My Parents Warned Me About The Writer's Life

Memorial Day

My mother died two years ago on May 30th. Her death came after a long, exhausting decline. A remarkable article in New York magazine tells the story better than I ever could.http://nymag.com/news/features/parent-health-care-2012-5/ This article is brutal, and all too true. It tells the story of Wolff’s mother, but it is much like what my own mother went through. The years where her memory failed her, the years where the quality of life diminished, and the endless ending, two full years of misery. Her body worked, but to what end? Now of course, I prefer to think of her as she was once, not as she was finally, damned with the one word that ends that article. My mother was “a dwindler,” imagine, there’s actually a name for this incremental wasting away.

I don’t think of her as that. I think of her as ferocious and hungry. Hungry for experience, hungry to get at things. She read history and fiction. She introduced me to mysteries. She read everything and anything. She talked politics. She argued over stupid things. She fought with me over my choice of wedding dress and back in high school over my skirt length. She loved me. She hated how I treated her. She was me. I was her. I was nothing like her. I am her. She was my mother. She fought with every shopkeeper on Broadway. They barred her from purchasing things in their stores so I was her emissary. She told people off. She told my father off. She loved him more than anyone. She let him get away with murder, almost. He changed her life, for the better and for the worse. She was my mother and I loved her. I miss talking to her most of all. I will never experience that kind of admiration again. If you’re lucky, you get to where we got to, detente. You get to have that for a while.

So on this Memorial Day weekend I think of her. I’ll drink to her and to all the fallen comrades. She fought her own war gamely, perhaps she fought a little too long. But knowing her, that is no surprise. The peonies are in bloom, they were her favorite flower, summer was her favorite season. This one’s for you mom.

The Swimmer

I am writing an essay on swimming. Of course, to do that, I must go to the pool and practice. Or rather, procrastinate. There’s something about being in the water that works best for me. Others get their kicks in their own ways. For me, its doing laps. If all goes right, I’m lost to the world. I put on my cap, put in my earplugs, and put on my headset. This month I’m listening to a mix of Arcade Fire, Beirut, and last year’s Sleigh Bells. I need to update to something new but it’s too much trouble. Mostly, I just swim. First, I think too hard. I think about all the bad things. All the worries. All the losses. All the bitter pills I’ve had to swallow. After the twentieth length I begin to stop thinking. By thirty, I’m coasting. It’s into what’s good. It’s into the zone and the nothingness. I get why runners run. Why addicts shoot up. Why drinkers drink hard. I’m an addict in that pool. I do my laps and when I’m done, I’m human again.

On trips, I would find a pool and go to it early in the morning. Oh the pools I’ve known, they are the history of my life. There are pools everywhere and each has its own character. The one in Santa Monica is full of young, lithe bodies. The one in Paris is the size of a football field and filled with Parisian men in tiny trunks who swim right over you and into you and into each other. In London, they’re polite. In Northern California, it’s freezing and you swim pretty darn fast. Yes, the pools I have known. Each of us has an obsession, private, public, in between. Each of us has a story too. Swimming shadows my story, it’s the way I manage the currents of life, it’s the way I get through and move on.

The Swimmer

I am writing an essay on swimming. Of course, to do that, I must go to the pool and practice. Or rather, procrastinate. There’s something about being in the water that works best for me. Others get their kicks in their own ways. For me, its doing laps. If all goes right, I’m lost to the world. I put on my cap, put in my earplugs, and put on my headset. This month I’m listening to a mix of Arcade Fire, Beirut, and last year’s Sleigh Bells. I need to update to something new but it’s too much trouble. Mostly, I just swim. First, I think too hard. I think about all the bad things. All the worries. All the losses. All the bitter pills I’ve had to swallow. After the twentieth length I begin to stop thinking. By thirty, I’m coasting. It’s into what’s good. It’s into the zone and the nothingness. I get why runners run. Why addicts shoot up. Why drinkers drink hard. I’m an addict in that pool. I do my laps and when I’m done, I’m human again.

On trips, I would find a pool and go to it early in the morning. Oh the pools I’ve known, they are the history of my life. There are pools everywhere and each has its own character. The one in Santa Monica is full of young, lithe bodies. The one in Paris is the size of a football field and filled with Parisian men in tiny trunks who swim right over you and into you and into each other. In London, they’re polite. In Northern California, it’s freezing and you swim pretty darn fast. Yes, the pools I have known. Each of us has an obsession, private, public, in between. Each of us has a story too. Swimming shadows my story, it’s the way I manage the currents of life, it’s the way I get through and move on.

Starting Over

The title is new. But the song it refers to is old. Rewriting this book for the umpteenth and I hope final time, I decided renaming was in order. And also, reinvention. You see, I’ve had it with grief. And despair. And sinking down deep. I’ve had it with all the things that make life hard. Yet, the older I get, the more they surround me. The truth is, being young is terrific if you could only appreciate it more. So, starting over. How will I do it this time?

The answer is still being worked out. Still all of you know, you have to start over. Otherwise, like that Woody Allen shark, you die. You have to keep swimming with or against the current. I want a new life. A new adventure. A new reality. I want to merge it with the old one, but have something better to look forward to. I can’t have the body back, you know the firm breasts, the stomach that was almost flat enough, the litheness, the ease, the absolute grace that come with being a certain age. That is long gone, but I can still enjoy things. I can still marvel at the crystalline sky. Or the perfection of a day. I can still linger over the sunset, beer in hand. I can still be me. I can walk through the city and find interest everywhere. I can wonder what those people do and what they think and feel. I have the power to invent lives, that is a gift. I have love, and a little money. I have a life. The rest is a struggle. But who told us any of it was easy. Certainly not our parents.

As for the title, it’s not Burt Reynolds although at the time I enjoyed that movie. It’s John Lennon. He’s in my book and even now I miss him. I wish I could have watched him grow old gracefully. He would have done it. He would have amused me now as much as he did then. So thank you John for that. And thank you everyone else, for everything.

When we become our parents and how I will let myself go gray

It’s odd how it happens, insidiously and without you even noticing. First, there is the moment when you look in the glass and see your mother. Then you recoil in horror and discover that it’s only slightly a mistake. She’s there, stuck in the way you set your jaw. Then there’s dad, oh dad, his nose the better of the two but still far too big for a face that is slowly but surely getting older. You tell yourself that you’re so different. Start with the way you raised your kids and go from there. The music you like, loud, unsettling to them, the friends you have and their artistic ways. It goes on like that for a while. Maybe a year. Maybe longer. Then you look again and they’re more evidently inside of you. Perhaps it’s something you said to a friend, a blunt statement like the ones your mother was known for. Or an analytical attack, the kind your father used to make. Or maybe it’s being a mother and a parent and realizing that you can’t always do the opposite of what was done to you, that you sometimes have to use their playbook too … however flawed.

Finally it comes down to this, we grow old after they go. We are the last ones left if we’re lucky. You find yourself going to funerals just like they did. You understand how it became impossible for your mother to do it. How she wanted to stay home and mourn on her own. You understand as you watch your own friends weaken and fall away, some way too soon or worse lose children. You try not to be sad. You give dinner parties. So did they. You tell jokes and listen to other people and enjoy every minute but then you wake up the next morning and they’re watching you in the mirror or sometimes they linger, there in your dreams and you realize.

So why not? It’s time to gray. Time to act my age almost and be myself and accept that part of me that’s like them for better or for worse. It’s time to stop straining against it so much and to embrace it and even in odd moments celebrate it. Here’s to phasing out the hair dye and looking my age. Because I’m like them without being them and that was my fear. I was afraid to become my parents. But now, without them, I can finally become myself.

Visiting the parents and grandparents

Apartments I have known. My mother’s parents lived on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. I was very little when I visited. I remember my grandmother in the kitchen, working on dinner, the table in the dining room, pulled out with the extra leaf, my grandfather at the head of it. There were two other rooms I think, a room with a black and white TV where I watched Invaders from Mars for the first time. It haunted my dreams for a decade. Next to it, their bedroom and of course between them, the bathroom. They wore dentures and that was a memory too, the teeth hanging in water. I was four, then five.

My grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Manhattan next door to us eventually. She lived in that apartment till she got sick then moved in with us. It wasn’t the same for her and it wasn’t the same for me. I associate that place in the Bronx with her, with him, with their life together and with my mother’s own life growing up.

My father’s father lived in Woodland Hills, California. His house was low slung, there were apricot trees in the front yard. I picked them and ate them. The juice dripped over my spread fingers. He lived with his second wife, his cousin. The rumor was when my real grandmother got sick, he took up with her. He was with her still when I visited. My father, his sister and brother called her Sylvia. They tolerated her and definitely had mixed feeling about their father. Easier to love their real mother who had died so young. I don’t remember the furnishings in that house, but I remember there were handmade quilts. Sylvia made one for me as a child and I took it with me to college and into adulthood. Eventually it shredded and had to be thrown out. My grandfather had run a bar, we sat outside and he taught me pinochle and canasta. He liked to joke with me, he had a dry sense of humor.

And then of course there was my parent’s apartment on eighty sixth street. I was the only child who lived there. They gave me the smallest room just because… the maid’s room. But that isn’t important. What is, is what my children saw when they visited. They saw an apartment that was filled with prints, every wall surface covered. My mother had decorated it and her taste was eclectic. Lots of printed wallpaper, and lots of orange. The apartment was dark in the front, the windows overlooked eighty sixth and faced north. Their bedroom was sunny though and the nicest room in the house. The dressers were old, so old I believe they must have gotten them when they got married. And there was a chest my grandfather had given them at the same time that sat at the foot of the bed. My father died in that bed. My mother on the couch in the living room five and a half years later. The bed was tiny, I could never figure out how they slept in it together. Not even a double really, but they did. And the red couch was incredibly uncomfortable though it looked good. Lying on it was fine, but sitting was torture. It’s gone, all gone.

Now there is this house, the one I raised my children in. For me it holds so much, the memories of all the games we played. Some I made up, I was ambitious that way. I would build castles of blocks and have them throw balls to knock them down, we played tag and hide and seek and other things too. Christmas was grand. But who knows what they will remember of it or of the house. Places exist in our memories and then that grows vague. Everyone has their own version of history, their own vision of what home should be and what it is and was. I can’t know my children’s version. But I do know my own and this was the place where I lived the best part of my life, at least so far. This was the home that mattered most of all.

When someone dies too young…

There ought to be a law. Children must outlive their parents. There ought to be a reason for it if they die. But there often isn’t. Long ago my mother’s close friend lost her son to a lake in Greece. He’d gone swimming and never emerged. It ruined her life. She had other children and a husband and she chose to stay here with the living. But she carried that loss with her, the woman was already tipped towards depression. This loss guaranteed she’d live a life that was rich in joy but also tinged with sorrow. It’s the sort of sorrow, the sort of pain we all fear. It is a parent’s worst nightmare, you need, you want, you demand to go before them.

And yet … sometimes you don’t. My youngest son has a group of close friends. One is a girl who in her early years was spark-plug short. She has the most radiant smile. It often seemed that she was at my house more than her own. On weekends, the group would get together. They were in middle school so they’d go out and then head back here, there would be movies, or games, and there would of course be gossip while all this went on. Girls Talk. Elvis told us so and thank god because I have two boys, they don’t talk much. I was glad to have the girls here with us, we made dinner for them and ate with them and enjoyed listening to them. They allowed me to learn who my son was. They would tease him and get the truth out of him, and better than that, they would confide in each other and even sometimes in me. But mostly I just watched and was amazed by them. The love they shared for each other, the easy intimacy, the bond they had as friends. It’s something that is truly hard to come by.

Later on in high school they came over on Friday nights to watch a movie. This girl inevitably fell asleep. They could be watching someone getting dismembered and she would be wrapped in a blanket, her eyes shut tight. The rest of them were staring at the screen, but she didn’t have a care in the world.  

Those kids are all grown up now, almost. They’re in college. I check on them and on my son via their Facebook status. Last week hers blasted across the screen, friend after friend consoling her on this very public forum. Her brother had died, he was all of twenty-one. This was the same brother who was her ride home before she got a driver’s license, whenever she mentioned him her face lit up.

I went to the wake for her. In all the years I’d known her, I never met her parents. I had one conversation with her mother on the phone. The life she lived here was separate from her home life. I didn’t go up to them. I wasn’t really there for them, although in spirit I was. I felt nothing but sympathy and horror. They had lost a son. I so wished I could reel things back for them. In that Dickensian way I wished I’d been there to explain to that foolish boy what he was about to do. It’s what you do to the ones you leave behind, not what you do to yourself.

Yesterday she was trying so hard to be mature and adult. She was poised, and we were all miserable together. On Facebook her profile photo has changed. There’s her brother with her back when. How old are they, seven and nine? It’s her, so her, the freckled face, the open hearted smile. They stare into the camera with the blind faith children have, believing there is always world enough and time.

Literary Agents 101 or they call this a career?

I used to discuss my long history with not publishing and then publishing books by saying I’d had seven agents. Now I can say eight. It’s not a record I’m proud of. But then again it’s not a record I wanted to set. Life is full of surprises for sure. When I began to write seriously back in the dark ages I thought that I wanted nothing more than to publish. Publish or perish is the adage. Well I have published quite a bit of material since. It’s certainly nice to see your name in print. But the rest of it is more than a little painful.

So I will begin at the beginning. By doing so, I do no harm. My first agent is still in the business. She likely doesn’t remember me. She took me on because an editor liked the first chapter of a novel I was writing. I was twenty four. I was just a tad anxious and had a few issues with success. Thus, after getting positive feedback I fucked up. I finished that novel in record time and it was a mess. The editor regretted her interest. The agent regretted signing me. She broke up with me the way inept guys do when they’ve lost interest in a girl. She screamed at me about something absolutely trivial and then hung up on me. That was it for her. No constructive criticism. No questioning me about what happened to the writer who had written that great first chapter … no help whatsoever. But then I was young, I didn’t realize that being an agent means being a business person. You’re only a writer’s friend when they’re making you money. Unfortunately writing is an odd business. You’re exposing yourself to the world so you’re at your most vulnerable. They’re selling you to the world and hoping they’re not wasting their time so they’re also vulnerable, (though one might argue less so). They’re in it for the money. You’re in it for the love.

I didn’t find another agent for five years … in that time I learned a thing or two about rejection and about writing, but mostly I learned about love. I spent my time trying to work out the details of how to live my life, how to be involved with someone in a serious way, how to make my own way in the world…

Agent Number 2 comes next… and I worked hard to find her… to be continued.

With thanks to Mr. Lin

Long ago and far away, that is before my present husband was around, I was in love. The guy was a Knicks fan. That was back when Walt Frazier actually swished and dished all on his own. Clyde liked to dress the part. Yes that was the seventies boys and girls, I was alive back then and loving my Knicks. I hadn’t been much for sports outside of show jumping till then but the Knicks convinced me. Team chemistry, a great story, my boyfriend’s love for them … my love for him. It all worked together and made them memorable. Plus hey, they were winners. New York City loves a winner.

Then I met Dave. We loved the Knicks together. I remember the day they drafted Patrick Ewing. I remember the game where Bernard King scored sixty points. I remember those heady days. I was a rabid fan. I also started to play basketball. My boyfriend and then husband was an addict. See hip replacement, knee surgery and crippling pain for details now. But back then he just loved it. I could understand why. Playing basketball is addictive, a pure adrenalin rush. Watching a team play is equally addictive, it is a true team sport. Thus the sadness of Patrick Ewing. Chemistry is everything in basketball though it sure doesn’t hurt if you happen to have Michael Jordan on your team too.

I am back oh Knicks. I am screaming and cursing and in there with the rest. I have waited all this time but now I am in love again. Thank you Jeremy Lin. New York has been waiting and I have too. It feels like a new beginning, hard to find those at my age. So if you’re at the garden one night up in the cheap seats and you see a woman of a certain age cursing like a sailor and going wild with glee, you’ll know it’s me. As I said before, you had me at hello.

We wonder while we wait…or Would you be my Valentine?

How much of life is spent waiting? Waiting for the obvious, for a plane, for a train, for love to come our way. Waiting for the less than obvious, for a promotion, for recognition, for our ship to come in. Waiting for a pregnancy to end and for a new life to begin. Waiting for a child to outgrow the phase where they say “no” to everything. Waiting in a car for that older child to leave school so you can take them wherever they want to go. Waiting for friends who are late to meet you at a movie. Waiting for your husband to be to go to another movie, long before and missing the movie because you’ve had to wait too long. But not missing him, finding him. Still there is more waiting to be done. Waiting for God. Waiting for an epiphany. Waiting for inspiration to strike. Waiting for Guffman. Waiting for the reviews to come out. Waiting for the rejections to arrive. Waiting for the results. Watching other women wait for them. Anxiety claws at us often enough when we wait. But there are other times too. Times when waiting has its pleasures. Missing a train can be excruciating, but it can also be an opportunity. Watching the people around you and imagining lives for them. Giving yourself an opportunity to expand and create while you wait. Letting the breathing spaces in between the events be an event. Isn’t it true that life is mostly lived in the gaps in between the big events, and isn’t it a waste not to take advantage of that. 

This Valentine’s Day I remember others where I waited. I waited for the valentine’s day card from the boy I was in love with in first grade. For the box of candy my father would bring me when I was so young. For flowers and other tokens of affection. Waited to be recognized when what I had was there all the time. Right there in front of me every day, life in all its absurdity and complexity. Life lived as much in the margins as in the event. We mark life with events, days like Valentine’s Day, Christmas, birthdays and sadder days too but in reality it’s all that comes in between that matters most of all.