SWIRLING

Swirling is not a word I would usually use, it seeming excessive.  But swirling is what it is doing outside my New York window, or, more accurately, terrace if a terrace can be really small and more than hazardous to step out on, especially with the snow swirling. Flakes, or sideways sort of clumps are seemingly trying to fall.  Over the rooftop edging the overbuilt seemingly abandoned apartment house across the way some windows are lit, as though this were still New York.  I am at once touched and baffled by this display of actual weather, it having been so long since I experienced any, my next to last days in LA having been so rainily out of character they seemed pretentious, an attempt to seem a real place.  On my way here I sat next to a nice couple also consigned mistakenly to a last row on American, having paid for a premium that wasn't available.  They had gone to LA for a dose of sun that was uncharacteristically totally absent.  Nothing right now seems to be turning out as any of us expects us to, except Trump.
    The Uber driver who brought me home, a miracle, from the airport was from a place I cannot name, since he couldn't either, being unable to speak any of their usual unintelligible languages.  You can't even Google them anymore in a tongue nobody can wag,  It is truly the end of the world as we knew it, or thought we did.  I may just stay in my tiny apartment forever watching the snow swirl.

You Said WHAT?????!!!!

So to my surprise, and, I suppose, in a way, gratitude, I am growing older.  This is not an anticipated eventuality, as I was always the youngest one: in my class at Bryn Mawr, in my building in New York, in Bikram's yoga class, till he started promoting himself and hitting on students... you get the idea.  It came as a shock then when I was contacted by my audiologist, I think he's called, to have a hearing test.  Deafness has never been true anathema to me, as my sweetest most lovable relative was my Grandma Gussie, with whom I lived for my five first years, because my father, whose family was rich, particularly for Pittsburgh Jews, loved nothing better than everybody else doing everything, and did not share with my mother till after their wedding party in the basement of her family, his intention.  As she told it to me, he said, as they left their mating celebration, "Why don't we just go upstairs?" and moved in.  My mother, not yet having embraced the fury that was to characterize her being, just behind the wit that also developed, stunned, acceded.  Three years later I was born, and so it was that my crib was assembled  just inside the doors that led out onto the sort-of balconied front porch, while at the other end of the hall my mother's several brothers, sisters and parents had to wait every morning outside the only bathroom while Lew W. Davis, as my grandpa Moisch always called him, a slice of wry with his observation, slowly maximized every moment of his bathing and shaving, impeccable as well as inconsiderate. 
      When Lew appeared to be going to work he would hide out just up the street in Grandpa's fruit and vegetable store so my mother wouldn't know he didn't have a real job, as he sold pharmaceuticals for Bauer and Black, and that you could do without going into an office as I don't think he actually had one.  He ate Indian nuts there until it was time to go home, shelling the little things and throwing the casings on the floor.  My grandma, in on the secret, and, as already noted, the sweetest person in the world, swept everything up and said nothing. 
     So because I loved her so, her being hard of hearing didn't seem that odious to me. As few of the people I've known were captivating with every word they spoke, missing a thought now and then didn't seem dire.  Being tested then, coming up with the numbers far below what they should have been, I quickly acceded to getting a hearing aid, as I know this is a transition time in my life, grateful at having come this far, past where I always assumed I would be over.  Also I have made a penny or two, and there is insurance, so the price of my new appendage did not weigh in to my cognition.  It took a few days after I had ordered the aid, tried it on, saw how primitively, obviously, even obtrusively it sat on, behind, and in front of my ear, or rather ears, that it even sank in how much I was paying.  $7200.  The price, once I thought about it, of a small used car.  Or maybe a new one if I knew the right dealer.
      Thus I have spent the better part of this weekend day pulling my thoughts, my phone, my ears and my soul together, arranging to return the things, just say "Huh?" and/or be with people who don't mind repeating, delighting in the happy fact that we are all still here.  Or if they are lucky enough to be cute and younger, that they will be privileged  to have my run, if they do, or if anyone can with what is going on politically. I am still going to have to pay $300 to return the aids, plus postage. I suppose with how things are and what is going on in the world,  I am lucky have become conscious before it was too late, and I had to go everywhere with what the dealer told me, surprised I wanted to return them, was "the Rolls Royce of Hearing Aids."  That might have mollified me if there was somebody fabulous standing by the curb.

THE DAY AFTER NOT QUITE OSCARS

So it is the morning after the Golden Globes honoring of Oprah, the boomstart to the speculation that she will run for president, and my understanding that I am more Californian than New Yorker in spite of Jeannie in the basement who keeps me from going madder than I am, and Acacia, Flower of the West, whom circumstance and her tough fortune and my Good one have brought into the Central Park South building, and my life.  In spite of eight hours on the runway and a landing in Las Vegas, making my trip back here as time-consuming as would have been a voyage to Europe, it was all in the end incontrovertible proof that here(LA) is where I belong, if I belong anywhere besides the moon.  Happily I no longer think I am meant to be in the center of things, especially as the center of things is only a little way away but the line-up to get there is many many many cars long, and motionless, engines running.
     I am at the little hotel I stayed at in-between sorrows or victories and defeats--hard to distinguish which they are from the distance- and it is absolutely empty of soul except for Armando, the bartender who's been here forever on and off, and an adorable young woman at the front desk named Asia who's going into business when she leaves here which I hope will not be soon as she's bright as a new penny and well-dressed, something that never really mattered to me I was convinced, but it is reassuring.  On the TV by the bar where I sit drinking the dregs of my coffee, served at my request in a paper cup as the china sucks, Trump, cross-armed, is fighting allegations that he had ties to mobsters which he certainly wouldn't have if they had any taste.  
     Am not exactly sure what I'm doing here besides being surprised at still being alive, hoping the brain is continuing to dance, even without a cute partner.
     Mon Dieu!  Outside the six-paned window that sees across the street to the small building almost everyone goes to for plastic surgery, rain actually falls.  I would like to think I may have brought it, as it isn't money, and is available to everyone at too long last.  Going back upstairs now in the hope there's something inside my head I may find in my room.