Author Archives: oinsketta

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.

The Dumbest Lawyer in New York

My mother was once wrangling with some guy at a desk in Florida.  She asked for my advice, which I gave her for free.

The next time we talked she said the guy said “your son must be the dumbest lawyer in New York!”.   It turns out she’d grasped the principle I’d explained, just had the action to take reversed.

“Ah,” she laughed when I told her.  I was only mildly indignant, the guy had a point if you considered only the benefit of the bargain I got for the law degree, licensing fees and dry cleaning bills.

Anger is Bad Policy

And so we see that while we may be right, and righteous, and on the side of the angels, and provoked terribly, mercilessly even– anger is not a good option.

“So, you slammed your arm across your desk and swept everything on to the floor, in front of your third graders?”

“Yes, but….” is a very poor answer, no matter how compelling the long ‘but’ is.

That was more than twenty years ago, a thing to lament when recalled during a somber moment every decade or so.  I’m grateful that I can lament it now, the high price already paid.

Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow

Years ago I had a single blind date with a sighted woman who worked in publishing.  I’m pretty sure it was she who gave me an advance copy of a book called “Do What You Love– the Money Will Follow”.  I remember it had a white cover.   I told someone about it recently and commented that I still have it on my shelf, unread more than 20 years later.  I don’t see it anywhere as I scan the shelves now, but it’s possibly fallen into a crevice and been covered with fur along with my missing pocket book of jazz standards and innumerable other items.

I read a few pages and put it aside in disgust back then, like many things.  Like a middle class life, for example.  How that happened is worth a word:  I found I wasn’t cut out to compete for the love of wealthy people in the art world.  Displaying drawings and paintings in libraries, as my father suggested I try, was not the same as being a fantastically paid meteor in the art world firmament– I retreated into a kind of autism for a few months as I came to realize neither of these options was viable.

To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed working with third graders.  I was hired as a teacher in a series of horrible situations.  Being a NYC public school teacher in poor neighborhoods was a bit like being a death camp guard in World War Two who loved Jewish and Gypsy humor.   I was as helpless as the children against the meat grinder that was at work on them, that was paying my salary and health insurance and giving me ten paid weeks off every summer. 

I worked full-time at four or five different NYC public schools.  Choosing which was the worst would be hard, and I’ve already used “meat grinder” and “death camp” and those pretty much cover the gamut.  I assume at least one of the principals I worked for was motivated by something other than lust for the virtually unlimited exercise of arbitrary will.  Assuming that, I can explain at least some of their distaste for their popular young male teacher as animated by a concern for the children.  

That was not the case with the last one, the principal whose clumsily sexualized tango proved deadly for any belated daydream I might have had for a middle class life.  Minnie Frego was probably insane, but was I any better?   In response to a series of escalating, mad provocations, as the new, mad principal zeroed in on me as the leader of the school I worked at for almost three years, I finally snapped.

“You’re not paying attention,” she told me tartly, as I tried to ignore the sickening demonstration of meat grinding she was conducting with my class for my benefit.  She had just crossed out the work of a bored child who was working on workbook problem number five when she was still working her methodical way through number three with the rest of the class.  She’d firmly told that child to fold his hands over his book and follow instructions.  I was trying to do the same at my desk, but it was burning me.  I was glancing at my required lesson plans when she called across the room to me.

“I’m doing this for your benefit,” she told me, as the eyes of every eight and nine year old Harlemite in the room turned to me.   It was like looking into the eyes of twenty-five smart young animals in the slaughterhouse chute.   I could not let them down, did not stop to think.  By way of response my arm swept everything off my desk on to the floor.  Then I folded my hands on my empty desk.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Rubber Crutch

They’re making them so realistic looking these days, it’s often impossible to tell what a crutch is made of until it’s time to depend on it.   Damnedest thing.   I could have sworn this was metal and wood.

“Tell that to your broken ass,” a casual observer suggests.

My Mother Reads

Driving back to New York from the outskirts of DC, where my once difficult aunt and still problematic uncle live in a well-kept, depressing home for unwanted old people, my dead mother is reading a story by Grace Paley.   The sun is fading behind the car like a world disappearing into the past as my mother reads the story like she’s one of the little girls, later women, arguing on that Bronx stoop.

“But Edie!” my mother pleads as Ruth, the perfect Bronx six year-old.   I used to buy my mother journals, try to get her to write, but she always complained that she couldn’t.  To hear her read a story, you’d never believe she couldn’t write one, she reads the stories exactly the way she would have told them.  Plus, toward the end she often spoke happily about how much she loved to lie.  She was pretty creative with some of those lies, too, and sneaky fast.

Eventually tears came to my eyes, driving as the daylight died, my dead mother’s voice coming through the car speaker, reading with such feeling, such understanding.   I used to urge her to write, she’d get defensive, then mad, but it wasn’t like I was writing.   I mean, I was writing, but I wasn’t out wrestling with other writers, proving my prose could kick their prose’s ass.  I wasn’t promoting myself, fighting the brutal fight to get recognized and paid, though my mother would once in a while read some pages I’d give her and smile and sometimes say “this is wonderful”.

“So your dead mother was a fan of your writing, how nice that must be for you,” says the guy standing on my head to get where I thought I was going.

The emotions I felt listening to my mother read, I’ll spare you.   How did I get the cassette?  It was found, by chance, in a box of tapes by my first cousin, my only cousin, really, as he was preparing to put the torch to his childhood home.  His older sister died young and I’ve tried to be more or less the brother he never had, he’s been the brother I grew up lacking.  We come from a very small family, most of the rest murdered en masse or dead of cancer.  Our two mutual grandparents, cancer.  His sister, cancer.  My mother and father and both of my mother’s parents, cancer.

“That’s impressive,” says the writer, eating my sandwich, drinking my single malt Scotch, dainty feet up on my hand tooled Corinthian leather divan.  He has all my stuff neatly arrayed in his condo.

But it’s not the cancer I’m thinking about, though on the same trip we visited a brilliant, patient, gentle man with a wise, slightly reptilian smile always at the ready, with stage four lung cancer, it turns out.  Explains a lot about how he looks.  He looked bad right after the radiation, but, even with his hair grown back, he looks bad now.  But he’s cheerful, taking every moment as a gift and planning on hanging around.  The new chemo is holding the tumors at bay, and he’s thankful for that, even with all the terrible side effects.

As I drove north, musing, I was unaware that a large library had fallen out of my pants pocket, onto the ground somewhere, probably at a Maryland gas station, with a tiny plink I didn’t notice.   My mother would not believe it, all the things that were on three tiny drives on a loop of black cord that together were no larger than a finger.  Maybe 2,000 pages, probably 1,000 tunes I’d recorded over the last few years, 200 short animations, maybe 500 drawings.   I have no idea what was on those flash drives, how to reconstruct them, back them up again.

Sekhnet was all solicitude, too much, really.  Her cousin reassured me that I could recreate the flash drives from my computer, probably.

It was almost like the gift of the found tape, recorded in 1986 when my mother was Sekhnet’s age, was cancelled out by the lost back up copies of my life’s work.   Why I was carrying my life’s work around in my pants pocket is a bitter little puzzle, at the moment.  As for the tape my mother recorded and sent to my aunt, another mystery.  

My mother once offered me $2,000, then quickly $3,000, to reschedule my court appearances and come to Florida for the week my aunt and uncle would be there visiting her, not long after my father died.

“You can’t leave me alone with them,” she pleaded, “I’ll jump out of my skin, just the thought of it.  If you love me, you’ll take the money and come down here when they come.  Please, Elie, there’ll be bloodshed.   Six days!   I’ll pay you!”  There was nothing phony about her desperation.  

The funny thing is, twenty years earlier she’d sent the tape of her reading Grace Paley stories (probably from the book of them I’d given her) to her only sister-in-law, the same woman she probably would have paid 5 Gs to be protected from.   By the way, I earned every penny of that $2,000.

“Your parents both look good,” I told my cousin at breakfast that last morning.   

“Way to kick me in the nuts!” he said, alarmed, echoing my mother’s tone as she bribed me to protect her from them.  “Why don’t you just take this fork and stab me in my right testicle?” he said, offering me the fork.

My uncle is 86, and except for the fact that he’s in a wheelchair after a stroke a year and a half ago, he looks like he could live another ten or fifteen years.  My aunt, a few years younger, also looks good.  Whatever serious health worries she’s had seem well in the past.  She’s steady on her feet, eats with a good appetite, the mild dementia agrees with her.

“I’d trade both of them for your parents, in a heartbeat,” my cousin said.  I nodded and chewed my breakfast, and thought of that ledger on which all our deeds are tallied.

Two minute drill

I’m on the timer now, counting down two minutes.  Unless I’m busy selling myself these days, and my program, I’m busy falling through the cracks into the past, a past of flashy, articulate non-worldly non-accomplishment.   A history of articulate failure, in  the cozy confines of my own mind, we might say.   Of course, in more than two minutes, this could be polished, shined up, presented better– but that would defeat the point of this exercise.   This is a test, at the end a buzzer will go off telling me “pencils down.”  Then the test will be scored.

“Not too shabby for two minutes,” a reader might say, but that is another story.  Here’s the buzzer.

Helpless Against the Avalanche?

Say your papers are piled over everything, as mine are.  You could experience a moment of panic confronting it, as I have from time to time.  It’s like looking at an avalanche about to happen, frozen in time, a jumble of all the moments it might have not become an avalanche.  There are virtues greater than a clear desk or kitchen table, sure, but those things are nice too.

Nicer, anyway, than that wall of papers, suddenly beginning to pulsate, about to overcome you.  I get back to it now, like the Dutch boy about to stick a finger into that little hole in the dike, to mix metaphors like the tossed salad of papers on either side of the screen where these words magically appear.