Elinor Nauen

A stabbing in last month's snow?

Or a mom helping up her sliding child? 

In case you think the skies are always overcast in New York City, this is a photo taken a day or 2 ago across from the Flatiron Building, looking north. It's stunning how much life and nature we get here. Skies as big as Montana & all the glory of human brilliance. Some sign that people don't totally regret life.

Walked out of the Basquiat show yesterday & immediately saw this—something I've walked by a zillion times. Everything is art after absorbing the world through his eyes.

This was my favorite of the paintings. 

My friend the wonderful artist Dot popped up with tickets to the Basquiat show, right around the corner from me. Cool building. Why didn't I marry Walter De Maria when he was living near me for 30 years, dang it. The Basquiats are pretty great—much better in person than in reproductions, which isn't always the case, or maybe that's because sometimes you are more familiar with the repro & the real thing doesn't look right? 

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, IN, is running for president. He's also a Rhodes Scholar who served in the Navy. Best of all, he speaks Norwegian! (along with Arabic, Dari, French, Italian, Maltese, and Spanish).

Why? He read a novel he liked (Naive Super, by Erlend Loe), discovered none of Loe's other novels had been translated, & taught himself Norwegian in order to read them. He goes sometimes to a Norwegian church in Chicago to keep up his skills.

This makes him a serious presidential contender in my book. 

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well. 

~ Hugh Walpole

Poetry,

karate, Torah reading, toast, my husband, my friends, my cat, snow, my neighborhood, the Blue Sky Boys, Ford Madox Ford, the Yankees, my grandkids, breakfast, Bingelbumpf, fonts,

Should I really list the thousand things that absorb me? Only a thousand?

The whole secret?

This was on 9th St in Brooklyn, taken on March 7 headed to Barbés to hear the wondrous Rachelle Garniez. That's how long Brooklyn celebrates. Will the display still be there next week? Next year? Maybe it's a year-round insistence on their love for the Ould Sod? Leprechauns are general all over Ireland...

This picture, if anything, makes the park look less grim than it is. It's under & next to highways, not near any homes, schools, or factories/offices. Who is it for? Apparently no one, as it looks like nobody has ever gone in. No trash even. 

Maggie & I went on a walking adventure to Brooklyn, to the house where Walt Whitman lived for a year (1855), when he was writing Leaves of Grass. It didn't have aluminum siding 165 years ago, of course, & while it was hard to truly feel his presence, to be walking the same exact sidewalks he walked was moving. 

Charles W. Eldredge told John Burroughs that Whitman had told him about the 1855 Leaves of Grass that it "was produced in a mood, or condition of mind, that he had never been able to resume, and that he had felt utterly incompetent to produce anything equal to it since.... That in contemplating it he felt in regard to his own agency in it like a somnambulist who is shown during his waking hours the giddy heights and impossible situations over which he had passed safely in his sleep."

Happy birthday to my (late) sister, Edie (on the left in the photo). She loved & was proud of her 4 younger siblings & had a zest for life. 

I got married 3 times in Las Vegas, she once said. Vegas is lucky for me!

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
~ Steve Biko

&

something I saw on a card while waiting to check out at the Strand: 

It's not who you are that holds you back — it's what you think you aren't. 

Those are similar, right? I've been trying to reframe when I have negative thoughts or feel overwhelmed: I'm not too decrepit to do karate, I'm still doing it. That kind of thing. 

My cat didn't know it's Daylight Savings Time & so instead of waking me up at 4:30 like he does every frigging day, he let me sleep in till 5:30. I am so not going to tell him to change his clock. That was a spa hour, oh yeah!

By 9 a.m. I'd been to the market, gotten my haircut, arranged a meeting & done some editing. By noon I was ready for a nap but my day continues: more work, a second meeting, a few biz-type things to take care of, & more (it will come to me). 

And hooray for International Women's Day. And then for the next 364 days, it's International Men's Year. 

Nick Sturm sent me this page from a notebook of Ted's in his archives at Emory University. Where'd he get the picture? (He snatched it, for sure: no way he asked for it.) Where was it taken? (Rockaways or Florida.) Did he know I'd be perplexed 35 years later? Probably! That man was a mixer, that's for sure—someone who stirs things up! I bet he grabbed it one time when he came over to help me find some pills I'd hidden so well they were lost for a long time. If Ted Berrigan can't find pills, you know they're well hidden! (Ask me where they finally turned up.)

Now I'm remembering once trading baseball cards with Anselm, who was about 6 at the time, & Ted made us trade back because he thought I was taking all the good cards & leaving Anselm with the duds. I probably was, although I was more interested in cute than stats, & Ans didn't care. I wanted Jim Palmer, the Orioles' handsome Hall of Fame-bound pitcher who later on posed in his underwear. A dreamboat!

How is it that I haven't said anything about pitchers & catchers (who show up on or near my birthday—part of the joy of my birthday) or spring training? It feels so un-springlike, given that I'm still waiting for snow AND we've had so much mean cold. But yes, somewhere men are throwing that perfect sphere, swinging for the fences, getting ready for the long season. For now everything & everyone is perfect. 

Buster, o Buster! He keeps figuring out ways to get closer. He sleeps right on my head or back or next to me, nestled between Johnny & me. My loving little man. 

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

~ John Steinbeck

And they're a dime a dozen, ideas. It's what you do with them that matters. I remember when I put together my anthology of women writing about baseball (Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend) & thinking that if I hadn't done it, at some point someone else would have. It wasn't a unique idea, just one that I carried through. I'm sure others thought of it before I did, for that matter. 

Every day I try to think of a project. Most I'll never do, but the more ideas, the more ideas. Multiplying like rabbits. 

I've been missing & reading Ted, or is it reading & missing him. Happy to run across this illuminating note of Johnny's in the Penguin Sonnets. 

It's hard to cling to the potential for lots of snow when the calendar has flipped to March. I've spent the whole winter waiting for winter. 

In other news: new (hand-me-down) refrigerator. With a freezer that works!

Hey! It's snowing! Hey, it stopped. I'm not asking for a little snow, I'm asking for a LOT of snow. Come ON.

And saw one of my oldest & dearest friends, before she finishes moving to Switzerland. How we talked, cried, & laughed together! 

Almost March & still barely any snow. So I went to see a movie called Arctic. It's man vs. the elements & I drank in that white landscape. I don't know that any of my friends (except the one who most shares my snow obsession) would much like it but I was satisfied. 

In reality, every reader, while [s]he is reading, is the reader of his[sic] own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which [s]he offers to the reader to permit him[sic] to discern what, without the book, [s]he would perhaps never have seen in him[sic]self. The reader's recognition in his[sic] own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. 

~ Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

quoted by Ruth Ozeki in her wonderful & puzzling Tale for the Time Being

We had hot ideas but none of us were good enough musicians to execute them. After Bob Holman—the only person who didn't flee from our first gig—told us we should try not to look startled if we all ended a song together, that's mostly what we practiced.

Everyone was in a band that year (1979). 

Definitely sparking a little contentment to have spent an hour cleaning my desk & throwing out lots of crap. It's maybe not enough for most people, but I'm good.

My reward for agreeing to a meeting way the hell uptown? This beautiful scene in Central Park after a day of gentle snow. 

Maybe they're right, those people who think birthdays are for kids. Mine was certainly enhanced by the participation of these two young people, who taped a banner to the stairwell to surprise me when I came over, made (sweet! yikes!) cupcakes in festive colors, & gave me two pairs of fun socks. That kind of birthday joy has worn off for me (a little!), but I got some of the magic back this afternoon. 

I'm not a huge fan of Yeats but it's my birthday &, well, here it is. This is from a 1936 letter to the younger poet Dorothy Wellesley: 

Gogarty once describd the wit & phantasy of a friend of his calld Tancred (who was he declared a descendant of the Crusader of that name). I knew him once, he had just been received into the Catholic Church. The ceremony over, some priest asked what had led him to th truth & Tancred said "I was in the Brompton Oratory & I saw on a tablet 'Pray for the soul of Elinor de Vaux' & I thought the name so beautiful that I wantd to gain the privilege of praying for her." 

Simehow, whenever I bolt out of the house early and do my grocery shopping (& today I also defrosted the freezer), i seem to have to lie down & sleep for the rest of the day. That’s where it’s at, friends. Also, I’m writing this letter by letter on my phone, just to see if I can do it. I can but will go back to using all my fingers next time. Zzzzzzzzz...........

The man I love. 

I had an appointment with my accountant a couple of blocks away & my driver's license expires on my birthday (MONDAY)—it felt great to combine two errands. I went to the DMV Express on 30th Street & was in & out in less than 20 minutes. AND everyone there was super-nice.

I asked if I could keep the old picture, which is far & away the best official photo of me ever. Chivaun glanced at it—that one from 20 years ago? Nope, you're upgrading to real ID (so I can fly with a dl) & it requires a new photo. She took a great one! She turned her screen around to show me. Wow! I said, that's great, I look like a terrorist! Her eyebrows shot up. I mean, I said, someone who would terrorize her husband but not anybody else, OF COURSE. I really just meant I looked like a wanted poster, but casual. Oh gawd now I'm probably on some damn list. 

The lady I paid wasn't as jolly. Enhanced? No, that makes me feel like I'm getting plastic surgery. 

In & out in 20 minutes!