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

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.

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I suffered for their art
These Are My Subjects

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 

Vacation Stack

Earlier this August, I prepared to take a vacation with my family.

We are very fortunate. My husband’s family has a beautiful house in the Berkshires. We planned a 10-day trip there.

On the vacation agenda was hiking, an activity the entire family enjoys. We planned to take trips to the beach, have a museum day, a family movie night and meals cooked on the grill. We mapped out a nice balance of activities and relaxation.

In addition, I wanted to spend a substantial amount of time sitting and reading. I wanted to bring a stack of books with me on vacation.

My plans included reading some of many books, rather than packing and finishing two or three books.

About a week before the vacation, I set out to assemble my stack of books.

There were two books from the library that I had already started and was enjoying. I renewed those books. I packed them for my vacation.

One of the books was a gift from a friend who works in publishing. She is a book matchmaker for me. She is excellent at this. In addition, the book she sent me was something that she may have thought I needed to read because of some of my behaviors while her children and mine attended the same elementary school.

I know how to take a hint. I added that book to the reusable shopping bag I had designated for the stack.

I then consulted my Books to Read list. I ordered the rest of my stack from Amazon Prime.

Ordering all of these books was a splurge. Most of the time I reserve books at the library. Some of the books on my list would be so popular that I would need to wait a long time. Vacation time is like a special treat. I wanted my books to feel that way too.

I fashioned my order to be a mix of books I really wanted to read. I included some fiction and nonfiction. Since I was spending money on the books and helping to keep the publishing industry afloat, I was savvy. I ordered one book that the other three members of my family would want to read when I am finished.

Two of the books I ordered would be books I would want to keep and place on the shelf I have designated as my personal reference library.

One of the books had no real rhyme or reason other than an intriguing review I read.  This one book, purchased in hardcover – was an impulse item.

Once we arrived at our vacation locale, I unpacked the stack and arranged it fetchingly on a dresser in the bedroom.

The next morning, I carried the stack to the living room. Over the course of the vacation, the stack resided on the screened porch, the dining room table, the coffee table and the bedroom. One or two of the books would accompany me on vacation jaunts.

I thought about the best way of approaching my stack. An icebreaker was in order.

I began by reading five pages of each of the books. Once I read five pages of each book, I could read more of each book, more of only one book, or a mix.  This is a construct I found extremely appealing. That is why I continued to do that for the duration of the vacation. That is why I adapted this plan once I arrived back home.

I loved reading my five pages, then adding that book to the bottom of the stack. I loved rotating the books. I loved the sculptural quality of the stack. It was like a horn of plenty, only with books.

Near the end of our vacation, some extended family members vacationed with us at the country house. It did not take long for the other vacationers to notice the stack. The stack makes quite a statement. The stack is a conversation opener.

One vacationing family member asked if she could look at the books in the stack. I discovered that I liked nothing better than have a family member who is also a friend leaf through my stacked books.

The stack led to many conversations about the books - whether certain books were as extraordinary as people said they were, what advice given in books was good and which authors had their heads up their asses when it came to certain topics.

It was also nice to discuss which book reviewers had true understanding of a book and which clearly had their heads up their asses.

It was fun to hold forth on which writers were the real deal, which books were difficult to put down and which books could be a little slow going if I had to read more than five pages a day.

I finished two books in the stack while on vacation. The stack is now residing on the coffee table of my apartment. I have added two more books to the stack because I have discovered I like having a large stack. I like reading many books at once.

I am planning to spend a three-day weekend at the country house.  I look forward to assembling the Labor Day weekend stack. Watch this space for future stacks.

 Book titles in photograph, from top:

1) How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims

 2) The Rocks by Peter Nichols

3) Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

4) I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam

5) How To Be A Friend To A Friend Who’s Sick by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

6) Signs Of Life by Natalie Taylor

7) The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

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Destination Library

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This Book Will Mess With Your Head

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What Comes Next and How to Like It

A Memoir by Abigail Thomas

I am a memoir expert.

I don't say this lightly. I read a lot. I think I've read more memoirs than anyone I know.

There was a period of my life lasting many years, when I struggled to live with what happened to me. I read only non-fiction. I read nothing fictional. A friend in the publishing industry finally got me started with the fiction again. You can read the story of that here.

Out of all of the non-fiction I read, a lot of it was memoirs. If it was a memoir, I probably read it. Some were good. Some were amazing. Some were very bad. Almost all of them were engrossing. That's what I needed at the time.

My reading has changed somewhat, but it's still slanted toward non-fiction. Even though I will read works of fiction, I still read a lot of memoirs.

Somehow in all of my single -minded memoir reading I missed the writing of Abigail Thomas. This is a mystery to me. I learned of her latest book on Facebook. I put it at the top of the To Read list I keep.

What Comes Next and How to Like It is a masterwork.  Not just of memoir. Of writing in general.

The good news for anyone reading this is that I've done a lot of reading. You can consider that legwork I have done on your behalf. There are a lot of books you can go ahead and skip. I strongly suggest you read this one.

I'm not going to tell you what the book is about. You can read about that anywhere. Abigail Thomas can tell her own story. It's not easy to classify anyway.

I will say that this book captures things that are true but difficult to write about. People and relationships and life are messy. It's all complicated. Things don't fit neatly into boxes. The space that lives between people can be ambiguous.

In the hands of a master this is illuminating and consuming. It's a cliché but I'll say it anyway. It was hard to put the book down. My husband and children were out one day and I'll always remember this snapshot of myself, eating the rare dinner alone and reading - consuming - this book. I was as happy as a person could be in those moments.

It made me happy but it wasn't easy. Like the Olympic skaters I love to watch, what seems simple on the outside is not. I felt like I was steeping in this book. Then after it was over it stuck with me.

There was this chatter going around for a while about a New York Times book review of What Comes Next and How to Like It. I purposely didn't read it until now. The review came out right before I read the book. I heard it was scathing.

Even with advance notice, I was not prepared to read what amounted to a literary version of a classic schoolyard bully incident. My review of this review is bad. I apologize in advance.

Katherine A. Powers has her head up her ass on this one.

Katherine A. Powers writes for The New York Times. I do not. Katherine A. Powers has won awards for her reviews. I have not. She gets paid for this. I do not.

But make no mistake. In spite of everything and all of these differences, let's not forget who the real memoir expert is here. That expert is me.

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I Changed My Mind About Finishing Every Book I Start

This Book will Mess with Your Head

This Book Changed my Life