Saturday, March 27, 2010

White Noise, Old Friends, & Dining with the Help!

It is a very curious thing: at home I am disturbed and distracted by the doggy daycare behind the building I live in. Add to that the racket that comes through the very low ceilings in my apartment -- slamming footsteps, vacuum cleaners at rather odd times (10:30pm?), washers and dryers that shake the walls of the living room, the howling beagle...... But right now I am in New York City where, even on the 36th floor in my son's flat, the jackhammers, sirens, honking of horns, all become white noise to me. I am rarely conscious of it and it certainly doesn't keep me awake. I grew up on a dead-end street in Brooklyn. A train went by frequently when I was very young. Then, after the war, it could be heard only a few times a day. Noise from the avenue across the lots behind our house -- must have been. I don't recall a disturbance. But there were clanging trolley cars and car traffic and screaming kids. On our street, there were delivery trucks arriving regularly. I suppose I absorbed the sound as city music. The sounds I hear from my current home are dissonant; noise pollution. Living two streets from the ocean -- I expected a different concert. I don't know why the racket in New York plays out like acceptable background to me. But it does.

I came to the city for a birthday get-away. Last year I went to Italy for six days. I couldn't replicate that trip since I've been unemployed for almost 11 months. But I had promised myself a trip of some kind to celebrate my birthday from then on. So I commandeered my son's charming apartment in mid-town Manhattan for 6 days. I traveled by train which was fine except that getting to Amtrak from where I live is a hassle with luggage. Though it is March, it was summertime in the city. Of course I was wearing my P-jacket (coming out of New England) and shlepping my suitcase the mile from Penn Station -- well, I was a bit warm by the time I arrived at the flat.

I saw a play that first evening; my son left me a ticket as a birthday gift. A good play -- NEXT FALL -- and so a good start of my holiday. The next day, a school chum bussed it in from Pennsylvania. We had a lovely lunch (her very kind treat), a long walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in search of a newly acquired Monet; tea and pastries at the Neue Gallerie Cafe Fledermaus. The latter is the German museum and the cafe serves Viennese desserts. Very elegant; felt for the hour as though we were in a foreign country. The waiters spoke Spanish instead of German, but no matter. The next day, Sunday, I went down to the Chelsea/Soho neighborhood to visit with a friend who had been at my little acting school -- The Acting Place, Inc. -- back in the day. We visited Chelsea Market, had lunch at a little French restaurant (again a very lovely treat for me), and then strolled the new High Line elevated promenade. We chatted a bit in my friend's delightful little penthouse apartment. On my way back, not ready to end the day, I went to see ALICE IN WONDERLAND at the movie theater. I love Lewis Carroll. I liked this film -- had it been called "ALICE RETURNS TO WONDERLAND" it would have been right on the mark. Another wonderful day. Visiting with friends who share history -- the best, truly. A classmate of my son bought me lunch at a great diner on rainy Monday. My Sunday friend, after reciting the weather report for Monday, said to me: "It's going to rain all day Monday. What can you do in New York in the rain?" So I told her: " The same things I'd do if it didn't rain -- except with an umbrella." So I bought an umbrella and walked and walked and walked. I love to wander around New York. Looking for yesterday perhaps. Do we search always for our lost youth? (Mine was Manny Luftglass, a kid in the Navy, and he was a heck of a kisser! Lost him over 50 years ago.)

On my birthday day, I visited the Museum of the City of New York. My dad and I used to go there together. I believe I wrote about this in an earlier blog. It is worth mentioning again. The exhibits are always fresh and enlightening and fun. On the third floor the toys and games are kept. Bits and pieces of my childhood. Yours, too, if you're as ancient as I am. They have my older brother's favorites: an erector set; Lincoln Logs; cast iron fire trucks, and on and on. But my favorites are the doll houses. All hand built. All magnificent. A number of years ago, my son, Jamie, built a doll house for me. He built my fantasy house. It took him six months. It was indeed a labor of love. And love it I do -- so much.

On my way back to my son's flat, I stopped at one of my best liked restaurants on 9th Avenue -- Basilica. It was a few minutes past three o'clock and I hadn't eaten all day. They were not open yet, but I was invited to sit down anyway. A waiter appeared and after looking at the menu, I told him what I wanted wasn't on the menu. He asked me what it was; I told him a simple pasta pomedora, a salad mista, a glass of red wine (well, the latter was certainly on the menu). They prepared the meal for me. The staff sat at a table across the way having their meal and took turns checking up on me. They put on some lovely music -- Andrea Bocelli -- and I was transported to the same time the year before, when I had the same birthday dinner in Florence, Italy. That evening I saw the play RED. I liked it very much; the performances (Alfred Molina) were brilliant. It is rare to see a new play, done well.


One more day. A visit with a friend I worked with when I lived in the neighborhood a few years ago. I went up to the office and saw some of the folks and then ate some Indian food with my Indian friend. I had meant to walk through the West Village or the Lower East Side, but I was suddenly tired. I went back to the apartment; chatted for an hour with my son's friend, then left to see the preview of the Twyla Tharpe ballet -- an homage to Frank Sinatra. (a college friend left a comp for me at the box office. Nice!) In the elevator on my way out I met a man who - it turned out - was from the same part of Brooklyn where I grew up. We chatted onto the street like a couple of old friends. It is rare for such an encounter to happen in Massachusetts -- unless you meet another New Yorker. If you smile at a stranger in Boston he/she will turn and run. If you smile at a stranger in New York, he/she will either say "What??!!" or " I know you? " or something else that acknowledges your existence.

So I thank all my friends in the city who treated me so well; my long-distance friends and Facebook friends who wished me so well; my son who shared his crib with me; and the blessed universe that has permitted me to reach this age with mind and body pretty much in tact. And now, like the March Hare, I will celebrate all the un-birthdays until the next actual one. We journey on.




Saturday, March 6, 2010

"Alone" - in search of a definition

You know more than you think you know,
just as you know less than you want to know.
............Oscar Wilde

Alone is not a word that is simple to define. Nor is the condition/state of being. Sure it is, you say; no one else is in the room. That's not what I mean; I suppose I'm taking an existentialist approach. i.e., one can be alone in a room full of people. Since I'm being obtuse I'll take the long way around to explain and tell you a story. Picture, if you will, a little girl -- five or six years old; blond hair, chestnut eyes. Not a waif; more of a presence. She lives in a big city with her family: parents, grandparents, older brother, baby brother. She is passionately in love with her family although she feels, oddly, that she is on loan to them; that she does not come from them. (She'll suffer later for both these emotions.) Her mother is distant, being very close to her own mother and subconsciously wanting to be the little girl of the family herself. Her older brother is "the prince;" the first born son with biblical impact. Her baby brother is the baby after all. So our little girl is vaguely apart from the family.

A huge occasion: the end of WW II. The entire city pulsates with joy. She runs across the empty lots behind her home to greet her brother returning early from summer camp. They hug and race back to the house. And before adults of the family turn the corner to greet them both, her brother swings, smacks her across the face and levels her. The parental response is
what did you do to deserve it? It begins with this and continues for the next 10+ years. Empty space is created around her; she steps back.

In all seasons, she runs to that house believing each time that it is truly home; safe haven. But there are challenges: the adult cousin of her father who corners her in the upstairs hallway and she has to fight him off; the stepbrother of her mother who attempts to bother her when she's sleeping on the living room sofa so he and his wife could have her bedroom while they visit. The mean kid from her religious school class who follows her home on the dark winter evenings and tries to assault her on the street. She goes to her parents who are ill-equipped to deal with any of this.
What did you do? She steps further back.

She hides somewhere in her head; in her fantasies; in her imagination. She lives in her love for dance, and movies, and poetry. Not a good enough dancer to make a career, she's told. That poetry is obviously not yours --
what did you do?? She steps back further still.

Racing ahead. She marries young believing that her husband will be her best friend. Her true partner. But he is looking to be taken care of; and to protect his own chosen isolation. They inevitably part.
What the hell did you do??

Don't hang up -- I know this reads like one huge kvetch! But really it's a street-map of sorts to understand a way of being. Our little girl, now a grown woman, creates camaraderie with her own children and within her artistic endeavors. When the children and the artistic endeavors move on, she steps back again and this time falls, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a place that she doesn't recognize nor from which
can she seemingly escape. Having lived in too many different places to establish community; having an internal sense of isolation (growing out of the events above and more) that prevents her from pressing into clubs or groups, etc., she can indeed be defined as alone. No -- please do NOT believe that she is a victim. From that first day when she was five or six years old she rejected that role. You can be sure that falling down the rabbit hole was not an accident. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Alone is not necessarily a bad thing. Not the greatest condition either, to tell the truth. But at the bottom of the rabbit hole, if you recall the tale, Alice
goes among mad people. And probably doesn't inspire a sense of normalcy herself. "We're all mad here," says the Cheshire Cat. "I'm mad; you're mad." It's a fine madness; a sort of protection against the terminal loneliness that "alone" can cause. The moments of clarity when one realizes the lack of "remember that?" moments; "no one to call" moments; the absence of a daily witness to one's existence. But since our girl is filled with love of life; of being; creating; since our girl has dear friends in various parts of the world (though not available for a walk on the beach) who care so much that she's there -- since our girl is an eternal tourist and is surprised constantly by the small moments of each day -- she is one with the world. And if you asked our girl what the hardest thing is about being alone, she'd no doubt tell you that she misses almost most of all -- the dancing.