Elinor Nauen

Our little John or Jean (short for PiJohn/PiJean) got him/herself born an hour or two ago. So excited! I've never seen a baby pigeon before. Almost no one has, I believe. Look out cute s/he is! I am anthropomorphizing the hell out of this. Every time I go in or out I talk kindly to the parent & I toss food to the little family. Now what? Will I get to see the passing of pigeon milk? Should I have bought a 5-pound bag of bird seed at the grocery store? It seemed like a lot & I don't want the rats to come back. This is such a happy event. I hope they stick around so I can see the little one grow up. (Oh my god, pronouns.)

All of a sudden two other pigeons are hanging around. I don't like that.

This Too I Love

 
Johnny on his side

one hand flung

between us

the cat

half-moving

I lie

next to

whimpering dreamers

Terrific show at Tibor of a new-to-me artist named Kenneth Aptekar, who does illuminated manuscripts on contemporary themes. Many are funny but all of them illuminate something about the world we live in. His drawing & lettering are fantastic. All the shows at Tibor de Nagy are small enough to really see them but large enough to get a real sense of the artist's work. 

The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, by Rebecca Clarren, is another entry in a category it's hard to believe exists: Jews in South Dakota. SoDak has the fewest Jews of any state & until a couple of years ago, it looked like there might be a Chabad on Mars before there was one in my home state. Yet there seem to be as many books about Jews in South Dakota as there are Jews in the state. 

Clarren's book is an important addition. She's not from there but her great-great grandparents homesteaded in a place not far from Rapid City called Jew Flats. Her book is about her personal history, the shameful actions of the United States government towards Native Americans, how everyone in this country benefits from that mistreatment ~ and what we can do right now towards repentance and reconciliation. 

You can listen to her speak with Tiokasin Ghosthorse on his First Voices Radio show. Tiokasin, amazingly enough, has lived in my small building & is from South Dakotan & not Scandinavian. 

I have no idea where I was. Maybe I got on a plane & got off in Cincinnati or Milan or Buenos Aires. Wide streets, small shops. Who knows? I always wondered why Walt Whitman lived in Brooklyn when the rent in Manhattan, where he spent all his time, must have been maybe $10. I actually tried to find out Brooklyn rents 175 years ago but to little avail. Why do people prefer to live in Brooklyn now, when New York City (i.e., Manhattan) is right here. I don't get it. Maybe if I didn't get lost every single time I go to a new place in Brooklyn. It's like the reverse of the dream every New Yorker has at some point, that there's a door we never noticed & we actually have another whole room in our apartment. Brooklyn IS the extra room but it's not clean, calm, empty. 

Disappointed that Superiority Burger sucked. I liked the Sloppy Dave when they were on 9th st ~ it was big & fun to eat. Now it costs twice as much & is 2/3rds as much food, & it tastes more like vinegary tomato sauce than ground meat. Uncomfortable chairs, the usual crowded tables. And no fries! What kind of burger joint doesn't serve fries? Why did it get such good reviews? Why is a cold noisy rush-'em place so popular? And why do the desserts cost $18? 

I will interpret your dreams! I will give advice! I have wisdom at my fingertips! Even my islets of langerhans are thoughtful! Submit your dreams and/or questions (anonymously, if you prefer) & sit back & receive a fresh, tip-top (possibly tipsy-turvy) response. What have you been wondering? I know all, tell all. Etcetera. 

Happy Poem

stately pigeon

Mayan face

hair blown

sunshine & 

one-handed cloud

I think her? his? partner has taken a powder & the one that's left is falling down on the job. My neighbor said there were 2 eggs previously. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHER EGG? This one has been taking off more, or possibly my schedule has been such that I've seen him? her? absence. I can tell the 2 apart (but not which is which by gender) & I'm (pretty) only one has been around. I thought they incubated by instinct. Oh gosh, I hope nothing has Happened & she? he? is about to be a single parent. You can't really tell what's going on inside the egg, but I think there's another week before it hatches. How long can a bird leave the nest & still be incubating successfully? Up to 10 hours! OK, one worry allayed. 

COOPERATION

Cooperation means concert for the diffusion of wealth. It leaves nobody out who helps to produce it. It touches no man's fortune; it seeks no plunder; it causes no disturbance in society....It contemplates no violence; it subverts no order.....It accepts no gift nor asks any favor.it keeps no terms with the idle and it will break no faith with the industrious.... It means self-help. Self-dependence and such share of the common competence as labor shall earn or thought can win.....

George Jacob Holyoake

London, England -1885

Holyoake (1817-1906) was an English secularist, co-operator and newspaper editor, who coined the terms secularism and jingoism. 

I have no idea what this means, why it's there, who put it up or why. 

Why did he just text me this:

Stop thief stop

?

How much do I understand of what he says in an given day? 

40 years & he's still as entertaining as ever. 

Update: Oh. He bought a pair of rainbow crocs a few months ago. They are hideous. He looks like a hotel manager from a Dashiell Hammett novel or whichover of those guys writes books with seedy hotels in Missouri. I hid one. So he started wearing one rainbow croc & one black croc. It gets worse & worse. This morning I handed him back the rainbow croc. 6 hours later he reacted. 

What's with this cold rain? 10° too warm for it to be snow. Don't want to walk in this, don't want to stand by the window dreaming into rain. Will it ever snow again? 

Empathy

 
I'm rubber she's glue

my problems bounce off me &

propel her into stories about herself

I read last night at Bowery Poetry Club, in the 3rd of 7 readings in a series put together by Bob Rosenthal & Ed Friedman. I know all of the other 21 poets, have for years. For decades. It was particularly fun to read "If I Ever Grow Old," what Martha King called an "arrogant little riff on age you penned in your 20s." It was like I dropped a bomb 40 years ago & it went off finally. We all knew how we would have heard that poem then & how differently it hits now. I prepared old school by trying out my poems in the bath. This is shaping up to be a good year.

They're having babies, right there at my door. Not a very private place but there you have it. I thought they had gotten used to me when they stopped flying up when I came in or left, but I realized they're incubating eggs. I'm a little excited but nervous that the super will disperse them. But he hasn't yet, & they've been there a week. Pigeon eggs take 18 to 19 days to hatch with both parents incubating the eggs, then feeding the squabs with regurgitated "pigeon milk." 

To read the New Testament apart from the context of the Roman war against the Jews—as it almost always is—amounts to reading The Diary of a Young Girl without reference to the Holocaust.

~ James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews

I'm only a quarter of the way into this long, fascinating book, full of provocative & thought-provoking lines like this one. I know so little about the subject that I certainly have nothing to add, at least at this point. 

Squeezed in on the last day of this terrific show, wishing I'd gone several times. So much to take in, the intensity, so fun to see the echoes (Alex Katz, Philip Guston, Goya). This painting is one of my favorites, shows all the dreams & hopes wrapped up in a child, in family. Simple yet all the layers of longing & aching. There were so many more ~ his mother's cornbread; homage to his brother, a former Black Panther; the portraits of murdered young Black people. Tender, yet he doesn't let the viewer off the hook.

Johnny bought that humidifier (there's a remote too!); the least I could do was buy a toaster to replace the one that didn't work right since Day 1. Second only to snow do I love toast & every day that I've had to turn the toast & wait & wait for the second side to not get bronzed was a dagger in my heart. A friend bought a beautiful toaster at MoMA & that's what I intended to do but she said it only worked a couple of times then conked out & I remembered that they focus on design over function so I bought a basic one at the hardware store down the block. I haven't taken it out of the box yet but believe you me, there'll be a full report soon. That is, if I can't manage to find something, anything, a little more exciting to write about. (Sheesh!)

I bought citronella essential oil yesterday at Dual Specialty for our new humidifier. Digression to say how fantastic it is, with a huge tank & even a night light. We both lie in bed watching the mist. 

The oil was $7.61 & I pulled out a handful of change + a $20. The clerk asked if I had 2 singles. I don't think so, I said, & a young man behind me said, I do! & handed them over instantly. 

Huh? I was so surprised that I don't remember if I thanked him. You'll get it back, I said, vaguely thinking about him paying next... 

Yes, I will! the young man said confidently. 

What did I look like to him? Someone poor, because I was counting out change? An old white lady whose assumptions about young Black men he could upend for 2 bucks?

Or was he someone who felt like doing a good deed? Someone in a hurry making it quick for everyone? Simply an impulse? 

Thank you! I did manage to say as I left. 

Lunch

 
I concentrate

exclusively

on the surface

in order to have

ample

depth.

Last week I found the cast recording of Oklahoma! from 1943 (!) with Celeste Holm & a bunch of people I've never or barely heard of, a beautiful set of 78 rpm records leaning against my front door. Today it was this piano. I tickled a couple of the ivories walking past. In tune! I know no one wants pianos anymore. You used to be able to find a manual typewriter pretty often, discarded when electrics arrived & then computers, but now they're a rare treasure. I wonder if pianos will come back into vogue. But an 80-year-old set of records in good condition? I hope someone who really wanted it picked it up. 

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.

~ French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Yes yes yes. And there's Frank O'Hara too: 

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes ~ I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

I don't think I will ever stop feeling fortunate as hell to be here in New York. 

Did I do the laundry, go to class, go shopping? Nope & we have no food in the house except cheese, so I should at least have managed that. However, I did set up our new humidifier. Why'd you pick this one, Johnny? It's the only one they had. Great reasoning! Watched a bunch of episodes of my current Norwegian-language show (Stjernestøv), the fourth "advent calendar" show I've watched this winter. They are kids' shows of 24 episodes, usually with some magic or fantasy, a kid who gets stuck in a different land, a Norwegian kid at the North Pole or a girl from the North Star in Norway. The plots & language are simple enough for me & they're fun. Sleepy but I like this leisurely pace. And I didn't have to go to an "experimental Ukrainian opera," which sounds like less of a good time than a ~ well, I can't actually think of a cultural event I would probably like less.

I got two long walks in perfect falling snow, a terrific Indian lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, to hang out with one of my favorite young people in the world, eat banana cream pie, read widely, nap deeply. It's the kind of day I love most, with nothing extraordinary but radiant ordinariness. 

And just as I finished writing this, I got a loving text from a friend since junior high. Making the day even better.. 

Our niece just sent this picture, which her mom, Johnny's sister, had somewhere. I love every bit of it, & not just because it's Johnny. The topknot, the white on white, the mischief in his eyes, the little bruiser posture. I would have fallen in love with him 4 years earlier than I did if I'd seen it in 1979.

Took an exercise class at my gym, went to a zoom poetry reading, saw a movie with a new friend, AND did my work & usuals. My new gym would cost $250 a month if I didn't get it for free because I am old, so the classes are excellent. We saw American Fiction, which was funny and poignant, & Leslie Uggams is in it. It was cold enough to wear my Irish sweater, now amortized to $50 per day of use, but maybe I'll get another chance this year. No deep thoughts, thank goodness. 

My dream was really a blizzard but this is at least snow for real. I went out early, before it changed to rain (but it's supposed to go back to rain). It was hard to believe that what I had been waiting for impatiently for 2 years had strolled in & done its thing of transforming the world, every twig, car, fence & discarded Christmas tree. 

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

~ Oscar Wilde

My mother, Alice Joyce Phillips Nauen, was born on this date 100 years ago. She lived to be a few months short of 98 ~ a good long time, though we all, herself included, had been planning to celebrate her centennary. It's 1° in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the moment so I guess we would all be wishing the party was somewhere else instead of no party at all. She was sharp & full of memories & absolutely herself till the day she died. Same as with my dad, who died in 1986, it seems like a big mistake. Someone got the wrong memo. There was supposed to be an exception made. It is very strange to not have parents. Whose carelessness?

I believe myself to an alert walker, practically a Sherlock Holmes in noticing everything around me. 

How, then, do I account for the fact that I have walked past people I know dozens of times. If they didn't bark my name, I would have drifted right on past. "You looked like you were doing math in your head," they might say. "I almost didn't disturb you." Sometimes they introduce themselves, as if I hadn't recognized them and not that I was lost in thought. I have even stared right through my own husband. 

This happens a lot, & yet it doesn't stop me from feeling very sure that I don't miss a trick. 

My Uncle Earl always claimed to have his ear to the family grapevine so it was very sweet to surprise him on his birthday one year, & the next day surprise him again on his anniversary. Good old 'Earlock. I am, it seems, my uncle's niece. 

Did I write something & forget to save it? Did I forget to write? Did anything happen today besides a really good sandwich from DTB (aka Downtown Bakery, which is not a bakery at all but a Mexican restaurant). I went to karate & it didn't snow, as it hasn't for 2 years. I'm so afraid it will never snow again. I'm hearing hints that we're at or past the point of no return, but much as I counsel open-mindedness, in this case I have my hands over my eyes while I bellow "Walking in a Winter Wonderland."