I could cheap out & just list the poets / writers born today: most notably Wiliam Butler Yeats, but also notably: Fernando Pessoa, Dorothy Sayers. Tony Towle, Todd Colby, Denise Duhamel. Oh the lines of a Gemini.
What have they in common? They are eating cake!
Except the dead ones, Pessoa, Sayers & Yeats.
I know perfectly well that every single day my beloved country gets closer to authoritarianism / fascism / a dictatorship, whatever you want to call it. My friend Steve is doing a fantastic job keeping us informed with his daily Notes from the Resistance. What I'm doing is giving myself (& possibly you, dear reader) a momentary break from fury /despair/ worry / &, for all I know, gloating, although I doubt that anyone I know is happy about the chaos & cruelty that is ravaging the U.S. right now.
Now my small triumph is going to seem even smaller, but here it is: my longtime laundry closed recently & the alternatives are far away, very expensive, or I had (ahem) already been 86ed from them. So I decided to go back to JJ's. Lou (the owner, now retired ~ his son is running the place) & I get along fine but his wife is insane; I'm far from the only one she has run out of there.
Today I wore a giant hat that pulled down over most of my face, had my kind neighbor go get quarters, & stumbled across the street with my stuff.
Success! My clothes are clean & off my mind till next time.
Naturally, I only go to museums 2 days in a row if someone is visiting, & off we went. The baseball card exhibit was small but we did make the acquaintance of catcher Matt Batts (1921-2013) & later I learned of a more recent Mat Batts (1991- ), who played 15 games in the Major League. The highlight of the visit was "Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room," which imagines Seneca Village, razed to make way for Central Park, if it had been allowed to develop and thrive. The Native American art, some of it "FROM SOUTH DAKOTA (or north dakota)" was pretty great too. How are all those grass, horsehair, cane etc baskets and clothing so utterly pristine a hundre, 200 years later?
The usual mix of one very good show (Amy Sherald's portraits); one conceptual show, where the theory is more interesting than the art; and one boring up-and-comer. The floor with the permanent collection was closed but we sat for a long time in colorful Andirondack-style chairs dreaming into the misty Hudson, which was about as good as seeing the Hoppers.
Then a quick circuit of touristy Little Island & my resentment that the West Side gets all the cool new stuff.
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Yeah, that's what we old people tell ourselves.
I was buying something at a New York store that has a few branches in the city - not a local place but not a big chain. Are you a student or teacher, the clerk asked. I was inspired to draw myself up & announce that I am a lifelong learner. He gave me the discount.
Topic Sentence
This poem is about people dying.
This poem is dying.
Dying is what people do.
I'm sad.
I'm hungry.
I'm distracted.
Natural stupidity writes everything now.
Natural stupidity writes everything down.
Dying is my last best hope.
I can change my mind.
Sox are not sex.
It's the strange & unwieldy bifurcation of all the ordinary parts of life (brushing your teeth, going to the gym, what's for dinner) & the deeper parts (grieving, worrying about the government), along with time (everything existing simultaneously). How does it not make us all crazy. Or maybe we all are crazy.
The Jews are doing it wrong. Why aren't we selling the all-star holiday of Shavuot/s, which includes
* a poem in whacky, tongue-twisting Aramaic
* chanting the beautiful, haunting book of Ruth
* AN OBLIGATION TO EAT BLINTZES &/OR CHEESECAKE.
Can you top that? Why do people not know about it?
And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then - if ever - come perfect days.
I know, I know, I always center on this James Russell Lowell quote in June. So here's a timely bonus quote from this great 19th-century writer, abolitionist, critic, editor, diplomat, & poet;
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood
For the good or evil side.
from The Present Crisis (1844) (thank you, Markos, for this)
Lightning Ahead
When I'm driving along the interstate
I like to look at clouds &
When I'm sitting still as well
What's your all-time favorite drug?
Is a terrific question for old friends or for people
You hope to get to know
Right now the clouds are bestowing their gift of rain
Other times their gift is shade &
Other times the curse of rain while I'm driving
However, in Orangeburg even the bananas are orange &
The egrets only visit when the sun goes down because
The law is out & they know what they did
We hydroplane across South Carolina, which
Is less amusing the second time just
Like those beans we ate last night
Lightning ahead!
O to live on Iron Mountain
Where your personal magnetism
Will hold us close
The rain drowns our conversation, which is inane,
But sincere
Which is even worse
Excuse me, ma'am, do you know
Your back window is down?
Oh shit! Thank you!
O to live high up
Up on Iron Mountain, now a marsh hill in the
Even Lower Country.
Elinor Nauen & Stephen Willis
5/29/25 ~ Steve's birthday
I love coming here more than almost anyplace in the world. Besides having some of my favorite people, South Carolina has beautiful & varied nature, as I've been talking about here the last few days (hit me up if you need photos). Unfortunately, some of that variety includes the heaviest heat imaginable. Yesterday we drove an hour to the beach. I walked 100 yards from the car to the water, took off my sandals, waded out up to my shins, & was back in the air conditioning a minute later. How does anyone stand it?
Then on the drive back to Spartanburg, we experienced scary hurricane-level rain (minus the wind). Our 4-hour drive took 6+ hours. The bright spot: we collaborated on Steve's birthday poem.
Also, I got to roll down my window at a reststop & ask a woman who had pulled up next to us if she realized her back passenger-side window was down. Oh shit, she said. Wasn't the sound different in the car as she drove? Couldn't she feel the breeze?
Hello from Beaufort, South Carolina. Haven't seen the Savannah-like old town yet but have driven along streets draped with Spanish moss & the wondrous Cypress Wetlands, a small wildlife refuge that hosts hundreds of species of birds (egrets, herons, roseate spoonbills, & oddly, the midwestern red-winged blackbird), some year-round, some migratory. We were there for the annual roosting season & saw many acrobatic bird babies. Also alligators & turtles.
I must look like a city slicker because a couple, not that young, came up the boardwalk & excitedly said: watch out for the alligators! they're fighting & there's lots of them! I was alarmed but there was no such shenanigans going on.
All this nature is making me miss art & city life & people: 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.(Frank O'Hara)
Yesterday we mostly hung out. We (mostly Wayne) made a pecan pie that was gorgeous & delicious. We ate at Wade's, where I have to go HAVE to whenever I'm here. Their yeast rolls are the best thing ever, as are their sides. I had okra & Steve was excited that speckled butter beans were on the menu. I liked that they organized the receipt by person, making it easy to divide the bill. Enough food that we weren't hungry again the whole day (except for pie) & less than $20 per person, including tip. Today we're off to— well, you'll find out.
Man, I love this country & this state. There is something beautiful everywhere you turn, in every single state. Sure, problems as well (SC leads the nation in number of books banned in schools, for example) but you can't beat the green back roads we took today to see the rare & endangered rocky shoals spider lily at Langsford Canal State Park. The lilies ~ the largest known patch ~ stand in clumps right in the shallow Catawba River. We were there at peak season. There's a mile-long path where we saw remnants of the 1820s canal, an eagle's nest that has been there for 30 years with the same pair (which I didn't see), & 2 people in a canoe stuck on the rocks. Then we ate a terrible Mexican lunch in Chester, as Gene's meat-&-3 restaurant was closed, & came home full of beauty. Beauty everywhere!
The heart stops briefly when someone dies,
a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes
from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.
~ Ted Berrigan, from "Things to do in Providence"
I probably should post these lines often. They are always necessary.
Steve has been part of my life since I was 19 (a long time, believe me!). His green & pleasant home (compound) is where I come to be restored, petted, teased, loved. The scent of star jasmine fills my room. I don't dream. In a minute we're off to see the Spartanburgers, a high-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers. Then I will nap again and maybe watch another episode of a 1960s Norwegian film noir TV series. I was half cured by the time I'd been here for an hour. A week will fix me up for a year.
The heat was on, that's how cold it is today. I forgot my keys & had to wait for someone to leave to get into my building. Looking forward to a restorative week in South Carolina. My thoughts are as unrelated as these sentences. I'll be OK, I always am, but first have to sit through the grief & change.
It's taken me 3 days to write this & still all I can do is say that she died, suddenly, in Paris.
I just had a long conversation with another of her old friends, where we laughed & told stories, & reclaimed the private relationship from the public version that we're seeing so much of.
Alice and I were part of each other's life in a profound (& complicated) way for almost 50 years. I feel like I've been in a fight with George Foreman, brutally beaten.
I'll try to say more down the road.
Research suggests that people who live to be 80 years old have passed through 71 percent of the subjective experience of the passage of time by the time they're 40; the years between ages 60 and 80 feel like just 13 percent of life.
This is oddly specific, isn't it? It's true that I remember a lot more about the years when I was 19 to around 30 than the decades since. Some of that is because I moved a lot & had locations to anchor myself. Now I'm doing well to remember if something happened this century. And of course, there's more new stuff happening in the earlier years & novelty stands out in that subjective flow. Pretty much all adult firsts happened to me after I was 18.
This feels like half an essay. I'll try to come back to it with more coherent thoughts.
I've noticed that when a person dies, people are likely to say "that's your/his/her demographic" or "you/we/she/he is that age." Sure, I get that death is getting closer for people my age (but every single person born is old enough to die), that it's not or shouldn't be a surprise. But still. That's hardly the point. One's feelings are not mitigated or diminished because your loved one was 80 rather than 20. When my dad died, people always asked how old he was. When I said 80, they would almost invariable shrug, Well then, as if his age disqualified my grief. "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."* Dismissing a loss because of the person's age is turning them into a statistic.
* Possibly not said by Stalin though widely attributed to him.
It took me, what, a year? to read this mystery in Norwegian (translated from the Swedish). It's dispiriting to read every sentence of a quick thriller like this. You really see the repetitions & filler. If I'd been reading it in English, I would have given up early on or raced through, but I don't have access to that many books in Norwegian, especially paperbacks, so I stuck it out.
I READ A WHOLE NOVEL IN NORWEGIAN! Jeg leste en hel roman på norsk!
My lovely laundry is closed! I thought I had one more wash but it's over. I had been going there for years - close, plenty of machines, nice & hardworking staff. There I was with a heavy bag. Where to go? I tried a place on Ave A & 6th st but you had to buy a card for $3 - just the card, which seemed like a ripoff. I took my laundry out of the machine (except for, possibly, one sock that ended up missing somewhere in today's saga & I can't go back because I was snippy about the card, damnit) & headed down Ave A to a place on 3rd and A. It started feeling ridiculous so I bought the damn card (only $2!) & did my laundry there. Closer to my house but not to my office. If I go there again, I have to disrupt my laundry routine. The new place on 5th St turns out to be drop off only. I think next time I will wear a big hat & try slinking back into the place across the street that I got kicked out of years ago. Or just be dirty. Sometimes city life is exhausting.
Update: My friend asked & they didn't have that sock. If you see a single cream sock with pandas, it's mine!
For 2 days, he (we) couldn't find them. I looked in the most unlikely places - basically everywhere in our house. I even sifted through the garbage, in case they got knocked off the shelf above at an absurdly precise angle. Where where could they be? You came in, put down your parcels, then... what? I coached. What if, I finally thought, they're in the bed? I shook out the duvet & voila! How did neither of us roll over onto them? I next put the keys on a lanyard ~ which he wore for the first time this morning, & called me not 5 minutes after he left the house, to say he'd left it in the hallway downstairs & would I pick it up. That man!
I was coming from 2 energizing classes at my gym, walking down 2nd Street - my block but a route I rarely take. A guy sitting on a stoop, who I don't remember ever seeing before, said something. It sounded friendly (no one catcalls me anymore) so I stopped. I'm the super of this building, he said. I see you walking down the block a lot. You often look tired, but today you look powerful.
Made my day! We introduced ourselves. Thanks, Emilio!
One of the reasons my bookshelves are only loosely organized is that I like to "shop in my closet" - when I'm looking for one or another book, I often find something I'd forgotten I own & that is exactly the book I need. The opposite is more frustrating, when I can't find a book I not only know I have but am pretty sure where it is.
For 30 years, my friend Greggo asked if I had his copy of William Carlos Williams' A Voyage to Pagany. Nope, I said every time. Guess what I can't find anywhere? Yep, that very same book. Dang! I even dived into the stack at the back of my closet. I found second copies of quite a few books. I found a couple of other Williams books that had wandered to random shelves. But no Pagany. Dang. I bought a $5 e-book but I also wanted to read the intro - & I'm so used to the New Directions typeface that Williams doesn't sound like himself in the generic e-font.
It'll turn up! Or someone will stop by & grab it off a shelf without even looking for it.
I might be running out of enthusiasm for this "get to know New York City" endeavor. It is depressing to discover that besides cool neighborhoods with supermarkets that sell pigs' legs, NYC is full of suburbs. Why would anyone want to live in a house on a quiet block when they could live in a teeny tiny apartment & have friends a few steps away, where they can see everywhere in their house all at once & never have to wonder what that sound downstairs is. I left Manhattan 3 Sundays in a row: enough! Spoiler alert: I'm going to South Carolina in a couple of weeks for some genuinely rural-esque R&R. New York should be a city & when I want to be somewhere else, there are plenty of terrific places that are somewhere else. There's NYC & there's everywhere else, & I want to be HERE. Except when I get on a plane.
"'He has spent his life in idleness,' we say; 'I have done nothing today.' What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations."
~ Michel Eyquem Montaigne
A hippie before his time.
Even though it hasn't been quite 4 years since my mother died, it feel like an absolute gulf between now & then. Not sure why it feels that way. She was very very present till the day she died at 97. She hadn't been backing away into dementia or even ill health. I suppose it's me ~ all my dead loved ones seem more dead than they used to. They're still part of my inside life but my heart has long since adjusted to the weight.
I regret omitting from her obituary that my mom was a nudist.
May 9, almost 2 months ahead, & the 99¢ store on my block has put up its Independence Day display: a cheesy poster with flag 'n' fireworks & 3 blinking packages of Christmas lights: red, blue, white. Today, with its cold rain, doesn't feel like summer at all, let alone halfway to Labor Day. But then again, the calendar gallops increasingly faster.
* The Man of Good Humor in Maryland sold a Red, White, & Blueberry among his treats.