Elinor Nauen

Went to the (trendy!) Shed in Hudson Yards last night to see a new work by Claudia Rankine called Help. Based on an op-ed she wrote a few years ago, it was, disappointingly, pretty much still an op-ed, with dancing. The audience was on her side, so she didn't have to do the work of setting up both sides of an argument, or find evocative images or language. I was thrilled to be in a crowd seeing theater together but wish it had been more challenging. 

The pandemic feels like it was permanent, I suppose because it was an absolute break: one day we were hugging & kissing & flying to Europe, the next we were housebound. The reopening isn't so dramatic given that it's piecemeal: the dojo is open, with restrictions, then fewer restrictions. The stores & restaurants & theaters & trains likewise. In fact, most parts of our lives are creaking open little by little. There've been permanent changes of course: the many deaths, obviously, but how we interact (elbows over handshakes), what we'll put up with (cf. work-from-home), how we trust or don't trust, more likely, our place in the world. I would like to put it behind me but I also want to remember, though I don't know why ~ really, I want everything sad/difficult to fade to where nothing was as bad as it seemed. 

Sigh... I don't know where I'm going with this... it always does seem to come back to memory... 

We will be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it. 

~ Kenneth Tynan

Or by our excuses for not getting our hands dirty, no matter how legit. Or our potential. Or all the woulda-shoulda-couldas that are always lying in sabotage. 

I've lost my mind! I actually read a book about decluttering. Once I was 4 months into the project, with my sole principle to spend 10 minutes a day cleaning, 10 minutes only & do it every day, I thought maybe I could learn some more tricks. Not sure how I came upon the book I did: Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning your never-ending battle with STUFF, by Dana K. White. If I'd read it earlier, I would have given up the whole plan, I suspect. The more she talks about how to make it easy, the more overwhelming it seemed. Although I liked that she said why should she store stuff when she could get it from the store: that's what stores are for, to store stuff till we need it.

Ten minutes, that's all I could imagine. When my sister was 200 pounds overweight & couldn't walk 20 feet without getting out of breath, she somehow managed to START: she walked 5 minutes a day. Now she participates in triathlons. Start. "Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now," said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 

There are an awful lot of books on the subject of decluttering! For those with ADHD, sentimentalists, for your personality type, workbooks, journals, 30-day guides, etc etc etc. Maybe it's reassuring to think of so many of us in the same boat. More if the boat were emptier. Even though I really don't buy much, I've lived in the same place for 45 years & if you get behind on tossing, suddenly (well, it seems sudden) you're overwhelmed. 

I've been reading from a tall stack of books of poetry, old new & in between. And then I pull in William Carlos Williams & it's hard to get back to anyone else. They all seem to be trying too hard. He's the spring weather, the clear breeze, the cool water. He's also savage & cold as "the male snow / which attacks and kills " ("The Polar Bear"). O Bill! 

Any guesses as to which 7-year-old is me? 

Not sure anyone has ever failed to spot me quickly. It's funny how some people always look like themselves. It's funny for me to see that familiar face & know what lay in wait. 

I asked someone today if this were a high school job. I'm 28 & I've finished medical school, she said; I don't know whether to be insulted or complimented. 

One thing is that the further I get from 28, the more those years compress, so "28" no longer reads as looking a certain way. The other thing is we get used to our face & see ourselves in the mirror as, say, 30. So if I'm 30, she must be in high school because I'm obviously older. It makes a certain sense, yeah? 

& karate is blooming. I love my Penn South group: Black Belt Review, aka Black Belt Revue. Supportive, smart, able to elucidate the nuances of the material, fun, chill. 

Also, I got a new phone. And found $2 in a box. And threw out my once-favorite t-shirt. And kept appointments. And sneezed so hard it registered on the Richter scale. Ah, Spring! 

My Latin teacher, Miss Skaff, had two sayings: 

* "Shouldn't you know this?" Yes, we should. Luckily no one in the class was a language genius, so we bumbled along not knowing & not thinking too much about it.

* "You have an advantage." To this day, I believe that Latin was the single most useful class I took. It gave me not only a vocabulary but a feeling for the origins & development of words. 

In all my years of public school, Latin was the only class I had with fewer than 30 students. So we were tight by 4th year, & still are, up to a point. 

I refreshed Latin on Duolingo recently & was pleasantly surprised at how much I still had in me. 

O the togas of our Latin banquets! 

I remember finding or figuring out that all the months had ides. 

It's not that one day you can do it & the next day you can't. It's more like one day you don't do it & the next day you can't. 

I'm quoting myself to explain why I have to keep going to karate ~ the day I stop will be, I fear, the beginning of the end of my physically & mentally active life. Although today I was mostly trying to paste over my usual deer-in-headlights look that I get whenever we do weapons. 

My grandma, a piano teacher, used to say that every day you don't practice you slip back two. Same idea. 

These are the poets I've read a poem or 2 of (or more) this week, in no particular order (how the books are piled next to me): 

Yehuda Amichai

Jan Wallace

Diane Seuss

Brenda Shaughnessy

Dick Gallup

Ted Berrigan

Frank O'Hara

e.e. cummings

Octavio Paz

I went a hundred blocks north, a handful west, & 50 years back in time. Why are there two phonebooths on West End Avenue a block apart. Are there more? Have they always been there? Were they installed for a movie shoot? I have been thinking that I'm living backwards & here's one more piece of evidence. 

I've been a fan of J. E. Mainer & the Mountaineers for a long time without knowing much about them. I was trying to figure out the second line in the chorus of "Run Mountain" & came upon this extremely interesting & illuminating piece, by Wayne Erbsen, who lives in Asheville and has written 30 songbooks and instruction books for banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin. In a comment to the piece, Mainer's son is quoted (by his best friend) as saying that the mysterious line is "Run Mountain check a little hill" & it's a moonshine reference. By the way, Erbsen credits fiddler Mainer (1898-1971) & his 30s band for playing bluegrass 10 years before its inventor Bill Monroe!

Exactly like books, there's always more amazing music to catch. Ain't life grand.

Kind of living in a bath of sloth, hope, worry & the pleasure of finding letters & cards from people who are still my dearest friends. Friends of 50 years! Nothing I'm more grateful for. This decluttering is working out really well ~ my house & office are both nicer daily & I'm full of happy memories. 

However, the cat woke me all night long, the little drittsekk, so I'm fogging around today. Luckily no one is chasing me down to fix their commas. 

I found the Ted Berrigan book & this photo from 1986, me giving a talk in rural Missouri when I was fiction editor of Woman's World. They wanted to find out how to sell me mystery & romance short stories, & there I was, way younger than they expected & with that calico hair, courtesy of Wendy at Girl Loves Boy on Thompson Street. Too bad the picture is b&w because my head was a riot of yellow, black, red, brown & more. And oh did I love that shirt, heavy pink rayon with airplanes. 

What I lost was my mind, editing the dullest paper I've read in a hundred years. Did I stay awake throughout? Almost. 

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettoes and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.

~ Hannah Arendt, in We Refugees

Oh yes, I know how true this is when I think about my dad. His last words were in German, even though he hadn't spoken it much for almost 50 years & claimed he didn't know it anymore. 

God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopolou "presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male ... a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world." I've only read the prologue so far but I'm riveted. The sections are Feet & Legs, Genitals, Torso, Arms & Hands, & Head. 

Since I work freelance & part-time, I rarely have the busy work week that makes people thank god it's Friday. This week was an exception but I got it all done & can kick back again. Should I retire fully? Everyone I know seems to be signing off but if you don't have a job, it's hard to quit. And I do like being sought after. I never thought that I, who basically retired at the age of 20, would become a workerbee in my old age. Am I living backwards? Bring on those youthful knees! 

Won: 2 $20 bills dropped out of a pamphlet

        a friend brought me cookies

        time! having finished a few projects

Lost: my vaccination card

        an opal & sapphire ring I loved

        Collected Ted Berrigan

(still have hopes that they will turn up)

Win/lose: a chair that was taped together. I caned the seat years ago with twine, & the twine mostly snapped. I miss having a chair but continue to be glad to get rid of crap. 

Update: Found the vaccination card, the thing I need least on this list. 

I don't have to go into detail about the horrific & frightening things going on in the world. But I want to take a little break to point out this remarkable "once-in-a-lifetime" find: a Roman mosaic floor at a South London construction site, at least 1,800 years old. Which makes me think of Kipling's wondrous Puck of Pook's Hill, a young person's romp through English history. 

An intense stretch of work is winding down & this seems to be as much as I can manage today. Do check out the link & the book as well. 

This is on a sheet of onionskin paper that I found in one of the many piles I've been sorting through. I have no idea why I have it or who wrote it or when or anything. Why did I think I remembered things? Who was XX who wrote me that she hoped we would always be friends & now I don't recognize her name?

(P.S. The lines across the letter came from my computer... long, boring, frustrating story & too maddening to try to fix...)

Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government, which sooner or later becomes autocratic government. 

~ William Lyon MacKenzie King 

William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who served as the 10th prime minister of Canada.

This is really going to be what I'm not reading. Books I abandoned or got shuffled down in the NEXT! pile until they shuffled right on out. Except for the Schama, I didn't get far in any of these, although far enough in most of them.

* Beneath a Ruthless Sun, Gilbert King. His Pulitzer-winning Devil in the Grove is a book I have highly recommended for years but I got pulled in too many directions to get into this. 

* Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama. The title feels like something essential but I dunno, medieval German art isn't doing it for me. I put it down to plow through a library book but with relief. I may leaf through & see if I can get back to it. 

* The Editor, Steven Rowley. Loved Lily and the Octopus, but I was bored & skeptical from the start. Disappointing. 

* The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz. This got great reviews but it seemed like a rehash of a million boring books about male writers & their angst. Maybe that was a satire but ugh. 

* Hour of the Witch, Chris Bohajalian. Another recommended book but the language had moments of jarring anachronism. I put it down. 

* Surviving the White Gaze, Rebecca Carroll. An adopted black child in a white family. I didn't believe she remembered things the way she says she did, & when you don't trust a memoir's author, it's all over.

* Colin Dexter. Another recommended (mystery) writer who bored me.

* Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit. I'm a big fan of hers, for the most part, but I guess I'm not that interested in Orwell's soft side, & she took so long getting there. Like one of those people whose stories repeat "but to understand that, first I have to tell you this."  

It snowed, rained & sleeted before dawn this morning. When I came out, early, the sidewalks were icy. I almost fell more times than I could count. Later, I had a quick sandwich with my birthday-twin granddaughter Meagan, & my hat blew off. I love seeing people run after their hats but not so much when it was me. A guy said, Twin Cities! you should know to tie it on! You are so right, my good man. It's a baseball cap with earflaps that was a giveaway at a Twins game a couple of years ago. Everyone in the ballpark had theirs on because Minnesota in April. It's my main winter hat. 

I was 10 when I wrote this ~ surely I was too old to mean it or not to know it was the Tooth Fairy I was writing to. I'd love to think I wrote it as a literary work. I also can't believe I even still have this. 

The broad-minded Norwegians eat Swedish pastries at the fantastic Fabrique, on 14th Street just east of 9th Ave. This one, called semla, is an airy roll with almonds, sweet almond paste and tons of fresh whipped cream. The Norwegian version is, it seems, more plain. I grabbed a cardamom bun for later, which was just as good. These have something to do with Lent, or Shrovetide, whatever that is. Either the 3 days before Easter or the 3 days before Lent, meaning Mardi Gras. Well, Norwegian or not, Christian or not, these were delicious. 

Mitt barnebarn had the day off & spontaneously we went to the beach. We chose Freeport I remembered boats & canals from an afternoon 25 years ago, but in that time its main street turned cheap & rundown, & the only open restaurant we could find was overpriced & mediocre. And what's with people answering your question (is there a beach nearby?) with their opinion ("it's too cold"). The first beach turned out to be a bird-watching walkway that was near promising dunes but not acually beach. But we got there (Jones Beach) at last & breathed the surf in, & the girls picked up shells, & their mom & I had deep wandering conversation. We drove home into the sun, full of love & laughter.

Our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. 

~ Upton Sinclair

I guess you can read that any way you want, from Democratic to wildly libertarian to unhinged Republican. 

I'm still reading everything I've been reading, but I did check out two intriguing books from the library:

The power of scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the origin of national parks, by Dennis Drabelle

God: an anatomy, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

I'll start them soon. 

Rushing because I'm headed to a Swedish bakery with my Norsk class then middag med barnebarna mine. 

Johnny's way of changing the subject used to be to clutch his chest & wince out: It's the big one.My big one is rolling the odometer over to 100,000... well, a zero at the end anyway. Should I say it? Can I? Yep, 70 I am. It's weird to think about that as an age that I could be but it's great in reality. A whole new decade to explore. Yes! 

The best thing about being 70 is having friends that I've had for 40 or 50 years. So many people that I've known & loved a long time. So many inside jokes, trips, laughs, calamities, surprises..... 

When I was 20, I had never been to New York (or any city) & was living here when I was 30. 

When I was 30, I barely knew Johnny Stanton & was married to him by the time I was 40. 

At 40, I wasn't involved in Jewish life & by 50 I had learned to chant Hebrew & had an adult bat mitzvah. 

When I was 50, it never crossed my mind to do martial arts & by 60 I had earned a black belt in karate. 

At 60 I was happily monolingual & now I can speak Norwegian. 

Of course I'm excited to find out what I'll be doing or have done in 10 years that isn't even on my radar now. 

I realize my soft spot for Myanmar is not any sympathy for its military coup but because of an exciting potboiler I read years ago about hunting for rubies there; the delicious thousand layer pancake dessert that I used to get at Minghala Village on 7th Street that I still crave; & Burma Shave shaving cream.* God, am I shallow. I hope if I ever went to that part of the world I would have a more nuanced take. 

* We loved reading Burma Shave's small sequential signs out loud when I was a kid driving around the Midwest with my family. Often clever & you just had to get to that rhythmic punchline. Early public poetry! Here are some examples:

= Every shaver / Now can snore / Six more minutes / Than before / By using / Burma-Shave
= Your shaving brush / Has had its day / So why not / Shave the modern way / With / Burma-Shave

= Shaving brushes / You'll soon see 'em / On the shelf / In some / Museum / Burma-Shave

= A shave / That's real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet after-feel / Burma-Shave
= Train approaching / Whistle squealing / Stop / Avoid that run-down feeling / Burma-Shave
= Keep well / To the right / Of the oncoming car / Get your close shaves / From the half pound jar / Burma-Shave
= Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave
= Past / Schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave
= If you dislike / Big traffic fines / Slow down / Till you / Can read these signs / Burma-Shave