Old friends

“Old friends, old friends… sat on their park bench like bookends… Old friends, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears…”

These Simon and Garfunkel lyrics are dancing in my mind lately. There’s nothing like old friends, people who knew you when you were in fifth grade or your first job, when you were negotiating new motherhood or slogging through a hard time.

Despite all the current ways to get in touch – text, cell phones, FB – it’s so easy to be out of emotional reach from the people you know and love. I don’t know about anyone else, but I need more face time, not more Facebook time.

It was as if the universe were listening to me because in the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to reconnect – face to face – with friends I hadn’t seen in years. In New York, I met up with the two Ellens: Ellen S., the one I played with on the stoops of our Bayside apartments, and Ellen G., whom I met in my early 20s. Both are at critical points in their lives now, seeking new employment opportunities after personal changes and challenges: illness, job losses, children growing up and going away. I hung out with one of the Ellens in her apartment and with the other in my hotel room during a break in the conference I was attending. You can pack a lot of talk in a short time; at least I can.

Closer to home, Dawn and I had breakfast together in Delmar. I met Dawn in a women’s support group in 1992 after both of us were separating from long marriages. I spent endless weekends at her country house, holing up with my books and writing and oil paints. We went camping together, and to music and dance festivals. I had my first Thanksgiving without my children on Cape Cod with Dawn and her daughter. For a long time, Dawn and I were inseparable. And then for an equally long time, we barely talked, having bumped along our respective paths in skewed lines. Except for the night she came to my Bookmarks reading at the arts center in Troy last month, a year had passed since we’d caught up with each other’s lives. And once we got talking, we could barely stop. Over coffee and eggs at the diner, we touched on it all: children, jobs, exes, homes, travel, her massage business, my collage passion. We even struck up a new partnership of sorts; she’s now showing a line of my card designs in her studio.

Later that same day I went to an antiques auction and had dinner with Steve, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly two years (and who knew the two Ellens and Dawn). I’ve known Steve since I was 23 and dating one of his best friends (now my ex-husband). Our friendship was forged over long talks on my pink couch late at night during his early visits to see us in Albany. Steve, who lives in New York City, has a country home in Columbia County, and we do our best to stay in touch, in person, though some years we’re more successful than others. Relationships evolve and shift, and we always meet now as a foursome; Steve and Robert, and Ron and I. It works.

I also saw Grace last week. The housekeeper of my son’s best friend, Grace was an angel in the days when my children were young and we were running here, there and everywhere. She helped take care of my son – feeding him, and sometimes picking him up from school – when I was at work. Now widowed, she lives alone in a new apartment across the river. She made us dinner and we had tea, like in the old days, when I’d pick up my son from his friend’s house and sit for a bit while the boys did homework or played sports or video games.

And in the middle of it all, on a night when I was feeling tired and cranky, came a real blast from long ago. I heard from the younger sister of a college friend. She was calling from Connecticut to lament a job interview at which she was told, immediately, that she was overqualified. I’ve seen Susie only once time in the past 30 years, at her father’s funeral several years ago. But I remember, as if it were yesterday, driving to Ithaca with Susie in the late 1970s to visit her sister Ruth, my college friend. We were young and carefree, endlessly happy to be on this invigorating road trip. Now, it was unsettling to hear about her depressing job interview. How many times have I heard similar stories of men and women in their 50s who are laid off, downsized or let go, and then overlooked when trying to rejoin the job market? I was surprised, then curious, then glad that she called. Old ties can be powerful. At least I could lend a sympathetic ear.

Finally out of the blue, came an e-mail from Jamal, whom I met in that same long-ago support group and whose children I’ve seen grow up on photos posted to Facebook. Jamal, who lives in Virginia, will be in town to check up on her mother. We hope to meet and catch up.

Happy convergences, good friends, lives in touch the old-fashioned way. All in all, a good month.

 

 

Begin again

“To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.” – Sartre

“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. – Goethe

January, as I’ve noted before, is one of my favorite months. The frenzy of the holiday season gone, I can hear myself think.

As wonderful as the November-December holiday period is, a chance to bring together everyone in the same place at the same time in our cozy home, I crave the quiet the new year brings.

So yes, I loved cooking with Elissa in my new kitchen, trying out recipes, devouring endless food and HGTV shows with Lucas, opening our Hanukkah presents, watching movies by the fire, hosting Ron’s family (and constantly scurrying down to the treadmill between meals and meal prep). Loved getting away to Keene Valley for a few restful days with Ron on New Year’s weekend.

But now it’s time to hunker down and WORK.

There are essays to be finished (some lingering in their unfinished state for years), chapters to be written, piles of writing scraps to be sorted through and organized, collage cards (my obsession of late) to be created, books to be read.

And in the midst of all this, I am pulling together a painting studio for myself, though it’s now been two years since I’ve dipped my brushes into my oil paints and transformed blank canvases into new versions of landscapes I’ve come to know and love – in Charlevoix, Costa Rica, England, northern California, Lake Placid.

I’m deciding between two spaces for the studio: the basement laundry room, which needs some thorough cleaning before I want to spend hours down there, enclosed with my oils (at least there is a window); and the sunny “coatroom,” for lack of a better descriptor, a small front room that’s a catchall for now. I’ll cover the carpet, bring in my easel and mediums and books and brush basket and boxes and boxes of paints, and begin. Maybe, at least I’m hoping, it’s that easy. I realize that some time ago I signed on to have a one-woman art show at the Colonie town library in September 2012, and now, unbelievably, 2012 is here, so I need to make something happen.

Let the year begin.

Thanksgiving thoughts

My girl is home from NYC, watching Michigan win over Ohio State with her boyfriend, Peter. My boy is home from Union (trimester ended), and in the library studying. My man is downstairs, communing with his college boy, and he’s been working in the garage, too, this Saturday, cutting a shelf for our kitchen out of antique barn planks. I’m raking leaves, writing some, puttering in the kitchen, munching on leftovers cooked by my girl (who crowned me sous chef) in my beautiful new kitchen.

Our Thanksgiving menu: Turkey with gravy and my traditional mushroom-celery stuffing; Marea’s spinach squares; Elissa’s corn casserole, sautéed Brussels sprouts and bacon-and-goat-cheese stuffed mushrooms; asparagus drizzled in butter; Ina Garten’s cranberry conserve; creamy mashed potatoes; Lucas’s apple crisp with vanilla ice cream. Ron carved and cleaned up (and made killer spiced-up chicken wings the night before).

And last night, a post-Thanksgiving feast with our friends, the Feins, Pat, Scott, Karen (in from SF) and Marc (in from Milton, Mass.). Eliss and I made Burritos and Tacos Three Ways, with turkey, tilapia and ground beef, homemade guacamole and other fixings, leftover corn casserole, a big green salad. Pat made the sangria and Mexican rice pudding. All quite yum. Conversation and laughter flowed as easily as the wine.

No doubt I will obsess a little about the essays not written this weekend, the collages not made, the early start on holiday cards not under way, the walk not taken (though the leaves gave me a good workout).

But for now, life is good, and I give thanks.

Collecting quotes

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been recording things that impress, startle, inspire and humor me. I collect quotes from famous folks and nobodies-in-particular. I read, listen, eavesdrop and scrounge around for adages, mottos, mantras, pithy phrases, tidbits of wisdom and whatnot.

Some of my favorite quotes come from my children. When they were small, they used to be delighted when I’d whip out my pen and a 3” x 5” notecard to write down something they said.

“I made the card!” my son cried, when he was 5 or 8 or 11.

“You’re writing that down?” my daughter asked.

I’d forgotten about the quotes until cleaning out a desk drawer in my writing studio the other day. Re-reading them took me back, immediately, to a time when we were all young and innocent.

Here, a few:

On inspiration

“I am interested in the drama of extremely small situations.” – film director Sam Gold, October 2010

On writing

“Fiction is a lie we tell to get to the truth.” – Camus

“This comedy is a kind of anguish, otherwise I wouldn’t be interested in it. I’m not interested in stand-up.” – Phillip Roth

“Recollection can constantly shift the meaning of the past.” – Robert Penn Warren

“Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog: You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can go the whole way like that.” – E.L. Doctorow

“People around me ought to be aware they are in constant danger of becoming characters in a story.” – Lafayette Proulx, the writer protagonist of John Dufresne’s “Love Warps the Mind a Little”

On motherhood

“Parents, once the children are grown, are supposed to survey the happy wreckage of their own long-deferred dreams and aspirations, and make a new life, without them.” – author Joyce Maynard

“The best part about you, Mommy, is that you don’t have a good memory. So we get away with a lot of good stuff.” – Lucas, January 2000 (age 10)

On writing and motherhood

“Perhaps when you were a writer and not a mother, just a writer, writing was the biggest love of your life. So now you have someone who’s competing for your emotional center.” – Lorrie Moore

On love

“Love is invisible.” – Elissa, 1995 (age 9)

“Ugh, this is sickening.” – Elissa, on making 75 Valentines Day cards, 1995 (age 9)

“Everybody who loves me, raise your hand.” – Lucas, 1996 (age 6)

“My mother always told me love grows in small houses.” – Julie Joly of Saratoga Springs, March 2009, in a letter to the editor

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid.” – Margaret Atwood, from “Cat’s Eye”

“Love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness.” – Wally Lamb, from “I Know This Much is True”

On loneliness

“Treasure your loneliness. It’s beautiful. You’ll learn something from it.” – my friend, Tom Morrissey, June 2001

On beauty

“I’m gonna look better when I’m older. I’m pretty ugly now. I look like a rat.” – my neighbor, Lia Casale, August 1998 (age 10)

On solitude

“Some days, hello is too much for me.” – my childhood best friend, Shelly, June 1997

On truth

“The truth is always so full of uncertainties.” – Jamaica Kincaid, from “Autobiography of My Mother”

On anger

“Never pick a fight with an Armenian dry cleaner. Know what he does? He puts extra heat on the collar and fries the buttons.” – Sean Casey, former co-worker, July 2002

On self

“My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.” – Ann Lamott

On popularity

“I’m as popular as I want to be.” – Elissa, 1999 (age 13)

On families

“We’ve got to stay alive long enough to be problems for our children; that’s my goal.” – Marc Ciccone, my former carpenter (and Madonna’s first cousin), December 1996

On life

“Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.” – Laurie Moore, “Agnes of Iowa,” from “Birds of America.”

“The egg is at the root of everything, of course. Everything is born from an egg.” – Hervé This, French chemist and cook, December 2009

“Things never happen the same way twice, dear one.” – Aslan to Lucy in “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian,” when she wonders why he hasn’t ridden in to save the day

“We all feel braver in the morning.” – Matt Farrington’s father, April 1996, after driving Lucas home from a sleepover in the middle of the night

“People are so hard to figure out, especially grownups.” – Elissa, June 1996 (age 10)

“We’re all just schlepping along.” – Lenora Pfeffer, cantor, November 1999

“If you can see the humor in life, you’re an optimist, whether you like it or not.” – my writer friend Wayne, 2002

On death:

“I found this on Mom’s desk, scrawled on a piece of scrap paper: Don’t be sad. Go forth in love, hope and peace. Be kind to cats and vote Democratic.” – Katrinka Quirk, March 2010, shortly after her mother died

 

Books by my bedside

“Maine,” J. Courtney Sullivan

“Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter,” Azar Nafisi

 “Tinkers,” Paul Harding

“From Where You Dream,” Robert Olen Butler

“Words Overflown by Stars,” David Jauss

“The Lake Shore Limited,” Sue Miller

“The Opposite of Fate,” Amy Tan

“Too Much Happiness,” Alice Munro

“Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” Anne Fadiman

“Le Divorce,” Diane Johnson

“Half Broke Horses,” Jeannette Walls

Musings

I.

Another weekend morning and afternoon at the writing desk, and I can feel it: the urge to compose something, the bafflement at what I might write, the deep questioning that accompanies the writer’s life: What will I say, how and why – and will anyone care?

It could be seasonal. It’s been weeks now since I’ve felt the first few shivers of fall’s slow onset. In Gloucester, Mass., in mid-August, weren’t those red leaves tingeing the trees on the road to the old quarry at Halibut State Park? I brushed past this small taunt of what would be in store once vacation ended.

Time. There would be time enough for me to feel the fall; why rush summer vacation?

I’ve never been good at change, have always had a hard time accommodating to the transition from one season to the next. In upstate New York, where fall is the loveliest time of year, it’s nonetheless hard to embrace without a sense of the bittersweet.

While I’m still planting caramel coral bells, patriot hostas and the sweet lime-colored creeping golden jennys over rocks in my newly unearthed back yard (literally unearthed, since we removed the swimming pool in May), the sight of mums at every nursery, farm stand and supermarket makes me wince.

II.

Of course, I feel incredibly lucky to have the luxury of this musing at all, given the calamity of Irene a week ago, the destruction across New York, New Jersey and in beautiful Vermont. Co-workers have had homes destroyed. Local businesses were flooded. Nearby Schoharie is a disaster. Keene, too, from what I can tell. The wrath of the elements was widespread and severe. Here on Maple Lane, the power stayed on. A branch fell and knocked the side view mirror from one of our cars, and a massive tree is down in my neighbor’s yard, but otherwise we have been spared.

In the midst of the coming storm, however, there was great sadness and loss of another kind. Earlier in the week I learned that a former neighbor’s son, 21, with whom my own son played for years before the family moved to another part of town, had died tragically. An accident. That’s all I know. My son and I paid our respects. There was little to say. Though I haven’t seen my former neighbors in some time, they remain an indelible part of our first years here on Maple. My heart grieves for the family, for this senseless loss of a good young man. It is hard not to be reminded of the fragility of life. I hug my own children a little harder when I see them.

III.

I feel unsettled and disoriented by the first chilled morning breezes, the smell of the crisp air, the withering annuals I planted so assiduously in May. Summer is a time of wild distractions. Fall and winter are good for writers. I love being inside.

But this in between time makes me feel a little unsteady. I’m wobbling between seasonal worlds. After a good conscientious, productive writing effort in Gloucester, starting each morning at my sturdy Adirondack chair beside the window overlooking Good Harbor Beach, I find myself at a loss for direction here at home, looking out this window onto my back yard.

It’s hard to keep the writing going.

I know this is the usual writer’s lament. The block, the dissatisfaction, the questioning. The angst. Is any writer ever spared this? As Joyce Maynard has said, “Sometimes the not-writing time is as important as the writing time.”

At the moment, I’m honoring that. Deeply.

I have trouble prioritizing. Should I be working on my memoir, for which I now have 46,000 words? Starting new personal essays when ideas move me? Or finishing that long-in-the-making, on-and-off-again, pesky novel? Poor Wayne and Paul, my cohorts in our monthly writing group, who listen to me read my chapters, who patiently discuss emotional continuity, plot, causality, structure, theme, characterization and all the rest all the time.

Time. Time to get on with it.

IV.

Still no morning sun, the sky is gray, a painterly gray. The mini rose bushes are full and hefty green, and the last amber flowers remain on my ligularia. The bee balm hangs on, too, its spiky scarlet florets giving a splash of needed color. The hostas wait for their planting, as do my Argentina chapters, which need to be firmly grounded in my novel. My memoir pieces, snippets, sections and musings are also calling my name.

There are the contests I feel compelled to enter. The writer’s websites I want to read. The blog posts I want to complete.

Meanwhile, the kitchen needs painting, and I want to make some collage cards. During a weekend in Maine recently, I managed to eke out an evening of collage-making at a picnic table outside our hotel in Camden. As dusk descended, I cut papers and arranged them into abstract landscapes and still lifes, and pasted them with glue dots. Why does art often feel more satisfying to me than writing? It feels more fun, colorful, vivid and immediately gratifying.

That’s the Gemini dilemma at work, as always. In college, I’d show up in journalism class with my massive portfolio and paint-smeared hands, evidence of another artistic life beyond the writing one.

V.

My evening after-dinner walks must start earlier, now that darkness descends by 7:30 p.m. No more luxury 8:30 p.m. jaunts out the door I was accustomed to for so long. I like being in – so I say – but once again, the transition doesn’t come easily.

VI.

Gone gardening for now. Writing – collage – painting – still to come this busy, in-between weekend.

HB2me

Well, my birthday’s nearly over. (Though still time to win the Pick 4.) Thanks to all my friends and family and writing mates and sisters of all kinds for the outpouring of wishes. This year, wishes came via U.S. mail, email, voicemail, cell phone, home phone, work phone, texts and Facebook (ah, not a single Tweet). And even in person. (Oh, and one from junior high classmate Laura Kosakowsky, “Happy birthday from the jungles of Belize!”)

Love to everyone. I tried my best to be clear, focused, happy, appreciative, witty and as wise as could be in my now-XX years.

This says it all

Ahh, another tough day in Writing City. This old quote sums it up:

“To write well, even to write clearly, is a woundy business, long to learn, hard to learn, and no gift of the angels.” - John Galsworthy

And while I’m at it, a few more favorite quotes about writing:

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” (Jules Renard)

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.” (Lillian Hellman)

“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” (Gertrude Stein)

“All you have to do is write on true sentence; write the truest sentence you know.” (Ernest Hemingway)

14 highlights of a Buenos Aires vacation

Ron y yo

What springs to mind from our 9 days in BA in April:

-       Conversing in Spanish with non-English speaking Radio Taxi drivers

-       The Passover seder: 50 Argentines at the Kizlanskys in Martinez; just like home, with matzoh balls, farfel, gefilte fish and chicken, but reading the Hagaddah in Spanish and Hebrew

-       Midnight huevos revueltos con papas at Club de Palermo, 3 blocks from our B&B

-       Lunch at Don Ernesto’s in colorful San Telmo

-       Watching tango dancers in Plaza Serrano

-       Trading stories with Camilla and Ugo, the young Brazilian architects from danger-riddled (they say) Fortaleza

-       Burly, chatty Charlie, the hotel driver, who knows English, Spanish, Portuguese and a smattering of Hebrew

-       A tango lesson with Ernesto, whom we later met on the #52 bus down Sante Fe

-       Learning more about the Peronistas and Evita (think Madonna on the balcony of Casa Rosa, the Pink House)

-       Buying goodies from the empañada and potato ball lady, Alicia

-       Strolling through Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood

-       Discovering the ubiquitous, provocative, artsy graffiti by and for the people (as opposed to the random, defacing scribbles everywhere)

-       Lunch at 19^th century landmark Gran Café Tortoni

-       Dinner at La Cabrera, where the lomo was great but I confirmed I’ll remain a non-red meat eater (don’t tell that to an Argentine)

Remembering Max

I think of March as Max Month. As we coast through to the end, here are a few words about my father, who would have turned 93 the other day, on March 25.

From the last months of hospital visits and waning hope I remember the bright spots, how my father flirted with his nurses; how my mother, an undemonstrative sort, began remarking on the beauty of his blue eyes, as if noticing for the first time while trying to etch them on her memory before they shut for good. As a diabetic, my father endured not only a long hospital stay and multiple medical interventions, but a harsh dialysis schedule. He lost a leg in the process. Yet he was stalwart to the end.

By all accounts, my father was a good guy, a great husband for 59 years. My father was a devoted son and uncle; a good-natured sibling who took his older brother’s bossiness in stride. He was a loving grandfather, proud to light the candles and say the motzi blessing over the challah at his grandchildren’s bar and bat mitzvahs.

My father played the harmonica, played pinochle, was a New York Giants fanatic, faithful through every season, win or lose. He took us sledding on the wide-open hills of Crocheron Park and on the rides at Kiddie City. We’d also go to Long Beach and Oak Neck Beach on hot summer Sundays and to Nathan’s afterward for hot dogs and crinkly, salted fries eaten with wooden forks.

In good weather, Max sat on the aluminum milk box on top of the stoop in our tree-lined courtyard, schmoozing with the other dads.

Once, on the way home from a cousin’s club picnic, he killed a bee that flew in the back seat of our car, terrifying my sister and me. Or at least we thought he’d killed it. It resurrected itself and stung him. My brave father drove all the way home that afternoon with a sore, bandaged finger. For two girls, 10 and 6, it was heroic.

Did I mention that my friends and I began calling him Max in high school? It stuck.

Max loved his cars, though he never traveled far in them. He took me out driving but grumbled, after I got my license, that I was wasting his gas. Later, on visits upstate, he liked to wash his car in my driveway, something he didn’t do as readily in the city. With a bucket of soapy water, big yellow sponge and garden hose at his fingertips, he was a happy man.

Max loved food. Fat when I was growing up, he thinned considerably after his diabetes diagnosis in 1972, the year I left for college. He liked hot pastrami on rye, Hebrew National hot dogs, cream cheese with chives, Dr. Brown’s cream soda and chocolate ice cream. He loved to make his own potato salad; he’d be boiling and mashing with gusto for hours in the tiny kitchen in our apartment. He was always the first to pounce on my Halloween bag when we got home from trick or treating, seizing the Milky Ways, Whoppers and Three Musketeers to satisfy his sweet tooth. He loved candy, any kind of candy but especially chocolate, though my mother, the shopper, rarely kept these in our cupboards.

Max wasn’t a political dad or a pontificating dad. He wasn’t a meandering, philandering or absentee dad, a businessman, a man in a suit or a “Father’s Know Best” dad. He didn’t baby-sit; never spent a day alone with my children, never watched my daughter play softball or my son skate around an ice rink. And he was far from a fix-it dad. The one VHS tape I sent my parents of their grandson – competing, at six, in a youth hockey tournament in Vermont – is still stuck in my mother’s ancient VCR.

Max, a tax man, taught me a trick to use when multiplying by 11, mathematical wizardry with which I could dazzle my friends. (Separate the two numbers, add them and put the result in the middle; e.g. 11 x 24 = 264). To this day, I still use the 11 trick.

Max lived for 88 years. We never shared math tricks for double 8’s, but he probably would have liked that number.