Elinor Nauen

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. 

I was on line waiting to order. I heard one of the 2 young women (pretty sure they were sisters) in front of me ask, What is pumpernickel? The guy taking the order, with the posture of genuinely having all the time & patience in the world, asked if they knew what rye was & went on to explain. I didn't hear more. When it was my turn, I asked, Where are they from that they don't know what pumpernickel is? London, he said. OK, I guess that makes sense; I probably didn't know what it was myself. Pumpernickel's my favorite, he said. Is that what they ordered? No, he said, french toast. I made the New York purist's face. No, he said, it's pretty good. He dropped his voice. I'll put one in your bag for you to try - no charge, because you're nice. It is pretty good but I don't think I'd ever order it. Now I'm craving pumpernickel & slightly regretting my usual everything. 

 

Then I ran into Jimmy Fragosa, who has kept up St Marks Church for as long as I remember, & we talked as we always do about the Yankees, & I asked him to put in a good word for the Twins, but he wasn't having any of it. I met his friend Raoul, & thought about how great both summer & the East Village are for chatting on the street. 

Music must be like breakfast. Many of us eat pretty much the same thing every day. I listen to the same songs often. Novels are dinner: we would get impatient if dinner every night was exactly the same & while there are a handful of novels I've read over & over, most of the time I'm looking for something fresh. Poetry is more like music ~ I go back to the same poems over & over. Am I in a rut? No, because I spend time every week listening to fresh-to-me artists. When I go to the Whitney, say, I always spend part of the time with the permanent collection & part of my visit with whatever show is going on. Not sure if there's a conclusion to draw. That variety and consistency are complementary? That the familiar is the base for appreciating the new? That listening to music is like being half-awake, when my stomach can only handle coffee & toast? 

Some of the 5-star songs that rolled through my playlist so far today: 

 

I'll Fly Away, Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch

Hard Times, Anna McGarrigle & Kate McGarrigle

Respect, Aretha Franklin

City Of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie

Shine Hallelujah Shine, Bill Monroe & his Blue Grass Boys

Dark Was The Night - Cold Was The Ground, Blind Willie Johnson

The Last Mile Of The Way, The Blue Sky Boys

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Bob Dylan

I Ain't Got No Home, Bruce Springsteen

Racing In The Street, Bruce Springsteen

That Lonesome Valley, Carolina Ramblers

Hello Stranger, The Carter Family

The East Virginia Blues, The Carter Family

Maybellene, Chuck Berry

The Leaving of Liverpool, The Clancy Brothers

Along The Bayou, Cliff Le Maire & His Melody Boys

Down On the Corner, Creedence Clearwater Revival

Teach Your Children, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Lonesome Frisco Line, Darby & Tarlton

Iko Iko, The Dixie Cups

Your Long Journey, Doc Watson

Just One Look, Doris Troy

Under the Boardwalk, The Drifters

Saturday Night at the Movies, The Drifters

Son Of A Preacher Man, Dusty Springfield

That Old Sweet Roll, Dusty Springfield

Take It Easy, Eagles

High Road, Elle King

Snowbird, Elvis Presley

Early Mornin' Rain, Elvis Presley

All I Could Do Was Cry, Etta James

I'd Rather Go Blind, Etta James

Morning Morning, The Fugs

Cry Baby, Garnet Mimms

All Fall Down, George Jones

Amarillo by Morning, George Strait

The Twist, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters

Ninety Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street), Hank Snow

Six More Miles (To The Graveyard), Hank Williams

Lost Highway, Hank Williams

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams

Mardi Gras Mambo, The Hawketts

Wayfaring Stranger, Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra (they're Norwegian!)

Another Like You, Hayes Carll

Smokestack Lightning, Howlin' Wolf

Four Strong Winds, Ian & Sylvia

Some Day Soon, Ian & Sylvia

It's Raining, Irma Thomas

Ship Sailing Now, J.E. Mainer

Love is life's snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight - whiter and purer than snow itself.
― Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North

 

The word snow, which goes back 1200 years to Old English, might be my favorite word. Certainly the most calming. Love's OK too.

I try not to take books from LFLs, because, y'know, so many books already. But these were irresistible!

 

* The Old Jewish Men's Guide to Eating, Sleeping, and Futzing Around, by Noah Rinsky. I am trying to have an OJM for a husband, & to that goal, am trying to teach my Irish husband to say "oy gevalt." For a New Yorker, he sounds as unJewish as the Scandinavians I grew up with. Oy gevalt! 

 

* Red Ribbon on a White Horse, by Anzia Yezierska, who wrote the great Bread Givers. This came out in English in the '80s & has an introduction by W.H. Auden (which is not noted on the cover - apparently her name was plenty). 

Who was that guy on the radio who used to say it was one of the Top Ten days? That was yesterday - a soft clear day with enough breeze to ruffle your nerves alert. 

 

Something happened that I meant to talk about, but what? Was it the utterly nerdy & addictive Norwegian grammar site? Was it finally buying some food? I'd been reduced to squinting at that last box of matzoh. Was it having a satisfying B&H breakfast? Was it that the pigeons on my ledge now have two eggs, or that the baby pigeon from last month is fully grown, with just a few wild unfurled feathers on its head, but still not flying, as far as we can tell? 

Even though we're members, I hadn't been to the Whitney in ages. Very much enjoyed the Amy Sherald show of large, colorful portraits of well-dressed Black people. She's probably best known for her official portrait of Michelle Obama, which holds us off more than it lets us in, revealing resolve & self-sufficiency. While flat & not overly detailed, every single picture was arresting - she showed something about everyone that I had to believe was true about them. Great hats! Great clothes! 

 

It was a two-for-one day of culture. In the evening my visiting sister & went to Drunk Shakespeare, which was funny & topically satirical, & the best kind of live theater: actors putting everything they had on the stage. Only one was drunk & boy was he. But he managed to give the "tomorrow & tomorrow" speech with dignity & conviction. There was a woman who sang fantastically & followed that with a perfect cartwheel. I also loved that everyone in the cast wanted the audience to have a good time.