Divorce Bard's Open Salon Blog

A Rose by Any Other

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:05:30 -0400

My daughter was part of a big event at her middle school tonight. Big like, this huge group of 6th and 7th graders big. I’m not sure where the 8th graders go, or what they do, when they receive some sort of honor from the school, or the school board, or whoever it is exactly. They weren’t there tonight. Just the 6th and 7th graders, and there were plenty of them. Like we all got busy, you know, about 12 years ago, and bang! now they’re in the 6th grade.

When I was in the 6th grade, no one had ever said in English, “I know, RIGHT?” I haven’t consulted with the staff of the OED on this, so I only have it on the authority of my own experience which was… hang on… 45 years ago. Yes. I was 11, 45 years ago. And it’s possible that my memory is getting foggy (although I do remember Marian M- quite well, oh yes indeed, rather well), although that’s possible, I swear the phrase was not in my daily experience, and not on Get Smart, and not on Leave it to Beaver, and not on Gilligan’s Island. I know, RIGHT? No, thank you, I don’t know. Wrong.

So this event. The big one. I have a semi-pronounceable last name. On a scale of one to ten, it’s roughly a four. I used to work as a broadcast buyer at an advertising agency, and I spoke daily with TV stations all over the US, and I would get my phone contacts to take a whack at spelling my name, when I left a message. And then I would take the spelling, and put it up on the doorway of my cubicle, with the call letters of the station. As I remember, my hapless spellers created upwards of 20 new spellings for my collection.

So the event. My daughter got this honor thing. She’s doing really well. She and I have made jokes in the past about my last name. How unpronounceable and unspellable it is. How everyone gets it WAY wrong. And at this honor thing tonight, with a list of dozens of honored kids, including lots of names I knew they were just butchering, they pronounced hers – mine – right. She got two honors. They pronounced her name right, twice. Twice.

I made a joke about it afterward, with a few moms and dads in the immediate vicinity. And then I waited outside the cafeteria, where the kids had been deposited, and she came out looking like the most breathtakingly beautiful creature that had ever been put on earth (she was wearing some very dark colors - this brings out certain tones in her hair and eyes, I noticed this when she was just six months old), and I said “Hey! They pronounced your name right! Twice!”

And she broke into an astonishing smile and said, “I know, RIGHT?”

And it took my breath away. This exquisite 11-year-old, who may have secrets to keep, and lives in her very own, inscrutable interior world, shares a name with me, and has learned the prickly annoyance of its being unpronounceable, and is learning to let it roll off her back, as her father began to learn, nearly half a century ago. The joke is ours, this is our common experience, the name that I gave to her that will drive her crazy to the end of her days. We laugh off this silly thing together, she owns this name, that is mine, that is hers. Whatever may come, this small thing will always set us apart from the world, just a little bit, just enough.

In My Kitchen

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 01:04:44 -0400

The oddest thing just happened. I’m working on a poem just now, a narrative of a Kenyan folk tale I found last year. I had struggled with it for weeks – or more accurately, I had avoided sitting down to it for weeks – and then somehow tonight, things started to come fairly freely. Suddenly there was progress, and a poem was filling up space and time.

So I kept working. It’s several verses longer now, and the meter has changed. And I just kept going, and now it’s past my bedtime. This is a common occurrence: somehow I have some of my most satisfying ideas when I’m close to keeling over, when I’m drunk from lack of sleep. I’ve nodded off in front of a poem enough times that I think my nose may be flattening, just a bit.

So. This thing that happened. I decided enough was enough, and it was time to brush my teeth. So I got up from my desk and started toward the bathroom.

Here’s the layout of my place: as I sit at my desk, with my back to the street-facing windows, I look directly into my kitchen. The apartment is sortof T-shaped. So to the left of the kitchen is my son’s room, and to the right is my daughter’s. The bathroom, where I was headed, is off the kitchen, by my daughter’s room. Got that?

There’s this feeling, when it’s really late and the kids are both sound, sound, sound asleep, that I don’t want to wake them, but virtually nothing I do would ever have any effect anyway. They pretty much sleep like stones. So there’s just this feeling, a notion of their presence, as I make my way through the kitchen, by both their rooms, toward the bathroom. Just a notion, a familiarity with the idea of their being there, a comfort of maybe a sleeping aura spreading out into the rest of the apartment, so I pass through it as I maneuver by the table and then the stove. Or something.

It’s just a little thing. I got up from my desk, started through the kitchen, and felt it, and was comforted by it, as usual, as always. It’s just that… they’re not here. They’re with their mother.

The thing is, it was so very comforting, you know?

A Faded Drawing

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:03:36 -0400

I was cleaning up the other day. There’s still all this stuff, just stuff left over from our separation, that came with me in boxes and didn’t really have a reason to. So I was tossing out stuff, and I came across some of the artwork that my daughter had done, just seven or eight years ago. (I kept it, of course.)

It wasn’t exactly on archival paper, you know? I imagined finding (I doubt I ever will) the first representative drawing she ever did. She could barely talk. I was sitting there, trying to make it out as she went – it meandered all over the page, but it had discernible eyes, mouth, and nose. I asked her what it was, and she said simply, “Elmo.” And yes, although really it looked a little more like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, sort of melted and running off the table, I could see the intent.

The emotional connection took me to the next thing here. I just had to slip that in, because it’s not a non-sequitur. It’s how I came to understand something.

Imagine yourself a twenty-something someone... say, an aspiring singer. The crowd you run with would probably include musicians, dancers, artists – you know, the usual suspects. Imagine that you get to know one artist, who of course has no commissions (he’s a twenty-something too), so one day out of boredom he asks you to sit for a portrait. And you do. It’s a simple thing, maybe pen and ink, on inexpensive paper. When it’s done, out of gratitude, the artist gives you the portrait. At some point over the next year, the two of you go your separate ways. The portrait, among your papers somewhere, is forgotten.

Many years later, perhaps you’ve discovered he has died. Consumption would be about right, for the period I have in mind. It makes you stop, and daydream for a little while about all of them, your old friends, and how obscenely young you all were, and how beautiful. And then you remember the portrait. You spend an hour or so, rifling through old papers, coughing from the dust you’re stirring up, and then – there it is.

But the paper was so inexpensive, you know? The vital force of every line is in place – it almost makes you breathless, while your head is still swimming about the lust for the present that you all lived. But the paper is so yellow now, and brittle. So the face is yellowed, as though age spots are only days away, all over that once-exquisite skin. The artist is gone, and the drawing itself has aged, and somehow you cannot believe you are no longer beautiful.

I said you were a singer, as a distraction. Suppose you were… a writer. Suppose your name was, you know, Oscar Wilde.

There is only one thing that can happen next. You just need a character name. How about... Dorian Gray?

An Incident.

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:02:05 -0500

A car went off the road, and hit a tree.
An ambulance was summoned to the scene.
Two kids were fine, as far as all could see.
And one, a girl, is dead at seventeen.

I knew her just a bit, when she was small.
At seven, she was headstrong. Pretty. Bright.
Now ten years on, she isn't there at all.
She died, one uneventful weekend night.

I've always liked her mom. Sometimes we talk,
Of homework, girls, and things we've learned, or tried.
The mourners filled the church, and steps, and walk,
With grief too great to be contained inside.

Tomorrow, all of us will carry on.
One hopeful life is over. She is gone.

Hands

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:02:32 -0500

This is a vid-cap of Luja Wang’s right hand. You can find the video here:

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/quick_hits_yuja_wang_plays_live/

There have been a small number of women that I’ve known, who have had hands that stopped me. It’s hard to explain this.

I majored in the piano as an undergraduate. My favorite composer has long been Prokofiev, although I never had the power to reach after his biggest pieces (I believe Luja Wang does: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_krRNdVnO0 – be sure so watch her octaves, at about 1:59-2:08). But I practiced for hours on end nonetheless, and along the way became very hand-centered.

A friend of mine pointed it out to me years ago. We were at a museum, looking at some photographs Picasso had taken of a young carpenter. I was pointing out his hands to her. And she smiled and commented that I always focus in on hands right away, with everyone. She was amused. I was surprised anyone would notice (was I THAT obvious?).

I remember my grandfather’s hands, at his funeral. They looked like they had so much love still in them, long after the rest of his body gave up.

Well. Luja Wang. I admire her, for what she can do, but even if I didn’t know what she did, I would be drawn to her hands. It’s not a sexual thing, really – I mean, precisely what good would a very powerful hand be in the act, you know? But still, there are a couple of moms with special hands among my kids’ friends, and I’ve had occasion to shake their hands once or twice, and it’s arresting. Most women who shake my hand produce an internal “mm-hmm” for me. Nothing worth noting really, and I get on with the conversation. But these two moms - one is a visual artist, and the other is a geologist - trigger something more like… “oh. My.”

I just want you to know: if you have hands like Luja Wang, and you’re at the other end of the bar, I am going to buy you a drink. I’m already half-smitten.