I wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured
we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
- from "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul," Frank O'Hara
On Christmas Day, we put together a shadow-box full of photos of his grandchildren for our grandfather to display in his room, since apparently the only thing anyone talks about in those halls is their progeny.
Looking through photographs, we realized that we haven't taken a photograph of the cousins since sometime in the mid-90s, when my brother was still carrying his 30 extra pounds and I had a mouth full of metal. Cue the line-up.
Predictably, not a single one of these turned out. Being the oldest, I blame myself.
In the meantime, see if you can play "Spot the Jews" here.
(At the office, they tell me it's strange how much I enjoy spending time with my family. No one moves to New York unless they're trying to get away from them, they say. I don't mind being the odd one out. I love the bejeezus out of them. I do.)
Go up to the roof to see if you can see the Northern Lights. How far away is the sun? How hard is it storming there? You take a mug of hot chocolate, you work hard for the horizon. Once in France the meteors were so loud they struck the sky in pinks and green, you saw them, you still have that.
You tell him all the things you want him to do to you. You aren't sure if they are true. You wonder how long it will be before you have to do something to yourself.
Goodbye to the busses and the poppies that flew past us behind bus-windows in deep red-orange-dotted- smudges and the edgeless fields where you walked when I wasn’t there, with you, in your head, where you walked, were you alone, were there fields, how alone were you. How
alone can anyone stand to be. Any one of us might be tapped any one lead away when that day comes will you be ready. Will you be prepared for what you have not said.
A little girl sipping juice through a straw in my corner bodega almost ran into me rounding a corner yesterday, and just as I was preparing to be annoyed she looked down at my turquoise rain boots and said, very matter-of-factly, "I like your boots." And I said thank you, and she said you're welcome, and it honestly made my whole week.
I found this photo today over here. She found it here. It is a cabin in France, of course, where everything is perfect, but when I saw it I was rushed back to a small home that my grandfather built, after my grandmother died, on Saltspring Island, just off the coast of Vancouver. He lived there with his partner at the time, the one none of us could quite warm to, but he built a room to house my grandmother's piano and in this tiny cottage that felt like an act of worship, so I forgave him. I took the ferry over by myself once and had him meet me at the dock. We ate soup at a small restaurant in town and then I read and napped on his porch for hours, waking with the windchimes, watching the raccoon he fed as it hooked its front paws on the rung of the top stair and peered at me across the deck. There is something so intimate in my memories of that place, which makes sense, I suppose - a small carving of land that he claimed, built, and cared for until he couldn't care for it any longer, a whole world in miniature. Like a Russian estate, if we were landholding Russians in a Chekhov play.
My grandfather had surgery yesterday morning. They put a screw in his fractured hip. Outside, it snowed, real snow in a city where that is a rarity. He had fallen in his bathroom at 3:00am. He had to use his panic button. I try to imagine the nurses with their small hands trying to lift my rapidly-disappearing grandfather off the floor of his bathroom. Then I try to stop imagining this.
This year has been a bruiser. All 19 days of it.
Recently a guy told me he stopped responding to my emails because he "couldn't find a deeper connection." This made me sad, and then really, really mad. My feeling is, if someone is looking for a deeper connection, they should really tell you first. I've got whole depths unplumbed, buddy. But there are things you have to earn, I believe. You certainly don't earn them by behaving like an asshole. It is strange to be found wanting without the awareness that you were being judged.
Which all goes back to making myself the smallest I can be.
My baby brother was born 24 years ago today. Tonight he will eat short ribs with his girlfriend after driving carefully through the snow to visit our grandfather in hospital. He doesn't really read books, or care about art, or think about his place in the world. And yet he's probably a better person than I could ever hope to be. I wonder how that works.
I run my body on Vitamin C and Zinc. I live off hyphenates: Cold-Eeze, Thera-Flu, Emergen-C. I curl the cats deeper into my lap and I ask them to be still for a moment. I ask everyone to care just a little bit more about each other.
I'm breaking out all my loaded words, lately. If you cross me, you had better believe there is one wrath-filled, strongly-worded email coming your way. It will end with something benign, something along the lines of, "Hope you're well!" but you will know that the subtext there is I HOPE YOU ACCIDENTALLY ROLL IN POOP AND THEN SMELL LIKE POOP FOR AT LEAST A MONTH.
On the subway home, just past midnight, a guy I initially thought to be drunk turns out to be meditating. He slowly moves a coil of green prayer beads through his fingers. He presses his spine straight against the hard plastic seat, eyes closed, breath moving up and down the column of his body. Earlier tonight I was kissing someone in a cab, and I laughed, because I was kissing someone in the backseat of a New York City cab, and doesn't that strike you as strange? And then even earlier than that I was sitting in Lincoln Center listening to the New York Philharmonic play Bruckner's 8th, his last, a symphony that is commonly known as The Apocalyptic, because of how closely it hews to death.
I'm not sure there is much to connect these things, beyond how I'm realizing that just the act of getting up in the morning is often an act of bravery. Just the moment of saying yes.
A friend recently passed along this video. "It'll make you cry," he said, to which I replied:
"Maybe not. I have a hard heart now."
It was a joke, sort of. Except it also wasn't. Because I didn't cry, watching this video, despite its beauty and poignancy. And I was reminded of sitting in the theatre, alone, watching Like Crazy, and hearing the entire audience sniffling around me, and thinking, "Am I missing something?"
A few days ago I opened a letter I had written to myself last winter, a worksheet that was meant to detail where I wanted to be in 2012. I'll be honest, when I finally got to opening it I was all, "Man, I've done so well. I'm sure I'll be right in line."
Except.
The whole letter was about how OPEN I wanted my 2012 self to be. It used words like "vulnerable" and "alive" and "awake." I wanted to be forgiving, to have achieved peace, to be ready and grateful. And I'm reading it going, "Man, that 2011 self sure is one naive idiot."
I work in smaller spaces now. I tried to explain this to a coworker. I only have so much room to move. I have smaller feelings. That is where I am comfortable.
"It feels good," I told her, "because it doesn't feel bad."
There is an element of self-preservation in this, to be sure. And maybe that's just where I need to live for a little while, until I get my footing again. I'm thankful for what turned out to be, in retrospect, a rather difficult fall, if only because it made me see that I can have feelings, still, that I will have them again.
In that spirit I decided to make a list of all the things that did make me cry in 2011.
(This does not include January through March, three months in which I barely stopped crying.)
