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April 24, 2006
Exit, pursued by bear Mushaboom
I make sure to keep a fresh AA battery on hand for those times when I need to power up the noise-canceling function of my headphones. When you work on a cubicle farm, plenty of distractions stand between you and the completion of your appointed rounds; ringing phones, water cooler talk (though we're yards away from the agua fría), the sniffles, hacks and sneezes of Cold Season.
To build up my zone of productivity, I usually tune in an ambient Web radio station from iTunes. Ambient isn't a favorite mode, but the lack of lyrics frees my mind to focus on more relevant tasks. A ditty with words slipped past several days ago, pulling me off-task and into the music. Artist info was scant, indicating a person or persons known simply as "Feist."
This would be Canadian singer Leslie Feist. According to her publicist, she toured with hard-charging rock bands until she blew out her voice a few years back. While resting her pipes, Ms. Feist taught herself to play guitar and developed a new vocal style.
How to describe her sound? Imagine if Blossom Dearie was 30 years old and wanted to rock out, cover a Bee Gees tune and toss in some bossa nova. And what if it made you wistful for the future, without ever treading into Lilith Fair territory? Now, that would be something.
For reasons completely obvious to me, I'm stuck on the terribly poppy and optimistic "Mushaboom." I hate to be pegged by a song, but it sort of sums up where I'm at these days. Substitute "rain" for "snow," flip-flop the genders, and there you have it.
It's rather unlike me to think about the future with anything besides dread or resignation, but I'm definitely peeking around corners.
Posted by Your Protagonist at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2006
Surprisingly quiet.
Garbage, recycling and compost is collected promptly each Thursday morning at 4:25 a.m.
If I'm not in bed when I hear them, it rarely bodes well for the rest of that day, but work beckons. And not the fun kind of work, where one is toiling to enrich one's self.
I'm talking about the worst sort of tedium -- aggregating information into Excel spreadsheets, line by soul-sucking line. I know some people don't mind -- even enjoy -- working in Excel, but I'm not one of them.
Math phobias aside, columns and rows are no way to present information. I started working backwards from row 2190, by the way.
Paying close attention to the small things is a part of life, and this is a time-sensitive project, but I hate it still. Better get back to work. I should be in the office in three hours.
Posted by Your Protagonist at 05:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2006
She doesn't know this, but...
right now, I'm on my way to rent a convertible so I can drive her to brunch in West Marin.
The sun is out, but who knows how long that will last?
Wish us luck.
Posted by Your Protagonist at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2006
A fine how-do-you-do.
When I went to move the car this morning so the city could clean the west side of my street, I found that someone had broken in sometime last night.
The glovebox was open, contents strewn across the front seat. The rear seats were flipped down to permit access to the trunk, hardly a trove of treasures.
I had to get to work, so I didn't spend much time cataloging missing items. Off the top of my head, I surmised that the thief made off with two well-used iPod car chargers, a CD wallet fat with personal mixes, and an umbrella that retailed for about seventy-five cents in Haiphong City, Vietnam.
Riding to work on the metro, I tried to imagine what would drive a person to target this nondescript gray subcompact. Drug addiction is about the only motivation that makes sense, but perhaps I lack imagination.
What they did with the purloined items is even more of a mystery. Presumably, the stolen goods are to be exchanged to someone else for cash or drugs. How much rock can you get in exchange for two iPod chargers, someone else's burned CDs and a cheapie umbrella?
They'd have gotten more value out of stealing the plastic and glass recyclables out of the trunk. At .05 a pop, they could easily have netted a dollar for their trouble.
You'd think there would be some Green crackheads in this city.
Posted by Your Protagonist at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2006
"It's all a bit much."
I'm writing this from seat 1A, 32,000 feet over Arizona.
Before you think me a spendthrift, know that this is Economy Plus, not First Class. I got five extra inches of legroom for the cost of a restaurant meal (sans appetizer), along with the privilege of boarding first. I was unable to enjoy this perquisite, as I was late coming back from spending some time with my Aunt Bev.
When I was a kid, she defined cool. She always sported a neat, short Afro, a sharp wit and interesting earrings. I was about eight when I realized that Bev didn't much care about what other people thought.
Her personality isn't a performance, a self-conscious put-on for the benefit (or consternation) of the many squares who walk the Earth. Not hardly. More than once, my mother made it clear that Beverly preferred to go her own way.
"She's just impossible. Someone cut me off or blows their horn, and there's your aunt, leaning out the window and cursing a blue streak. Giving strangers The Finger. I remember one day, some man showed us his gun! Well, of course you don't remember -- you weren't in the car."
In the mid-seventies, Bev spent a few years living on a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv. I can only assume her conversion to Judaism happened sometime before. My father tells me that his mom even visited his sister in Israel. Beverly returned to NYC after a while, possibly due to some visa problems. I don't have all the details.
In fourth grade, my parents relayed an invitation to me from my hipster aunt: she had a friend who worked the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and would I like to go with her? When I was 9, I was all about parades. My parents put me on the Long Island Rail Road, and Bev met me at Penn Station. We took the subway to her tiny studio apartment, where she prepared a vegetarian hotplate dinner. I remember walking down the chilly hallway that night to brush my teeth, thinking about how neat it was that she never had to clean her bathroom.
Just after 5 the next morning, we swaddled ourselves in wool and left to meet her friend in a large building I can't recall. It may have been an armory, or some other improbable expanse of enclosed urban space. It was weird, holding her hand as we walked around the fringes of a cavernous room filled with dingy, deflated icons of the American century. "Underdog!" I shouted at one bluish mound. A saggy comb-like structure took shape across the hall, heralding the arrival of a well-known cartoon moose.
I was a weird kid. By fifth grade, I had five Jean Pierre-Rampal LPs. I couldn't hit a baseball with any confidence, but I knew my French flautists. Bev invited me out another time to see Rampal perform with Isaac Stern at Carnegie Hall. I wore church clothes on this outing, and for reasons still unknown to me, I brought along an actual grown-up tie, instead of a clip-on. Of course, neither of us had any idea of how to knot it, but a portly, very effeminate man down the hall did a fantastic job of adjusting it for my height.
When the concert was over, Bev turned to me and casually asked if I'd like to go backstage.
Backstage at Carnegie Hall! I was culturally literate enough to understand that this was a Very Big Deal.
As we threaded through the crowd, she added, "we're going to meet some friends of mine, okay?" Turns out Beverly knew Issac Stern's children. And there's me, a precocious aesthete with 10 birthdays under my belt, shaking hands with not one, but two virtuosos. No one cared to hear my story at school a few days later, but I didn't care.
I always wanted to do more with my Aunt Bev, but my parents separated when I was 12 or so, and our relationship took a hit. We were out of touch, but she remained my cool aunt well into adulthood.
Twelve or thirteen years ago, I got a call from my father. Beverly had suffered a debilitating stroke. Dad brought her out to Phoenix from Toledo so he could keep an eye on her as she convalesced. She spent several months living with Dad and Ella until she found a place more her style -- an assisted-living facility managed by a Jewish community group.
The stroke affected her ability to walk and talk, as these things do. Still, she was able to get around with a cane, and she followed conversations closely, though it was a struggle for her to find her words. I learned to phrase questions simply. "Red or white?" presented a nearly insurmountable challenge, but "white zinfandel?" was an easy one for her to field.
Before long, Beverly developed her own life -- plenty of friends, talk radio, religious services, trips to Wal-Mart. There were times when I'd be in town and she literally would not have the time to see me, due to a holiday or pre-arranged activity.
"You know Bev," my dad would say. "She likes routine and doing her own thing." Most times, she was able to fit me in. If she knew I was around, she'd always be sure to bring a small Ziploc to dinner with all of her broken earrings. We'd sit at the table after everyone else was gone, and I'd talk about what I was up to while tweaking her silver back into artful shapes, reattaching spangles and beads.
Just before Thanksgiving, she was hospitalized for observation after blacking out and falling in her room. That's when we learned about the brain tumor that had metastasized into her lungs. She'd been receiving regular medical checkups, so how this progressed to Stage 5 is something I don't understand. Then again, I don't understand any of this.
Experience hasn't exposed me to much grief. My darkest moments spring from real and imagined personal failures, not external calamities. I'm in the second half of my fourth decade, and this is the most time I've spent with someone whose clock is winding down. When my father called me to catch me up on how she's doing, I didn't think twice about flying out to see her.
This photo is about everything that's wrong and everything that's right about being alive.
I went directly to the county hospital from the airport in my rental and asked a woman at an information desk for directions before popping into the gift shop. "If it's not kitsch, we don't stock it," seemed to be their motto. I left empty-handed and resolved to bring a real gift on my next visit.
Then I rode the elevator to the sixth floor and wandered until I found room 31.
Beverly was in bed, her upper body elevated at a 30-degree angle. I counted five pouches hanging from her electronic IV infuser, as well as a feeding tube and a ventilator. My eyes followed the plastic lines from the machines into Bev's body. Her head lolled to one side, eyes closed as she breathed deeply. Chemo made quick work of her hair, and she was without her trademark earrings and glasses. A telenovela played quietly on her roommate's Zenith. As soon as I sat, Bev stirred.
She turned her head and looked directly into my eyes for a few minutes before I said a word. I held her gaze, even though part of me wanted to run away. I'm still not sure what I was feeling. Fear? Guilt? Anger? All of that, and more besides, but I'm not in touch with it enough to write about it competently.
n.b.: My aunt has the same eyes as my grandfather; a distinctive, beautiful blue-brown I've never seen in anyone apart from those two people. I'd never noticed it until that afternoon.
Finally, I spoke. I asked her if she knew who I was, and she nodded. I tried to be upbeat, wishing I'd Googled something that would help me provide comfort to a loved one who's terminally ill:
+aunt +cancer +goodbye
"life cut short" + injustice "coming to terms"
"raw deal" +unfair +acceptance
I started talking, feeling more useless with each word. She never took her eyes away from mine.
Mostly, I reminisced. Hayden Planetarium, Carnegie Hall, Thanksgiving parade. I told her she inspired me to be intrepid when Liz first suggested that we take a trip around the world. I told that she was always my favorite relative, and how amazing I thought it was that she'd traveled as much as she had and learned a few languages along the way, picking up a grad degree in German Literature before she was done studying.
Things I should have said years ago. Why we save these things up, I don't know. Have they started selling time in Costco-sized quantities we can consume at will? No?
I asked how she was doing, possibly the dumbest damned thing I've said as an adult. She glanced at the IV and the tangle of tubes passing in and out of her body, and then back into my eyes before she replied with great effort:
"It's all a bit much."
That's Bev.
I saw her twice more. The day after I arrived, the doctor decided that more chemo wouldn't be any use, so they removed the feeding tube and discharged her. By my third visit, she was back at the nursing home, this time in the hospice wing where they'll try to make her comfortable. She was angled up in bed, studying the menu for next week's Passover seder.
I brought her several CDs I'd burned that morning. Ella put on the Lou Rawls disc while I made small talk. I'd gotten lost on the way over, leaving me with only 20 minutes before I needed to speed to the airport and return my rental car. I paused to check the time while Bev read and re-read the Passover menu.
"I've got to go," I said, "but I want you to know that I love you a lot, okay?"
Her eyes bore into me, and she nodded her head ever so slightly.
"Okay, then." I stood, and put my hand on hers.
I leaned in so she could kiss my cheek. I kissed her forehead, stood up, and turned away quickly. Sharing my grief with Bev was a selfish action I would not permit.
Ella put her arms around me and thanked me for coming. I'm not sure what I said, but I recall that speaking was difficult.
Outside her door, I passed a nurses' station. Two women were engaged in conversation while a third completed some paperwork. A fourth woman nodded at me and gave me a short wave I couldn't return. She kept nodding, as if she understood something.
In the parking lot, I considered something I'd read the night before while researching Jewish funeral rites. Kaddish is a traditional mourner's prayer recited daily for the first year after someone's passing, and then yearly on Yahrzeit, the date of their death. For people of faith, reciting Kaddish elevates the departed person's soul in the World to Come.
I'm envious of religious people. Books and rituals offer them answers and a level of comfort with life's randomness that I'll never know. I'll find personal and creative ways to celebrate Bev's life -- now, and after she's gone.
These remembrances won't take the form of a lighted candle, and I don't know where I'd find 10 Jewish men to help me recite the Kaddish, even if I spoke Hebrew.
But I can continue to seek out new experiences, challenge myself, and draw strength from my friends and family. I can travel, write, feed my head, use humor and sarcasm to make strong points, and work to care a little less about what others think.
That's my tribute to Bev. I don't foresee any trouble making it happen, and as it turns out, it's even in keeping with Jewish tradition:
Yizkor:History is a continuum. If we, the living, give charity or do good deeds due to the lasting influence or in memory of a departed parent or other loved one, the merit is truly that of the soul in its spiritual realm. Moreover, G-d in His mercy credits our deed to the departed one because he or she too would have done the same were it possible.
Posted by Your Protagonist at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)