Old Love

Los Angeles

12/24 – 12/28

In my mother’s house on a Saturday night, the TV is blaring, two computers whir a slow drone and there at least three conversations going.  It’s hard to discern if anyone is listening to anyone.  We all compete to be heard. I am sitting at the dining table looking for quiet that will only be found if I zone out.

In my house on a Saturday night, it is usually dead silent but my home is 2000 miles away and I won’t miss it all that much until it’s time for sleep.

Two dining chairs away from me, my cousin Danny is watching a movie on his computer.  Danny is here with his daughter and his wife.  Four years ago, he gave up a very lucrative career at Johnson and Johnson in the Philippines for the promise of America. 

Now he rents a room (an illegally converted garage) in a bad neighborhood in Long Beach.  The room fits a double bed and he sleeps alone most nights.  When his wife and daughters are in town, the four of them sleep on that bed.  The room has no insulation and so small that they often go to my mom’s house just to find breathing room.

This must sound dire and pathetic.  But they are grateful for everything they have --   everything being jobs where they work too many hours for too little pay, substandard living conditions, a sort of condescending kindness from my know-everything mother.

Not that I blame my mom.  It is tiresome to hear about exploitation that is recognized but tolerated. If you plan to keep on living with something, then don’t complain.

When I look at my cousin, I wonder if he regrets giving up his life for this.  What pushed him to come here when what was in Manila was not bad at all?

The promise of America will never cease to amaze me. It is a testament to hope and ambition and folly. 

 The little girl cousin just peered into my computer screen and asked me what I was doing.  Nothing, I said.  “Are you writing a story?” she asked. Yes, I said.  Her father gave me an apologetic look as she skipped away yelling, “Whoa, author!”

It is always entertaining to be here.  I get a good dose of regular life and realize that I live in a kind of bubble in New York.  I keep singling out the city where I live, but really, it is a bubble all single people live in regardless of geography.

San Francisco

December 31

I went to Union and Laguna in San Francisco.  Modest and almost pretty was not the way I remembered this part of town but things have changed in nine years.

Now this city is like an old love – fondly remembered but not quite the thing that you want anymore.

It has been a wonderful sojourn to California.  I don’t think I’ve ever said that in all the years I’ve been coming and going.  Most visits are fraught with negotiation. This time is no different but somehow it is okay.

I am ending the year with family. My oldest friends will be coming around in a few hours to say hello and to have a few laughs.  It is a fitting way to end my very bad year and I will say, in spite of everything, that today I am not unhappy. I feel quite fortunate and loved. 

When I reread this post later, I will be dissatisfied with what I’ve written. But I wanted to get one last word in before we all bid this year a collective adieu.

The downside of all these reunions is that I also have zero privacy.  Last night when I was trying to write, my 16-year-old cousin sat next to me, peered at my screen and said, “do you mind if I sit next to you?” Then she slept next to me on the floor. If I go outside to smoke a cigarette, someone will follow me to “keep company” and now, other relatives have arrived and they are asking when I’m leaving.

How can it be that all this minding is so nice and so awful at the same time? Right now, my youngest brother and I are both in search of quiet but there are five people sitting with us at the dining table.

One more cousin and her boyfriend arrived.  My friends – one group of six and a solo will arrive later.  There will be about 26 people here. The youngest cousin just asked me (as she did in L.A.), “are you writing a story?”

That is my cue to post and be done with this—it isn’t getting any quieter in the house of family.

I will try to post a picture of everyone and write a little better. But that is for later. 

Here's to a happier next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/31/opinion/20091231_opart.html

We Are Made of Others

If this is true, then it explains much about goodbyes and hellos, doesn't it?

Christmas is a few days off and my family and friends wait for me in California. I look forward to going home as much as I dread it. I think I say this before every trip.

My father requested that I take three of my watches back to him (he will get each one cleaned and overhauled).  I got my first watch when I was about seven years old.  It was an Omega with a tiny face and a thin strap. He and my mother decided it was time for me to have it -- it was the first expensive gift he had ever given her.  One day at school, I washed my hands and water seeped into the watch. 

A year later, a Cartier.  Stainless steel and 14K gold for an eight-year-old. My mother, then with a gambling problem, took this watch from me and pawned it. When my father found out, he kicked me so hard I rolled off my parents' bed and onto the floor.  Later that night, he said he was sorry.  

When I first heard the Elizabeth Bishop poem The Art of Losing, I thought of all the watches I’ve owned.  There is but one line about losing a watch but for that I will never forget the poem.

Now, at 36, I own about six watches.  Limited edition Cartier, Bulgari, Gucci, a Panthere, others I don't remember the names of.  Last year, I found the balls to refuse my father’s extravagant gift. And this year,  I told him I wanted nothing. We will see what I find under the tree when I go home.

I like the gift that most people would not think much of – a pearl one of the Muslim relatives gave my dad, it is large and discolored and worthless.  My mother had it set with a diamond and a platinum chain.  I love that the imperfection cannot be disguised.  The diamond is lovely and clear, and it deepens the scratch on the pearl as if someone ran a jagged fingernail across the surface.

One evening a few years ago, at a black tie affair in Florida, a woman approached me and complimented that necklace.  When she was close enough to me, she noticed the scratch, and she understood that it was not ignorance of gemstones that made me wear that necklace.  She understood that it was a kind of sentiment. She invited me to her apartment and to one of her concerts in New York – she was a pianist and a crazy lady who doted over a potted azalea that lived on the window sill of the kitchen in her Central Park West apartment.

I have travelled in circles my parents never dreamed of. I’ve met actors and divas, pundits, the very rich, Elie Wiesel and Queen Noor.  After each brief encounter, I wanted nothing more than to return to my bed and put on the white shirts I buy from the hardware store. Sometimes, after long days of schmoozing with the rich, I would daydream about calling my very own old friends -- the strivers who would never feel comfortable standing where I happened to be in the moment I thought of them.

My parents gave me what they could to prepare me for the kind of life they didn’t quite understand. This is not to say that they wanted me to mingle with the famous (and really, it was an occupational thing – I was working at these events). This is not to say that they gave me much. 

Without rancor, I will say that my parents gave me everything half-assed. It was not what they intended, but it is how things turned out. I have often wondered if they wanted to give me too much and everything was bound to fall short.

I have always been a drop-out.  My elementary school education happened in three countries, and I did not complete the third, fourth, fifth or sixth grades.  My mother gambled away the tuition and sometimes we would have to stop going to school. Sometimes she gambled away the money to pay the electric bill too so we’d move to one of her sisters’ houses and stay there until my dad sent more money. 

Oddly, my father had no knowledge of all the financial problems.  It puzzles me to this day.  That is how I love my father – I don’t ask him why or how.

I skipped the eight grade, discovered the dictionary and fell behind in math. Because of all the missed school, I have never doubted my intelligence. I came back after each hiatus with a new lie to explain why I’d been gone. I researched countries I’d never been to so that I could say I’d been to Rome or Luxemburg.  The reality was that I was home, listening to bad pop songs and reading romance novels until four a.m. I was never the dumb kid.

What is the point of all this?

“We are made of others” is the point.

There are two new girl cousins who have moved to California from the Philippines. They will fare better than my family has because they have more realistic desires. They want, simply, to have a life in America. 

I want to give the 12 year old girl a copy of Anne of Green Gables but that is a gift that will disappoint.  I want to give the 18 year old a dictionary and The Elements of Style because her written English is not good. But these things are not important to them or their parents.

Would any of my family give any credence to my belief that it is language that sets a person apart? What do I have? I have no education, no money, no whiteness—I’m not throwing a pity party for myself, I am stating facts. But more than any of my family, more than any of the people I went to school with, I am the one who fits in and the one who can fake it.

I want to teach those girl cousins something that has brought me a kind of intangible success, but it was strongly suggested that for Christmas I should buy them perfume.

This is how I count the days

A suggested that we have coffee before I leave for California. We have not seen each other in almost three months. If I see him now, I would have to start another tally.  And counting days, much like counting sheep, is not the most fun a person could have.  So I said no.

One day, I will stop keeping track of how long it has been between meetings, and that is the day I get to tick off “not pathetic anymore” in my mental list of things to strive for.

My ex secret friend and I spent the evening in my little apartment.  We drank beers and had mediocre Mexican food.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that is seemed as if no time had passed but it was a relief to know that our present lives fit into our conversations so that we didn’t spend our time together with nothing but nostalgia to keep things moving.

We used to call each other secret friends because we met though CC and her ex husband.  We used to sneak around, uncomfortable to let the people who introduced know that we’d formed our own sort of team.

I am hoping to pay a visit to Vermont one of these days. I would like to see how she lives now with a daughter and a husband in a town that seems so quiet. I can’t even imagine that sort of life simply because I’ve only ever lived in cities.

Secret friend told me that she wanted my life.  I laughed and she retracted her statement – part of my life, she corrected herself.  That made better sense and I told her that I wanted part of hers.  The good parts of both our lives meshed together would make for the ideal existence.  Drunken talk of course.

But it did make me realize that everyone is always looking left and right, that we spend our lives figuratively crossing the street. Forward, even though to the right and to the left might be where we’d prefer to go. Or where we like to dream of being.

I think I just fucked up the road less traveled cliché and I don’t even know what the point of that was.

Today I worked toward the front of the bookstore. I saw everyone who walked in, I saw the snowfall starting in the afternoon.  First it was nothing at all, as if someone had upended a boxful of packing popcorn.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to snow.  It always delights me. 

Delight is not a word I would use easily but that is the only way to describe how it feels when I feel ice touch the tip of my nose. No matter where I go, always an FOB.

After the bookstore gig, I tried to go Christmas shopping but I walked out of every store empty-handed.  It’s pretty simple -- I don’t want to give anyone anything.  I mean that in every way that it can be interpreted even though just the other day, I baked cookies that I gave away and last night I shared my apartment with someone who was almost a stranger (isn’t that true when you don’t see or talk to someone for many years?) and now I will spend a good part of this snowy evening in a bar talking to a friend about everything with much affection. But I don’t want to give anyone anything or take anything. 

I want only to tend to myself.

‘Tis the season.

The Girl Who Said No

Perhaps because I just had a birthday or because the holidays are a time when people are most lonely or because certain people I didn’t think I’d ever see again have reappeared in my life, I am thinking of two Yeats poems about love and time passing and death and memory.

A few days ago, it was decided that an ex friend of mine and CC’s would come and stay with me for one night.  I am somewhat sorry that I invited this woman to my house – we had one of those strange friendships that began and ended quickly. Still I want to see her even if all we might have to say to one another is hello and goodbye. I like to think if that is what will happen, at least we will be able to say it properly.

And then A made a reappearance though I don’t suppose that is a surprise to anyone.

My old trainer, stupid and perfect-bodied, started contacting me again.  We were never involved even though he once told me he loved me and called me boo. I laughed and never went back for another exercise session.

A few hours ago, a man I slept with a few times over the summer called me. This man, my dreamboat who turned out to be a footnote, as Elvis Costello once sang, wants to see me again.

Someday, if there are ever any grandchildren, would I share any of these stories with them? That is probably a strange thing to contemplate, especially for a girl who has turned down pretty much every sexual/romantic opportunity that has come her way in the last three months.

Not that any of the options listed above would lead to any kind of meaningful relationship but I am starting to worry that this self-imposed exile will turn me into the girl who said no and ended up with nothing.

One Perfect Day

5:00 a.m.

My stomach hurts from hunger.  It is five a.m. on a Sunday. I slept for three hours tonight but woke up at four a.m.

For my birthday, I received a DVD of Saraband and a bar of lettuce scented soap (I wonder what lettuce would smell like as a fragrance since I still can't smell anything) and went to tea at The Peninsula. The best scones in New York City, no arguments. I spent the morning in SoHo in the nice bookstore wrapping gifts for charity. An interesting day -- begin with a "good deed" (I don't like to think of volunteering that way, it seems too self congratulatory) and then end with genteel overindulgence at one of the most expensive hotels in the city.

We were served Earl Grey tea first and then Dragon Jasmine.  I found the jasmine too bitter but loved the way each leaf, before steeping, curled in over itself like tiny fiddlehead ferns.  When the water was poured in, the leaves unfurled and darkened like sage and the heady scent of jasmine rose so strong I  wanted to turn my head away.

Today, for my birthday again, I am going to the Frick to look at paintings and the garden in this gray winter light. After the museum closes there will be a concert (violin). Then dinner in Chinatown which I could skip but will attend and most likely enjoy. I would prefer to go a few blocks uptown and have dinner at Cafe Sabarsky but I am going to dinner with my friend who is unemployed. I know she will insist on buying dinner because of my birthday thing and because I paid for the concert tickets. Normally, I wouldn't care who pays but I watch out for this friend.  She seems on the verge of breaking (financially and emotionally) and doesn't seem to realize it herself.

She thinks dancing is going to fix everything. Oy vey.

Noon

It's raining now--lazy annoying rain. Can weather be described as perfunctory?  Why not rain all the way?

I move slowly.  My little apartment requires a lot of maintenance, picking up clothes, washing cups, gathering tissue (I am sick!) that litter my floor like puffs of cotton.  This apartment is so small that any mess shrinks the place and makes it look unkempt than it actually is.

When I think of the amount of space I live my days in, I actually find myself contemplating moving. And sometimes in the subway, when I feel someone's elbow dig into the middle of my back at rush hour, I consider it again.

If I ever do leave this city, the decision will be made in an instant like all the other decision on flight.  I am somewhat surprised I'm still here after all the crap this year.  My younger self would have fled and gone for reinvention in a new zip code. But this woman I have become insists on staying put.

11 p.m.


If I were seriously considering leaving this city, I would have changed my mind after going to the concert at the Frick Museum earlier in the evening. The violinist was young and German and had scars all over his face and neck.  He played Beethoven and Prokofiev.  The best part came at the end, three encores and two standing ovations -- he played bits of Carmen and for a minute I had to laugh because after the intermission, I kept thinking "this boy would play Carmen beautifully" even though Bizet was not in the program.  But old Georges made an appearance after all. The last piece I didn't recognize at all but the nicest surprise of the evening -- Liebesleid.

The scars on the violinist's face reminded me of Louis Kahn the architect.  I saw his face clearly after the performance when I went backstage to say hello.  So tonight I was a kind of groupie. It is always a wonder when I find myself so moved and makes me think of some woman who long ago told me that art heals --maybe she was not such a crackpot.

The Contrarian

That's what the name of this blog should be. I tend to dislike things other people fawn over.  My dear friend and ex roommate once said that made me an iconoclast. Another person who did not have much of a vocabulary told me I was a person who got off on being different. 

Because I have nothing else to write, here's a list of things I hate that most people like:

• hearts are stupid
• balloons are tacky, especially the mylar balloons
• greeting cards offend me somewhat. Why don't people take the time to write down how they feel?
• "Sweet" is an overused word, but when it is said sincerely and unexpectedly, it breaks my heart (in a good way). Actually I hate hearing it as a description for a person but otherwise, I sort of like that word.
• electronic greeting cards are even dumber than regular cards (unless you have Parkinson's and can't write -- I have a friend like this).
• Disneyland is a horrible place. If I ever have a child, I worry that I might have to take him or her there and think of ways to raise a child who won't care about such places. How can any adult like it there? What is wrong with them?
• black shoes -- this one is personal and impractical, I don't care if other people wear black shoes 
• crafts -- they're usually ugly but politeness dictates that we ooh and aah because someone made something by hand
• people who knit/felt/bake/cook -- oh god (disclosure -- I cook and bake but I am not a nazi about telling everyone)
• pictures of food that people post on Facebook 
• parades depress me 
• self-help New Age books -- I cringe whenever I find out people read self-help books.  To each his own and all, but I'd rather not know
• Godiva chocolate -- it is not very good and is of poor quality
• Georgia O'Keefe -- blue vaginas and pink desserts. No thanks.
• God and the people who can't stop talking about their faith -- way too many people in my extended family who are like this. 
• shopping with girlfriends -- this is another personal thing 
• group outings -- makes me feel like a lemming or a snail that has lost its shell
• parties -- I can fake my way through most of them it but it is never fun for me
• foodies -- why does everyone want to be part of some club?

Well, that was the least satisfying blog entry of all time! I was hoping I would have come up with funnier things but I just sound like a crotchety old bag.  And today, that is not the way to describe me. 

I am in quite a good mood.  I am reading Laurie Moore--she makes me laugh even as she annoys me with her overlong paragraphs (sometimes I don't even notice) and wows me with her skill.  My neighbor is playing his guitar and it is lovely.  It's too cold tonight and I like it.  

I am a bit of a loner. Most people would find that hard to believe but there you have it. 

Wood

By Sarah Arvio

The last thing I ever wanted was to

write again about grief did you think I

would your grief this time not mine oh good

grief enough is enough in my life that is

enough was enough I had all those

grievances all those griefs all engraved

into the wood of my soul but would you

believe it the wood healed I grew up and

grew out and would you believe it I found

your old woody heart sprouting I thought

good new growth good new luxuriant green

leaves leaves on their woody stalks and I said

I’ll stake my life on this old stick I’ll stick

and we talked into the morning and night

and laughed green leaves and sometimes a flower

oh bower of good new love I would have it

I would bow to the new and the green

and wouldn’t you know it you were a stick

yes I know a good stick so often and then

a stick in my ribs in my heart your old

dark wood your old dark gnarled stalk

sprouting havoc and now I have grief again

and now I’ve stood for what I never should

green leaves of morning dark leaves of night

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/11/30/091130po_poem_arvio#ixzz0ZGOVWMPv

What I Don't Want to Share

So if you know who I am and you happen to read this, mum’s the word.

I am alone on my birthday.  Up until 5 p.m., I had plans. But then I lied and said I had to work late. My phone is turned off and my friend Jonathan has called me three times wanting to talk. He has no idea it's my birthday and no idea that I don't answer the phone even on regular days.

This is the first time I’ve ever been alone on my birthday, and I hope never to repeat it again because I don’t ever want to be in the same place as I’m in right now.

This is what mourning feels like.

To badly quote something I read in the New York Times, there is no emoticon that could convey what life has been like this year. It has been one loss after another. But I always come back to this.

During my somewhat miserable childhood, after one or two of those incidents that involved my crazy family, I remember striking deals with God (that seems like the wrong thing to say – I don’t think I ever believed in God) – “okay, I’ll do it, but no more after this” or telling myself that whatever the bad thing was had to be the absolute last bad thing that could happen because life wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

What I have learned is that life, with all the moments of happy and wretchedness, is quite indifferent to us humans.

My shrink asked me why I wanted to do be alone and I didn’t have an answer at the time.  Now I do – it is because I want to look at myself. No liquor, no friends, no exes, no family.

I’ll never know why I didn’t keep my baby. All the rational thoughts that led to that decision could be written down, but right next to that column, would be just as many reasons for keeping it.

I wanted that baby.  It’s hard for me to admit that even now because it makes me wonder how I could have done it. I do know that I want any child of mine to have better childhood than I did, and at the time, I didn’t think I could provide. I wanted to be fair.

I don’t know if I will ever have enough guts to decide on whether I was a brave girl or a scared girl or if there will ever be a time when making a judgement on myself won't be so important.

On very bad days, I find myself saying “sorry, baby” again and again as if I’m talking to a person.  It is all I have to say and it’s not enough and it’s too much at the same time.

What kind of girl am I now?

Love After Love

Derek Walcott wrote that poem and I first read it years ago in a piece of shit book.  Someone else’s words were the best part of a 400-odd page novel. I ripped that poem out of the book and have had that page somewhere in my apartment for the last four years, something I read once in a while, sometimes out loud.

A called to wish me a Happy Birthday. Three days early.  I think he did it on purpose to show me he’s forgotten or maybe he did forget.  But never mind that.

Happy Abortion Anniversary, Lucy/Reticent Diarist/whatever I am today. And oh my body remembers.  I am sick again.  I almost didn’t cry today.  Maybe one of these months I won’t.

It is cold tonight, the wintery sort of cold that gets in under your skin.  Unmistakably the beginning of another season. I keep track of time in a different way now, as if I feel every change on my skin rather than by what the calendar reads.  I don’t know what all of this means, if anything at all. But I remember what it was like to take a walk in the summertime and in the fall and now when it hurts to breath because it’s so cold. With each season, I am more myself. I am less hurt.

It probably doesn’t sound true because tomorrow I will wake up with puffy eyes and a hoarse voice.  But these episodes pass. And it is less about a lost relationship and more about a baby.

With my shrink last week, I discussed how joy and grief can coexist. I think now that the good times were almost a kind of punishment, it underscored the grief.  The joys of the last few months were so fleeting; and at home at night, it is not what returned to me.

This is what comes to me at night now – sometimes nothing at all, sometimes words from the book I happen to be reading or the memory of someone else’s body. Always there is fear of remembering and forgetting. Both things can’t happen, can it?

I think of jewelry.  I pass by the windows on Madison Avenue and imagine myself plunking down one of my credit cards for something shiny. Not because I need another bauble but because I want a kind of memento for this year, to keep close to me.  That probably sounds morbid and a little bit shallow.  But I would like a little memory to remind myself of something I had but couldn’t keep. Hello, Lou Reed.