -- in the midst of exile. Like the chuppah wedding canopy, the sukkah must be built to be temporary and allow a view of the stars through the roof. Home is made up of the people within guided by the lights above, not the structure without, I thought this morning as little toes wiggled under my tummy seeking the warmth of mommy and daddy, wherever we are.
It's taken me six years to read 284 pages of Aviva Zornberg's Genesis, reading a page or two a night since I barely understand any of it, and yet I'm addicted. She makes these ancient stories read like self-help texts to me, all the more reliable for their endurance and resistance to too obvious interpretation. I've been into Jacob recently, when he's making his way back from his twenty years' sojourn in the land of Laban. According to Rashi according to Zornberg (wow, I'm putting myself out here), "Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquility after all his troubles. One might even say that is characteristic of righteous people to yearn for such a 'settling,' a clarification of the turbulences and anguish of life. But God rebuffs this yearning, in a tone of strange sarcasm: 'Is it not enough?'" (243) Jacob "wants to compose a whole world of his own... a cognitive and aesthestic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world." (247)
But God offers a "counternarrative"... Instead of peace, Jacob suffers extraordinary pain and dislocation at the supposed dismemberment of his beloved son, Joseph, the fulfillment of anxious premonitions he's suffered his entire life. Anxiety, grief, the troubling of the spirit are all parts of being human, and "to seek peace prematurely is to beg off from reality... a profound disqualification from the human project." (259) In her last piece of magic, Zornberg puts this dismal picture of existence back together in the hopeful human process of "re-membering" against the dismemberment of experience, as Jacob must do when he discovers Joseph to be alive. "There is, it seems, a painful law that obtains in this world -- particularly painful for the righteous who would like to retain memory intact, to be loyal to all of life as it was experienced." (278) And in her final triumph (for me!), Zornberg draws on a 19th c. Hasidic writer, the Ishbitzer, to conclude that "Jacob's desire for a stable, coherent reading of his own experience, based on cognitive certainty and moral scrupulousness (which the Ishbitzer calls 'fear' and 'humility,' respectively), is countered by God's insistence on the tragic nature of existence in this world... In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love -- the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not obtainable." And shortly thereafter, "God turns Jacob's quest away from philosophy, from the search for certainties, to the world of poetry. Poetic language is the loving act of the human being, who seeks to redescribe his reality, in the midst of, and against, teruf." (279)
Got that? I'm not sure I understand one bit of it. But I love it nonetheless, and her interpretations somehow imbue our little journey with a hint of cosmic relevance, or at least resonance.
The other day the boys and I read Eric Carle's A Home for Hermit Crab in which the protagonist discovers he's grown too big to return to his shell. He seeks a new, bigger one, but finds it drab, so he wanders the ocean floor inviting sea anemones, starfish, barnacles and sea grass to help decorate his home. By the time he's done, he has grown not only a home but a neighborhood. In the meanwhile, however, he has outgrown his shell yet again. He is bereft until he finds a sweet little hermit crab who promises to take good care of both his shell and his friends. ("Mommy, why are you crying?" my boys ask at this point in the story.) In the end, the hermit crab finds a bigger drab shell and sets off once again to re-decorate with new friends discovered on the way.
Maybe this is going according to plan, just not my plan. I think I'm down with that, if it qualifies me for the human project. Just let me know if you hear of any bigger shells going on the market...
In the latest version, sometime recently, we are on a bus en route to an airport, or other terminal, when a kindly bus driver offers an infinite supply of Legos to our boys. Soon the floor of the bus is littered with millions of Lego pieces sliding this way and that as the bus careens around corners. Without warning, the driver announces our arrival at the terminal. We must collect all the pieces and get off this very minute, or miss our connection. Outside, horns bear down on our delay.
This is not going according to plan. After months of painstaking design after years of waiting to renovate, it seems we are selling our Brooklyn house instead, on the road once more. And so my dream returns with an updated vengeance. (We had not yet entered the Lego Stage of life when the dream first appeared in Los Angeles years ago!) My sister informs me that we are perfect candidates for an HGTV reality show entitled "Love It or Leave It." Is there a category for both -- love it and leave it?
It is an economic decision, my left brain states with Republican certainty. It is a leap into the unknown, my right brain whispers with Democratic honesty. My grandfather said decisions about your home should be kept separate from investment decisions. He lived in an era when many people with 30-year mortgages actually paid them off while still living in the house. But he would also say (with Republican certainty) that it's time to move on, that our growing boys need room to stretch. My grandfather was a master of timing, largely because he looked the future straight in the eye without flinching and planned accordingly. I need to study his example now.
A warm little body crawled into my bed sometime in the madrugada this morning. My half-lit brain began to play back images of our life on Howard Place, flickering like an 8mm movie. Walking into the picture were two strangers. They already love it, or the idea of what it will be, as I loved it on first sight seven years ago. They are planning the paint they will use to cover our crazy murals everywhere, erasing us. I happened to hear Garrison Keeler read this poem on the Writers' Almanac this morning:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked in white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
- Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"
The sudden about-face to sell happened during the festival of Sukkot, when our rickety huts are meant to remind us of the harvest bounty, in spirit as much as from the earth, even -- or maybe especially -- in the midst of exile. Like the chuppah wedding canopy, the sukkah must be built to be temporary and allow a view of the stars through the roof. Home is made up of the people within guided by the lights above, not the structure without, I thought this morning as little toes wiggled under my tummy seeking the warmth of mommy and daddy, wherever we are.
It's taken me six years to read 284 pages of Aviva Zornberg's Genesis, reading a page or two a night since I barely understand any of it, and yet I'm addicted. She makes these ancient stories read like self-help texts to me, all the more reliable for their endurance and resistance to too obvious interpretation. I've been into Jacob recently, when he's making his way back from his twenty years' sojourn in the land of Laban. According to Rashi according to Zornberg (wow, I'm putting myself out here), "Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquility after all his troubles. One might even say that is characteristic of righteous people to yearn for such a 'settling,' a clarification of the turbulences and anguish of life. But God rebuffs this yearning, in a tone of strange sarcasm: 'Is it not enough?'" (243) Jacob "wants to compose a whole world of his own... a cognitive and aesthestic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world." (247)
But God offers a "counternarrative"... Instead of peace, Jacob suffers extraordinary pain and dislocation at the supposed dismemberment of his beloved son, Joseph, the fulfillment of anxious premonitions he's suffered his entire life. Anxiety, grief, the troubling of the spirit are all parts of being human, and "to seek peace prematurely is to beg off from reality... a profound disqualification from the human project." (259) In her last piece of magic, Zornberg puts this dismal picture of existence back together in the hopeful human process of "re-membering" against the dismemberment of experience, as Jacob must do when he discovers Joseph to be alive. "There is, it seems, a painful law that obtains in this world -- particularly painful for the righteous who would like to retain memory intact, to be loyal to all of life as it was experienced." (278) And in her final triumph (for me!), Zornberg draws on a 19th c. Hasidic writer, the Ishbitzer, to conclude that "Jacob's desire for a stable, coherent reading of his own experience, based on cognitive certainty and moral scrupulousness (which the Ishbitzer calls 'fear' and 'humility,' respectively), is countered by God's insistence on the tragic nature of existence in this world... In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love -- the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not obtainable." And shortly thereafter, "God turns Jacob's quest away from philosophy, from the search for certainties, to the world of poetry. Poetic language is the loving act of the human being, who seeks to redescribe his reality, in the midst of, and against, teruf." (279)
Got that? I'm not sure I understand one bit of it. But I love it nonetheless, and her interpretations somehow imbue our little journey with a hint of cosmic relevance, or at least resonance.
The other day the boys and I read Eric Carle's A Home for Hermit Crab in which the protagonist discovers he's grown too big to return to his shell. He seeks a new, bigger one, but finds it drab, so he wanders the ocean floor inviting sea anemones, starfish, barnacles and sea grass to help decorate his home. By the time he's done, he has grown not only a home but a neighborhood. In the meanwhile, however, he has outgrown his shell yet again. He is bereft until he finds a sweet little hermit crab who promises to take good care of both his shell and his friends. ("Mommy, why are you crying?" my boys ask at this point in the story.) In the end, the hermit crab finds a bigger drab shell and sets off once again to re-decorate with new friends discovered on the way.
Maybe this is going according to plan, just not my plan. I think I'm down with that, if it qualifies me for the human project. Just let me know if you hear of any bigger shells going on the market...
Thursday, August 29, 2013
The Push and the Pull
1992. I was sitting on the kitchen steps to William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi, no one home but me and Jordy. We'd snuck onto the grounds after the caretakers had locked up. The Ole Miss marching band was rehearsing somewhere beyond the trees. The sky was low and heavy, still very humid in mid-September. I was awash in emotion, mostly sad. "What is it?" Jordy asked, seeming unsure whether I wanted comfort or to be left alone. I tried to explain, knowing how crazy I sounded. I had fallen in love with this place but knew it would end, and was mourning it already. Without questioning my logic, Jordy replied kindly, "But maybe it won't."
Places do this to me. I fall for them, the same cascade of feeling, surrender, irrational sense of inevitability usually reserved for love between humans.
When I was 14, my mother invited a Japanese college student for a study-abroad home-stay. Naoko was entirely alien to me -- her language, both verbal and body, her fashion, her neatly arranged toiletries. Yet before her three weeks were up, I felt an inexorable pull to go to Japan. I was falling. Six years later, in my muchachuka Japanese, I gave a toast at Naoko's wedding in Osaka.
When I landed in Los Angeles for film school, my neighbor, Melodee, a divorced former actress now commercial real estate agent, illuminated it all (after a pitcher of Cosmopolitans). I had to return to Japan because I'd been a geisha in a previous life, and I had probably committed suicide. I was pulled there to make peace, to mend, my broken past. Only in LA! (I nursed quite a hangover that first day of film school orientation!)
Jordy was right -- I've never stopped loving any place I truly loved, but I have felt the instinct that it's time to move on, often when some other place has pulled me. In the rare instance when I left a place before I was ready -- Mississippi, left it for what I thought was love of a person -- I regretted it, and resented whatever place received me after (San Francisco). Los Angeles was a surprise, the first pragmatic move (in-state tuition for graduate school) undertaken with the double prejudice people from the Bay Area and New England hold against that city. But soon my tolerance for LA blossomed into a proper love affair, endless strip malls and all.
But New York was calling... During the Tribeca Film Festival, Jordy, baby Duncan and I climbed to the roof of the West Village apartment we'd rented through Craigslist (later, oddly, Craig himself would award my film a prize, so funny) with my little brother Richard and his girlfriend, Breanna. It was sunset, springtime in New York, layers of quaint village buildings and water towers rising toward shiny Midtown. A pair of wispy clouds bracketed the sky like wings, pink in the afterglow, and I was awash with the feeling that we should move to New York, and if we did, New York would look after us. I smiled to imagine my grandfathers, New Yorkers both, somehow engineering the sunset to deliver this message.
Most people wouldn't make transcontinental moves based on such a moment. Of course, there were many other more reasonable factors. But once the decision to move was taken, Brooklyn didn't "speak" to me -- it shouted. There I discovered an entire borough of people like me - scavengers of the broken pieces of a tired world, having fun seeing what new things we can make of them. (I was a kid who dragged trash from the dumpster of our condominium complex into a dwelling in the woods, appointed with discarded chairs, plants, newspapers, dishes...)
So, what are my broken pieces? How did they get broken? And what can I make of them?
Admission: I've just finished Kate Atkinson's extraordinary novel, Life After Life, in which her heroine, Ursula, is born and dies again and again, until she "gets it right." I am mesmerized by Atkinson's construct and still much too involved in her characters to let them be fictional, subject to sudden bouts of weepiness both sad and grateful, etc. Long ago I wrote a blog entry here called "A Pseudo-metaphysics of Birth" in which I toyed with some of these ideas. (Was my cold clarity that Jordy must leave the house when he contracted Swine flu in my eighth month of pregnancy with Tucker callousness on my part, hysteria from all the warnings to pregnant women, or a flashback to my great-grandmother's own swift death in New York City in 1919 from Spanish flu? In any case, Jordy recovered more quickly for being relieved of parenting duties, and Tucker was born with a surplus of good health. We are traveling the fork of history we all wished for.)
But, really, who knows how anything works? Maybe not a geisha and suicide, but I did bring back something of Japan, or found something of myself there, that travels with me now forever, as does Mississippi. We are very attached to the idea of our autonomous identities in American culture; we revere people who are "true to themselves," "authentic" and so forth and so on. Yet we are so shaped by our family, our culture, our moment in history. Without evoking reincarnation fantasies, it's pretty clear that a person's sense of self will be radically different if raised in rural China or adopted to a Brooklyn family. Do the people make the place, or the place make the people? (Or, of course, both?) Are some people (gee, who?) more impressionable to place than others? (One of my best friends responded, when I told her I was taking a part in a play this fall, "Of course you are! You've always been a chameleon!" It was said lovingly, though I felt ambivalent about the characterization.)
So why back to New Hampshire? Why now? We've got endless reasons, all of which sound pretty convincing (and have, as Jordy's Hungarian friend Robert would say, "the added benefit of truth"), but in the end it's an instinct. We're supposed to come home now. At least for a while. To gather something? Glean something? Rest back in the source? Make peace with the source? Maybe, like Ursula returning to the day of her birth amidst a snow storm over and over again, being here gives me a chance to return to some of the forks in my life and walk a different way, if ever so slightly, or just walk it again and discover it's still -- and maybe has always been -- there. The other day I was wading in the stream that wraps around our house, and time collapsed -- I was eight, wading in the stream behind Brook Hollow, content among the trees and dandelions tumbling down the white water, whole in some way that felt lost. Earlier this summer, our determined little Reeve leapt into the pool, forgetting his goggles, and groped with terror in the blurry water without finding the ledge of the underwater bench. Time collapsed and I was the one, four years old, having lost my grip on the steady silver rail of a motel pool and groping in watery oblivion for what felt like forever. I lept after Reeve, leading him to the bench and reassuring him. When I drive the back roads home from Cornish Elementary, I catch my breath at the view of the Green Mountains, instantly in my mother's car returning from a piano lesson, Susan Stamberg on the radio, greeted by this same view 32 years ago. This summer the kids entered the Cornish Fair; in the spring Jordy and I hope to make maple syrup with them. Yesterday I picked up my husband and son, passing the time while waiting for their ride with an acorn battle in front of the post office where, at the eleventh hour (literally) on May 1, 1987, I switched my "Yes" from a familiar East Coast college to one in California, off the map of my cozy, familiar world, and threw the envelope in the mailbox before fear could change my mind. I leaned on the hood of the car that night, alone in the dark, trembling for minutes before I was fit to drive again. But here I am again, picking up Jordy and our three-year old, who just demolished a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
Tiny loops of time folding back on themselves, carried by gently clicking knitting needles working out some pattern I only glimpse but can't quite yet make out.
Twenty-six years ago I ran to the big wide world that beckoned me. But I also ran away because, though I had no idea at the time, my heart had been broken here in ways I couldn't grasp until I started to gather the pieces in far flung places. It feels like an undeserved blessing to get to come home, and to realize that of all places, I love this one the most.
Places do this to me. I fall for them, the same cascade of feeling, surrender, irrational sense of inevitability usually reserved for love between humans.
When I was 14, my mother invited a Japanese college student for a study-abroad home-stay. Naoko was entirely alien to me -- her language, both verbal and body, her fashion, her neatly arranged toiletries. Yet before her three weeks were up, I felt an inexorable pull to go to Japan. I was falling. Six years later, in my muchachuka Japanese, I gave a toast at Naoko's wedding in Osaka.
When I landed in Los Angeles for film school, my neighbor, Melodee, a divorced former actress now commercial real estate agent, illuminated it all (after a pitcher of Cosmopolitans). I had to return to Japan because I'd been a geisha in a previous life, and I had probably committed suicide. I was pulled there to make peace, to mend, my broken past. Only in LA! (I nursed quite a hangover that first day of film school orientation!)
Jordy was right -- I've never stopped loving any place I truly loved, but I have felt the instinct that it's time to move on, often when some other place has pulled me. In the rare instance when I left a place before I was ready -- Mississippi, left it for what I thought was love of a person -- I regretted it, and resented whatever place received me after (San Francisco). Los Angeles was a surprise, the first pragmatic move (in-state tuition for graduate school) undertaken with the double prejudice people from the Bay Area and New England hold against that city. But soon my tolerance for LA blossomed into a proper love affair, endless strip malls and all.
But New York was calling... During the Tribeca Film Festival, Jordy, baby Duncan and I climbed to the roof of the West Village apartment we'd rented through Craigslist (later, oddly, Craig himself would award my film a prize, so funny) with my little brother Richard and his girlfriend, Breanna. It was sunset, springtime in New York, layers of quaint village buildings and water towers rising toward shiny Midtown. A pair of wispy clouds bracketed the sky like wings, pink in the afterglow, and I was awash with the feeling that we should move to New York, and if we did, New York would look after us. I smiled to imagine my grandfathers, New Yorkers both, somehow engineering the sunset to deliver this message.
Most people wouldn't make transcontinental moves based on such a moment. Of course, there were many other more reasonable factors. But once the decision to move was taken, Brooklyn didn't "speak" to me -- it shouted. There I discovered an entire borough of people like me - scavengers of the broken pieces of a tired world, having fun seeing what new things we can make of them. (I was a kid who dragged trash from the dumpster of our condominium complex into a dwelling in the woods, appointed with discarded chairs, plants, newspapers, dishes...)
So, what are my broken pieces? How did they get broken? And what can I make of them?
Admission: I've just finished Kate Atkinson's extraordinary novel, Life After Life, in which her heroine, Ursula, is born and dies again and again, until she "gets it right." I am mesmerized by Atkinson's construct and still much too involved in her characters to let them be fictional, subject to sudden bouts of weepiness both sad and grateful, etc. Long ago I wrote a blog entry here called "A Pseudo-metaphysics of Birth" in which I toyed with some of these ideas. (Was my cold clarity that Jordy must leave the house when he contracted Swine flu in my eighth month of pregnancy with Tucker callousness on my part, hysteria from all the warnings to pregnant women, or a flashback to my great-grandmother's own swift death in New York City in 1919 from Spanish flu? In any case, Jordy recovered more quickly for being relieved of parenting duties, and Tucker was born with a surplus of good health. We are traveling the fork of history we all wished for.)
But, really, who knows how anything works? Maybe not a geisha and suicide, but I did bring back something of Japan, or found something of myself there, that travels with me now forever, as does Mississippi. We are very attached to the idea of our autonomous identities in American culture; we revere people who are "true to themselves," "authentic" and so forth and so on. Yet we are so shaped by our family, our culture, our moment in history. Without evoking reincarnation fantasies, it's pretty clear that a person's sense of self will be radically different if raised in rural China or adopted to a Brooklyn family. Do the people make the place, or the place make the people? (Or, of course, both?) Are some people (gee, who?) more impressionable to place than others? (One of my best friends responded, when I told her I was taking a part in a play this fall, "Of course you are! You've always been a chameleon!" It was said lovingly, though I felt ambivalent about the characterization.)
So why back to New Hampshire? Why now? We've got endless reasons, all of which sound pretty convincing (and have, as Jordy's Hungarian friend Robert would say, "the added benefit of truth"), but in the end it's an instinct. We're supposed to come home now. At least for a while. To gather something? Glean something? Rest back in the source? Make peace with the source? Maybe, like Ursula returning to the day of her birth amidst a snow storm over and over again, being here gives me a chance to return to some of the forks in my life and walk a different way, if ever so slightly, or just walk it again and discover it's still -- and maybe has always been -- there. The other day I was wading in the stream that wraps around our house, and time collapsed -- I was eight, wading in the stream behind Brook Hollow, content among the trees and dandelions tumbling down the white water, whole in some way that felt lost. Earlier this summer, our determined little Reeve leapt into the pool, forgetting his goggles, and groped with terror in the blurry water without finding the ledge of the underwater bench. Time collapsed and I was the one, four years old, having lost my grip on the steady silver rail of a motel pool and groping in watery oblivion for what felt like forever. I lept after Reeve, leading him to the bench and reassuring him. When I drive the back roads home from Cornish Elementary, I catch my breath at the view of the Green Mountains, instantly in my mother's car returning from a piano lesson, Susan Stamberg on the radio, greeted by this same view 32 years ago. This summer the kids entered the Cornish Fair; in the spring Jordy and I hope to make maple syrup with them. Yesterday I picked up my husband and son, passing the time while waiting for their ride with an acorn battle in front of the post office where, at the eleventh hour (literally) on May 1, 1987, I switched my "Yes" from a familiar East Coast college to one in California, off the map of my cozy, familiar world, and threw the envelope in the mailbox before fear could change my mind. I leaned on the hood of the car that night, alone in the dark, trembling for minutes before I was fit to drive again. But here I am again, picking up Jordy and our three-year old, who just demolished a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
Tiny loops of time folding back on themselves, carried by gently clicking knitting needles working out some pattern I only glimpse but can't quite yet make out.
Twenty-six years ago I ran to the big wide world that beckoned me. But I also ran away because, though I had no idea at the time, my heart had been broken here in ways I couldn't grasp until I started to gather the pieces in far flung places. It feels like an undeserved blessing to get to come home, and to realize that of all places, I love this one the most.
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Packing Up the Rickety Ladder
The puppies and I were running through the woods above the Top of the World yesterday when a thought unrelated to anything arose that it...
