What I saw, what I heard

Movie theater on West 84th

West 73rd Street store window

The church of Hal

"It is hard to know where our stories are going as they are being written. That is the mystery of faith"

—from the Jason DaSilva filmWhen I Walk as quoted by Hal

Don't blow up the dolly house

Well, there you go. I tempted the fates, got caught by hubris. I dared to suggest all is well and sure enough, it isn't. My husband is in his cave. I don't know if I drove him there or not, maybe I did. Or maybe I was just absorbing some energy from the air between us that made me act out last night. He refused to go there with me, he was very mature. He said, I am trying not to fight with you. I was grateful for that. I had lobbed dynamite at his cave to try and smoke him out, to try and see what's up, and of course, it makes him go deeper inside. He is so deep inside this morning it's like he's not here. His robot self is here, but he, his light that dances, has completely disappeared. I don't know what is up. I feel terribly insecure, despite 28 years of marriage and weeks upon weeks of good humor and harmony, suddenly, this distance again, and the stories I make up. I am trying to remember that I absorb darkness as much as I absorb light, and that sometimes what feels like my own tragedy is really someone else's, and I have lost the boundary of where they end and I begin. I don't know what is up with him, why he has shut down. Is it me? Of course it's me. Of course it's not me. It is both. I need to stop trying to reach him, stop trying to find him inside the empty eyes and monotone answers, which always feels to me like a withdrawal of love. Baby, it's cold inside. I need to leave the house early and stay gone all day, so that I will avoid the temptation to light that fuse, cause the kind of explosion that could wreck us for sure, even if we have survived such explosions before. Somehow, when we are in this hollow, the dark airless pit, it seems as if this is how it's going to be from here on out, as if something fundamental has been broken. I am trying, like a grown up, to remember that we have been here before, we have passed through this valley before and made it to the other side. I just need to swallow the words that arrange themselves in my throat, ready to fly like knives, the flouncing of a scared child, unsure of her safety, unsure she will survive what comes. Where was that child born, I wonder? In the wine I drank Thursday night with my women friends? Is that what has upset my chemistry? In a childhood of functional and dysfunctional alcoholics, none of whom were cruel to me, but who I was always so aware could be lost to me at any moment? Where did I learn that nothing is ever for sure, and why do I fear it so? This might be just the weather inside me, a hurricane I'm cooking up all on my own, but I don't think so. I'm responding to something. All is not well. I do not feel emotionally safe. Am I aching for something that does not exist? Is emotionally safety ever and always an illusion? This morning, I don't actually know.

Red Glitter Hearts

I am having a rare and lovely day of being able to choose what I want to work on. My monster project is done, it was well received, and I don't yet have another pressing commitment, so the day is deliciously mine. It's cold out, but sunny. The men are at work and I have the house all to myself, it is full of peace today, and tonight I will meet two of my women friends for dinner, then come home and curl up next to my love. I lay awake for hours before daybreak this morning, but the usual angst that comes during predawn wakefulness never made an appearance. My mind skipped like stones across a clear pool, and I let the ripples take me wherever they wanted, and I was mercifully free of anxiety. At one point I looked across at my husband, holding fast to sleep before the alarm rang and he'd have to wake and get dressed for work, and I marveled at the fact that for almost three decades now I have shared a bed with this man, spent my most vulnerable hours of the day next to him, all worldly artifice abandoned, and it suddenly seemed like the most intense act of intimacy I could imagine. Now here I am at my magic light box again, and when I look up, I see those glittery red hearts that sit on top of the armoire where my laptop lives. I want to declare that all is well, but my superstitious nature won't let me. It whispers that as soon as I say it, it will no longer be true, something will blindside me, so I won't say it, I will leave it unsaid and allow it to continue to be so. Happy Thursday.

Fire

Two buildings exploded at 116th Street and Park Avenue in East Harlem yesterday morning at 9:31 a.m. It was a gray morning, not a clear blue one, but it brought back memories of the day two other buildings exploded, and everything was forever changed. The death toll is rising, now at seven souls. More than 60 people sustained injuries. Tenants of surrounding building cannot go back into their homes. Their windows blew out and their apartments are unprotected from the elements. The temperature fell last night into the 20s and heavy rains came down.

My friend Leslie, who lives six blocks away, felt her apartment shake with the boom. We had dinner last night because she was still feeling shaky, reliving the emotions that rocked her after 9/11. When you live alone, she explained, these things slide more deeply inside you, because there is no one around you to show you that life is continuing on. You might as well be alone on the planet.

I cannot fathom people just going about their day, an ordinary morning just like any other, and then their whole world is in rubble around them. It was a gas main explosion apparently. The people in one building had been complaining of smelling gas for weeks, and there were apparently no carbon monoxide detectors in the apartments. Compounding the hell was a sinkhole that opened up beneath the concrete and steel debris, so that heavy vehicles and rescue machinery had to be carefully brought in. The rooftops of surrounding buildings were covered with firefighters, the streets still filled with EMT uniforms. Overnight, new flares bloomed as the remaining fuel from the leak burned off. Today, the recovery and clean-up continues. My son isn't there with them. Not yet.

Foodies

My daughter majors in hospitality management and so even though she has courses with serious-sounding names like microeconomics or financial accounting or organizational behavior and leadership skills, occasionally her classes look like this.

I have no idea what they are doing with all that butter and flour. This is my girl's favorite class this semester. It's called Food Service Management Theory and Practice, but she calls it Culinary. She says her school specializes in giving fun classes dreadful sounding names.

 

Here she is with two of her fellow hotelies. She adores these kids. It's so odd to me that there are people in her life who she feels so familial toward and yet I don't know them. The days of seeing all the corners of her life are long gone. This is the natural way of things but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I miss my girl but I'm glad she seems to have made good friends at school. She's a little stressed out this week because she has four prelims, which is what they call midterms. But the pictures say she's definitely managing to mix in some fun!

Stone and Spring

"One wintry night in Wyoming, a group of men come calling to collect a debt—the life and service of Stone, the young woman at the center of this strange and mythical frontier tale." 

Brittany Tuttle's novella is a potent work of art, the writing so deceptively spare, the world that springs to life in your imagination so fully realized. Elizabeth's review of the book says it better than I ever could. I, too, was seduced, mesmerized, unsettled and finally enthralled. Our Vesuvius at Home is an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. I have said before that some of the best writing I read anywhere is happening on blogs—and by bloggers.

You can get the book here.

Going there

These are all places in St. Lucia, where I will be going with my daughter and two of her college friends for spring break at the end of the month. We won't be staying in any of these luxury homes. We will be staying at my mother's house, which has been undergoing a renovation that includes a new and much needed roof, repair of water damage from the last hurricane, pulling up the old carpet in the bedrooms and den and putting down easy-to-clean tiles, refurbishing the bathrooms and powder room, painting everything, reupholstering some of the furniture, and so on.

The house now looks nothing like it did when my mother was there, so I am having a little emotional storm about that, and I need to prepare myself. I need to now think of it as a house in St. Lucia we can go to, that is steps from the beach and adjacent to a very lively part of town, dining and entertainment wise, and how lucky are we to have that. I have no idea if I will even like the new decor. I haven't yet seen any pictures, but the real estate agent, who is responsible for renting the place to short term renters and earning a commission from that, likes it, so I suppose that is what matters.

I have a knot in my chest as I write this, remembering the house where my father last lived with my mother, the house my children went to each summer growing up, to spend the month of August with their grandmother and their cousins, and how much they are who they are today because of those summers. I pray that I make the transition to the new life of that house with enough grace and gratitude, and how blessed I am that my daughter wants to make this trip with me. We will all have a fine time, no matter what, and life carries on.

Counting for something

While scouring for receipts in my wallet in order to send in my expenses for this story I have just completed, I ran across this slip of a photograph tucked among business cards from long ago, from people I can barely remember. This is my husband in our first year of marriage, before children, before the Twin Towers fell to the ground. I have carried this photo of this man I love in my wallet ever since that year, and it was apt to find it anew yesterday, those Twin Towers at his back, because yesterday our son got the news that he had passed his EMT certification exam and is now officially a New York State EMT. We're so proud of our boy. This is another step on a path he chose on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were cut to the ground. That's my son, below. He is now just four years younger than his dad was when I married him. I have been lucky to be surrounded by good and purposeful men.

My son's desire is to save lives, and he is training himself to be able to do so. My husband saves lives in another way, as warden of his little church in Harlem with it's huge homeless outreach program. Two weekends ago, as the snow came down furiously on a Saturday afternoon when the homeless outreach crew was out in the neighborhood handing out sandwiches and looking for people who needed to come inside, they passed a mound on the sidewalk. Something didn't look right, so they turned back to investigate. What they had seen was an old mattress and underneath it, huddled on another mattress was a family, shivering in the cold. I have not been able to get this image out of my mind, a family sandwiched between two torn, stained discarded mattresses, able to see no other way to weather the below freezing temperatures and snow swirling down. The homeless outreach crew brought them back to the church and set them up on cots as they made calls to find them shelter. I keep wondering what would have happened if they had not noticed them there. A lot of snow fell that day. 

I am made differently from the men in my life. I do not have their common touch or their selflessness and level of commitment. I once told my husband that I would be so overwhelmed trying to solve the entrenched problems of people with so little hope and even less means. It's so huge and mind-boggling, I told him. He shrugged. You do what you can, he said simply, and you trust that your little bit will count for something. For that family riding out a snowstorm huddled between two mattresses on an icy side street in Harlem, it counted.

Lunch is served

Lentil soup and steak-like portobello mushrooms steaming hot from the kitchen of an empty post-lunchtime Max Soha as I tap-tap-tap on my keyboard, fielding emails and phone calls and setting up interview times and checking off how many more pieces of information I still have to track down in the two days remaining to me, my reporter hat precariously perched, the golden source out of the country, frantically scrolling through my growing list of experts to find the perfect replacement, knowing finally what my work wife means when she says it's the reporting I love, it's getting the knowledge all to myself, the deep knowing of things, but then I have to write it and that I hate, trying to whittle it down to its essence when the truth of it is so much larger and will never be captured in a single story. Reporting, writing, editing, they are such different hats, and the muscle to make the hats sit properly needs to be exercised and I am grateful (I think) for the opportunity to exercise the reporting muscle again, to flex it so hard and so furiously that I have almost fallen in love with it again, even though I think the story I'm writing might read like rubbish but my reporter friends tell me it always feels that way and to just power through. One more week. Popping a chiclet from its sleeve, coffee cup at my elbow, reporting, transcribing, writing, connecting, all of it far more arduous than you ever think it will be, and not nearly enough thinking time, and I can't wait for life after to rush back in so I can breathe again and pay Aunt Winnie's bills and spend my cousin's morning commute on the phone with her instead of rushing to my computer, setting up my tape recorder for yet another 8 a.m. interview that always turns out to be exhilarating in some measure but how many more? One more. Just one more.

Just saying hey

I actually have lots to write but no time to write it because every spare moment is being spent on meeting this crazy short timeline for this crazy big and amorphous project that I have had to create an outline for, and I fear I was overambitious in what I promised, and they loved the outline and so now I have to deliver. Every single moment from now until I turn in the whole thing on March 10 is accounted for. I have so many interviews still to do, tapes to transcribe, sections to write, experts to follow up with, and whenever I fear I have bitten off more than I can chew I make myself look at the post-its that my cousin Helen made me put around my room—"I am the perfect person for this job" and "Everything I need comes to me at the moment I need it" and "I am committed" and "I don't know how I will but I know I will because I always do"—and you know what, it helps!

My husband is in the kitchen making two big pots of seafood gumbo for a Mardi Gras jamboree tonight at the little activist church where he is the warden, and he is doing great service, humbly and patiently, chopping and stirring, Premiere League Soccer on the TV, and he just told me that each pot works out to about one hundred dollars in ingredients and I find that astonishing but that is the cost of living in New York City.

My son left yesterday to travel to Ithaca with his team for a regional track meet, and he's staying on for a few days since he went to school in that town and has friends still there. His sister is also there. She texted me yesterday from a Top Chef type competition at her school at which she had signed up to be a judge, and she said, "Mama these are the times I realize what a good choice I made." Ithaca is such a great college town, despite the below freezing temperatures and feet and feet of snow. How lucky that both my kids got to attend and enjoy school there. My niece, too, who always said, "Ithaca is most beautiful on the day you are leaving it, and you always want to return."

Anyway, got to get back to work. I miss my usual immersion in blog world and spending time with all of you, but I'll be back soon enough. The pictures of my kids are just because.