A November chill

Saturday, November 09, 2013

I wake to the cold this morning, steamed breath even thought the temperature is still above freezing.

The chill air kissing my chin where it pokes out from under the blankets – not as raw as when I lived in Passaic, but with the gentle reminder of how tough things were in those days when I perceived myself as a starving artist.

I miss Passaic and that life in a way I never thought I would, partly because we risk little when we are still making the climb. We rarely look back or down, only up.

It’s when people reach the point at which they believe they actually have something to lose that they glance back down at those climbing behind them.

Those, who look back often on the climb up, rarely get to the top.

I talked to a minister last week who said she’s glad she doesn’t have power – when she actually does.

What she was trying to say falls into what Joseph Campbell said about power, in that those who wield it for the public good seem not to be aware of the power they have.

Evil in Campbell’s opinion, are those who use power for personal gain.

This is the essential evil of myth.

When I ventured to Cape May last month, we saw a sign on a lawn that said “I’ve never been the same since that house fell on my sister.”

The film “Oz” tried to capture this concept of misuse of power, of witches either duped by their own egos (which allowed others to misuse them) or people consumed by their own desire to lord over others.

The minister’s power is disguised by the fact that it is almost always outward bound, and that whatever influence she has, it appears to be benefiting those around her and beyond her, and not herself.

After a final conclusion to an election season in which we saw a host of back stabbing, behind the scenes manipulations and power grabs, it is comforting to know that in the end – sometimes, someone is using power the way it is supposed to be used – and a good witch doesn’t have to worry about a house falling on her or her sister, or how much such a tragedy will alter the course of a life.

The power is not in the ruby shoes, or even in the wand the good witch waves, but in the ability to do good for a good reason, and not to worry about who knows it or whether you get credit for it.

Back in Passaic, I would get up in the cold, turn up the heater in the cold water flat, and make my way to my small desk to write out my morning journal entry – a warm up exercise that not only heated the cold water flat, but stirred up the coals inside me.

I was never sure exactly what I wanted, except perhaps to have what I wrote read some day after I no longer needed to warm my bones. In those days, I was worried more about keeping a roof over my head more than a house falling onto me. And I never had ruby slippers to take me home, I was home. I had a handful of friends who as in the older version of Oz, sought courage, a heart and intelligence each of them already had and didn’t know it. And I suppose in that quest for what I wanted, I had what I wanted and needed as well, and it takes cold mornings like these, with my chin chilled with a November chill for me to realize it.

Apples, Bananas and figs

Monday, November 04, 2013

The warm weather held out for another day, leaving Sunday a mixture of rain threat and sharp sun.

This is laundry day traditionally for me, and as I have since moving to Jersey City, I made my way to the Bubbles on Kennedy Boulevard, to buy the paper and coffee at Angel’s Market, before putting the clothing in the washers.

Then, again as a weekly ritual, I made my way down the street to the fruit market – which previously had been a popular eatery and hangout – for my weekly purchase of fruits and vegetables.

Over the summer, this is an easy chore since the assortment of fruits overflowed bins and I could take my pick.

But with autumn rapidly passing into winter, the plums and berries I usually included in my purchases were no longer available or the few that were so untrustworthy, I needed to select something new.

Celery and bananas are staples for me since I tend to bring them both with me for lunch daily – along with Greek yogurt and tuna sandwich – even though the bananas I buy today are not the same ones I knew as a kid, nor nearly as flavorful, as the ones I knew as a kid were wiped out in some early blight forcing us to settle for a blander kind.

I’m told that we are supposed to eat things in season, and for some reason, when I saw the golden apples in one of the outside bins, I felt a yearning for them I haven’t felt for apples in years.

During the week, someone close to me offered me a caramel apple which on account of teeth issues I politely refused. Perhaps this started my craving for the Garden of Eden fruit and so I grabbed them as I passed and carried them to the register with my usual purchases.

But the desire for the fresh figs I saw on sale at the counter came from some inner craving. In the past, I always preferred the dried assortment to the fresh, but for some reason at that moment, I could not resist.

All this has little or nothing to do with healthy feeding. I mostly eat well – only recently letting ground turkey back into my diet. But this purchase of fresh fruit every week is a kind of religious ritual, a connection to my primitive past, as if it is important for me to connect to some aspect of nature I cannot otherwise find in the big city.

I go to the river as often as possible, and even managed a rare walk in the woods this week, but this market thing seems to touch something else, something I carry with me each day in my lunch bag.

Indeed, the apples proved to touch a spot in me that I didn’t know needed touching.

And so did the figs.

Feeding a craving I didn’t know I had, and may not have again for a while, as the chill weather comes and the threat of snow, and autumn fruits give way to those things that we share around the holidays.

Perhaps next week, when I wander to the market, I’ll find some new thing to devour, something that will touch me deep inside the way the apples and figs did this week, something I can carry away with me, warming me against the external cold, brought on not just by winter, but that other change of season we all dread most.

Saturday Night's all right for – getting lost

Sunday, November 03, 2013

Still hungry for rock music after being spoiled by a club in Cape May, we went in search of it back here in good old Hudson County.

But short of dipping our toes in Hoboken where parking is harder to find than gold nuggets on a place misnamed The Gold Coast, we followed a trail of rumored music in Bayonne and a mythical bar called The Venice – only a block from the office I work in five days a week.

Since traffic from my house in The Heights of Jersey City makes the most direct route to Bayonne impossible during the week, I figured on Saturday night we could get there with no problem.

I didn’t account for the fact that in reconstructing the circle that connects Route 7 with 1 & 9 (something that happened after the death of a family some years ago – the state always expends millions in a knee jerk reaction to accidents that are really reckless driving in disguise) I mistakenly thought the state would put up road signs that made it clear which of the multiple roads would direct us to Bayonne. They had multiple signs, including one that directed people to Route 1 & 9 south (but none to Route 440 at that point) and so we wound up on the Pulaski Skyway headed into the heart of Newark’s industrial area (or Kearny’s) and took Newark only because I knew some of the roads there and could eventually get back to where we started.

I had not been in that part of Newark since the 1980s, empty streets – even that portion of Raymond Boulevard – with this sense of foreboding that defied the concept that it was to become shortly the new Hoboken, another edge of the Gold Coast only real estate brokers and corrupt politicians could find nuggets in.

After one or two turns, I managed to steer back to Harrison, then Kearny and then back to the same former circle I had intended to get to when coming down from my house, passed a car fire, and then the usual blank faced Hudson Mall, until at last, after nearly an hour of going in circles the state could not reconfigure, came to The Venice, to be told that the band scheduled had come down sick.

We walked over to another nearby bar known for its music to find it empty. And then drove up to a place near my old office to find that empty, too, with a man out front giving us wrong directions to a fourth bar uptown that might have music, and when I found the bar on a street other than the one he said, this was empty, too.

During the drive home, I realized live music was a luxury these days with so many alternatives, and I thought about Hoboken and Maxwells (which closed earlier this year) and the few bars I knew that were fools gold in Hoboken, but still played music, and I calculated how it might be easier to take the questionable public transportation to those places than to follow misdirection by the state or bar flies.

But alas, I came to miss Cape May all the more for what it gave us for free – a gift of music we could not find so easily any closer. And I wondered, after all that driving, it might just be well worth the two and a half hour drive each way to Cape May since it required so few turns after you actually got onto the equally mis-named Garden State Parkway.

One small consolation in all this, was that we got to turn the clocks back and managed to lose less sleep than we might have otherwise.

A harried visit

November 3, 1985

She came and went, but is still not gone, nor has the storm of controversy disappeared from around her.

It sends shock waves ahead and behind.

I should have known she would be coming and that the reason for her coming would not be simple.

I’ve been writing about her again and that seems to draw her out of the woodwork.

She has numerous reasons for coming; the least important of all is seeing me.

No, that’s not true either.

Seeing me is a matter of convenience, and she manipulates me by withholding fact until it is too late for me to do anything about any of it – and possibly upset her plans, or would be so embarrassed to do so as to seem unreasonable.

She called yesterday at two in the afternoon saying, “I’ll be down for a visit.”

A short visit, she said, just in and out.

She claimed she would have to get back home to meet a friend the next morning.

“Going to New York City,” she said, and in my half conscious state this did not hit me as a calculated statement.

I offered to let her spend the night. It seemed silly to have her drive all the way back only to come back to this neck of the woods a few hours later.

She said “Maybe,” and hung up.

Some hours later she called. She had gotten off at the wrong exit – again – and was lost in the heart of Passaic.

I went out and led her back through the maze of streets to my little hovel.

It was then she informed me that she was to attend a Halloween party in Clifton.

“Something my boyfriend doesn’t know about,” she said.

How strangely her mind works, the push and pull of motives and plans. She comes all the way to Jersey to party and make peace with me – at least long enough to have a place to rest.

“I start a new job Tuesday,” she said.

In the meantime, she is making good use of her short vacation.

This morning I deliberately overslept – just to see what would happen.

Maybe that upset her plans enough to wrangle a real visit out of her.

She managed, however, to salvage her trip, and even managed a brief telephone confession to her boyfriend back home, telling him she would be going to a party without him.

Maybe she feared I might accidentally reveal her secret the next time I met with them together. And then, in yet another bit of last minute information, she informed me that she had driven her boyfriend’s car with her, but that her friends from the party would be picking her up and could I keep an eye on the car if she leaves it here.

“I’ll be back to collect it in the morning, I promise,” she said, wiggling her fingers as she left to the honk of horn of her party friends just then pulling up outside.

A harried visit 1985

I will always miss the mushrooms

June 17, 1987

I used to come here with her some times, autumn walks through the mills which gave us something to do between the time she came home from work at five and I went to work at eleven.

One might call it a nature walk, though it was more than that, it was an oasis in the midst of a growing and insane commercial world, a walk where dog owners and lovers came to share the shade, lovers often walking arms around each other along the two main trails.

There are other overgrown grassy trails that give the illusion of wilderness. She and I made love on a few of these – although we generally made love everywhere on anything, flat surface or not.

This is one of the places she said she could still find peace.

But she didn’t introduce this place to me; Pauly did, close enough to the town where he grew up for him to consider it his personal natural laboratory.

I was dating another woman then, who came with me and Pauly to explore it.

In many ways, it always reminded me of a race track with trees, one long looping gravel path that brought you back to the small gravel parking lot where you started – although on the far end, you could sit down on the edge of a cliff and stare out at the suburban sprawl these trees hid mostly from view.

Sometimes – when she was not in the mood to make love or after we did – we strolled along the path just to look at the mushrooms that sprouted up in droves to either side of the path – as pretty as flowers, we thought, which is why I got so angry when some right wing gun toting jerk in a pickup came here and picked them all. We caught them carrying out bags of them for some feast they had planned because they thought they had a right to pick them since their taxes (the ones they actually paid) make this park possible.

I secretly hoped the mushrooms he ate were poison.

I felt as if the bastard had robbed my wallet. But I got over it, and the mushrooms returned.

Our visits here came infrequently in winter since the trail closed at dusk and we had so few hours to spend between coming and going from work that we dared not waste any time making the drive here from Passaic, choosing to make love in my pathetic bed in my pathetic cold water flat instead.

But as I walk here today, two years after we split, I miss most holding her hand as we strolled, and treasure the memories, such as the raccoons who we caught in the middle of the path or the ducks who mistook a puddle for a pond, and the mushrooms. I will always miss the mushrooms.

I will always miss the mushrooms 1987

The morning before the morning when the clocks go back

Saturday, November 02, 2013

It is the morning before the morning when the clocks go back – that one day when it is possible to relive what was lost, only to lose it later in the spring when things spring ahead.

I go back in time reluctantly.

I am not one of those people who looks back and wishes I could do something over that I did wrong the first time (not an unusual event), learning to live with the consequences of what I do on the first go round.

Yet on this day, this moment when we become master of time for an hour, I relive things I wish I could relive exactly as they were, even when they seem painful when first lived, not to change them, but to examine them more closely, to take each moment apart tick by tick to see how it ticked in the first place, to understand more fully what I could not possibly have understood when I was in the midst of it.

This is the day for that, when I know that I will relive on hour out of this year, and will be able to treasure it and polish it like some precious jewel, a gift from the gods, who have bestowed upon me an hour of reflection, even if it is the hour before the dawn in which they come to collect Christ, or that moment before the world ends and I get to breathe the free air for one hour more before all falls in.

It is still dark out now. Tomorrow it will not be at this hour. And later after the dawn when the sun rises, the day will seem older because of the slanted light of the sun and the later hour I have used up already, worn out, sad light that casts everything into a deeper glow that will bring on twilight too soon.

There is always a price for receiving gods’ gifts, in this case months of this sadder sun, a penalty for man’s messing with time.

So that now, on this morning before the morning the clocks turn back, I must appreciate this gift, and accept it, knowing that the world will not return to its normal spin until this hour is recaptured, and instead of living in the past for an hour, I must leap ahead and lose another hour later – and always wonder what I might have done in that hour in spring, and if it is worth keeping this hour now at the expense of that hour.

But I never know.

All Souls Day

Friday, November 01, 2013

The rain came after I left for the office. So the wiper washed away the bird poop that had decorated my windshield for days

This was after I managed to clear the leaves that blocked my window washer, but poop always eluded the wiper blades and so remained like a tattoo on the glass.

This All Souls Day, one of those magical moments when the world changes for me. The rain fits the day and my mood – although Friday being Friday all the lunatics are loose on the roads. It will be worse going home after some people leave work early for a little pre-weekend nip.

This is such a routine that I sometimes see the same people driving home each Friday doing what they always do, and I learn to avoid them – the way I do potholes.

This is a day of sadness for me, the kind of bitter sweet sadness I get when I see leaves falling from the trees after a long summer.

Something is over and gone, and will never come back. What we will see in Spring – if we make it so far – will be utterly new, looking a little like what we saw before, but not the same.

Nearly all of those closest to me in my life had passed away in the months between All Souls Day and Easter, as if the symbolic dying winter signifies bears fruit during these barren months.

But something also dies inside me at this time of year, leaves from blooms I had seen rise from seedlings in spring, now perishing.

I am as predictable in this manner as the drivers I avoid on Fridays, knowing that I am always most inspired at the first buds of spring, and feel inspiration work up in me through the summer and come to this point in the year when I wearily concede to the change of season, and must find rest.

These are not dismal thoughts I think as I steer along these Jersey City streets. They are merely a random collection of feelings I have come to expect, knowing that something will happen within a few days or weeks that will send my life in a new direction, and that will show signs of growth when spring emerges.

The sadness is in the air with the sudden gushes of rain, wind shoving hard against the car as I plunge through the puddles.

What is shed at this season, must be shed, should be shed, in order for new things to grow. Yet it is still hard to let go of the old, knowing that even in their decay, they still show signs of their one-time value, and even when fallen, these things make up the soil for some new, perhaps more successful growth.

We all grow stronger after we have let go of that which no longer has value in our lives, and out of the past emerges the future, hardly predictable at all, no matter how many life times we have lived and no matter how much we have learned from past lives. We are always plunging through the dark of winter into the unknown with the hope we can survive until we see green again.