Silence is Black

I was told Friday night that I was not "very cheery." The tone of voice with which this statement was delivered made it clear it was an accusation, and not the compliment I take it to be. I agreed, as it was not only true, but not a point one can argue when dressed completely in black, which, as a poet, is required in our contract. I then said nothing, noting I was feeling a psychic static run through me, as if I'd accidentally bitten down with a filling onto a piece of foil. 

So, I silently assessed, Good Girl was still hanging out in me somewhere, just waiting for her opportunity to point out to me once again that I might actually have a boyfriend if I would simply wear pastels and not say things like "I find that highly flawed logic" to men trying to make dinner conversation on a first date. She was pretty smug, feeling sure her time had finally come, and soon life would be a series of make-overs and giggling girlfriends doing each others hair. She has, you see, remained perpetually 16--that awful delusion age when you believe that your breasts have brought with them unending potential for a gorgeous life, if you can just find the right top to go with them.

Artists are not actually known for being highly socialized, or good at pretending, which I believe are very often the same thing. I actually have only two speeds: the truth, or silence. I've learned to allow myself that constipated look as I remain quiet, as people take it for thoughtful listening instead of the low-level frustration I'm really experiencing at not blurting out my insightful but potentially-insulting observations. This accounts for my near hysteria when I finally do hit upon something both witty and impersonal. I shout it out, like a trader in the stock exchange whose "sell" number has finally arrived, further cementing my reputation as one of those friends best kept to Facebook.  

I decided to have a talk with this inner teen, to put her down once and for all. She could, I decided in the cab going home, leave willingly, listening to reason and experience. Or I could silence the idiot using a water glass filled with ice and vodka.  She chose the latter, which left me with puffy eyes the next morning but a quieted soul, residing once more in my authentic intense nature. And smiling, which can look exactly like cheerful. As long as I'm not talking.

Professor Canine

My dog, Chili, watches me constantly, as most dogs do the source of all their comforts. I am producer of organic salmon kibble, the bit of high-fat cheddar, and cool water in a hip stainless bowl. I have even procured a memory-foam bed that she insists, through her stony posture, now move with her as she shifts from sleeping underfoot in the entry way to blocking the fire exit of my bedroom door. And yet, her attention on me is not only suspended, but rendered utterly irrelevant on our walks to what we humans call the park, but which she clearly views as the regular coming of the Rapture.

These long walks began with the goal of finding our way back to Chili's hips, as they had been disguised beneath the seal-shape she'd taken on from her preferred state of sloth--interrupted only by trips to the food or UPS man. I did not expect what I got, which has happened before, though usually I'm on a blind date at the time. Every morning and evening, Chili becomes completely herself--no one's pet, no one's companion. She stands at our elevator and waits, knowing it is this conveyance that will bring her what she seeks, those perfect nervous objects of desire: squirrels. 

Trying to keep Chili from squirrels has been yet another lesson that nature has presented me, that rough and tumble class time at the foot of a furry Gandalf that has no interest in teaching anything. No. Chili's only interest is on the gray creatures she was born to chase. And I have learned in this mossy green classroom all I need to know from her, and wonder now who exactly rescued who in this relationship.

Chili is not distracted from her squirrel hunt by human laughter at her bald display of passion, nor their commentary on the futility of her chase. In fact, she does not think of them at all. Genetic muscle moves her up, scratching at tree bark, moaning like a lover, her tail wagging with simple perfect pleasure. Some stop to watch her: the artists, library-book toters, or weary workmen. They then go on to where they've promised to be, buoyed by the rare sight of that much common sense. 

My job, so far as I understand it, is to keep her from those metal objects with gas pedals on the right, as the game goes afoot the next street over. And I do. I keep her safe enough to live the life she's meant to have, and just that much, not a single caution more. That, too, I have learned from tugging too hard and finding she would rather choke. She's made me cry twice in my life: once when she abandoned her Zen bark-less nature to defend me from a psycho schnauzer, and the day she gagged on my pull and pulled against me toward a so-close squirrel, rooting for herself more than me, until I picked the right side to be on. 

I've stopped hoping that she catches one someday. Instead, I smile and watch her, and let her show me again. And I remember, again, the necessary joy of the chase.   

Fantasy Island

Nearly a year has passed since I've moved back to NYC full time after years in our long-distance relationship, cheating on it constantly with the moist welcome of London, and occasional romps with the dark nights of Rome. Then there is perfect couture of Paris, of course, but we don't speak of those things. At least we don't commit them to paper.

So, I have to decide again. Should I stay or should I go?

I have fantasies. In one of them, I'm living in a cottage somewhere. A thatched roof is involved, something from "A Quiet Man," sans the wife-beating John Wayne, who I would have knifed then used same to eat my supper. In my close-up, there are many suspensions of disbelief. There is no mention of how I make a living, for starters. Or how I've managed to start an organic garden when I've killed every plant I've ever had but a cactus that thrives on neglect. My cottage is all about absence. Absence of appointment reminders, the need to find my glasses, and tourists blocking the door of the train. I'm wearing white, and it's slimming.

I find my cottage fantasy best in small doses, as reality seeps in quickly on this one, seeing as I had a brief stint in a hellish bucolic atmosphere in a past life in a New England town called West Springfield, which had no adjacent North, South or East, nor even an over-arching Springfield. Those hamlets, apparently, had been abandoned for towns with roads. I made it until mud season when I stepped into the driveway and my leg sank a foot into the ground, taking my Joan and David kidskin flat with it. I removed the other, stuck it in the hole, showered, and drove away, not stopping until I got to a town with street lights and a Gap.

Disappearing, in truth, is the narrative thread of all my fantasies and has been one of the high points of my nomadic life. I love the blank slate of what's next, the potential before it's been dulled by habit,  numbing routines and the mental exhaustion of ducking other's expectations for my life.

This co-exists with a rabid hatred of moving companies, a distrust of realtors and their over-scented bodies, and anxiety about approval processes that morphs at warp speed into rage as someone decides whether or not to allow me to be gouged for 600 square feet living under a flamenco dancer.

But, for now, it's all good. There's still time to imagine a life of Zen nothingness. Of changing without change. I think I will wear white.   

Birthday card

It's raining, and I have a cold. But, as it turns out, I also have peanut butter. I think of Brad Pitt whenever I eat peanut butter, just the way he says it in "Meet Joe Black, " with all the emphasis on the butter. This of course proves that he indeed is Death come a 'callin in that movie, as I didn't really need another reason to find him irresistible then to pair him with my favorite high-fat food.

After exhausting my memory bank of bare-Brad moments from the greatest films of all time, I also think of my father when I eat peanut butter. Dad used to slather it on to what we called hard rolls, meaning fluffy white nutrition-free bread with a crusty exterior, usually with a few poppy seeds clinging on for dear life. As if the hydrogenated/sugar/substance with some peanuts wasn't enough creamy mouth feel, Dad would slather on butter. And he would eat a couple of these--three if the Yankees were losing.

Today would have been my Dad's birthday, had he lived through such habits, which he did not--leaving us ten years ago to find our own way to the store and answers to arcane movie trivia. I think he would be horrified at the organic soy peanut spread that skims my toasted whole-grain pita. And that's okay. I have a lot to live for. Two "a lots," as a matter of fact: my son and my daughter. And today I'm feeling the gratitude for these marvelous adults that are both friends and my off-spring. They survived me, somehow--I suspect by turning a blind eye to my lefts, and following my rights, and then mixing in themselves: a brilliant alchemy that created people I not only am delighted to mother, but would flagrantly beg to be my friend.

When I look back to when they were kids, I never daydreamed about how they would turn out. Most of the time I was simply holding on, trying to do no harm. And I'm glad, because maybe I would have been some bent tiger mother, tying them to a piano bench because it made me feel successful. I like to think not, but you never know. I wore aqua lycra pants. That should call anyone's judgment into question.

So, Dad, happy birthday, from me and the grand-kids. You would like how they turned out, I am sure. They both love me, and peanut butter.  

Arriving at beauty

It has been said that until we can define something we can't think about it. The brain needs a handle of sorts to grab onto what it wants to talk to itself about. The problem with that, of course, is definitions are very dangerous territory. How we define something is critical to how we measure it. Definitions being as powerful as they are, I approach them they way I do people dancing on the subway: they may be harmless, and even entertaining, but I keep my eye on them just in case.

I've been in this mode of intelligence gathering since I turned 50 about the definition of beauty. This is one of the big questions, the kind we were presented with in Philosophy 101--which never got solved, of course, or there would be no need for Philosophy 201 and its accompanying tuition. In fairness, these big questions do take time to work through, especially when interrupted by breast cancer and buying a convertible, which not surprisingly were events in my life that happened very close together.

The biggest problem with a 50+ year old woman talking about beauty is getting over that tinny echo of defensiveness. One begins to avoid the discussion at all because it has that ring of doth protesting too much, as if we are hiding the truth of our dismay behind a lemons-to-lemonade approach to what is seen as our decline. Well, fuck that. There has never been a topic off limits to my mind. So, I think I will start where I always do: with the truth as I experience it, not heard it to be.

My experience is that beauty does not end, but it changes. And now I understand exactly how, which is a feeling similar to when I gave birth to my children--an amazing lightness after being weighted down for what seemed like a lifetime, and having my body back to myself, not housing another. There is a freedom in that which I can still call up, so radical and physical was its shift in me.

My beauty, when younger, was the beauty of youth. It was male-centric, exterior, and had a shine of innocence, even with all I had been through. It was lovely, in its own right, though even then I felt its limits and pushed against them, to no avail. I wanted to feel confident, and I rarely did, though I learned how to mimic it for success and survival. I wanted autonomy, but I craved male attention as if captive to some inner imperative I did not understand. I hated my innocence. I wanted to slice through it and find that self-comfort I saw embodied in some older women. Yet, when youth began its slow drip away, I felt a static of fear firing across my brain. It had been all that I'd known of beauty; it had been my truth.

And now, a new definition is in its place. I cannot take credit for it; it was not a flash of insight. That drip of draining youth, it turns out, was being captured in a crystal glass, just waiting for me to drink. This is a Socratic beauty: where the inner and the outer are as one. Where once male attention was a measure, my attention to how it feels to create beauty is now its entire reason. As I have freed from dressing for another, my style has flourished in the joy of creating it anew each day, something I never knew when I was desperate to be seen. It is now Intelligence, as C.S. Lewis spoke of it in his wife--that synergy of wisdom, confidence and humor about it all. All that, with the tender care and feeding of my body as it is now:  beautiful, vital, and not young.

If we as women do not get over this conversation being classified as sour grapes by those too young or too afraid to flourish in this ripened beauty, we will go on cramming into a too-young definition like we do those skinny jeans, looking desperate and unable to breathe. We will create daughters terrified of its arrival, who get Botox in their twenties, instead of those who, with their friends, celebrate their mothers' beauty, call them friend and are not afraid.

When I was in my thirties, I had a meeting with a woman in her fifties. Her hair, in a perfect chignon, was a silver blond, as mine is now. Her posture betrayed a life of dance. Her makeup was a beige canvas for a lipstick so red I see it still. While everyone drank coffee from Styrofoam cups, she drank her tea from a china cup with saucer. She laughed easily. She said no with grace and an utter lack of guilt. I felt see-through beside her; she was substance and everything I wanted to be. She did not covet my youth, nor did she dismiss it. She shined on me. She knew our different beauties; I was not her enemy.

Fifty is not the new thirty. It is the new fifty. And it's beautiful as can be.

Once in love with Amy

Well, my first Valentines Day in New York City is about to sling its arrow of outrageous fortune my way in less than 48 hours. Even when I did have a man in close proximity to my La Perlas, I can't say I ever cared much for the holiday. To begin with, it involves leaving the house in February, which has become even less desirable this winter, as I'm still walking on snow that fell while I was doing my Christmas shopping.  I mean, I think it's snow. Or it's those familiar carcinogenic bus fumes now available in a brand new flavor. And, then there's the overall downgrade in the quality of chocolate making its way into unsuspecting homes across America. Not to mention the ubiquitous red roses--the Barry Manilow of the floral kingdom.

My celebrations of love are usually marked by a martini and an in-market test of whether or not my mascara is truly sweat-proof, said sweat consisting of water and $180 an ounce perfume proven to be worth every penny.  Valentines Day does have something to recommend it, however. It is the best day of the year for being able to openly discern romantics from people I could actually like.

There are three types of heterosexual men riding the subway on February 14th: those carrying gifts--taken; those listening to Coldplay on their iPods--romantics; and those who look up from checking their phones upon hearing me unzip my jacket--possibilities.  

But, I have to say, I'm just not in the mood for some inexplicable reason, possibly having to do with an amazing workload, a broken collarbone, and a really good book. So I've decided to make this Valentines Day about self-love, which has turned this whole holiday around already. I've started with a love letter to myself: a shocking exercise as it made me realize how much of my journal is about what is going wrong, and not about what is going so very right. I had a facial and scheduled it early in the day so I wasn't laying there wondering if the dog was going to pee on my new rug. I ate a burger with caramelized onions and didn't leave off the cheese.

Best of all, it has made me think to count myself among those I love. And that's something worth celebrating, even in the middle of February.

Honesty Policy

I sit tonight waiting for the second major snow of the winter, even as soot-crusted remnants remain of the last one--a storm I place now, chronologically, in the mental file folder of "right after," meaning right after a man on a bicycle did his best to relieve me of the burden of my handbag. I also refer to that event as Christmas Eve, which when combined with the attempted larceny gives both events a certain gravitas, as if the parting gift of a broken clavicle was not enough.

In the telling, it never fails to deepen the despair for humanity and where we are all headed, when a woman can't go out and do some last-minute getting without ending up at St. Luke's talking to detectives instead of making her 7:30 dinner rez at Bar Baloud. And, in fact, there is some sense of naive surprise that there is not, actually, a cease-thieving called at noon on December 24th. It would seem it's actually its busy season, with my mugger and I both waiting until the last minute to do our shopping, giving us something else in common besides  coveting my Prada bag.

Since it happened, I find my already well- entrenched insouciance has magnified. It may be the pain killers, or may just be a normal response to being slammed to the ground, but I find detachment from human nonsense easier than ever these days. The bald act of robbery has, perversely, a kind of honesty at its center--if not morally, certainly in its purpose. The man who tried to grab my handbag was not pretending to do otherwise. In that way, my responding by not letting go was a direct and unambiguous exchange between us. It had an almost Zen-like clarity. While I do not wish to repeat it, it served to heighten my insistence that all attempts at passive-aggressive behavior directed toward me in the new year be immediately met with aggressive-aggressive behavior. Unless I don't care enough, which will then turn quickly in to passive-passive, and may involve a very dry martini.

See. I feel better already.