December 14, 2012

The Newness of Things

     I still experience the newness of things, the immediacy of objects that come under my scrutiny for the first time, or again after a long while. It's the only antidote to melancholy, which is pleasurable but deadly, like drinking poison.
     The computer facilitates this tactile work, like the putting on of a new cotton shirt, or the first step into the mouth of an unknown trail through woodsseductive, full of unfamiliar bends and pockets where little brooks flow.
     One by one I collected antique French chef's knives. The milky, pockmarked surface of the carbon steel blades thicken toward the bolster, heavy but perfectly balanced in the hand by the fastidiousness of an old craft. The metal is soft.
     I discovered M.F.K. Fisher, the sensual, gin-quaffing food writer who was the world's Julia Child before the later model—puritan, striving, horsey and middle classemerged. I collected the unpopular books, filled with her open-ended sentences like the floating metaphors of William Carlos Williams.
     I lost myself in the dogma of the clarinet, the endeavor for good breeding in tone, a gigantic snobbery. The hand-tuned instruments of the 30s and 40s, asleep in their brittle cases aromatic with mold, are cool to the touch. The burnished ebony of the joints reflects the colors of brick and aubergine and even sky blue like soundless overtones.
     I plunged my face into a copy of The Common Reader twice my age, inhaling the odor as if it were the overcoat Virginia Woolf filled with stones as she stood on the bank of the Ouse. The old paper became the smell of knowledge itself, of possibility.
     I ate a buttered fresh beet, which I haven't done since 10, and life filled my mouth with its spice, not staled by its long absencea frightening journey of loss, of adult pleasures that now seem childish, of towering commitments I couldn't honor.
     The depressive and the manic—heartbreak and blissful curiosity, sugar and salt—continue under the noontime sun.

November 26, 2012

Old English Major Tells All

     Thirty-one years later, I still have tiny seizures of memory about the writers I loved in college. Whatever was contained between the covers of their books enlarged upon entry, like stepping outside from within a dark and tiny house: the sensation of the sun on your arms and the endless sky.
     Not too long ago I bought another copy of the old Norton anthology, my first literary companion and still the ultimate symbol of my education. The swayback enormity of its pumpkin orange spine arched in an ever-greater curve with each use, each consultation by a student. Like the Bible, its thousands of onion-skin pages spoke with a bygone authority: Here is everything you need to know.
     The bookstore with the wagon wheel is still there, a compartment in the tiny do-nothing shopping mall south of the campus. Walking through its series of rooms was the first time I felt the restrictions—the biteof economy, longing for the complete novels of Jane Austen or a set of Proust or a particularly old edition of Pylon.

October 31, 2012

The Costume Party

     I was 24.
     Bob dressed me, his long arms forming a thousand slender, firm bridges between us, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. I concealed my inhalations of his scented breath, the hibiscus oil of his shoulders and chest. (I concealed everything.)
     I was at last a mannequin, starved down and petite in my pale yellow Sahara Club polo shirt and jeans like powder blue leggings—and I collected and memorized every stare, every approving, longing glance as I walked in the city.
     The first outfit—whatever it was—had to be scrapped. Ruth insisted the skirt was an important item in her wardrobe. Her jaw became more set as I was transformed. Bob's decoration of me was for Ruth the gold leafing of an annoying, inferior object recently being paraded into their apartment.

August 31, 2012

Goodbye to Princess Di

     Five hours behind Paris, I was in the twin bed of my uncle's funky house in Maine when word came that she had died. This was before he had moved the bed into the corner, and it was still parallel to the narrow room. With its ribbed foam mattress pad, layers of blankets and duvets innumerable as baklava, the control bulb of the electric blanket tapping against the footboard, it was a lumpy canoe of insomnia due northwest, toward Bangor.
     I had left the news bulletins, each one reluctantly graver than the last, downstairs. The reading lamp was already turned off when I heard my uncle on the chirping floorboards, coming closer through the unlighted maze of cut-up hallways and rooms. He was 64, and his steps landed always in the same spots. The old house was filled with his papers and souvenirs, sets of coronation china, postcards and photographs from former students—many of them fortyish now—and his acrylic paintings from 35 years ago. Landscapes of his beloved Maine, rocky coastlines, snow-heavy spruces, and a blood orange lake sunset with giant cattails in the foreground, they were fastidious, literal, composed but unimaginative. Yet they formed an affectionate opus, the backs of the boards amply filled in with the painter's name and location, the date, and often a handwritten paragraph of dedication. Painted for Grace L. Dodge in thanks for many kindnesses and in remembrance of many good and pleasant trips.
   

August 24, 2012

Waiting for September

     Fall is coming, and the dogwood berries are tucked into bunches of leaves like clip-on earrings.
     I spent the whole summer standing in the door frame of the back porch, smoking. Outside, the sun baked the steel landing and steps, and the trip down to the garden, wilting yet overgrown, seemed pointless.
     The coneflower refused to stand, but the deep yellow rockets stared heavenward the whole time, like a children's choir. The saturated color against the grey-green and cobwebbed background drew my attention, hypnotically.
     

July 13, 2012

Friday the 13th

My monitor is 1920 x 1200 and the photo of the pond, under a lid of flowering water lilies, shines back into my face like a mural. It's unintentionally Monet-ish, and the blues do seem blended, as I blended Cobalt Blue with Titanium White on my double-thick glass palette so many years ago.
     All week the picture has held my hand, the tops of its thick green trees becoming violet as they softly leak into the blue sky. The entire composition is a jigsaw puzzle of remembered tranquility—a highly pigmented, dreamily soft blanket that I have held up to the side of my face throughout five days of uncertainty and fear.
    

June 21, 2012

June 21, 2002

     Ten years ago today, I picked up the phone in my office and a stranger told me that my mother had died that morning, hours before.
     All the troubles of my life—more than a few of them caused by my mother—had not left a permanent stain, and my ennui and melancholy had to borrow their gusto from blundered love affairs or vague memories of my grandmother's bejewelled left hand diving for bass octaves on the piano. Coming up with something to cry about was a job.
     Ten years later, I am no longer 42. I still have the Lubiam sportscoats, and even a pair of Ferragamo slip-ons, I bought during that time. Pictures show my face so narrow and young, my hair (as always) a spiky bedroom crown the color of Hires root beer extract. I was still that person my mother would position in front of her coworkers at Hertz and say, barking like an emcee, "Guess how old he is!"
     Right up to the last minute, I was her baby, the last of four boys—never her favorite, but a proof of her own youth, in Raybans and jeans. I always had the sheepish grin and smooth skin of someone who was only incidentally adult.
     Although my mother acknowledged in me only an echo of the traits of her first and beloved gay son, she had my watercolor sheets expensively framed, and she encouraged me—knowing she had mishandled that previous relationship. I was still a member of her team, even if I wasn't tall.
     Now I have a face full of feelings. No need to stretch for purple sunsets.
     You can't guess how old I am.

May 27, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend

     It will always be three days of rain at the Golden Dolphin Motel in Brigantine, New Jersey. I think they played cards, or perhaps a board game. Perhaps Scrabble, although I would have remembered that because of my love of words.
     My mother's pack of Viceroys, perhaps by then cozily tucked in its Robin's egg blue vinyl holder with the tiny kangaroo pouch on one side for her lighter, purred at her elbow with her cocktail, sweating on a lazy square of paper towel. The ashtrays were marbeled plastic cups the color of dog's droppings—never the wonderful tartan sand bags of an earlier period, which my mother conscripted into duty when the ball bearings in her car ashtray shot out at her one day, as if the dashboard were spitting them. Her lucklessness with spray cans and folding chairs and cars was the greatest source of her story-telling, and she collected and curated each episode, embellishing it in the retelling with genuine good humor and a kind of grace that made her—even as the butt of the joke—seem more attractive.
    

April 16, 2012

First Hot Day

The dogs cling to the kitchen floor, their forearms and chins flattened down, like a spinning carnival ride. Indoors, nature fails the animals, and their useless instincts send them under chairs and low tables, airless and dusty. Only the paunchy bees are happy, loitering in the air around the wooden gate, friendly as drunks. The ceaseless fan, the windows opened all the way, make the dining room feel like public space: a classroom, a Sunday School picnic pavilion, a limestone cave with a plate rail.
     Summer is too early. The rainy, gothic days of April never came, yet May is weeks away. We who are older remember weather that never happened. The world never did go right—my mother in 1967 opening the trailer door as she cooked Christmas dinner. The Easter snow storms and chilly July swimming of my childhood—the selfishness and perversity of dead people who were, at one time, 40. The atmosphere will always be wild, and young. But we will remember a more seasonal time, as our instincts mislead us.

March 27, 2012

Liquor Store Walk

Liquor store walk! A big letter "C": two blocks over, eight blocks up, and two over again.
     Today I reached across a chain-link fence and pulled a newly-opened wisteria to my face. No smell. Later, balanced on a slender branch that seemed to have no source, a single fist of lilac punched through the underbrush of a neglected yard. The encounter was like a sudden meeting between old friends, as I stooped to inhale the distillation, cupping the blossom in both my hands as my mother did my face.
     Advancing up the street, past the little front lawns like vernal bath mats, the boxy side porches with their out of season chairs huddled together for warmth, everything in its right place but more sharp-edged in the cooler, fresher air of this last March week, my body unfolded in the walk like a swimmer's legs and arms open to caress the sea.
     Warming up, my muscles slowly reclaimed my wounded mind, subsumed it—lovingly, as a mother puts a bowl of soup down in front of a young son—restored order among the sensations, a hierarchy of personal survival. A temporary end to pain.
     A cheerful walk.

February 18, 2012

Pym on a Saturday Morning

Pym is in the yard, in the bright February sun, looking up to the porch with a gentle rebuke for the wasted booty—all the hydrangea branches and the peanut shells that failed to compost—he must enjoy alone. He sits like a sparkling pin affixed with a jaunty angle on a gown of moss and raw umber. His effect is to heighten, to focus.
     His is the worst kind of loneliness: pleasure that is not shared. He returns again and again to the ground, always finding something to lift with his mouth and toss into the air. Even Franklin naps inside a trapezoid of sunlight on the kitchen floor. We all ignore his bliss.

February 3, 2012

Windex Etude

     My mother had to have the radio on.
     It popped out of her luggage before the Sea Breeze, when we traveled.
     She entered any room as a surgeon or a teacher might have, her hands always busy pinching and shaping the space, modeling the clay into a stylish busta perfect room. Music and ashtrays. Milk glass candy dishes and plastic flowers. Side tables and throw pillows.
     She progressed across the floor picking up dirt, bent like the Negroes in old plantation photographs. I remember her in white cotton pullovers, the sleeves jacked tightly up her forearmsthe better to accommodate scouring the bathroom sink.
     Her slippers, always parked beneath her silvery velour swivel chair, napped the weekday afternoons away like a pair of cats. The placement of her cigarette pack and lighter had an enviable formalitya neat, happy decision: a couplet.
     She wipes the phone receiver, flips the calendar, and disappears into memory.
     Quietly, I rotate a philodendron's face toward the sun.