REPORTFROMTHEFRONT: The God Within

So as I continue my struggle to find out where I belong, if one is supposed to belong in one place, I attended my Quaker meeting this morning and that certainly ain't it. First, there is the reality of Memory, which, though I was given a Still There by the Memory doctor, is better when there is someone else nearby who remembers, is best in another place, spiritually anyway.  The Quaker Meeting in New York is absent of soul, but may be intensified by the truth that I can hear almost nothing.  There are many rows of built-in bench, and a small number of people who also appear built in, none of their backs particularly inspiring, and I leave hungering for my little Meeting in Santa Monica.  So along with my growing affection for my Grandboys, I have a hunger for connection with my West Coast spiritual buddies.  Also I found out after leaving that meeting that the woman there who seemed smartest and most intense had gone to Bryn Mawr, so am hoping that pinky touch of No Kidding! can be re-established.  And the colder it grows, the older I realize I am, the most happily spoiled by weather all these years I didn't have much to cling to, if you can be said to cling to air.
    Then I stopped in a food place on 57th street and enjoyed myself as I rarely do, or at least haven't done since I used to go south towards San Diego of a Sunday.  Eating all kinds of thing I wouldn't dare usually, imagining the place had just opened, only to discover on departure that it had been there for 18 years.  None of this is particularly exciting except as an alert that my spirit has been slumbering, if that's how I can describe it, assuming or probably more accurately hoping it hasn't died.  If I stayed here I would probably chub up, as fooding is the most sociable---it seems-- activity I have found, since the Y hasn't spoken to my soul, if I still have one.  A soul, that is, since we can be sure there is a Y.
    Oh please, God, tap me on the mind.  Let me know I am still here, and there is a reason to be.  It is quietly dazzling to discover you are still here when you thought you were gone.  And there is even a song, the other side of this, even after you have less than delighted in Brigadoon, though were happy to have seen it, City Center being so close, even though your own center seemed so far away.  You can remember a friendship with the tossed away Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner, the lovely Nancy Olsen, who was told by him that he couldn't live without Micheline, then seeing her on a side street in the south of France a few years later, withered.  The universe does seem to mete out Justice.
     

WHAT THE HELL: Why Not?

So I have lowered my head against the wind, and my expectations, bought an overpriced book (Callas) at one of the few remaining independent bookshops in Manhattan, have given up hope of a predictable schedule, (pronounced the British way,) and decided not to run away, not today anyway.  Somewhere inside me I am borderline terrified, as I have not been this old before and am surprised to still feel girlish.  You never change from inside your eyes.

     In the same book batch that I found Callas, I found a much cheaper little volume by Thornton Wilder, who at one time I imagined myself to be like, creatively anyway, full of bright imaginings as I was, not having come to terms with the truth that I would probably never find the creative partner for my soul.  I was a little girl for a very long time, the happy conviction that I would be able to fulfill myself as a dreamer who could write and be realized, exacerbated by a novel, Sweet William, being optioned when I was in my early twenties (Sweet William), going back to my high school (Cherry Lawn, Darien, Connecticut, the capital of anti-Semitism in America, and us mostly Jewish kids, put out on the hill by confused or incompetent parents) for a movie that never got made (the star went to another film instead, taking the money and the deal with him.) I still get flashes of memory of the long weekend when it was still going to happen, and Bazz Burwell, my wondrous once drama teacher, sat musing , his fine face in his fingertips, and seeing me seeing him softly said, "I was just remembering you as a student."  I really loved him but didn't have the money he needed, so the relationship didn't continue, the school went out of business, and I still don't know if the Carter Burwell creatively in the movie business is his son.  "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety" Shakespeare wrote of Antony musing on Cleopatra, but the relationship must not have gone on long enough.

          Oh, Life she am a puzzle. As is this instrument of writing I am not quite sure what to call, typewriter that she really isn't.  Laptop, I guess.   Just as I am unable to maintain true sovereignty over the size of the print. 

       I could take it back to the Apple store, mercifully not that far away from the apartment left me by Maman, as I think of her in affected recollection, in spite of her oft murmured threats that she wouldn't, including once as she awakened from a coma.  "You're not getting the apartment!" she grunted, before even opening her eyes.  

      I have to guess she really loved me, as much or as well as she could, having sold, lost or profligated everything she had, from the diamonds to the Jackson Pollock, The Blue Unconscious, 8 x 12, feet that is, which I slept under when home from school once she'd married Puggy, and turned it (and him) on its side("What difference does it make?"she'd said.)  He had gone to school with Clement Greenberg, the art critic, who'd gotten Puggy (Saul Schwamm he was to fellow brokers who'd mostly had their backs to him, since he was a Jew) to buy the painting as he was the only one with any money.  When their marriage ended... he'd fled, left everything, and she, a child of the Depression, had panicked and sold everything in the huge Park Avenue apartment for peanuts, almost literally, the Pollock for ten thousand.  It is now worth maybe two hundred million.  Maybe more  by the time you're reading this.  Gag.  Oh, well.

       It's only money.

       Cost me only a hundred and ten dollars to go to the Christmas show at Radio City.  I thought (not sure) I had gone there as a little girl, with my daddy, as I called him and was sure he was, except I liked my mother better, cruel though she was.  Cruel is a heavy-handed, heavy-hearted word, but it applied to her.  She was beautiful and brilliant, the first after minor plastic surgery: nose.  Incredible eyes and a dazzling smile.  Only one cavity her whole life.  

      There had to have been something truly mentally ill about her, as she was disproportionately smart, and had times been different probably could have become the head of General Motors.  As it was, she knew how to downcast those eyes.  But no idea how to look up into herself to become.

      Poor Mama.  Probably she was as enraged as she was having spent all those lunchtimes in a cubicle toilet in a bathroom at 

school, eating the sandwich Grandma Gussie had made her, saving the two dimes, giving them, all added up, to Grandpa when she'd graduated.

        Writing this, remembering as best I can, I am touched that she was only as crazy as she was.  And only part of the time.  Even more moved  by how much in love they must have been, a few years later,  Puggy the self-made Jew on Wall Street, Helen the social director she'd become after the struggle upwards from secretary she'd learned to be on the train as we Southerned towards Florida from Pittsburgh that winter.  I'd turned five but had to pretend to be four as we didn't have the money for the ticket.  Already knowing how to read,  I could dictate to her as she practiced  shorthand, and we moved towards her improbable Destiny.

      

So to my happy surprise, I am starting to be glad to be in New York.  I spent this... I guess it is: Holiday weekend, and the day after in this allegedly festive town where I have been sullenly less than glad, running into some really nice people, some of them picked up in coffee shops which you can do here, and on the streets themselves where there were parades and races and quests for merriment.  Forgive me, Universe, for doubting.  I would not like to blame it on Donald Trump, but I could.
    In any and all events, I have beamed onto some really good spots, that carried on them some truly nice people, seen a good ballet, The Red Shoes, the stage adaptation, of my high school roommates obsession. It was not as engaging as my high school roommate, Lenny Landau, Leonara she was actually, who had a life in the theatre, semi-sort of, and with whom I reconnected for not long enough as I really liked her, and she was married to a creative man and lived in a town house, which seemed very creative to me.
      But the beautiful San Diegan I met in my coffee shop and I have definitely linked up, and it is joyful to make friends, something i hadn't really been doing much except for the people who work in my building.  This is a tough town if you're not going to the right places which seemed to be everywhere i wasn't.  But enough about loneliness. It does take a strong hold, and that pulls you into television and then you grow old.
     Am off to a concert now, something I did not often enough since coming here, walking as I've been with downcast eyes, shut ears, and weighted soul.  See you later, I hope.

So alas, I missed a day.  Two now.  May I come back this evening.

So when I got to the restaurant, late, which I didn’t mean to make intentional, it just takes longer to get someplace on foot than I remembered, or maybe the foot is just slower, it was closed.  Not permanently, just for the day, or maybe the Universe toying with my sense of attachment, imagining that things were supposed to work out, even though it was New York.  So I walked over to Lincoln Center, hoping to find/bumpinto them, sprawling though that setting is, wandered around, spoke to some kind people working windows where ‘No,’ there was no ticket for me, went over to the coffee shop where I saladed next to a kind couple from outside the city as many seem to be on a concert night, went to the ticket window, bought one for myself, when the woman of the couple came to the window and offered me a ticket as a child hadn’t shown up.  So I returned my bought ticket, to the annoyance of the woman in the window(No, not the movie of that name, if you are old enough to remember) and went inside and up to sit with my new, generous friends.   

      Concert great, I thought, though twas just the first half, met another wondrous couple, European, elderly as apparently I am, too, went back in and was impressed by the performance of Jeremy Irons as I always am, as he stays masterful and doesn’t age, especially from the good balcony. Afterwards went down where two aging Brooklyn women were arguing the spiritual applicability of the piece we had just heard.  I hadn’t judged it for God rules but just theatre.  Pretty good, I’d thought, but what do I know.  Then I’d wandered down, had a nice exchange with a young viola-ist, and ambled down the street and into a cab to go home, as I’m trying to make it.  Got to my door when I’d dug into my sleeve and not found my earmuffs, the fur accessory to my silver-fox trimmed jacket, all I have left of unnecessary luxury, having sent my ground-length red-dyed mink to a cleaners that has closed and disappeared, but hey, I was fearful of that ensemble anyway.  I can remember having worn it only once when Maman, who had given it to me told me “Wear it with nothing underneath, as you have no taste in clothes.”

    Now, fearful of having lost the earmuffs, having given away most of the many furs Maman had had and passed down, I taxied back to Lincoln Center, where the muffs weren’t on the ground, found a security guard who let me back into the center where I searched for my headpiece to no avail, took a taxi back to home, which I am still trying to make it, and no, no one had come to leave the earmuffs, went upstairs having resigned myself to the loss, trying to figure which earmuffs I might wear with it even though they weren’t a true matching accessory,  took my fox-fur trimmed cape off, and went to hang it in the closet, when all the way up on my shoulder I found the earmuffs.  Am I that old, or is my upper arm that insensitive?

    In any case, I regard it all as a Victory.  I have made new friends— I received an e-mail from the nice couple who’d invited me to concert and then the restaurant had been closed, and we hadn’t found each other, we shall meet again, my new wondrous buddy from Florida who feels like a contemporary from inside my eyes, my doorman seems always glad to see me, and it looks like Trump is on his way out, though it ain’t going to be easy. 

LOVE AND GRATEFUL KISSES.