Last Train to Muguet

I remember in what were carefree days that I didn't recognize as such, when I would meditate in May in St. Tropez, they would celebrate Spring with a little bouquet, a sprig of Muguet, which I didn't know at the time, either, was Lilies of the Valley. It would be given to all present in the charming village, which it still seemed to be in May,the tourists not having yet invaded, with a ribbon tied to a tiny card saying 'Profitez de la vie', meaning 'Enjoy Life.' I had first heard that expression in French when I was visiting there-- it was still possible to do that for centimes, and I used to go and do silences and swim among the calming Maritime Pine, shading my anxieties like leafy umbrellas-- and Grace Kelly drove off her cliff, and the assistant concierge at the little hotel I stayed at in Ramatuelle, as the whole Cote d'Azur grieved, said "Il faut profitez de la vie." In other words, you better.
Well, today is the last day I will be the age I am, so I am summing up, as Mr. Maugham would put it--does anyone read Mr. Maugham anymore?--remembering all the wonderful friends I have made in these interesting years. When I first started studying spiritual things-- you don't have to gag, I have been less than faithful-- Jack, my Jewru(new book out: The Wise Heart) in his always moving talks quoted a lot of Castenada, so I think it was Castenada he cited as dissing the idea of things being blessings or curses, but just seeing everything as what it is, meaning life, with all its challenges and changes. In spite of this wisdom, I do consider my life has been studded with blessings, meaning the places I have been able to go when they were still go-able, and the friends I have made in the course of my travels, both in the world and in inner space. There was Diane who introduced me to metaphysics, and Pippa who introduced me to Orient Express, and Gerrie Pitt who showed me through the less-than hallowed halls of the Mandarin in Hong Kong, and several fine locales to follow, Sandy whom I loved best of all who was murdered in Bali, so she won't get this e-mail,unless of course there is an Afterlife and it's electronically connected. The rest of you have been on my computer and in my heart for a number of years now,so I will not cite you one by one, but you have all and each given me moments or days or years of warmth and connection, and I thank you.
Yesterday was a good friend's birthday, so to celebrate her I went through the driving and blowing rain, torrential it was, a leftover either from Myanmar or our own tornados, tearing my umbrella apart, to see Iron Man as she told me I should do, and I was happy to sit there soaked watching Robert Downey, Jr. make a new life for himself, since I knew his grandparents(Good God!) the Dorsos, when Dick ruled showbiz and Betty ruled fashion, and I am relieved he took himself by the back of the collar and worked it out. I would wish the same for my own children with whom I am not celebrating Mother's Day/my birthday, but that is another story, actually probably a novel, but one I don't think I will write, as I am weary of children that disappoint and parents who are surprised by that. I have in the past year become entranced with the simple miracle of speech, how it comes into the brain of little people and grows into thought, and eventually words that can lift your soul, and keep you floaty for days. So that takes care of Silas, who is four, and as fine a spirit as I have ever encountered, a personal gift to me, I think, from the mischievous angels who can't wait to see how we recover from the slings and arrows of outrageous spawn.
I have also, I think, come at last to enjoy New York, expecting nothing from it, finally, hoping for nothing from it in the way of acceptance, validation or good weather. It is enough to have watched the park burgeon with Spring, first the daffs, yellow and white dazzling, now withered, which is what happens to all things Spring, then the greens, bursting, growing daily from their shoots, then the great sweeps of white and salmon azaleas, and always and lingering, the little white flowers that I didn't know what they were till I walked with an actress friend and she started singing 'White Coral Bells upon a slender stalk, lilies of the valley deck my garden walls,' a song we used to step-sing at Bryn Mawr, the delicate blossom I finally recognized as Muguet.
So il faut profitez de la vie. I certainly feel that I have. Having all but completed the novel that caused me suffering in L.A. where, if I do not write I have little to make me happy but sushi and Silas(and of course you) stunned at New York's making me more charged up and creative, so you never know, I rest my case.
Thanks to all of you for all you have given me, and all I have been lucky enough, I hope, to receive with some degree of grace when I listened, and was able to give back when I could. We are all part of each other's story. Happy Birthday.

SPRING IS HERE

The flowers that etc, Tra La, out at last, little miniature daffs raising their bright yellow heads like in children's books: one half expects them to have faces that start to smile, mouths that sing. One gorgeous day where I lunched outside, so Mimi could come too, with an old friend who told me I shouldn't write these things as it will interfere with my novel, but as my novel is interfered with anyway, what the hell.
That day blossomed into high adventure, the New York variety, where I went to the Italian Cultural Society, and met up with new friends, a brilliantly funny PR person, Morty, and his quietly intense associate, and we went to dinner at Swifty's, where we were sat down next to a couple who looked TV familiar. A little into the appetizer I connected: it was Joe Wilson who blew the whistle on yellow cake nuclear bullshit in NIger from the administration and his wife Valerie Plame, the outed CIA-ette. So our dinner was even more stimulating than if it were just us being festive and interesting, and when they asked for their check, I leaned over slightly-- we were elbow to elbow on a banquette, and thanked him. "For what?" he asked. "For what you did for our country." He looked benign but somewhat puzzled, and asked who I thought he was, and I told him. He said that wasn't who he was at all, and a few minutes later showed me his driver's license to prove it, but Morty is convinced that's who he was anyway, and if he was Joe Wilson is very good-natured in addition to sharp, to be so pleasant while keeping up his charade.
Yesterday was dark and cold again but today dawns softly bright so Mimi and I strolled around the pond to check the progress of the tulips I came to town to visit-- they are not blooming yet, but the shoots are higher, so I hope the color will come out soon so I can see them and go back home, which I really feel LA is now, since it's where I'm writing this novel which is, alas, the center of my universe except for Silas, and Mimi who follows me everywhere, something Silas is not permitted to do. I spoke to my old friend George d'Almeida who lives in Tuscany on a vineyard he was smart enough to buy for a pittance in the 60s, and he has stopped painting as he says there are enough d'Almeidas in the world, most of them in his studio, and he wants to spend as much time as he can with his wife, the usual excuse of politicians here. But they are a special couple, and I envy them their companionship, as I envied the young people across the way from my tiny balcony in a glassed in room where they were eating breakfast, she in a nightie, picking up whatever she was eating with dainty fingers, he in a dark jacket, slicing with knife and fork, forking it into his mouth with his left hand so I took them to be Europeans. I remembered as I watched them that 'companion' comes from the Latin which I never studied, 'to break bread with," and I miss breaking bread with, especially French bread, that I never broke with anyone, that whole epoch of my life being mostly solitary. My Scottish buddy Rosemary is living in Paris now, and I would envy her that, too, except I came across a poem I wrote that goes

It is the function of envy
To shorten the breath
And the vision
And blur the senses
So that all one can feel
With perfect clarity
Is rage.

So envy is out. But I did tell George, as I told my good friend and editor, that I would rather leave a truly good book than have lived a happy life, and that does seem to me to be foolish.
Back to the moment, which is really all we have, and should live to the full if we learned anything at all as apparently I haven't: the park this morning was radiant, not only with the aforementioned about-to-sing daffodils, but bluebells and a little purple flower that barely peeks out above the grass but the color is vivid and soothing and would serve for mindful meditation if i were wise enough to be doing it. I wiped down a bench on which a vanished lover had left a message inscribed in metal "Think of me when day turns to night and believe it will be all right." a good thing to have fixed my eyes on before I saw the headline in the Times about how hard it would be for anyone to pay for college, and thought of a new motto for W, "No grad left behind, except how are they going to get there, heh heh," and the adjacent column about GE having a bleak projection(did you know Vonnegut worked for them, and much admired the company even after having become disgusted with everything else ?) and that being a bellweather for our tragically blighted country thanks to U Know Who, or perhaps we should change it to W know Who.
But in the distance I heard the lovingly mournful bleat of the saxaphone player who seems always to be in the park in the morning, and he was playing "I Concentrate on You." I tried to follow the counsel of the song, "whenever skies look gray to me and people declare we're through,:" combining it with the lost loving advice inscribed on the bench and concentrate on who? My You is long gone, as is Cole Porter, who wrote that song, and I wonder if he would have rather have left a slew of great music and lyrics rather than live a happy life, and knew of course the answer would have been yes, as he had no choice.

For I Have Measured out my Life in Dubble-Bubble

The true extent of the economic downturn, as it is politely called but really translates as the end of our world as we knew it, is not the $4.00 gallon of gas but the 50 cent piece of bubble gum. I got through most of my intellectual(such as it was) growth by balancing all my esoteric studies and learning and yearning and striving by reading Love Comics at Bryn Mawr while chewing Bazooka bubble gum or Fleer's Dubble Bubble.
Although this clearly, as I was to discover later in life, played havoc with my teeth and gums, it did handle the fact that I was always in love with the wrong narcissist(George Segal in college, Tony Perkins in my early days in H'wood, before they or I knew what gay was and it might not have mattered anyway, I so adored how smart and gifted he was, and was grateful for his pride and admiration for my creativity.) Chewing feverishly eased my frustration and thwarted lust.
As I wandered the world which I did even as a young striver I went to a-- I cannot quite call them a bevy, as they were none of them particulalry comely with the exception of Pattie in her youth, --fortune tellers, none of whom had the answer to my destiny, as the answer is usually in yourself or destiny, which is very mysterious.-
. Nonetheless wherever I wandered I had my fortune told, which is more exotic in Hong Kong than most places where you toss sticks in a temple. But it is none of it as satisfying even though incorrect as it is when you open the fortune cookie that says 'Your luck has been completely changed today' on the Fleer's Dubble Bubble Fortune in 4 different languages which it used to be if you you traveled far enough or wide.
Once I took a ship from Italy to San Francisco hoping to find out what my fortune was or if, indeed, I had one, and when I got to the last night of the voyage on which everyone on the ship except me was violently seasick-- I think it was the President Wilson on which I was traveling coolie class- I went to the Banquet that was to be the finale, -- with everything roped, chairs, tables, food, as the seas were so violent everything was sliding, including the people who were all in their cabins throwing up, except me-- and there before me were several hundred tables with roped crystal and roped china and nobody eating the Oriental feast, but all the tables laid with piles of fortune cookies. At last! I cried inside myself, enough fortunes! and nobody to go through them, but me. So I went to every table and opened all the cookies, and they were all homilies and bullshit except for the very last one that I opened with shaking fingers: 'You will go on a long voyage," it read.,'to no advantage.'
SInce that time I have resorted to colorogy, my own form of numerology, where you put the money in the machine and the gumball rolls down, and whatever the color is is what you can expect. Red is passion,(not very likely) yellow is luck(one can always hope) Green is money(ditto) orange is lust( still?) white is purity(what choice does one have?) and blue is spiritual growth. Today, on the heels and toes and instep of our latest disastrous figures, I went next door to my sushi restaurant,-- where the Dubble Bubble gumballs are. What was, when last I gumballed,, a quarter a ball, is now 50cents. Not to be deterred(I have no plans to go to France what with the euro and how stupid and ruined we are) I thought I could at least get a piece of gum. The pinlk one(love) rolled directly onto the street, and the man who owns the market felt compassionate, so he put 50 cents in for me. It was yellow, but that one, too, fell directly onto the sidewalk. He indulged me in one more, and I caught it in my hand. Blue. Spiritual growth. Well, I guess that's the only option we have. All the same it caught in my teeth and I have to go to the dentist.
It doesn't really matter that T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. He wrote really good poems that Jews can read.

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGE W

So as I strolled through the streets this early afternoon, having read the financial section of the NY Times, with all the bad news and the worse/amusing notice that the dollar is about to be bailed out by Japan, I heard in my ears the strains of the burning boys of Sherman's army singing 'Marching Through Georgia." It is beyond fiction, which I may have to give up writing, that the combined destructive talents of Attila the Hun, Charlemagne(to whom my friend Nancy is related), General Patton at the height of his messianic metaphysical warriroring, and Douglas MacArthur when he didn't want to stop, could not have accomplished the cumulative damage done to our country by our vacant-headed Prez. Those of us who believe in Karma wonder what past evil could have been done, including slavery, that could have earned such a sad and idiotic payback and fall. The greatest country in the world it was, for all the years of growing up, war, anguish, but always (almost) steadfastly principled and smart. That this great nation should be brought to its spiritual and monetary knees by a moron defies belief and understanding, except that we must have waterboarded God.
I have been accused by Harris Wofford, an old president of my college, Bryn Mawr, of having an apocalyptic mentality. But he is on board Obama's team, and I do believe that the minister's curse on the US will have undone Obama, and it is my fear, deep and strong in my apocaplyptic heart, that Hillary heading the ticket will elect John McCain. Oh, fearful New World, that has such creatures in it.
What the hell are we going to do? Answers welcome.

The Forty-Three Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding

I don't know how many of you are as old as I am, but I remember a novel that made a sensation in my still-youth, about a black(it was all right to call them then) hooker and a kind of hoosier, straw-chewing john who didn't realize there was a price to pay. In my less-than-youth but-still-naivete-except-for-my-prose, I wrote a novel with its central character a dominatrix based on Vicki Morgan, Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, except I loved the character and through mine own compassion made her deep and complex and very touching, so I hated it when she got killed and even more when Dominick Dunne wrote a book on the same subject and made her cliche and superficial but that was his problem, as well as mine, probably, because not only did I feel he had killed my character but also his was a huge bestseller and mine had a struggle, as most everything I have written does except The Pretenders because it was so dirty. Oddly, Silk Lady, the one about Miranda as I called her, was not that dirty at all, even with its subject matter, but I did have to research dominatrixes, which led me into some adventures. I answered an ad in the LA Free Press("want a little discipline? call Mistress Victoria") so I did and told her I was writing a book and she said "Yeah, sure," but invited me to come anyway. Her 'dungeon' was in a little house behind the LA County Museum where I am going tomorrow(the museum, not the dungeon) its windows draped with red velvet so nobody could see in. She took me in to see all her gizmos, which included an Iron Maiden and a leather swing, told me how she had gotten into the business and how proud her parents were of her. Then she invited me for Easter Brunch, which my darling friend George-Anne, nursing her baby Nick at the time told me I had to go to, if only to see what they were serving, if they had bagels and cream cheese, fruit, etc.(as it turned out I think they had Hot Cross Buns, but it is possible I made that up as a pun.) Anyway, I figured unsound counsel would not come to me through a nursing mother, especially George-Anne, so on Palm Sunday, after going to Quaker Meeting and getting people to sign a No-First-Strike petition and taking my children to the airport to go visit their grandfather, I went to the Brunch. The details can be found, much prettified, especially the people who were in real life gross and pathetic, in Silk Lady, which except for that chapter is a fairly literate read. But I did learn from Mistress Victoria what it was that drove her clientele, mostly, according to her, high-powered executives under a lot of pressure so they needed women in spike heels to step on their genitals or paint them with mercurochrome, etc. as a release from having so much control. I was to go back to observe a private session with my lawyer, a woman of some caution and a most unsatisfactory sex life who insisted on accompanying me for my own protection(Ha!) but Mistress Victoria called me just before we set out to tell me the meeting was postponed as "two of her slaves had board meetings." When I called to re-schedule, she had disappeared, and I suppose the rest of her adventure can be found through CS!.
All of this brings me to Eliot Spitzer, for whom I cannot help but feel compassion, because compassion is my thing now more than it ever was, and I think I understand why he did it, if I can believe Mistress Victoria. So much pressure. And yet, such a lovely wife and such a smart law professor(Dershowitz) and so many hookers in DC. WHy did he have to bring anybody in? And why the Mayflower Hotel? It is all very Bill Clinton whom many people say always wanted to get caught but I think he was just a hubristic pig.
So to me it is not so much puzzling as suicidal and spendthrift. Surely he could have gotten someone for a hundred dollars, or, as things go nowadays, a few gallons of gas. I am brought in mind of Hugh Grant whom as we all may remember got a blow job from a street hooker around the corner from Grauman's Chinese, and when caught was asked by Jay Leno on TV, "What were you thinking?" Especially as there must have been multiple thousands of women who would have done him for nothing.
Well, "Men," as Sadie Thompson said. "They're all pigs." Of course I don't mean you or yours.

Charming Child Stories

A friend of mine from Bryn Mawr, so knows how far Memory can go back, fears that Memory might not go forward, so thinks I should write down what Silas (Age 4) says or I will forget. Had lunch with a very bright pal, which always gives the lie to what they say about LA, and told her the least endearing thing he said, and she found it most endearing. So I shall unpack what loveliness has happened so far, to make room in my mental luggage for anything tk, as we say in the journalistic profession, which I seem to have abandoned, but means: to come.
Also I am tussling with my novel, so praps its a good idea to leave sentimental baggage behind, and harden my heart, like Pharoah.
Sooooooooooooooooo
Silas at three: "Read me a story from your mind."(My favorite)
"Are you going to get a house?" "No." The apartment's big enough for me."
Silas: "Don't you want kids?"
When I explained that I'd had kids, that his dad was my son, he said "But he was never little."
When asked where his mother was one Saturday ; "In schule."
"What's it like in schule?"
"Boring." A beat. "So boring I weed my pants."

Now he's turned four, so there began a series of outings where I also introduced new words. I wrote a little children's book for him that he wasn't much interested in, because he wanted pictures. One of the words in it was "Indeed." "I don't know what indeed means," he said. Payoff tk.

"We're going to have an adventure," I said. "What's an adventure?"
"It's something you don't know how it's going to turn out, and it involves taking a little bit of a chance, but it almost always ends up fun."
So far we have had a number of adventures. They have involved collecting maple leaves, buying flowers, which I have counseled him he should do for girls "When I get married?" he asks. "Yes," I said, "and even before."
"I'm going to remember this adventure forever," he said.. "Even if you're dead. Even if I'm dead."
Then there was yesterday. In between park and bumper cars on the Santa Monica pier, and corn on the cob and a taxi back to the car as it was far to walk, and he was tired, I told him that 'indeed' meant Yes, that's really true.
Afterwards there were crepes on Main Street. "This is the best adventure we've had," he said, when it was almost over. "I'm serious."
"Really?" I said.
"Indeed," said Silas. "Indeed."

A Literary Life

It is the kind of weather today that traps people into moving to California. The air is clear, swept by Santa Ana winds, and the sun is warm, but not too hot,and there are no shadows, since nobody walks. On such a day, were I in Paris, everybody would be casting off their scarves, coming out of their caocoons(sp?) and crossing those fabulous, often gilded bridges, and Mimi and I would walk from one end of that gloriously walkable city to the other, as we did in our September adventure. But as I am here, and have to stay alert and awake this evening, I cannot walk to anyplace where I might have a meal, and Mimi has had two breakfasts(one from me at 7, another from Carmen who comes to clean once every three Sundays, who didn't know she had already had a comida.) So instead we walked to Dutton's bookstore, not a great distance but at least one that stretches the legs and seems to serve a bit of a purpose.
I think I could live in a bookstore, but even Lasiked, would have to have my reading glasses, as though I can see the words, naked(the words AND my eyes) I have to struggle a little so the words cannot dance, they lumber along. I had meant to buy the Letters of Noel Coward, as he has always lifted me-- Tony Perkins gave me his memoir at a down time in my creativity, to reinforce the point that you should never give up. I opened that huge new book, as I do metaphysically from time to time to see what word or thought is seized upon, to a letter to or from Marlene-- it was not clear,-- about a dinner party where Yul Brynner, with whom she was in love, was there and also Susan Strassburg(sic.) whose name was misspelled, which spoke to the fleeting nature of fame even when you're having it. Susie (Strasberg) was a dear friend and the end of her life still makes me mad, as the evil second Mrs. Lee did not even give her the money from the sale of Marilyn Monroe's white piano which was her gift to Susie, who considered her a sister since she'd been essentially adopted by Lee and Paula, or even anything for insurance, so Susie died alone and untended in somebody else's apartment where she went into the bedroom because she was cold and wanted to lie down, which our mutual friend the psychic Pattie McLaine said would have preferred to the hospital that wouldn't admit her, but one should have options.
So my interest moved to the book below it, a biography of Edith Wharton, which I bought instead to get over my sorrow at never having lived the literary life. As previously noted, the poet HD, from Bryn Mawr, my college, ran off with Ezra Pound and later became a lesbian, neither of which experiences are mine, although I did have an almost close relationship with a German named Wolfgang who claimed not to be a Nazi but when living in Singapore said they should line up and shoot all the rebels in East Timor, so so much for that assertion. Nor have I ever been embraced by the community that Gay Talese whines constantly about having to spend so much time with. So I figured reading of the life of the estimable Edith would get me over my envy, as she was tight in the circle of Henry James, who I'm almost sure would have been as boring as his novels.
Even as I start to write" I am reading the life of Edith Wharton," I can hear the voice of Oscar Levant around whose brain I had the privilege of waltzing for one night, one night only, saying "The night June stabbed me, I was reading the life of Berlioz." Gone now from the planet almost all memory of Oscar Levant, along with the immediacy of having witty friends in LA except for one, a gay dope dealer. It is too sunny a day to be overcast with any feelings that one has not been in the right place at the right time, but it would have been fun to know Hemingway when he was vital and in shorts as he was in today's New York Times with a recently discovered letter, or Saint-Exupery, or Yeats, or D.H.Lawrence, whose poetry was reviewed in a poetry magazine they had at Dutton's, by Joyce Carol Oates, whom I do not grieve over not knowing, as she scares me.
The phone just rang, and it is a recorded message from Michael Winship, president of the Writer's Guild East to which I belong as I always loved Herbie Sargent who was its president and infinitely smarter than the one from West, telling me I can cast a ballot on Tuesday, Feb. 12th, as to whether or not to end the strike or wait till all negotiations are formalized which will take several weeks. I will of course say yes, as I am especially aware that that is Lincoln's actual birthday, and as he freed the slaves it will be good to free the writers. Still, selfishly, I will hate giving up all the muses who had noplace else to go but my house.
The day ended with the great sickness of the country being celebrated, Celebrity Worship. A good friend who works at the Beverly Hills, where the Grammy parties were, invited me to come, and as I walked up the (mandatory) red carpet, I saw the lineup of the victims, the our-lives-depend-on-intrusion Paparazzi. They are of course a sorry lot, but there might be a real story in there somewhere. The first time I saw them I was going to an event where Michael Douglas was a heavy name, and as he entered, they screamed 'Zeta! Zeta!' at his wife, who might have been the best shot of the evening. It was terrifying, but not yet, as it has become, the national disease. A cult of personality, mostly about those who don't have one.
Still, once inside the hotel, with the bar set up with a giant screen and standing speakers, so eatching and hearing the Rhapsody in Blue, played by two great musicians, Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, conducted by John Mauceri, was like having the best seat at a concert that reminded you there were great composers in this country, before there was dope.


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