gypsies

Zeffirelli's La Bohème was the first opera that I saw at the Met, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, when I was young and impressionable. My primary complaint was that a woman withering away from consumption should be, well, withering.

Today I realized an additional complaint, namely that no one with TB would have a lovely clear soprano voice. While this isn't TB, my voice is a pack a day jazz singer's growl. I'm smothered in Vick's (fully mentholated), downing codeine, sticking my feet in a mustard bath, and reading bad novels.

So, DYP! is on sick leave this week.

Next week, DYP! will be making pies.

Then we'll be back.

dead pen office

At the top of the staircase, the back staircase with the pine boards and a bare 40 watt bulb on each landing, where most of the steps creak and some are only held in place by habit and gravity, at the top of the staircase is a room which has been through many iterations : attic, nursery, apartment, study, sitting room, studio.

For many years it was rented to a mysterious Italian man of short stature, a man who arrived at the top of the stairs at exactly 9.45 in the morning, stayed all day, departing at precisely seven in the evening. He did not converse with anyone he met in the entryway or on the stairs, but this was never construed as rudeness or antisocial or otherwise noteworthy, for he always made eye contact, smiled, tipped his hat, and, truth be told, there were very rarely other people in the entryway or on the stairway to notice or indeed comment on his reticence, and they may have chalked it up to the habits of a curmudgeon whose English was not fluent. Very rarely would visitors climb the steps to visit the Italian man, perhaps once every ten or eleven months, but no more, and these infrequent visitors would stay for fifteen minutes, an hour, half a day, but never repeat a visit or reclimb the stairs after their business was completed.

No one really knew what the man did at the top of the stairs, and in the quiet moments of the day, while drinking tea or folding laundry, if someone chanced to think about him, they assumed he was a writer or an artist and thought no more of it, except to wonder at an artist or a writer who kept such regular habits, who did not throw drunken fits or erupt in rages. One day, on the first of the month, he neglected to arrive at his customary time, and, after holding the apartment for him for three weeks, with no sign of the man or note from him or payment for the month, the landlord went up to do an inspection, and discovered the door locked, the key slid under the locked door, and the rooms completely empty, except for a folding chair by the front window.

The landlord, being of a practical nature and not prone to flights of fancy, did not conjecture on what this might or might not imply or signify, but merely placed a classified ad for immediate occupancy and thought no more of it. In a few months time the residents had forgotten the years the Italian man had spent on their top floor, and would have only identified him from a crowd with difficulty and a generous amount of luck.

The apartment was then occupied by a concert pianist who had the piano moved to the top of the stairs with great difficulty and much damage to the plaster, and who would alternate drinking binges of no piano playing but much pacing back and forth with long stretches of incessant playing, repeating the same passages from Mahler or Mozart or Schubert until the entire building quivered and shook with the anger and passion of the performance, or spending three and a half days playing constantly through an unidentifiable but changing and never ending piece of music before collapsing into an exhausted sleep.

The pianist never seemed to be in demand for concerts or performances, and saw students only on Fridays, and only then if he was sober. The neighbors were not certain if it was an honor or an embarrassment to have a pianist in residence, but none of them were the types to raise a fuss and he paid his rent as promptly as the next person, and so stayed on. One day, he arrived at the building in a state of great excitement, his shabby coat carried with an air of pride and his hair almost combed, almost clean shaven, with a pile of broadsides under his arm and beaming: beaming at everyone, even the boys who snuck into his apartment and stuck the hammers in the piano with chewing gum: his symphony was to be published, a concert had been scheduled, he was finally to receive the recognition he deserved. While no one knew quite how to interpret this announcement, they could tell it was important, that it might mean fame or fortune or both, and so heartily and sincerely congratulated him.

For the next week he played continuously, at all hours of the day, and saw no students, and the same the week after that, and then something in him switched, nerves or stage fright or a change in the weather, and he began drinking again, drinking heavily, and when the night of the concert finally arrived, he was not sober enough to either take the piano part or to conduct, and so Beethoven was performed instead, much to the relief of the audience and critics. That night, full of cheap vodka and dashed hopes, he went to the railroad tracks and watched the freight and passenger trains, and in the morning he was found, drowned and drunk, in the fountain outside the concert hall.

The piano stayed in the apartment, far too much of a hassle for the landlord to move, and no one came to claim it. The apartment was rented to a young family, to two sisters of dubious profession and questionable genetic similarity, to a poetess who became quite famous for her communist views and habits of vandalism, to a school teacher, to a recently divorced chemist, to a dentist, and to a small arms dealer for third world countries. These tenants all kept themselves to themselves, except for the chemist who began an affair with the concierge a week after moving in, more out of habit than passion, and the two sisters, whose constant stream of visitors made them unpopular with the other residents and whose inability to ever pay the rent made them unpopular with the landlord. Over the following years, one infant was born (a boy, with a head full of dark hair), three plays were written, a dozen or so vaguely illegal military coup were organized, a cookbook full of recipes for the perfect omelet was researched and written, a still was operated, three marriages ended and two newlywed couples conceived their first children (both daughters, born elsewhere).

When the developers moved into the region to create a commercial and transportation hub, they commenced buying out the tenants and acquiring the properties on the block, until they came to the house with an apartment at the top of the stairs, which had been purchased by the owner so very many years ago, and who refused, under any condition, to vacate or sell. He was a small Italian man, stooped even shorter with the burden of age, and he spoke rarely, was not a man one would notice in a crowd. It was uncertain at what point he had bought the building, or how old he was, or who he was, but he smiled gently and shook his head: they could construct a cloverleaf interchange around his building, pave a parking lot and build a hospital or a factory, but no matter. He was not selling, not leaving, and not negotiating. Too much life had happened, too many feet had gone up and down those stairs, for him to even consider changing his mind.

The developers had lawyers, immigration lawyers and eminent domain lawyers, and the building had, if not a reputation for debauchery, then at least an air of the disenfranchised, the lost. The old man fought but never really had a chance; where that staircase stood is now exit eighteen, highway nine.

---

reading
Meetings with Time / Carl Dennis

weather
the only thing I dislike more than this time change -- is the other one.

invisible shadow

My dear,

I feel this has gone on quite long enough, this endless to-ing and fro-ing of words flowing from pen onto paper, sealed in envelopes, stamped, addressed, dropped in blue boxes to spin through the bowels of the postage system and arrive on your doorstep.

It is not that I do not take an inordinate amount of delight in your letters, hurrying to the mailbox and sorting through magazines and fliers and renewal notices in the hopes of finding one such gem, the scrawl upon the envelope as distinctive as always, reading the letter quickly on the front step while I rummage for my house keys and deter the cat from dashing out the door, then a second reading, more leisurely, after dinner and dish washing and bill paying, falling asleep knowing that I will write to you in the morning, enclosing a photograph or a leaf or a knock knock joke or the classifieds section of the paper that I received as package stuffing for an item sent from Tulsa.

All of this has been the source of a pure, burning joy, that has illuminated these otherwise dark days of seclusion and work. But this has gone on quite long enough, and you must hear me out. These letters were a lark, the raw materials for a play I was writing about the impossibility of connecting with one another, how we talk to someone or across someone or at someone without ever quite nudging into a conversation with someone, and to this end our letters have served admirably.

Had I been gathering data for your FBI file I could not have done a better job of fact finding. I know your politics, radical and engaged and subversive and fundamentally not interested in leaving the couch; I know your fears and hopes and anxieties, and the fears, hopes, and anxieties of your children, how you last ate meat at a family barbecue in 1986, then embraced veganism and now your daughter wants to raise chickens and it is destroying your marriage, but I already knew your marriage was failing because throughout your writing there is never any mention of another, and it is only through the chickens that you found the metaphor to state that which you have for so long denied. I know the books you read and the movies you watch and your childhood passion to sing in musicals, I know of your visits to your widowed mother and your love of morning walks with the dog.

But what you do not know is that I wrote all of my letters to you, before I read a single one of the ones you wrote to me, that I wrote them using thirty year old newspapers for stories and details, using city phone books for names, that I routed them through dead letter offices and post offices at universities, never actually mailing one from my own town.

The truth is, you began this correspondence under a misapprehension; you found my name and address on an envelope with the Christmas cards or penciled in an old address book, and you convinced yourself that you knew me, that you remembered me, although we have never met, never spoken, never had a relationship. We did not sit next to each other in third grade, we did not take driver's ed together, we did not work in the same office, we did not attend the same camp, church, or university.

The truth is that we are strangers, that the first letter you wrote was delivered to an address that no longer exists, that may never have existed, and, yes, I confess to you, here, in writing: I committed a federal offense and read a letter written to someone other than myself, and for four years, seven months, three weeks, and five days, I have allowed you the luxury of the fantasy of your nostalgia. You do not know who I am, you do not know where I am, you do not know how I am: in fact, you cannot be entirely certain as to my age, my gender, my values, my hobbies, my politics.

But that is of no matter: you were never actually communicating with me, I was merely the recipient of the stories you needed to tell yourself, stories of love, bravery, heart break, taxes, disease, and bitter realizations, and my letters to you were a touch stone to a life outside your own, immaterial if that life did or did not exist as you assumed.

Wait, pause, be calm: do not storm and curse and knock over your drink and dash this letter into the trash can, feeling hoodwinked, jilted, taken advantage of. I intended no harm, and I caused no harm. I gave you no advice, good or bad, I neither requested nor received gifts or money, I never agitated for your involvement in my causes nor passed judgment on your causes. None of the actions in your life over the past almost five years bear the imprint of my being, for my letters to you were created specifically to prevent any applicability to your life, except where you chose to assign significance where none was intended.

Take them out: look at them. Read them over. Oh, I know you've kept them; there's no shame in that. But now shuffle them: place them in strict order of day of the month, ignoring the month and the year, say, starting with September 1, then January 3 to August 5 to July 6 and so on, until they are all shuffled and intermixed and now read through them again. Nothing changes; the plot remains the same. No event from last week or last month or last year could not have occurred four years ago, and any event from four years ago could occur today or next week.

That's the way life works, all our plans and actions and emotions taking place at once, in a great unsorted heap in the vast space time continuum, and whatever order we happen to create out of that random assortment of events we call stories, we call history. In Italian "la storia" is both story and history, the perceived truth is that which we choose to remember, and whether you assign meaning to a calendar of years or days, the significance was in your action at the moment of assignment.

Do not blame me that you felt this story had a different arc, a different plot line, than the one which I may have assigned to it: both of our stories can be true, they are not mutually exclusive. Be consoled that in those moments of reading your letters I took great, exquisite joy in the passionate sincerity of your writing, and that as I created the replies you were to receive, I created a world, just for you. Perhaps not the world you expected, perhaps you are disappointed in discovering that what you thought was a continent is only a snow globe, but it is a snow globe of the most careful, exacting craftsmanship, and it is yours, singularly yours, this world I have created and given to you.

Those we love are only ever projections of our best selves, of who we hope to be as the sun rises and the day begins anew and we have a sliver of opportunity to reinvent ourselves to become worthy of their affections, and if I have been slightly more of a projection than your spouse or your family -- look closer, look at who they are versus who you want them to be.

You shall not be hearing from me again, my dear, for, fond as I have grown of you, our graduation is upon us, and it is time to part ways once again. You will not be able to write again, for the kind postmaster who knew where to forward your letters is retiring, and I will soon return to the country of my birth, which is neither near you nor far, but is not here.

How did we say good bye before, in your memory? You must remember. I kiss both your cheeks and smile deeply into your eyes. Do not hate me, but do not love me either; good bye and god speed.

Very warmly yours,

---

reading
Fragile Things / Neil Gaiman

weather
deep frosts

trapped in time

{Oct. 31, 10}

So simple, really, if only she could remember what it was that she was meant to be doing. It was no Herculean task that she had forgotten, but it was becoming harder and harder to grasp at the moment of intention and implement the thought into action. Once she had only to think a thing and it was as good as done: not merely simple things, like paying the electric bill or calling her mother or making a cup of tea, but more difficult tasks as well once use to almost complete themselves: writing annual reports, compiling financial audits, once even rebuilding a carburetor.

It had all been so effortless, but now she found herself standing in doorways not even certain if she was crossing the correct threshold for the task she had determined to accomplish. Sending a birthday card to her brother. Making an appointment for an oil change. Answering the phone. Picking up the dry cleaning. Defrosting the chicken. Opening a bottle of wine.

For a time she compensated with organizational skills, compiling task lists, a detailed daily schedule on the left side of the page, a to do list on the right side of the page, the two integrated using a coded flow chart of arrows and colors. Then she began mislaying her lists: it would be Thursday before she found Monday and realized that on Tuesday she had forgotten to take the trash out, again. The third week this happened, she determined on a new course of action, and, in large block capitals on a 3"x5" index card, she neatly wrote
        HARDWARE STORE
        BLACKBOARD PAINT
        CHALK
        ERASER
        CHECKBOOK

For some time now the hardware store had allowed her to tally up her purchases on account, billed monthly, but as she wasn't certain when she had last paid them, it seemed safest to be prepared to settle any outstanding balances at the time of purchase. She tied a shoelace through a corner of the card, tied the card to her wrist, and returned home an hour later to create a blackboard on the wall of her dining room, paint drying by sundown.

She had purchased colored chalk in addition to white, and started by dedicating part of the space to a weekly schedule. It worked quite efficiently, in combination with a programmed alarm clock set to different bells and different times for each day of the week. For almost three months, her bills were paid on time and she made every doctor's appointment and social engagement in her schedule, to the pleased surprise of her friends and colleagues. She avoided having people over, to postpone the discovery of her system, but as she had stopped entertaining after the second dinner party she had forgotten she was hosting until she had a house full of guests, two years or so ago, no one thought anything of her suddenly reliable behavior.

Every Sunday she would put gas in her car after church, whether she needed it or not, a practice implemented after the third time AAA rescued her from an empty gas tank, and she hired a local crew to attend to lawn mowing, leaf raking, snow shoveling duties, as she only became aware of the urgency of the work when her car was mired in leaves or a neighbor made an offhand but pointed comment.

Through all this, she kept wondering: is it early onset Alzheimer's? Is it dementia? A brain tumor? A chemical imbalance? Her doctor, therapist, neurologist were all equally at a loss, one specialist even writing her concerns off as hysterical hypochondria, another prescribing a harrowing regime of mental exercises designed to teach focusing skills; blood work and brain scans and family history alike returning no cause for concern. None of her siblings suffered a similar impairment, nor had she been born under particularly harsh or inauspicious circumstances. There had been no car accident or sudden emotional trauma. But from her twenty sixth birthday, thought had become slippery, ephemeral things and life became a battle against the oblivion of the present moment.

She carried with her an assortment of pens, notebooks, electronic gadgets, post-it notes, wrote messages on her hands, programmed reminders and created methods of instant implementation so as to not be fired from her job for gross incompetence or to alienate all her friends and family members. Most thought of her as absent minded, but sincere, and discounted the depth of her struggles to inflation of a fairly normal condition, and more than one lover ended things in disgust, accusing her of shallow self absorption and incapable of compassion.

It's not that she was uncaring; but when she could barely keep her own tasks on target, it was hopeless to expect her to remember birthdays, anniversaries, food allergies, promises to attend family events, the names of mothers, siblings, or cousins. Once she arrived for a romantic dinner only to realize, too late, that she had driven to the home of a former love, and after spending hours convincing the new wife that she was not trying to rekindle an old flame, she had finally arrived at the correct address, to a burnt chicken and a very drunk, very angry now-ex-boyfriend. That had actually been one of the less awkward situations.

Through careful delegation of responsibility and automatic payment schedules and direct deposit, her credit worthiness was reestablished and her mailbox was no longer filled with threatening letters from the IRS and the electric company, but she was not yet forty and her systems to retain information were becoming more and more difficult to maintain and implement.

She contemplated moving to a simpler culture, one where the only tasks were the daily tasks of living; she hired personal assistants and housekeepers; and she struggled to keep her job and her life functional. On her fortieth birthday, she decided to check herself into either a mental hospital or an ashram, and, finding the fee system of the ashram easier to understand, shaved her head and entered into a life of deliberate conscious living, rising with the bell at four for meditation, following the prescribed schedule and order with a sense of gratitude and relief.

She fit in easily with the clarity of the requirements of the day, although she found the meditation periods physically excruciating and mentally tedious. She was wise enough to not mention these troubles in her daily meetings with her spiritual adviser, but something she said or didn't think to say evidently alerted him that hers was not a spiritual practice so much as a quest for the safety of preordained external structure, and after six months of contented living she was firmly but gently informed that hers was not the spiritual avocation, and it would be most appropriate for her to return to the ways of being in the outside world.

As her employer was not expecting her back from her leave of absence for another three months and the center for psychiatric well being had a ten month waiting list except in the event of court mandated emergencies, she found herself once again at home, with her neatly coded black board but not even the daily structure of a job to bring order to her mind. In despair she drew up a schedule of responsible living, mapped out a daily regime of juices, raw foods, herbal teas, and exercise, and finally decided that she could exist just as successfully on the road as she could in her house, and so armed with her toothbrush, a credit card, and a stack of post-it notes, she started to drive, with no destination in mind, and thus no fears about becoming lost on her way.