In Sympathy for the Passing of Your Estranged Father

My father is dead. 

I spend some time before he dies participating in a modern-day vigil. My sister texts me that our father is on hospice. At frequent intervals, she sends me stats. Oxygen saturation, IV’s unhooked, a sleep state he may not come out of. This goes on for a few days. 

True to an inheritance that is fraught with alliances, broken alliances, factions within factions, egregious boundary violations, a first family, a second family, and a history so pockmarked that it is worthy of a limited series on any streaming service, my sister and I assume our usual positions. There is a primary connection to our father who she will speak to but I will not. My sister feeds me information. 

The primary source to our father is with him all the time. A small number of visitors come by to see him. My sister reports back to me. 

We discuss how relatively few people come to the bedside. Our father is old and many in his circle have died. 

Our father has also burned bridges recently with several family members who, if this happened a few years ago, would likely be at the bedside, but since nothing got mended, they stay away. 

Then there are those who would never be at the bedside because he burned the bridges a very long time ago. 

There are those who would not go to the bedside because the primary source to my father is there and, like me, they choose to not have contact with this person. 

I am the holder of memory, the decoder, the person filling in the blanks of our shared past. My sister sends me photos of our father. I lend context. That’s him during the Cuban missile crisis. That’s his best friend Frankie. People who my sister thinks are blood relatives are not. People she’s never heard of are. I call myself a repository and my sister laughs, but it’s true. I do not want to use my ability - my gift -  to keep years and years of genealogical shit straight to make a family tree. But ask me anything and I’m happy to tell you. 

I have Covid. I work at an in-person job. HR from my company sends over the latest Department of Health guidelines. The protocols now are so loosey-goosey that I realize on Sunday that I meet the full criteria to return to work on Monday. I also know that any more days off could mean not getting paid, as I’ve already used up most of my PTO. I mask up, go to work, and remain masked up for five days.  

I stay the course at work throughout the text vigil my sister and I are carrying on. When my father dies on Thursday morning I go in. I go in the Friday after he dies. I tell no one at my job what happened. I know what they would say, out of kindness, but I don’t want to hear any of it. 

I am a person wandering through my days without a blueprint.

The world doesn’t stop because I am having a text vigil with my sister or in deference to my father dying. As luck would have it, life decided to deal me a shitshow, along with, as children’s book author Judith Viorst so aptly put it, one Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

But I go to work anyway. I also watch myself go to work. I think about the girl I was. The grown version of me goes to work and takes the girl along. 

A girl whose father leaves her family on her first day of kindergarten might not find it necessary to take time off from work as he sickens, then dies. 

 When the girl is fourteen years old and scheduled for every other week visitation with the father - visitations that, in retrospect, probably should have been held with a social worker present - he doesn’t show up. He has what was then called a nervous breakdown, moves across the country, tells no one, and goes missing for years. It turns out that the girl never sees the father again. 

If the fourteen-year-old girl goes about her business as usual, albeit with trust issues and confusion around attachment - then the grown-up version would logically do the same.

The father surfaces again, wanting to see the girl. He is unable to abide by the most basic boundaries she has for him and is so devoid of empathy that the girl ultimately refuses his proposals for any kind of relationship. 

That girl’s refusal sends the now more than grown woman into her place of employment.

A girl who is estranged from her father does not tell her colleagues what happened because their condolences and offers of accommodations would be for a girl with a regular dad, not a girl with this dad. She does not have the bandwidth to tell them the nuances of the situation. 

So the girl goes to work. What she does have the bandwidth to do is work hard. She works hard in a way that is reminiscent of her mother and grandmother. She works hard despite the bits of fatigue she still holds from Covid. Her work ethic remains untouched by the vigil and death of a man who had a great deal of trouble getting up in time for work or holding a job. Her matrilineal inheritance assures that she not only goes to work but also sees the irony in the situation. 

I don’t know what to say, my father’s sister, my aunt, who is also estranged from my father, says. She DMs me on Instagram.

The girl struggles to put words to what has happened. It has no container. There is nothing that Hallmark makes that can speak to this, no collective vocabulary. 

But then it happens. The girl hits upon a simple phrase. The girl I watch grow up with a deadbeat dad is nothing if not resourceful. That girl takes care of business. Now the girl’s phrase is mine.

I’m sorry about the death of your estranged father. 

If you read this and you know me, say these words. Extend them to me. I’m sorry about the death of your estranged father. 

Loss that has no home now has some words. There are no euphemisms, no pretty turn of phrase. There’s no mincing these words either. 

I am little and my father takes me to Green Lakes State Park. There are parts of the lake hundreds of feet deep. The water is so clear you can see all the way to the bottom. All my murky, mixed-up feelings give way to the crystalline depth of that lake. My estranged father died. I am sorry that my estranged father died.

From the archives:

The Spil

That which stands tall, that which frays

1963

The Spill

I’m not telling anyone I said. He nodded. Some things should be kept between two people he said.

And for a time, that’s just what I did. I kept it all in a tiny box.

Then it changed. Let me explain.

What happened is not dead. It’s a crisp twenty dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket.

This secret has its own biography. You can barely see it here. But come a time, I don’t know when, where it will get spilled, making the sound of a bottle of whiskey held upside down and poured down the drain. The flood of it will soak this entire page.

From the archives:
Pegboard
The long fade

Rations

That which stands tall, that which frays

I have no exoskeleton. I have no bottom underneath. I remind myself of the helpers. Right on cue, one appears.

The man understands instantly that all is not well. He comes bearing a soothing voice and all manner of assistance. I was not expecting the bouquet but after the first smack of surprise, I realize it is just what I need.

The bouquet is not a professional floral arrangement. It’s Queen Ann’s Lace, those tiny blue flowers I don’t know the name of, dandelions plump and yellow. Best of all are sprigs of lavender. I fill a canning jar with water, snip the bottoms of everything and put the gift on my table, stems splaying at angles, others upright. I breathe in the grassy smells and especially the lavender.

Other helpers come because they are called, I go out to meet others. They arrive in the form of words or provisions. It’s alright, all of it. How many times, have I, in fact, been the helper? Too many times to count? Yes.

For days upon days, the flowers brighten and refuse to fade. Blooms I didn’t notice when the bouquet arrived unfurl and blossom. I know it won’t last forever, this flower show in the midst of it all. It went on longer than I thought it would. That’s important to mention.

Slowly, then quickly the inevitable transpires. Eventually it all ends up in the garbage. The memories carry me a little, until they don’t.

I make a phone call to the man who brought the kind eyes, the bouquet. I can’t expect him to read my mind even if he did do so that one time.

He is scattered, sorry I am not well, but his voice is too brusque for patience. When I mention the bouquet and gather my resources to ask for another, he finds this funny. You can’t depend on flowers! That is not what they are for! The idea of him keeping me supplied with bouquets strikes him as ludicrous. He’s still laughing when I say a hasty goodbye. Someone is at the door, I lie.

I realize that the man has empathy that flits on and off like a faulty wire.

I vent about it to the others. It amuses me. But I am still unwell.

Somebody suggests I learn to sit with anger, learn to tolerate the discomfort. This I cannot do.

It is winter, there are no flowers in the park even if I could justify picking them. The weeds nobody cares about are dead. There is no money for the florist even if I like what they have, which I don’t.

I rifle around for leftovers, anything to be put to use. A rainbow of construction paper, a stash of pipe cleaners, tissue paper, yarn. The YouTube videos are too crafty, too calculated. I am left with myself. I make my own damned bouquet, stick it in a proper vase, then tape some individual flowers, all misfits, to the walls.

He shows up some days or weeks later, everything blends together now. He brings wisdom he thinks I want and some books of advice. He means well.

What’s the matter, he finally asks, brows furrowed. He can’t figure this out. Nothing, I say.

From the archives:
Pegboard
Hospitality
Check Back With Me Later

1963

The mother cradles the baby in white and yellow, green, black-gold, the sun rises warm red, a blue primrose nursery, newborn creatures tumble, flap wings, prance, parade along, three or four apace, the baby prattles with the sparrows, blows kisses to four bunnies rampaging in her toy box, the infant fox meets her slate blue eyes, the spindly-spotted rise on shaky legs licking her unfurled petal hand. Two field mice place a daisy crown in her hair as owls joyfully scatter roses. 

When the animals take their leave, she forgets their ministrations around her tears, her tender beating heart, sticky human words amass, the language of squirrels and chipmunks relegated to maple trees and running brooks full of pollywogs, the stray cat skulks away, swans and geese look all the same to her now.

The baby outsmarts the playpen, the back door slams on its hinges,the mother pulls gravel from her skinned knees with tweezers, the girl plays with children on splintered sea saws, twirling sticks in filthy puddles, she lifts heavy rocks to stare, unflinching at all who live in the dark. Somewhere between girl and maid she blows dandelion-like toward the mean streets, in smears of sandy dirt and cracked sidewalks, she grows the very arms and legs she needs, as feminine as she is, as well as anyone.

From the archives:

The Pass Through

Unsanitary

Accelerant

Everywhere is sacred but if it’s not there’s always someplace else

Before you drop everything for the romance of the Pacific Crest Trail. Here’s a book about dirt and stink and calloused skin, of shriveled, freeze-dried food, of snow in summer, and things held dear dropped over steep ravines.

Tornados ravage the flatlands, turning love to dust but catch yourself and hold on tight before getting smug about it because the undulating hills you live on has folks so crammed up against each other that sickness gets passed among you faster than a game of telephone. 

Earthquakes or floods, droughts or out in the middle of nowhere and nobody helps, or stuck in a city and still nobody helps. 

There’s so many ways of staying where you are but the choice to leave could be so good that everybody who knows you says you’re a different person in a good way, not that they didn’t like you before. Or it could be shoes that refuse to fit and a tail between your legs. The roots you lay down are a sad sack sorry life but just as easy it could be brick by brick reaching all the way to heaven. 

Before you even think of moving to central New York where an intricate meandering fixer upper enough for a family of twenty awaits you for so little coin it’s ridiculous not to do it, read every single one of Joyce Carol Oates volumes including the ones that don’t have that place etched in its pages and I’m sorry she’s so prolific. Before you pack up your stuff, either by yourself or with hired hands, I’m going to ask you to do the same, no matter where you’re going, the only reason why is because I said so. 

If you read what I did in the last six weeks then you’ve seen Harlem, Norway, Germany, the inside of a mobile home, rooms in a hospital, a pig farm, an undisclosed location, another place so specific I started skimming just to get to the end of it. This won’t help you at all, not in any business-like way you’re maybe asking for, and I sense I’m so far off track as to have gone the other way and start making sense, but in either case  it bears mentioning anyway.

From the archives:
Best Case Scenario
The sun it did rise again
To mend 

Music Lover

Two thousand eighteen turned into two thousand nineteen and even a small slice of two thousand twenty. His average concert attendance was probably around once a week.

But averages tell an incomplete story. There were the nights when he zigzagged all over the city, attending three distinct and separate musical performances in one evening. More often than not he could go to as many as four intriguing gigs at any given time, but unable to clone himself, chose the most important, the cheapest, the newest, or the most convenient. If he could be physically present at more than one concert he would. 

Often he extended invitations to other music lovers but having a friend along was not a deal breaker. The truth is, he didn’t care much one way or the other. At least three quarters of the time he went alone. 

He’d go from home, comfortable in his own skin, clad in jeans and a tee shirt bought at another band’s merch table, taking a train to the upper west side or a crazy quilt of transportation to some out of the way neighborhood at the edge of nowhere. He liked stadium shows and tiny intimate venues.

He’d go straight from work, dressed for the office, the oldest guy in the room, people  assuming he was the manager or from the label. 

Eventually he organizes himself differently around after-work performances. He brings jeans, a signature tee shirt and casual socks to work. Concerts outside of the rarified classical or New Music genres can be sticky affairs. He does not relish the idea of spilt beer on his dress shoes or briefcase. In changing from one costume to another, he refuses to be placed in a box. He had the satisfaction of surprising colleagues, who only knew the business side of him.

If good music was playing or had been played, he belonged there. This belonging, giving himself a seat at the table allowed him to stride purposefully to the bar, the front of the stage or backstage to talk to the headliner, the drummer, the raw opening band singer, the accomplished cellist. Knowing that he loved a good musical hang, and would be late coming home I insisted on a cab. He complied.

Rock, folk, hip hop. classical, avant-garde. country. Music impossible to define. Blockbuster acts almost everyone liked, folks no one has heard of but him and half a dozen people. Nose bleed seats at Carnegie Hall. Standing for hours, eyes affixed on the tiny stage. Dancing wildly among strangers at a DJ set. One of the crowd at Madson Square Garden. Folded into a camp chair in leafy Prospect Park. Every one of them is his happy place. He’s not put off by the minuscule smattering of people at a brave, first concert. He is also perfectly fine being cheek by jowl in a  sweaty, overheated mess. 

More often than not a concert will have a second life. He likes nothing better than to tell other people what to listen to and why. He will work his words, his photographs, his intricate impressions into a story. He will remember every musician’s name and every note. He will notice what they do not notice themselves. 

He is not an epidemiologist or a fortune teller. He doesn’t know what a pandemic will be like until he is in one. One day he is squeezed around a table, listening to a vocalist with the voice of an angel, a windswept walk away from home. He thinks nothing of leaning in close to our friends, friends of friends, and friends’ new boyfriends to whisper between songs. The next instant he is locked up. 

Heroes go to work and ride the subway but everyone else is on lockdown. He’s cooped up, but so are the musicians. Everybody regroups. 

He shows up in virtual spaces and is not constrained by the rectangle to which he’s relegated. Singers, guitar players, people making their own instruments. He’s witness to their living rooms and basements, empty stages, the accidents happy and unhappy. 

He casts live concerts, enlarged and hyperreal to the TV. He plays vinyl, old and new on his turntable. He stands before his collection, and transfixed, pulls out a CD and stares. Music accompanies him while working remotely at our dining table, soft and low. His movements are curtailed by four walls but because of screens he travels to other continents, cultures, and time zones. He is witness to musicians reinventing themselves and they see him too.

He is rapt as though this were his chosen path, the only place to be. 

He must miss his former life. There was a time when he breathed the very same air as these musicians. Never once did he behave as though a Zoom concert was second fiddle. Not once did he complain. 

When his turn comes, he’s vaccinated. Afterwards he remains cautious and calmly watchful. The two year old child I lost to cancer was his too. He knows that life is fragile. He is not afforded denial. He makes do without it.

When the CDC says that vaccinated people can do whatever they like, he hangs back. When they change their stance, he is unsurprised. He has an inner compass which tells him what to do. It tells him to be careful.

Like a rare jewels or diamonds in the rough, some live music beckons him and he follows. He attends a concert at dusk in a historic, old cemetery. As the sun sets he walks about, masked and in like company, from one musical station to the next. For one precious evening those living mingle with the dead. 

He briefly digs in his heels about a gathering in a city park to honor a famous dead musician. It is the one time when his patience around the pandemic becomes frayed and britttle. As the guest list expands, then bloats to a number he deems unreasonable he reluctantly stays home. 

He attends an outdoor concert on a brand new island cooled by wind coming off of the water.

A favorite musician plays in an apple orchard and he shows up. Musicians can be afraid too. Musicians gather a community in the freshest, safest, most fruit and tree perfumed air. They do his bidding and he theirs. 

If the weather holds, if the pandemic doesn’t get any worse, if a natural disaster doesn’t threaten the shoreline, he is scheduled to go to a concert soon. He will be listening to live music. He will be listening while seated in a canoe. 

From the archives:
I suffered for their art
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
Lucky

Even The Locusts Wouldn’t

It works its way under my clothes
Traces my spine then spins around front 
Finding every tiny paper cut and scrape
Before pooling dark and syrupy
Where it always meets me
Where it likes to go 

Then, because it can
It finds me at home 
Coming in the back way, down the basement stairs
It works together with the termites who arrived first
It eats through the cellar floor then onto the foundation
Turning all that once stood firm to dust

Finishing there 
It moves to my pretty tended garden
A modest but colorful affair 
It takes its food and fodder 
Then fortified and ready 
It swings itself, catty corner, across the street
Smug and full of itself
To my wretched neighbor’s yard 

From the archives:
Shana Tova
Scissors
Mammalia

Pegboard

First comes the intention.

The place on the wall that will eat up two junk drawers and a broken toolbox. The stuff squirreled away in closets that we keep forgetting we have. The desire to make our home neater, lovelier better. To make ourselves all of these things, too. 

The measuring tape binds us to what can and can never be. We have this much wall space and no more. A hardware store smelling of wood grain and eggshell paint. A slab of hope and ambition in the form of plywood with almost infinite numbers of  tiny holes. A choice not to paint our cut-to-order purchase. A pegboard allowed to be itself.

A level. A drill dusted off and loudly employed. Hardware in five different sizes lined up and waiting. Minimalism will soon become a jumble of sizes, colors, patinas, new, and well-used. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One by one, we examine what used to live in the dark. Most things go up easily. Like with like, clustered together in more or less sensical fashion. 

One item remains. It won’t hang from a neat loop, it won’t balance between two hooks. It’s too big, unweildly, irregular. It’s not useful. It doesn’t match the array on the pegboard, nor does it belong with anything else. We’d throw it away, but neither one of us can bring ourselves to do it. The reasons are too numerous and complicated to go into now.

Alone on a shelf, unhoused, singleton.
Trash or jewel, not everything fits. 

From the archives:
Five Minutes
Picture Edit
The very second you lost me

The pass through

This is no labored, sweaty job.
Myself apprenticed, grasping at straws.
Wearing out my best mind.
Working too hard, but never hard enough. 

Instead, I’m handed a gift. 
Free and clear. Exacting, portioned right.
Brilliance so bold, who wouldn’t want to bottle it? 
Prayers for next time made futile and damned.
This can’t be summoned or conjured up. 

There’s no newly paved road, no tarry path to the horizon.
And even if there were, nobody’s lined up and clapping at the end.
Lifted high, without effort, athlete-like from there to here.
I’m alone. By myself and incandescent. 


From the archives:
Accelerant 
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
You are not okay.

Be exacting. Measure. Make that second nature.

Ride the subway from Upper Manhattan to Brooklyn in the morning, then over to Queens in the afternoon. Rush to class on the Upper West Side. Head on home. Board the Metro North to Westchester the next day, ride share to my destination, then reverse the whole thing come evening. Cut quite a figure across the tri-state area for the rest of the week.

Assume that my feet take the brunt of it, but it’s not just them doing the heavy lifting. The bus doesn’t pay any mind to one more. Keep getting on. 

Have shaky standards. Visit with this one and that, combine folks randomly. Never ask who pleases or fills my cup. Wear myself out with volumes of everybody and in-person, no less. 

Seal myself off. Listen to science. Embellish it.

Adapt seamlessly. Surprise myself. Don’t burden the doctors and nurses. Do these things for a long time.

Watch as helpers come with provisions that will one day, at a time and place of my choosing, be my slow ticket out of here. 

Let almost everybody else go first. No destination is benign. 

Make it simple. Say yes to yes places. Maybe means no. 

Never forget what happened while locked up. Eyes that crinkled around the edges, perfectly matching the smile inside the rectangle. Those who asked for help. Those who made old timey phone calls or wrote generous, multisyllabic words in sentences with punctuation. Those who came to find me. Those who left me where I was.

Let the world work harder before getting up from the ground to meet it halfway. Plant the seedlings but when something is dead on the vine, go ahead and compost it. Better yet, put in in the landfill. There’s a time for haste. 

When leaves dazzle in twelve gradients of green. When the answer is either gunshots or fireworks. Garbage strewn about, flies and dank. Fine fresh air with a hint of lilac. A perfectly calibrated air conditioner. 

Have one rule for people. Make ambivalence I can taste and smell a hard no. 

Peripheral vision is a privilege. Use it. Listen to the shift in color. Hope made it all a mystery before. It never was. People tell me what I need to know. 

Whatever it is. Whoever. Allow it to speak. Then rise up and make it mutual. 

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
Rending
The sun it did rise again

Zinger

This conversation has taken a turn.
Because you’re working my last nerve, I look at the time.
I say something.
It isn’t diplomatic. True, though.
It lands with a satisfying thud. 
I get up and put some money on the table. 
In one swift move, both literal and symbolic.
I’m leaving you alone with it.

From the archives:

Accelerant 

Five Minutes 

Careful Words

Unsanitary

Once our son’s pediatric oncology nurse teaches us how to wash our hands, we will never again use the melted and misshapen bar of soap in the clammy puddle of cloudy water. We will cringe at the sight of the limp, damp, terry cloth hand towel provided in other people’s bathrooms. 

Our child died. It wasn’t from opportunistic infections or carelessness. It was from cancer. All of the germ fighting things we did for him so that he could sustain the strong treatments we hoped would save his life remain with me. There were times when he had zero white blood cells. He still died but at least we controlled the things we could. His death is 100 percent, but my regrets around him are zero. 

So when a pandemic hits, it’s like riding a bike.

While other people are still moving in slow motion, I leave my old life behind without looking back. Everyone is immunocompromised when it comes to COVID-19. The implications are massive and unwieldy.

Soon my hands develop eczema from all of the washing. This too, is familiar. I take the recommendations of epidemiologists and  then embellish them all  for good measure. My doorknobs gleam. 

I don’t game the rules, finding a little loophole here or there. 

Before my child developed pediatric cancer, I was just like the rest of you. I call other parents, unscarred by chemotherapy regimens or pint-sized caskets, civilians. 

Civilians live in a place I can observe but not access. You do not have flashbacks of the moment your child died. You do not have what psychologists call intrusive thoughts that come uninvited, superimpose that death onto surviving family members in crystal-clear details that can only be described as hyperrealism.

Make no mistake. I have no desire to edify or initiate you. I don’t want you wearing my shoes or walking in them. I want you cosseted in innocence because the alternative is just too tragic.

But this pandemic is a beast of unnatural proportions. Would it hurt you to be a little more careful, watchful, aware? Of the children you’ve been gifted? Or, while you are at it, yourselves? 

From the archives:

Before, then, wide open

Rending

The sun it did rise again

Memoir

You throw open your front door wide in invitation, but soon I’ll come in the side entrance. Everyone knows who is company and who can just go around the back. 

You’re generous with yourself. You show me around. You don’t apologize for the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, or the baskets of clean, unfolded clothes waiting at the base of the staircase. 

Things are lived in but there are moments of exquisiteness. Photographs on the walls, unframed works in progress curling at the edges. The teapot you pour from passed down through generations. There’s a story for each of these things. You tell me the stories.

The soft sciences advise us that self-disclosure creates intimacy. There is something disarming about you. I’m intoxicated by your candor. Your command of language is breathless if a bit audacious. You are a page turner except when you’re not.

Occasionally, you get mired in the details. You look deeply into yourself, your heritage, your process. Even less frequently, you forget that my eyes, ears, self are still here. 

During these times, I look at you full on. You don’t mind my staring the way most people would. You have the kind of wide set eyes and cheekbones which invite words like breeding and society. Your folks have been here longer than mine.

There is no denying this lineage, not in the serviceable overalls you wear for comfort, the handcrafted farm table your husband made himself, a ferile, unladylike manner, age creeping about your eyes. The paint spattered, broken-in loafers you wear around the house cost you a pretty penny thirty years ago.

Because you married above your station, your offspring are even more finely drawn, their countenance begging for the artist, even - especially - luminous while just being messy, insolent children.

You engage me once more, knitting your story together. You connect all back to you spanning land, time, elders. You do this directly but also hold back with intention, allowing me to fill in the blanks. There is absolutely nothing reciprocal going on here. 

Still, I am rapt. I participate by noticing the uncanny, the apples not falling far from the tree, an apt metaphor with an orchard blooming right outside.

My own story, told in drips and drabs for a tiny audience, if you can even call it that, is held in suspension. With you, it’s clear who is who, who is the teller and who is the recipient. This is not a conversation. 

A familiar unease takes up residence in me. You serve up one picture, one report card, one remembrance too many. I soldier on. I finish what I start. 

Unlike some people with a pinnacled purpose, wanting to teach something or help the world, you hold no such elevation. Here is what you’d say, if you talked about it at all. This is about me and mine and nobody else. The applause and prizes serve as buttresses and for the time being, hold you up. 

Our visits have an arc, and like all things, come to an end. It’s been a sprawling, weighty chunk of time. I’ll fill in the hole you leave behind with more of the same, but cut from a different cloth. Somehow, there will be less talent but more grace. One of your brethren will have an expanse of story paired with economy of words, a balm for my own exhausted, not charmed life.

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
The Book
Rations

Accelerant

I never actually wanted to build a campfire.

But I’m on a beach with the air getting cold. There’s a rough hewn circle with a few logs. I have a lighter. All the kindling I need is up for grabs, in the woods. 

As if in a dream I build the fire. I’d been resistant to the idea but the ease is almost shocking. Soon I’m sitting in the warm glow, as the night grows darker. It’s a tidy fire, but the heat and smoky, woodsy aromas are real.  

You see me sitting there, tending my little fire. You don’t want to put it out. You don’t walk away either. You don’t join me in my quest to keep my fire contained.

You spend some time fanning the flames. You pour some gasoline on there. It’s scary but also beautiful. I don’t know what you will do next.

All I can really do is watch. I’m frozen. I watch you and I watch myself watch you. 

After all that effort you bring buckets of water over. Things turn grey and acrid. The ground becomes boggy under our feet.

By the time you leave, nothing is left of the glade. It’s scorched earth. In the end, water won, but not before you burned down the trees and blackened everything surrounding them. Thick smoke rises into the sky. Whatever this was, it’s over. 

I’m wearing flannel but feel naked. My hair smells bitter. It will take many shampoos to wash this night away, and even then, there will be a tinge.

Slowly, without Interface from me, the rectangle of earth will replenish itself. Seeds will blow over from trees unscathed by you. Hardy, adaptable plants will sprout here and there. Soon there will be lush overgrowth.

I’ll plant some trees to move it along. Some things will be the same as before, but most of it will be different. The collaboration between myself and regeneration will not be for nought. I don’t have to worry about you doing this again. It’s clear you aren’t coming back, and my belief in that is full and whole.

From the archives:
The Book
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Scissors

The paper cuts easily
The fabric frays in the beginning, then catches a break
It’s smooth sailing from there
When I get to the kindling, there’s some effort
I put my tool aside and use my hands
The dry ones crack sharp while the others shed and bend
It takes a while, but I do my best

There’s stuff here not worth mentioning
They lay untouched as nothing I have
Or nothing I can be
Can do a damned thing about them

Then there’s the spilt sugar
The wind comes, hot and sure
It makes quick work of the clumsy hand
That laid that sweetness down
The flies and hot water left hungry, myself spared

From the archives:
The Book
These Are My Subjects
Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Before, now, then wide open

These are my relics: wallet, backpack, sneakers, backpack, sunscreen. Squeezing into a party, my shoes left at the door, my back pressed up against a wall close to the air conditioner, talking closely, very closely. Rush hour that seemed to last all day, letting one, two subway trains go by, but being packed in anyway. The long Starbucks line where a man my age stares at me and I remember that while I am not everyone’s type some find my arrangement of features and my countenance much to their liking. A well attended memorial service.

You already know what happens next. The hand sanitizer, the homemade bleach solution. We’re all in this together, until we look more closely and realize, no we are not and never were. The science is there but it keeps revealing more and more. There are no good assumptions anymore. The only way to stay ahead of it is to stay inside.

I’m nothing special to this virus. It doesn’t care that I’ve already had unbearable loss. It doesn’t care that I love my husband and children. It is like I can see it. I’m not even stir crazy.

I clap and cheer and then I stop. My mother did me a great service by instituting rules around thank you notes. This got internalized rather than rejected. But even she would not ask you to send the same thank you note again and again.

People outside of my apartment are bored. I don’t understand.

Everything hands can touch is spic and span. I imagine the fragile lipid layer of the virus dissolving as I clean. I take stock at what foods have come into my home, much of it substitutions, whatever was available, or a surprise. Every morsel of it is precious.

I hold and console. I make space for the others to do their work. I ask for protection to do mine and it is granted.

There is one day that I realize that the only person I am not mad at is Andrew Cuomo. I get more sleep and better sleep and that resets me.

Ambulance sounds remind me that I’m lucky.

When other people are assholes I look for the helpers. When I am the asshole, several people decide that it’s better to be kind than to be right.

I had already engaged in a reinvention and now I’m called upon to reinvent the reinvention. I’m going to have to ask perfect to be quiet for a while.

People say, back to normal or new normal. Neither of these things are reasonable. There are times in life where there is an actual dividing line. This is one of them.

Vacations, trips out of town, restaurants, and plans of any kind are for other people. There is a magical space inside their heads that doesn’t need to know where the nearest hospital is. The sense that things are clearing up, getting better, or that the virus is going away is like believing in unicorns. Rainbows happen sometimes but not because we will them to.

I say goodbye to how things used to be. I don’t even know what will be useful or useless after this. When I think of what it could look like for me at some yet to be determined time it looks like a white canvas. A clean, large, brand new blank slate. Like the first day of school, only better.

From the archives:
The Book

Hydration
The High Cost Of Being Me

Secret Service

Until I trust you, I don’t trust you. This is my default and I come by it honestly.

When something bad happens I become watchful. That is exactly how I am right now, during this global pandemic.

Fellow citizens are usually good people but they are impulsive and unpredictable.

Before the global pandemic, I covered a lot of ground. I rode the subway everywhere. I took photographs all over NYC while waiting for traffic lights, running errands, going to appointments, and commuting to work.

Now I go out very rarely and when I do I need my full brainpower to navigate congested streets full of people. I do not want to catch COVID-19 from a fellow citizen, remain asymptomatic but contagious and spread it around my household and my building. I don’t want to be sedated and sucking air from a ventilator. I do not want to be with fellow citizens who are losing their damned minds because it is 65 degrees and sunny.

Even before lockdown I stopped taking photographs outside. I turned my attention to stuff I could photograph inside of my apartment. That way I don’t have to be aware of my surroundings or dodging fellow citizens.

Constraint can be good for art. It has been - most of the time. I post the good, the great and maybe in retrospect the mediocre to bad on Instagram daily. I like to share my practice.

One day I had an idea. For the first time, I longed for fresh air. I wanted to photograph outdoors. I also thought that this might be a good thing for Jeremy. He’s a photographer. too. We are on the same page with COVID-19.

The plan was to go outdoors together. We would walk single file on the sidewalks and into the park. We would be spotters for one another and that way we could concentrate on our photography rather than fellow citizens. It will be like having the Secret Service, I told him.

This is not our first rodeo. When you’ve cared for an immunocompromised toddler, a global pandemic is like riding a bike.

Jeremy was gifted a period of time. While he was photographing my only job was to watch from all angles to see if fellow citizens were headed our way. One time, as he bent to get a different angle on a subject, I told him we had to move along. When the spotter tells you to move, you’ve got to listen and act immediately.

In the park, my Secret Service detail involved scouting emptier parts of the park, away from vectors on bikes, the brazenly unmasked, and the coughers. When I was on duty I did not look at my phone or become distracted.

Then it was my turn to have a protector. All of the time spent photographing inside the bathroom and out the window had a way of informing this work. I could keep busy in a very small area. There are no trees or grass inside of my apartment. That was enough to keep me engaged.

We didn’t have free reign, but that was okay. Like I said before, constraint can be good for art.

As we walked home, we took a circuitous route in order to avoid fellow citizens clogging the sidewalks. We walked single file at my insistence. The breeze and air invited us to do this again. We will.

You can follow me on Instagram at to see my recent photographic series called Shelter in Place and Protected Photographs. I also have pre-pandemic imagery there too.

You might also enjoy:
Best Case Scenario 
I suffered for their art
These Are My Subjects

The Book

Somebody wrote something no one else did. It wasn’t easy to find.

Looking as hard as I did made me question the idea that there is a book for everything.  But I didn’t want to have an orphan for a problem. I didn’t want to think that no one wanted to write about this.

Then it arrives, not just being itself but the newest, latest, updated version of itself. This book makes me a student again.

All of the notetaking skills I perfected in 10th grade come back.

One day I ask myself, what is my truth? My answer is sure and clear. He wrote the book, but the book is nothing without a reader.

I get out my composition book. The first pages are neat, then things go to chicken scrawl. My writing edges out of the margins crawling along them.

If I want to know my truth I look at my notes.



From the archives:
Hard Fall
Careful Words
Hospital Corridor

Listen
I understand now
What will take you weeks to know
I implement now
What you will stumble and scramble to do
Someday hence
Tripping over everybody else
Grasping at empty
In thin, tired air
Worsted, wishing
You’d listened then

From the archives:
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
The sun it did rise again 

These Things Bind Together

Something big is happening. You’re a major player, not somebody on the sidelines.

You’re feeling exclusively happy about it. You’re ready to shout from the rooftops. Or it’s quiet relief. A sense that things are working out exactly as they should. 

You don’t know this yet, but you need to acknowledge the sadness. Let it lap over you. Every blessed event, no matter how anticipated, has loss attached. If you don’t wade out to meet it, it will come for you later. Meet it halfway. 

Maybe instead, it’s a shit show. You’ve been singled out for a private hell that has your name written all over it. It hits you where you live. 

Eventually, that dark feeling is going to have to soften. If this rotten thing has something okay attached, however tenuous, give it a name and let it sit at the table. 

You’ve made a brand new friend in the waiting room or wherever you find yourself that you never wanted to be. Also, now you have the get out of jail free card for all the crappy stuff you never liked doing anyway. 

All of this insomnia means you saw this kick-ass sunrise. The fact that you’d hoped to never see the sunrise, because that’s a time when people living blessed lives are still sleeping, shouldn’t dampen that moment because that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Damn anyone who finds that silver lining before you. That isn’t their job.

Let it in on your time. 

If there is no nuance or gradation then you’re missing something. This is not meant to be sequestered or cordoned off. You hold them both together. 

If something big is happening and you’re feeling bittersweet and complicated, seeing some cracks in the foundation, seeing the foundation present in the cracks, then thank you for reading this, but honestly, you’re doing it already and you don’t need any help from me. 

From the archives:
These Are My Subjects
Shana Tova
Yes, Please