Dark Country

Here in Tiny Town on a Sunday night it was already dark at 6 in the evening, and I had pretty much lost my will to go on. I had spent hours on the help lines of both Apple and Dell trying to figure out why my new Apple DVI mini adapter was not bringing a picture to the Dell 1800FP analog display that FF gave me, and my "unresolved issue" seemed to have quite destroyed my desire to accomplish anything. That, and the darkness.

It is very dark now in Tiny Town. A velvety black darkness falls upon us earlier and earlier out in Stag County as autumn creeps up on us and our gardens. It gets to 6 PM and we are stunned that it is night already, and even though we know the winter's coming on like it does every year, we say to each other "what happened?" Behind closed doors, we talk about what it would be like to move to South Carolina, or anywhere south where the light and the warmth hang on a little longer. Oh sure, we can stroll to Main Street where the colonial-style street lights cast a dim yellow on the brick sidewalks, and where twinkling strings of Italian lights illuminate the faces of the faithful huddled around the gas heaters at the Lenape Inn's outdoor tiki bar. But the feebleness of the illumination only serves to emphasize the vast depth of the darkness and does nothing to cheer it. Chill autumn seeps in through the cracks in the old wood of the the garage siding where the Virginia creeper goes scarlet, and works its way into the drying leaves of the hydrangeas and burns the cheeks of the maples along the Delaware. I check the shed for shovels, salt. I wash sweaters, and I realize I don't have any that I like very much.

It is dark in Tiny Town, and the elections are almost upon us. FF and I watch the TV in the evening and are left speechless by the dumb viciousness of the political attack ads that all the commentators seem to agree "work". But to what end do they "work" except to mislead the voting public and fan the flames of generalized middle class anger? If that is "working" I'd rather have disfunction. When FF and I have the energy, which is rarer now as the light fades, we check out Politifact and research the inflamed statements delivered to us by the candidates themselves and the rabble-rousing "non-profits" that place their ads on Comcast: We find that most of the accusations made are either "mostly untrue" or "pants on fire". Our airwaves are absolutely gummed up with deliberate, nasty lies. Oh, did I say "our"? Yes, I know, the airwaves stopped belonging to the American public year before last and now Mom doesn't have TV because she refuses to pay for cable and instead has a converter box, swearing that the stations come in better when she sits the iron on top of the TV. The political stank smells pretty bad here in town, and it almost overcomes the perfume of the drying leaves. FF and I might just start leaving the television off, which will leave the house a little bit darker still.

Next week, I will cast my ballot at the Tiny Town Eagle Fire Company Engine House where we keep our bright shiny fire trucks and the new EMT ambulance bought with funds raised from the Wednesday night spaghetti suppers and a few private donors. It will be the first time in over 25 years that I have not voted in New York City and (as you all have reminded me) my vote will likely count more here in bright blue Stag County. I am taking the morning off to do it, and I plan to hang around the polling place for a while to feel the vibe.

Tiny Town is proud of its spirit of self-reliance and its spaghetti dinner fundraisers. Here lives a piquant mix of extremely wealthy country squires and very middle to lower middle class workers and immigrants. Our county is the third wealthiest in Pennsylvania, and Republicans outnumber Democrats by a very long shot. There is a fair rumble of Tea Party sympathy, though we have no Tea Party candidates in this upcoming election. The Tea Party is too extreme and déclassé even for Stag County. Anger at and distrust of government has reached hissy fit on the dial, and that's the most popular sentiment you hear over the counter at the Eagle Diner where the working class gathers for the blue plate special. The problems of society have become too complex and overwhelming for those too intellectually impatient, unprepared or unwilling to bend their minds to ideas, and so comes the bitter call to "get all the bastards out". At any cost.

I am afraid of these sentiments, afraid of the growing feeling that we can just emote our way out of the problems in which we finds ourselves. I am afraid of our willingness to be attracted to terrible bombast and be dismissive of thoughtfulness which, by nature, is quieter. Yes, our problems are complex, but not too complex to think out in a reasoned way. But that kind of thinking takes patience and a kind of focus that is hard to come by in this time of money and attention deficits. Social, economic and personal disappointments weigh hard on the people of Stag County, and if we drive west to York where FF's parents live, I can see the discontent-o-meter rising  higher on the faces of the people with each mile west we drive. They wouldn't say so out loud, but the people farther west and north of Tiny Town don't understand why their kitchens don't look like the ones on HGTV, and they're sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Free-floating discontent feeds free floating anger feeds "get the bastards out". At any cost.


I want to go see it for myself. I want to go northwest where the Alleghenies meet the border of upstate New York and maybe stop at a diner in Dimock, Susquehanna County where it's 98% percent white, 60% registered Republican and dirt poor. That's where Norma Fiorentino's house blew up because methane gas leaked from the drilling in the Marcellus Shale into her well water. The utilities, all part of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, are sucking the natural gas out of the good Pennsylvania shale around Norma's house and out of vast tracts of Pennsylvania countryside. They promise jobs. They promise to turn dirt farmers into millionaires with royalty payments, the kind of overnight "success" that the people yearn for. The voters of Susquehanna County are grabbing for that gold ring and, after all, who wouldn't? Things have not changed in Dimock at all in over a century except that the buildings are older and dirtier now. The folks in Dimock don't take kindly to the thoughtful suggestion made by the Democratic candidate for governor that we need to take another look at this shale drilling thing, regulate it, and fund the EPA properly to keep an eye on the drilling companies. No, "Drill, baby, drill" is the motto the people can get behind in Susquehanna county. And if someone's house blows up, well, that's just the price of progress.

A place where they tell you to open the windows before you take a bath is not somewhere I want to live. And the idea of flaming tap water is downright Apocalyptic. Oh, yeah, it's getting darker in Susquehanna County.

The Dark Ages began when the Roman Empire fell. Go read it for yourself; Gibbon is still waiting for you, all six volumes. You connect the dots: Superstition, ignorance, desperation, the decline of cultural artifacts, the rise of belief over knowledge. Oh, for the darkness of the womb! But I want to have that discussion, Susquehanna, about why you vote almost straight Republican when the same fellows that brought you the trillion dollar boondoggle called the Iraq War where your sons and daughters got their arms and legs blown off, are now trying to bring you methane-flavored water so that you can blow up your own own house by taking a bath. Can we have that discussion, Susquehanna?



In New York City, where it is always bright and the night sky takes on the comforting aspect of a soft violet pink dome, I was sheltered from this darkness for so many years. We heard about it, read about it in the New York Times, but in New York City you can always go downtown and forget all your worries, forget all your cares, just like Petula sang. There, in the glittering 24-hour midway of writers, hipsters, Rockefeller University wizards, university kids and the lords of hip hop and poetry jam, you can believe that you're living in a world that is getting brighter and more brilliant, not darker and dumber. But here in Stag County, it's getting darker. And it's getting darker still in Dimock, and all over Susquehanna, Johnstown and Juniata counties. There's no soft, pink dome hanging over the dark, hulking, cool coal backbone of Pennsylvania, north and west of the Alleghenies. All that they have out in those parts is the kind of chill that takes a century to set into your bones, the lonely whistle of the train in the night, and the stark rage that comes from being left in dark for too long while other people get to dance with the stars. From the shadows of northern and western Pennsylvania, they see the bright lights of New York City twinkling like the eye of Sauron from the TV in living room. But there amongst the TV trays, the sprung sofas, the smell of disappointment and the unpaid mortgages, a spark of longing ignites into stark fury.

It's getting dark now in Stag County. Here in the comfort of Tiny Town, I am not nearly as sunk into the shadows as many others. But now that I have left the shining dome of the Emerald City, I can peer a little deeper into the night and, as winter comes on, I see a dark country.

Swept Away

My extended absence from this blog would make it seem as if my breakup with New York were complete. Things have demanded my attention: the election, my business,  the fall planting, and an array of time-consuming personal matters that demand more attention as the years pass. Principally, though, the urge to do write about you, New York, deserted me as FF and I passed our one year anniversary here in Piedmont. After 28 years, New York, you'd think it would take me longer to get over us, wouldn't you?

Am I over us?

Photo by Tenured Radical

I felt keenly vulnerable in my last years as a resident of New York City.  I knew what it was to watch a skyscraper crumble, a subway line flood, a mischief of rats storm up the A Train platform to escape the fire and fumes of downtown. I knew what it was to bend myself double against a winter blast, ten times harsher and colder than normal because of the glass canyons of midtown. I knew the desperation of walking more than 100 blocks in summer heat to get home when the transportation system shut down.  People weren't made to live like that, I thought. I wasn't made to live like that. And what pretty pipe dream of fame and fortune is worth that much trouble, anyway? Why endure it? Just to say I live in New York City?

As Hurricane Sandy pummeled the Northeast last week, here in Piedmont we  were sitting pretty. Cozied up here in the folds of these ancient hills, we were spared and are spared the worst weather most of the time. Hurricanes rarely penetrate deep enough inland to threaten, and the scattering of tornadoes seem to come to a cartoon-ish, screeching halt at RTP. Sometimes it rains a lot, but our abundance of fragrant balsam forests handle the water pretty well, except in those spots where developers have been too imprudent in their love affair with concrete. 

Last week, FF and I noted that we still had our preparations from hurricane Irene pretty much in place: The baker's shelf of canned goods, the lantern, lamp oil, flashlights and batteries, the Coleman stove and bottled gas, and the gallons of bottled water. This time, we added sandbags, filled and stacked neatly against the cellar door, and a backup sump pump and a manual pump just in case of power outage. Seasoned firewood was stacked cozily in the garage, the patio furniture stowed in the crawl space and, thus prepared, we waited. But we didn't have to break into our stores for Sandy and we merely passed several cold, gray days watching the hurricane gather itself, follow the train tracks north, and then punch you, New York City, right in the schnozz.

When FF and I left New York for the last time a year and a half ago, having dropped the key to my Harlem apartment with a clatter into the mailbox, we passed over the George Washington Bridge and I felt a tug at my heart as we made our way to the mainland, the lights of Riverside Drive receding in the rear view mirror. But beyond the nostalgia, I felt an urgent sense that I was getting out just in the nick of time. And when the apartment finally sold and I pulled my last material  assets out of the city, I experienced a breathless feeling as one might if a nightmare magically resolved itself and that dream suitcase you had been trying to pack was finally packed, or the dream person you couldn't find was finally found, or whatever anxiety-charged situation you were facing in your sleeping life suddenly morphed into a nice dream from which you woke up, warm and smiling in your own bed. I felt as if I had cheated fate when I got out of New York City without suffering heavy losses, like a person who had the presence of mind to leave the casino with a few dollars still in his pockets.

This feeling of having escaped in the nick is not something I've talk about with almost anyone. It's not a conversation I imagine that my old friends, who still see the City as the center of the worthwhile universe, would want to have with me. I lived through 9/11 there, and I experienced first-hand what it's like when things go very, very wrong in that  huge Rube Goldberg device called Manhattan, and I know how hard it is to make it work again.  I was there in hurricane Gloria in 1985 which, though it didn't hit the city head on, caused the evacuation of all the high rises. I'll never forget fighting my way in to work that day because I was new on the job, and finding no one on the darkened 32nd floor of the Time and Life Building except my obsessive compulsive boss, reading the Times in the yellow glow of a desk lamp,  and the big plate glass windows shimmying so fast in the wind that they rang like bells. I've been in floods, snowstorms, blackouts and pretty much everything that could go wrong in a big city except invasion by zombies, and when the chance presented itself to opt for a less disaster-prone environment, I leaped at it and into the waiting arms of my beloved FF, who never trusted the place, anyway.

Sandy with and her peak 80 mph sustained winds doesn't come close to matching The Long Island Express of 1938. Sandy was a big fat, wet storm, but she wasn't nearly as powerful as the storm of '38 that killed nearly 700 people in the New York City area and changed the topography of Long Island forever. But it's possible that when all the numbers are added up that Sandy will be the more expensive date, not only in terms of dollars but also for the cultural losses. Coney Island is a muddy memory now, and Staten Island a place of  homelessness and death.  Out in the Rockaways, fire and water consumed communities that had already suffered airplane crashes in the last decade, and had lost nearly 300 people in 9/11. The word "apocalypse" has been used a lot for Sandy, and such low-lying places as these cannot help but continue to be victimized as changing climate, urban congestion and global political unrest heighten indefinitely. 

Idiots and heroes were in abundance on TV this week, making me hoot and weep as I watched you take it in the teeth, New York City. I fumed angrily at the story of the man who refused to open his door to a woman in distress with two little boys who later drowned. My heart swelled in admiration for a man who rescued his 81 year old mother from her flooded house with only waders and a surf board as equipment. And yesterday, somebody put up a YouTube featuring the whole Lower East Side cheering for about 15 minutes all up and down First Avenue and beyond because the electricity was finally back on. And at that moment I had a pang of missing you, New York. I actually missed being part of that cheering crowd that had spent the last five days dealing together with the miserable cold, the food rotting in the refrigerator and no hot showers. Briefly, I felt as if I were missing the main event. Will I ever know such difficulties again? Will I ever know such triumph? Are the highs you offer worth the insane lows you inflict?

25 years in New York and I was never convinced that I was a real New Yorker. I felt most like a New Yorker when I was somewhere else, on a stage singing in Germany, or working a cruise ship. "You're from New York? Wow!" the Europeans would say, a glimmer of admiration in their eyes.  But it felt good to bask in your reflected glory, good to accept that prize of specialness that being from New York (undeservedly) gave me.  Back home, though, I lived in Harlem where I was nicknamed Snowflake and where I was never really an accepted member of the Harlem club. Neither in the other neighborhoods where I lived did I ever feel like a New Yorker truly, nor did I understand what truly linked New Yorkers to each except the capacity to endure insult after insult, and a tireless belief that maybe one day they would "make it". Or at least know someone who did.

Here in Piedmont, life is smooth. The mountains are old and round, the rivers are many, the forests are big and the coast is long.  I know already that I'll never really belong to this place any more than I did in New York City. But I have adopted Piedmont wholeheartedly as the place I will likely spend the rest of my life, and I hope I can offer it something while I'm here. Carolinians are not, in the main, interested in far-fetched ideas of glory, power or drama. They like to be outdoors, enjoy the back porch, watch the seasons pass, and they are known for making things with their hands that take patience, like guitars and quilts. Carolina smells good, and the beauty outweighs the ugly by a long shot. These old mountains don't care about roller-coaster highs and lows: they are the face of eternity and the glory of nature, and are unconcerned with the self-glorification of mankind.

As they say here, there may be something better somewhere, but this is as good a place as any to wait for better to come along.  So  I can't imagine a true Carolinian ever feeling, as I did for a brief moment this week, that I should have been in New York City, not in this peaceful place, when a bunch of cold, dirty, tired New Yorkers cheered in the streets just because the lights came on.

D O G

He stands four-square, his big head slightly lowered, floppy ears akimbo and his great dark eyes tilted up, focused entirely on me.

D O G

"Come!" I command, in the sharp authoritarian tone of voice I've been taught to use by the professional trainers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Now, again, in a slightly higher tone, "Come, Carter, come!" And I crouch a bit, arms wide, a big smile on my face. Oh, that gets his engine running! Here he comes, galloping straight at me, thinking no words, expecting no thing: Perfect enthusiasm and trust on four legs.

 "Goodoggoodoggoodaaawg," I enthuse, rubbing his head, his shoulder blades, his broad white chest. "gooooooddog!"
Carter is my first dog.

He is not my husband FF's first , though. FF was brought up with dogs, had dogs in his previous marriage, and indeed has certain dog characteristics himself, all of them positive, like loyalty and razor sharp intuition about how I am feeling in any given moment. How did the word 'dog' come into negative use in modern parlance anyway? It's a usage based on sexual politics and invented, I believe, by people who don't understand dogs and are apt to abuse them.  Thanks to Carter, to me the word 'dog' is synonymous with the word 'good'.

I spotted him on a flyer in one of our local diners and was mysteriously and immediately attracted to his big black nose and huge dark eye sockets. A few days later, I was overwhelmed with emotion as I sat on the floor of his foster family's apartment with all 48 pounds of him seductively curled in my lap, leaning his great heavy skull against mine, breathing and snuffling into my ear.  I was utterly taken by him as I have rarely ever been taken by another living being, with no words exchanged, only a kind of Super Soul Meet in which I understood that this creature was utterly innocent and one hundred percent good. When we returned to our car that night without him, I burst into tears: There was no other option than that Carter should come to live with us.

Carter is about a year and a bit old. He was rounded up by Animal Control here in Piedmont, lived in an Animal Control shelter for a while, and then was boarded by a foster family for six months.  He owes his life to an unbroken chain of generous humans who quietly fought for him and believed that he ought to keep on living. He has had three names in the course of his short existence, so we let him keep the last one they gave him to spare him more changes. He's good-looking and smart, and we can't quite figure out how it is that he managed to stick around without being adopted for almost six months: He was waiting, apparently, for us. He was waiting for me.

Carter is a great dog; he is also a clear sign of my successful breakup with New York. It would have been both impractical and also unkind to keep this jumping, running, digging tribute to animal grace in a fourth floor walk-up apartment. Furthermore, we never would've found a dog like Carter in New York City: this mix-up of Akita, bull terrier, and typical Southern hound dog is a product of the liberal propagation of dog genes that occurs only in wider spaces and warmer climates. Carter, FF, this house and this garden are the tap roots I am  sinking down, the visible artifacts of a decision made to become part of this place that is so very far away from the winter cold of Tiny Town, so very far from the hard, punishing surfaces of Manhattan where I strove for so many years. I look around me at the evidence of the work we've been doing here in the house and on the property and I know I've made some intelligent decisions lately.

I hear Carter's trademark shake in the other room: 7, exactly 7, shakes of the head and body that make his dog tags jingle-jangle. He's letting us know he's on the move, making sure where we are, checking what's going on outside. During these last two and a half months of forming our pack of three, Carter has come to see FF and me as his leaders, the givers of all good things, of all correction and praise. He wakes us in the morning, and he doesn't go to bed until he knows we've retired too, no matter how sleepy he is.  He greets us when we return home with sustained enthusiasm evident in every tensed and quivering muscle that wants to jump up but has learned not to; he follows us down to the TV room at night, curling up between us and falling into a contented sleep. He knows what good is: praise, food, sleep, running, digging, sunshine, play, being together with the pack.

They say dogs don't think. Not like you and I do, anyhow. But Carter thinks and I know he does because we watch him trying to decide if he's going to obey a command he knows -- or not; we see him design squirrel catching strategies of different types and then modify them when they don't work; and his quick cleaving to our daily routines shows me his brain is working just fine. What he doesn't do is worry about tomorrow, dwell on the yesterday or have moral dilemmas. Training him requires me to be aware of his enviably straightforward world view, and be utterly connected to what can be understood without language; no assumptions can be made, consistency and clarity are the foundation of our relationship. Carter gives me big clues about how I might be a better friend and a better person.

Carter is also, oddly enough, helping me to become a better language teacher. In the first month or so of training him, I had regular epiphanies about how to work better with my students and I started to emphasize techniques I was using with Carter in my work with the human students.  Among these techniques are:

• Be consistent.
• Smile a lot.
• Repeat a lot.
• Always reward good performance clearly.
• Always indicate poor performance clearly.
• Make sure the rules of the game are clear.
• Don't make the game too complex.
• Treat each element of a complex game as a skill in itself and practice it separately.
• Don't play any game for too long.
• Use body language carefully and with purpose.
• And be consistent.

I already knew these ideas from 20-plus years of teaching, but Carter is helping me become more careful still because, unlike my human students who have an ego involvement in trying to be right, he invariably and shamelessly shows me immediately when I've screwed up as a teacher. Watching him, I've become more alert to my students' expressions and body language to figure out when I need to make an adjustment.

Carter is out in the yard now, enjoying the bright Piedmont sun, still trying to catch a squirrel. It's been two and half months and he hasn't caught one yet, but still he tries. I wonder at his optimism, his ability to remain stock still for as much as 15-20 minutes. Soon, I'll go out and we'll play a game in the backyard, and once again his doggy world will blend with my human one, each soul become finer for the time spent together.

Come, Carter, come!  Good dog.

Watching New York from Afar on 9/11.

It's 10:09 a.m., and we're in Piedmont having turkey sausage biscuits and coffee for Sunday breakfast. The 9/11 memorial service is on TV, and New York City feels so very long ago and far away. I realize that I don't know that place anymore, that site where AG and I played music for the relief workers in the big white tent in the weeks after the towers fell, in those days when every other song we sang took on an unexpectedly tragic tone. I never visited the memorial later. Didn't want to.  Now, I breathe a great sigh of relief that FF and I have found a safe nest far, far away from the City. New York City, 10 years and two wars later.

Photo: AFP

Ten years ago today after the first tower fell, I walked 92 blocks from Chambers Street back to the Upper West Side and waited on the stoop hoping that AG would materialize eventually. It was a preternaturally crystalline blue fall day. And in the street were delivery boys and pastel mommies pushing strollers mixed in with bedraggled business people clutching odd assortments of office stuff, women in bare feet and ripped pantyhose, and bewildered men covered in soot. I did not have the strength to walk the next 63 blocks to my apartment in Harlem, and all the phones were down. If I didn't wait there on his stoop, I wouldn't know if AG was OK or not. So when he came galloping around the corner covered in sweat, I was profoundly grateful and relieved.

Stark fear kept AG and I inside that apartment for two days. For two days we stayed inside, as the plume of black smoke drifted above the city like a toxic feather boa, and we talked about getting the heck out of New York City. We started that day plotting to take our songs and guitars to Europe and possibly even stay there for good.  Within two years of that day, AG and I were headed to Switzerland. We stayed for three years.

The feeling that New York City had become too much like a rat trap took root in me then, and it's a feeling that has never left me. I could no longer feel the magic of living in New York, and even after I met FF and started spending most of my time with him in Tiny Town, on my weekly trips back to New York I found myself imagining how I would escape if the bridges closed, if the tunnels collapsed, if this whole gigantic, man-eating pinball machine became broken and uninhabitable again. On the commuter train, I would meditate about how I would walk back to Tiny Town, how FF would find me -- somehow. And I knew that as long as I had chattel and business in New York City, I would continue to live with these nightmares.

I didn't want it.

When AG and I came back to the United States, it was because we missed Americans, not the city. How I love Americans! Our arguments, our passion, our humor, our music, and our magnificent diversity which is the very source of all our arguments and is also all that makes us great.  In Europe, in the beautiful historic cobble-stoned towns, on the modern high-speed trains that we took from gig to gig,  life felt harmonious and socially advanced. We played music for astonishingly well-disciplined and well-socialized Europeans who seem so adult and well-mannered compared to Americans, and who paid so well for music. I kept experimenting with the thought of living the rest of my life over there. But despite Europe's beauty and romance, despite the comforting order and sheer social intelligence of Europe, I couldn't see myself fitting in there. I missed America like a lost tooth. Or, rather, I missed Americans. And I wanted to go home.

Today, Vice President Joe Biden gave probably the best speech of his life to the assembled mourners at the memorial park in front of the Pentagon in Washington D.C., He said, "The true source of American Power does not lie within that building; we draw our strength from the rich tapestry of our people." He spoke about the courage that lies within the heart of every person and how it is right that sometimes that courage must be summoned as it was on September 11, 10 years ago. He spoke of the irreplaceable nature of every person who was lost on that day, and as he choked up you could tell that he was thinking of his own irreplaceable loved ones lost in an auto accident on another less spectacular but still terrible day so many years ago.

We all love and we all lose.  Every day. The hero that lies waiting within each of us of whom Biden spoke is honorable, whether or not we are the ones called upon to race up the stairs of an inferno to save someone's life. It is the tragedy of our condition that someday all heroes must die, that we all must die.

I would argue that it ultimately doesn't matter when or how or where you lost your beloved.  We project ourselves into the experiences of other people, especially those whom we love, and it hurts to think that they hurt, makes us cry to think that they suffer. Have we developed the wisdom yet to project ourselves into the experiences of people who are not like us, and to feel their pain as keenly as we do our own? And if not, why not?

It seems to me as I watch these ceremonies on TV on this 10th anniversary, that there are less people crying out there in audience, less people weeping as they read the names of the dead. That's good. As a little boy who lost his Dad in the towers said "I get a little agitated sometimes, because I don't want to be known as someone directly affected by 9/11: I want to be known for who I am." What wisdom! May the adults take heed, and begin to lay to rest our culture of victim-hood. May we heed the words of this child and ease his burden. Let us know that it's wise to heal and it's strength to accept and go on, released of the binding chains of suffering while informed by its lessons. I hope that this 10th anniversary comes with a lessening of pain in the world, not just in America, and that the culture of victimhood that sprang up in the years following 9/11 will begin to fade away. Hanging onto anger and to hurt is ultimately not a creative act. It is possible to honor heroes without suffering their passing, just as it is possible, and necessary, to make justice without vengeance.  If we don't, September 11's will continue to happen both here and around the world until we perish from this Earth.

1 World Trade Center is finally going up. Mayor Bloomberg calls it  a "symbol of our freedom," which to me is an absurdity. The Twin Towers were as this new tower will be, a symbol of American money and power, which is exactly why terrorists attacked them in the first place. It would behoove us to start telling more truths, and to be more clear-minded about who we really are. It would behoove us to get our symbols right, and to understand that freedom is not something that you build with steel and concrete but rather with wisdom, compassion and truth and by defending the rights of your neighbor as ferociously as you would defend your own.

I fear that in our passion and our willingness to be led by flag-wavers, we Americans are setting ourselves up to ignore the lessons of 9/11. What if we get it wrong again? What if we become only more arrogant, and not more wise? What if we become more deluded, and not more clear-headed about the world and its problems? What if we never learn that our very survival as a species depends upon us caring as much about the suffering of a child in Iraq as the suffering of a child in New York City?

In Piedmont, it's a sunny day. Here, I am as safe and happy as I have ever been in my life. The New York City apartment is now sold, Tiny Town is behind us, and I have FF by my side here at our peaceful homestead in the Carolina forest. In a material sense, the break up with New York is complete.

Behind me, the muted television continues to flash terrible images of a decade ago interspersed with views of New York City today, where clean reflecting pools and flowers fill the space that once was all fire, smoke and ruins.  Our big kitchen windows look out on a green lawn, and the winter garden is sprouting kale and cabbage in the autumn sun. The piney forest stretches out beyond, filled with the hum of living things. I will go out there to the forest today with my gloves and tools. I will go to tend to the Garden. And if I remember the places I've left behind, it will be with love.

Hurricane in Piedmont

There was a moment this hurricane weekend when I thought, "I am afraid".

We have only owned this house in Piedmont for two months and we've lived in it for only six weeks. We only just got the custom blinds installed in the kitchen, and I know hurricanes: They mess stuff up.

When I was poor and landless and living in New York City, I loved hurricanes. I loved the mess they made, the hole they tore in the control freakiness of the big city. Once, I spent a weekend on Fire Island in the teeth of one of them, running around on the beach nearly naked, screaming challenges at the wind, and then creeping along the boardwalks behind the dunes where tiny white-tail deer were waiting motionless in the swamp for the storm to pass. I rejoiced then in the destructive force of the wind. I didn't worry about getting hurt, or things getting hurt.

But I have lost that urban brashness. Now I have something of serious worth that the hurricane could take from me. Now I am different. I have trees.

As we stowed the patio furniture, stacked the cushions in the living room, and packed the two-car brick garage tight with our two cars and everything else that might turn into a missile in high wind, what tore at my heart was the trees, these magnificent trees that have enchanted me from the first time we drove up to our new house. We have only just met each other, these trees and I. There are huge, mature willow oaks at the front and back, venerable natives of North Carolina with great, grey trunks. There are girly pink, bobblehead crape myrtles in the backyard with their slick, peeling skins, and the fluttering, lacy dogwoods who gather beneath the oak canopy. There's the row of Leyland cypress which somebody planted too close together some years ago along the northern border of our property and which I've promised to prune hard come fall, and there's the spindly, young pear tree standing tentatively next to the back deck. And then there are those old men, the native North Carolina long needle pines, straight backed giants in the woods out back, and our squat, bodacious Brunswick fig with its leaves like big flat hands, blowsily overspilling its protected spot in back of the garage. And there, there by the back gate, is the bay tree standing spit-shined and dark green, stiff like an obedient schoolboy in his brand new suit.

I cannot protect them from the hurricane. Neither, with all of our preparations, can we protect ourselves from this storm if she wants to take us. But in my heart, it's the trees, the trees. Will the trees make it through?

Before the storm, the air goes quite still. For a day before it hits, a gray wetness hangs in the air making the atmosphere heavy and motionless. The birds go silent, group by group, and all crawling and flying things shut down for business except for the frogs that start gathering closer in to the house, one very large one even appearing at a kitchen window as if sent by the amphibian world to warn us. Storm, says the frog with his googly eyes. And then he disappears into the bushes. Soon then come the wet globs of something not really rain, just drops of sweat flung from the brow of this monster dancer, hurricane Irene.

FF occupies himself assembling the new wet vac, taking the battery powered sump on a test run and reading the directions for our last line of defense against wet basement: the hand operated bilge pump. I flit and fret around the house filling water bottles and bathtubs, feeling unsettled, and worrying for the trees. In the calm before the storm they go still, gathering themselves as if taking a big, collective arboreal breath. And when the wind gusts start up, we watch as their great crowns sway and bend with the wind, tossing leaf clusters, dry twigs and needles down to the ground like candies from some massive piñata. The noble wood, more flexible than we could imagine, bends and bends hard. But it does not break. And Irene, who capriciously decides to pirouette just enough to the East to save us all, leaves the sky a wooly white, throws some trash on the ground and turns her attentions elsewhere.

Piedmont, it seems was just out of reach. And while the coast was slammed, we were merely put through our paces. Irene laughs as she lumbers on, gathering her wide skirts around her. The TV maps show her moving north, towards our friends and family up Virginia way and on to Tiny Town and New York City where some await her, huddled in apartments. There in New York City mass transit is shutting down and people are evacuating from low lying areas. I think of my friends, stuck uptown by the closed GW bridge and the shut-down subway system, and I am concerned. But my heart also does a little happy dance that I am here worrying about trees, and not there depending on the works of man to save me.

I am in Piedmont where people handle storms with chainsaws and and generators. I am in Piedmont, where the forest and the hills are my fortress, and where the trees are braver and wiser than I shall ever be.

No Time to Celebrate

On this gray day when all the media is awash with news of the assassination of 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seal Team 6, I am solemn.

I was a New Yorker on Chambers Street the day the Towers crumbled to the ground, but I do not join in these celebrations. I broke up with New York City in part because of an ever-increasing sense of unease at the security risk of living in a densely populated urban area, but I do not join in these celebrations.

I find unseemly and disturbing the jubilation in the streets, the flag waving and the vulgar language on the front pages of certain New York newspapers. I wince as the families of the victims of 9/11 are trotted out (again) on the major networks to admit morosely that justice has been done but to also reassure all of us that their wounds will never, ever heal. I am also wondering, as does Chauncey Devega of the intelligent blog We Are Respectable Negroes how right wing strategists are going to find a way to deny credit to President Obama for this momentous event.

Joy over the death of anyone is a bitter joy indeed. The solemn face of our President as he reported the death of Bin Laden last night might have been a guide for us as a nation, if we respected our elected leaders enough to model ourselves after them. As long as we maintain our passion for revenge, our delight in the suffering and death of people of whom we disapprove, our determination to hang on to our personal wounds as if they were badges of honor, and as long as we continue to rapture in violence and death, we invite Death and War into our homes and hearts.

Inevitably, the Fear Machine is already cranking up in the wake of this "victory". Already the commentators are warning us that alert levels will be higher, and that once again we should fear what comes next. The cycle of Death and Fear, uninterrupted by wiser thoughts and higher consciousness, is never ending. The human ego, which wants everything for Self and has never learned to share, continues to eat the Death Pill despite our professions of Christian charity and belief in eternal life. We remain prideful of our supposed liberty and free will as Americans while still living as unconscious prisoners inside this maximum security facility of Fear and Separateness that we have built for ourselves with our grim celebration of Death and our belief in the rightness and inevitability of Violence Ever After.

It is not just history itself but how we react to it that counts. Are we only able to mourn for our own? Must we celebrate the demise of our enemies? Can you imagine an America filled with generous people, candles lit, praying for the souls of the dead in this battle and remembering with love those lost in the attacks of 9/11? Can you imagine a silence falling over New York City, a thoughtful silence, in all American cities and towns far and wide as we collectively prayed for Peace and the end to assassinations and war? Can you imagine an American public and media awake to their own fundamental role in and individual responsibility for the creation of a world free of hate?

I can hear you scoffing. Don't scoff. That is what the Dark One wishes you to do so that he can keep you incarcerated in the prison you currently inhabit. Do I believe in a Devil, you ask? No, not "just so". But I know that if you want peace, you have to Be Peace, Breathe Peace, Live Peace in every act, every day, and I am certain that the frenzied chest-pounding over the death of Bin Laden is not that.

Is the death of Osama bin Laden a victory? Certainly it is an important victory for the US Armed Forces and the President: A mass murderer has been run to ground. But for global humanity it is a complete failure that we continue to settle our differences this way.

What the city can teach this country

Everyone agrees that shouting fire in a theater is a crime. It's a social agreement that emerges from the culture of congestion.

Yesterday FF and I sat sorrowful and silent watching the news coverage of the massacre in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona while Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford lay in a hospital having a bullet removed from her head. I called my friends in Tucson, Mountain Sea and his girlfriend, to make sure that they were O.K. They were as O.K. as any two really sad people could be. They have been thinking, as has the avuncular Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, that Tucson has become the epicenter of bigotry and hate speech in America. And they are thinking of getting the heck out of there. This is the same state where armed posses of citizenry have been armed by a sheriff (not Dupnik) to go after illegal immigrants in the desert. Who can blame them for being, well, a little down on Arizona?

On Saturday, Pima County Sheriff Dupnik remarked ""The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry." Then, refusing to moderate his speech on the topic on Sunday, he continued: "I think we're the tombstone of the United States of America." And he seemed to be suggesting that our country is on its deathbed and Tucson will mark its grave. Pretty strong words. But unmerited?

Who will be called to account for Sarah Palin's "target practice" propaganda previous to the midterm elections in which a rifle site was placed on Congresswoman Gifford's district? Who will bring Bill O'Reilly to justice for repeatedly spouting hate against Dr. George Tiller, murdered while attending church in 2009 by a crazed anti-abortion activist? And what about Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman's infamous line delivered at a Tea Party rally in July, "If ballots don't work, bullets will"? And then there is the ongoing hum of vitriol which is the stuff of talk shows and certain TV hosts.

As FF is quick to point out, Keith Obermann has the talent to be as odious and over the top as Glen Beck. And the horrific season of political ads previous to the midterm elections is something I still have nightmares about. We have become a nation of bullies, kids who humiliate each other on Facebook and adults who, unable to express ideas in complex sentences and ruled by their fears and prejudices, lower the tone of public discourse to "screw you!" "Yeah, well screw you too!" Thomas Hobbes, the ultimate federalist, claimed that the life of the average man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Now the only difference is we imagine we are not solitary because of Twitter and, oh yes, we live a lot longer than we used to. But the brutish, nasty and poor are qualities in which we have come to revel and make good money on TV deals. The nastier, the more newsworthy.

Legally, speech inciting others to violence goes unpunished unless a direct causal relationship can be determined between the speech and an act which results the deprivation of another person's civil rights, among them the right to remain alive. But in a world of rapid individual broadcasting and widespread editorializing, is it fair to hold ourselves to those standards meant for a slower world, or practical to expect the torrent of electronic messages to be traceable to those angry, deranged recipients who decide to actualize their hateful words?

People who live in cities understand something of the difference between free speech and saying whatever you want whenever you want, and if there were no calibrating forced at work in America's cities, they would have exploded a long time ago. In New York, we understand this because we are in unusually close contact with millions of other people on a 23 square mile-sized rock. On each square mile of Manhattan real estate is living an average of 75,000 people: The average US town/city has less than 7,000 people in the whole town. If Mr. New Yorker always said what was on his mind, he'd be in the hospital or dead within a week, which is another way of saying that good walls and closed mouths make good neighbors. I would say that by and large the New Yorker is more tolerant and restrained than the average American citizen by a long shot (pardon the expression).

New Yorkers know something about the niceties of free speech, because our daily safety depends upon it. I think that cultural artifacts like rap and hip hop developed in the cities precisely because of a strong need to find an outlet for angry self-expression that won't get you killed. This sort of contained, organized creative expression is unknown in rural environments where you can say what you want when you want to and populations remain either homogeneous or self-segregating. There's no particular need to practice tongue-holding in the land of the romantic country ballad, Nascar and caribou shooting with the Mama Grizzlies.

Most New Yorkers know from birth that "straight-talk" is not the same as shooting your mouth off, and freedom is not doing whatever the hell you damn well please. If you'd ever been standing in an attitude of studied restraint on the platform at Lexington and 53rd with a hundred other people while an evil-smelling, homeless prophet of doom preached loudly that all women were whores, you'd know what I'm talking about.

But in this Brave New World, country becomes city and city becomes country, geography is leveled and foreshortened by the video game landscape of modern digital media. Suddenly non-urban people who don't have experience with getting along with others in a crowded subway are in sweaty, close proximity with fellow beings the world around, thrust into a crowded virtual Metropolis for which I believe they are ill-prepared. Both the new broadcasters of opinion and the recipients of their virulent messages on MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter are swimming in unfamiliar waters, newly puffed up with the ability to throw their voices long distances, and desperately uneducated to the grave responsibilities of doing so. Indeed, as in the case of the Tucson gunman, many are simply desperately uneducated. Period.

As Congresswoman Gifford fights for her life in a Tucson hospital and others in that desert town grieve the loss of their loved ones, the difference between free speech and criminally irresponsible speech has to be considered carefully -- and soon.

We have failed to recognize that everyone now lives in a culture of congestion thanks to the all-inclusive aspect of modern media, but most are unprepared to deal with it. The messages that are broadcast now are unfiltered by wiser minds and voices of reason, and the air is full of the egotistic buckshot of hate speech and irresponsibly provocative imagery. Most of the citizens of this country are utterly unprepared to deal with the new media. And many of them will defend to the death -- maybe even your death -- their constitutional right to shout "fire" in this very crowded theater.

The Seasons of my Soul

If there were no Starbucks, I might freeze to death in New York City.

It was Tuesday, my New York City day, the air was bone-achingly cold, and I didn't have many classes. My teaching schedule tends to fall apart in December. And although I keep showing up faithfully, my students tend to get sick, flake out inexplicably or suddenly realize that, by golly, they are too busy at Christmas to study Spanish! Suddenly my schedule sprouts holes, unprepared lessons, confusions about billing, and other miscues of various sorts. So in the gaps between cancellations and hectic subway encounters in the frozen urban tundra, I seek refuge in Starbucks.

I am deeply thankful for free WiFi and hot tea.

FF and I are about to celebrate our second Christmas in Tiny Town and our first as husband and wife. This weekend, he helped me string up fir garland around the stone and timber walls of our pre-Revolutionary War living room, patiently looking for the nails I had driven with care into the old timbers last year. He hung the garland as I stood there holding the donut roll of connected fir boughs, fragrant like a sylvan feather boa. And as I stood watching him loop greenery around our cozy room, I suddenly had a mental picture of my Dad, now almost 11 years deceased, putting up the big old-style colored Christmas lights on the big yew outside Mom's kitchen window while she stood on the snow crackled lawn in her embroidered shearling coat giving him instructions.

That mental picture of Mom and Dad is one that surprised me. It was a "new" memory, if you will, one I don't remember ever having remembered before. Coming as it did in that moment of decking the halls of Casa Tiny Town, it showed me the continuity between my life now with FF and the world from which I come. For if there is a rhythm and logic to the life FF and I are building together, there is also another deeper logic that comes from our past and it provides a comforting synchronization between now and the other lives we lived when we were young trees. When I was a girl in the suburbs of Philadelphia, when I was still wondering who FF would be, I was watching this very scene unfold. Now here I am doing the Christmas decoration dance in another time and place, and it makes me feel as if I am living right.

There is a comfort to my life in Tiny Town with FF that is based on sameness. Our life has a schedule that involves our individual and cooperative activities: My Tuesdays in Manhattan, fish on Wednesdays, diner Fridays, welcome home notes, and countless small gestures and activities that through happy repetition make our life take shape and assume a form at once reliable and comforting. When we said our vows in August, the unspoken subtext was that for a long while now things are going to continue in basically the same way and that we two are really OK with that. This sameness is like a favorite record (yes, I wrote "record") that you've played hundreds of times before and, though the songs are always the same, the pleasure is new each time. In the soothing warmth of good love, I am finding out, the fun comes from observing the slight variations that emerge as we dance to the same old song.

Early on, before the wedding, the sameness of this rhythm here in Tiny Town irked me in a way I couldn't quite locate: I felt kind of jittery. Life was delightfully, annoyingly, enchantingly, maddeningly peaceful here! It was as if I were afraid that life would outrun me, as if there were something I was supposed to be doing but wasn't doing while I was here watching the leaves turn color and the river rise and fall. It was as if I could not feel truly engaged in Being writ large while quiet, as if I were going to miss my stop on the destiny train without the onslaught of the City's obstacles and energies. Constant change, of personnel and place, have been my life in New York City for the past 28 years. And constant change is not only inevitable, but also good, right? Keep pushing forward! Change keeps you young!

But I am no longer just about myself and my own quicksilver dreams: I am profoundly anchored to Love with a man who is himself as rock steady as a sustained G below middle C. Deep and kind, tired but tireless, he keeps a steady rhythm for me that quietens me. Is it this countryside or is it the man himself that soothes my heart so? No longer does the whim of change intrigue me, nor does it seem like the way towards any destiny worth having. I want to gather myself up like a thunderhead, like a great tree silently exploding from its roots in centennial slow motion towards the heavens. I want to feel my roots beneath me as I move with deliberate dawdle. I want to know the depth of my life, not just its speed, and see how it is always the same and ever-modulating in microscopic ways that I -- finally -- find worth noticing.

I no longer need a world tour to make me feel alive. I lose myself in the profundity of one single square foot of Right Here, Right Now.

Tradition, sings Tevya forever, tradition! I have discovered here in Tiny Town with FF that Tradition is not something that you do alone: You do it with other people, people you love. Tradition is not merely a series of parties and holiday shopping lists, but rather it is a conscious, cyclical exchange of feelings based on a continuity of identity and a shared passion with specific people. Now, in our first year of marriage and our third year of knowing each other, FF and I get to say, "Remember when...?" and we get to laugh together in a way that presages a future that will be equally, satisfyingly ours.

Somehow tradition never happened for me in New York City. People were coming and going too fast and they were too occupied with getting the project done, the better job, the invitation to the networking party, or whatever they were off trying to do. I, too, was coming and going too frantically to really know where I was headed. The spirit of strive and conquer, which is at the very heart of New York City's reason for being, discourages silent nights and it does not care about the quiet contemplation of one square foot of snow crackled ground.

Here in in Tiny Town, Christmas creeps upon us with a tree lighting in Revolutionary Square (our tree is about 15 times smaller than the one in Rockefeller Center), and a frozen hush that is so deep you can hear the very thoughts of the few passersby. When I shop on Main Street I get a 10% discount because I am a local, but I would shop here anyway just to share some encouraging smiles with the local merchants whom I now know by name and who continue to tough it out in this very contracted economy. The local weatherman promises a white Christmas, so I will pull a tarp over the short-cut logs from the old buttonwood tree we had to fell this autumn. Those logs will require some seasoning before we can burn them, I think. And I am satisfied that this pile will keep us warm. Next Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a very Happy New Year.

Soft Is Not Stupid

The recent news of pitching ace Clifton Phifer Lee, aka Cliff Lee, turning down the New York Yankees' offer of around 150 million for the Philadelphia Phillies more modest 120 million dollar offer had me exultant. Crowing. Ebullient.

I'm a lifelong Phillies fan, and of course I was thrilled that we now have probably the best lineup of starters ever in baseball history with Lee, Roy Oswalt, Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels. And if we can only remember how to hit the ball, the 2011 season is shaping up to be a humdinger for Phillies fans. But the story really got to me because Cliff Lee, in his very polite Arkansas way, said "no" to a big steaming wad of money and "yes" to a lesser wad and the team and city he really wanted to play for. Cliff Lee said no to New York City.

Texas Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels remarked to MLB , "He was very appreciative of the time he was here (in Texas) and how he was treated. He and his family enjoyed his time here. He also enjoyed his time in Philadelphia and liked some of the things that opportunity had to offer. People rag on players for following that last dollar. Cliff didn't do that. I have a lot of respect for him."

Me too. I also admit that if anyone offered me 100 or so million dollars for anything I would be really OK with the "lower" amount. But in the professional sports world, saying no to money is unheard of and saying no to the New York Yankees, the Rolex of the MLB, just doesn't happen.

Did Lee turn them down because he likes the team in Philadelphia? Apparently yes. But there were also some factors weighing against the Lee family going to New York, like the fact that during the World Series some Yankees "fans" decided to spit, throw beer and shout obscenities at Lee's young wife Kristin who was sitting in the visiting team's seats watching her husband play. Nice, huh? And not too darned surprising to me. Yes, there's dumb fans everywhere who do mean things. But this particular bad had the stink of New York on it and, sorry folks, but no way that would have happened in Benton, Arkansas where the Lees are from. Neither in Philadelphia, I'd wager.

Said Kristin Lee "The fans did not do good things in my heart. When people are staring at you, and saying horrible things, it's hard not to take it personal." The fans did not do good things in my heart, she said. I am utterly charmed by that one sentence which is a gentle rebuke from a southern lady who was truly hurt by the uniquely barbarous behaviour of New Yorkers. That meanness, coupled with the arrogance and swagger of the city that considers itself the center of the universe, is one of the main reasons I am breaking up with New York. And it is fortifying to have my experienced verified by a pitching legend and his wife.

My lifelong friend Mary Elizabeth is a style writer and was born in the south. She was transplanted as a teenager to Connecticut, shared an apartment with me on the Lower East Side for a while before marrying her painter husband, also a southerner by birth. Mary Elizabeth and her husband woke up one day to discover they were sincerely and deeply unhappy in New York, though both were pursuing careers that would have dictated that they stay near the supposed center of art and fashion. But, she told me, they had an epiphany one day and left New York soon after, with a sense of great urgency. Says Mary Elizabeth, "We (Southerners) are genuinely hurt when (New Yorkers) mistake our friendliness and outgoing natures for falseness or stupidity." They went South, to Charleston SC, a place where you can be friendly and not be despised for it.

Not long ago, Mary Elizabeth and her husband bought a home in beautiful Altamont, NC. She only has to endure that peculiarly New York meanness when her career as a freelance writer brings her back to the city for conferences with the sharp-clawed denizens of the fashion and design world. It's not as if Mary Elizabeth can't have sharp claws when she wants to, it's just that she prefers not. Just like Kristin and Cliff Lee prefer not. Just like I prefer not.

It is not a sign of stupidity to smile, or to be generous or kind. But New Yorkers as a tribe seem to think so and if you have even a scrap of graciousness in you, you will eventually be hurt by New York's brand of mean. Beauty wears a frown in New York City, and she has sharp elbows and knees that she won't hesitate to jab into you if you show the least bit of softness. That is why I am leaving New York.

And that is why Cliff Lee said "no thanks ", in the softest, nicest, Southern way possible to New York City.

Help! (or, How The City Kept Me Skinny)

When I was younger, so much younger than today,

I never needed anybody's help in any way.

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,

Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Opened up the refrigerator door, more like it! My life in the country is comfortable. So comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable? This week Exile went to the doctor, a new one only a short drive from our little stone house above the creek in Tiny Town. I found out that I have higher than normal cholesterol and I need to lose weight. Bummer.

I was pleased with myself on a sunny morning scooting along in my suburban car to the nearby doctor's office, presenting my shiny newlywed Cadillac Insurance Policy card to the receptionist, and getting all my tests, prods and pokes done before 9. I was less pleased with myself when yesterday I got the message on my cell phone telling me that my cholesterol - "*BAD* cholesterol" she said, audibly shaking her finger at it - was high. "You need to go on a low fat diet," she remarked seriously, and then suddenly perky, chirped "Good luck!" and rang off. Good luck. Indeed, good luck. Perhaps just a bit too much good luck?


I have spent my life either underweight or just right. I have always taken a quiet pride in my low blood pressure and excellent blood chemistry. I was the quietly despised one you knew in high school and college who could eat anything and get away with it. Of course, in those days I also yearned for a bit of body fat in very specific, womanly places, and I was afraid I did not have enough of it. But those fears aside, I could EAT and I did. I see in photos from that period how thin I was, how slightly downcast-looking; a bowed young plant, too pale green as if lacking in adequate sunlight. When I was not long out of college, MUE (Mother of Urban Exile) gave me "A Half Day of Beauty " at Elizabeth Arden in New York City for my birthday. The well-muscled Swedish masseuse who said her name was Helga and had blonde braids wrapped around her head like a crown, kept telling me to relax my belly muscles as she pounded away at my front. And then she realized that they were just naturally that thrillingly drum-tight and rock hard. Ah.

These days are gone.

It's not as if Exile has been utterly unaware that things were getting, shall we say, a bit tight in the inseam? I have taken repeated, if short-lived, stabs at cutting out the extras and getting on the old gym horse. But physical activity for its own sake has never been my habit. The family still jokes about my single-handed revival of the archery team in high school and the odd group of misfits who joined me out there behind the gym getting their ya-ya's out by repeatedly assasinating a straw target, perhaps imagining it to be the face of their adolescent sorrows. It felt so much better to be shooting a real weapon than it did to get clocked in the shins by a hockey jock! I wanted to flow, not run with sweat. But still, I was thin.

I moved to New Haven, and college was a wash-out athletically for me. Old Eli did not have a physical culture requirement, thank Heavens. So I remained in the library and off-campus among the musicians, writers, outlaws, stoners and fringe elements. I don't think I attended even one football game at the Yale Bowl, not even one. I was romantically involved with boy-men whose main characteristics (besides having adequate smarts and/or money to be at Yale in the first place) were a passion for guitars, sex, marijuana, and being very adept at passing academic courses without apparently ever picking up a book. My lungs suffered in this period. And I stayed thin.

Help, I need somebody,

Help, not just anybody,

Help, you know I need someone, help.

I launched into post-College life armed with Wealthy Boyfriend (WB), his emotionally scary family, and a job at a major media company. Exile began to notice there was trouble in her ivy-covered paradise: WB's obsession with weed, his Fender electric guitar and his subsumed anger at his mother caused problems in our relationship. Meanwhile Exile was anxious and unhappy because WB's family used their connections to get me the job and because I was living in their carriage house in Westchester rent-free and driving theirVolkswagen to the suburban train station every morning, and because I could not figure her way out of this horrifically dependent situation. WB slept in every morning while I sallied off to my New York City job wearing uncomfortable linen suits and high-heeled pumps. WB did not have a job -- besides being WB. And the green corduroy blanket that covered us at night smelled of a heady perfume of body and bong. Exile was wracked by worry in this period and I became, if possible, even a bit thinner.

Help!

WB abandoned me by moving quietly to California and simply never returning. I discovered that I was living completely alone rent-free in someone else's estate house in Westchester and, after the fashion of only the very rich, nobody said anything or even suggested that I move out. But a few months later I moved permanently to New York City, found myself a sublet on the Upper West Side (with a two-octave, out-of-tune antique upright piano, no less) and thus began my New York City period. The phone went silent. And alone in my flat, I ate spaghetti and scallions with garlic most nights, hardly drank at all, stopped smoking weed and started writing. I joined a gym. I was still thin but a bit worn out.

Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.

There used to be a weight gym called Women's Health and Fitness near the major media conglomerate where I worked, not far from Times Square and the Pink Pussy Cat. It seemed to me that the trainers were all awesomely well-muscled lesbians with Brazilian waxes, sculptural hair cuts, and unshakeable sang froid. I aspired to their form. I began to go there every day after work, crunching and moving and tightening my body, and I developed some serious muscle on my thin frame. I began to cultivate a more positive world view and I felt as if I were arming myself, for what war I have no idea. I knew that this new, sculpted me wasn't any more really Me than the bent reed Me with the slight cough, but I liked the sculpted Me better. I was incarnating, thin and tough.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down

And I do appreciate you being round.

Help me, get my feet back on the ground,

Won’t you please, please help me.

Yes, New York City kept me lean. Overwork, lack of money, a challenging public transportation system, and generalized anxiety kept me on the thin side and on the down-low with the old cholesterol. I didn't have enough money to build up any plaque in my arteries anyway. Long after I quit the major media company and my membership at the Lesbian Power Gym had lapsed, and after Mountain Sea and I went touring in Europe for several years playing music and collecting Euros in a hat from our German fans, I was still thin. Humping from city to city in Europe with my suitcase, a guitar on my back and lugging an amplifier on a rolling cart kept the pounds off and my muscles stretchy and tough. I ate fresh herring and fresh juices several times a week (that's fast food in German train stations), sprouted grains, dried fruit and yogurt and doses of thick European espresso. And when I came back to good old New York City after three years, I was tough, strong – and thin.

That was three years ago before I decided to find a mate. I found FF and we fell in love. And that's when I started the slow unsticking from New York City, the careful move to the countryside of Tiny Town, and now – though Exile's apartment is still not sold as of this writing - I have moved to the country. For the first time in my life, I felt the pounds going on, felt the pants a bit uncomfortable. But when I asked FF about it he didn't seem to mind or notice at all. And when I whined about my weight gain, MUE said, "Don't worry so much! It's because you are finally *happy*."

But my doctor cares. And I care. A lot. If life has become good for me, it has also become a bit myopic and less challenging. I no longer have broken escalators that I must mount or remain trapped in the subway, no longer do I have a fourth floor walkup to live in and miles of pavement to cover every day. I no longer have stick then New York model types around to suggest the way of lesser flesh, nor my chronically overweight black and latino neighbors in Harlem to remind me of the dangers of Doritos. I have only this happiness of mine and a fair dose of prosperity. Can I get my body back in the midst of all this fresh air and plenty?

Perhaps if my gym had an inner city obstacles course, complete with runs to the subway, tenement walk ups and a subway to stand on all the way home...? Or? Maybe I'll just have to learn to push away from the table.

Coming In From The Cold

Innocent of the privations of city life.

I just found my way to my friend Jen Block's blog, Pushed Birth. She writes: "Pushedbirth.com is the sister site for Pushed, the book, and was created to provide women with uncensored, unsweetened information about U.S. childbirth care. (I) spent years researching why so many labors are begun by induction, why so many births end in cesarean section, and how modern maternity care is impacting women and their families. " Check out Jen's fantastic June 2010 blog (Yes, I am just catching up on my reading!) about how the closings of Bellevue and now St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan have deprived New York City's women, especially low income women,  of the two main facilities that made midwife care feasible (and legal).  You must check out Jen's book and blog, if you are planning to have a baby or care at all about women's health issues.


And now it is autumn for sure. In Tiny Town, I have brought in the begonias and placed them on the broad, sunny window sill in the dining room, the window that looks onto the little walled brick patio where they grew so splendidly all summer in their big earthenware pots. There are only two small plants left in the apartment in the city, one rather sad looking aloe and a tropical of some kind that came from a cutting a neighbor gave me. I tend to be unreasonably sentimental about plants, and I feel badly that these two are still living alone in the apartment where I only go now for an hour or two each week to check things out and give these two stragglers a little water. 

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Urban Plant Exile

One of the begonias I just brought in from the nippy autumn air is three years old: I created it from a clipping I took when my music partner, Mountain Sea, and I got back from our last tour in Europe. I was tired then, a little worn thin in a variety of ways, and I was trying to get comfortable again in the Sugar Hill apartment which had grown dusty and lifeless during my extended absence. It was November and already chill when I saw a large begonia just barely hanging onto a dirty brick wall on 153rd St. and Broadway where it was being blasted by the cold night air.  I heard the plant's thin voice calling out to me to save it, so I surreptitiously took a cutting and brought it back to my steam-heated rooms, rooted it in a jelly glass, and later planted it in earth bought from the dollar store. There in my westerly kitchen window, the begonia slowly turned into a plant with oddly transparent leaves that had a fragile, gummy texture, but were stubbornly and defiantly alive. Sporadically it put forth a couple of of anemic light-pink blossoms: They fell almost immediately to the floor. 


This June, as FF and I moved things out of the apartment and to Tiny Town, I brought the begonia with me, and clearly it thought it had died and gone to Heaven, for over the course of two summer months it has turned in a bodacious wild creature. It now sports huge, dark, glossy almond shaped leaves, and numerous fleshy red racemes covered with dark pink blossoms. In a couple of country months, the begonia went from being a weak city weed to being a well-fleshed, rainforest beauty.


I take special pleasure in my plant's story: Its start as a wilting, frost-struck cutting in a jelly glass,  its survival from a certain urban death, its patient period of semi-wilted stasis in the city, and its recent phoenix-like rebirth in the country summer.  This plant is joy and hope, and its greatness is now apparent. I am touched by the begonia, and so I can see that it is really myself I am seeing in it. By saving the begonia I saved myself. I know that these softly rolling hills, this air, this river, these sun dappled sycamore leaves outside my study window are all working their big medicine on me, making me stronger, glossier and more powerful. I have always wanted to supply an Ark to the weak, the lost, and the damaged. Has it been my way of telling the world that I needed an Ark myself to shelter me from my life's storms? From the terrors that afflicted me as a child and then, later, as an adult? The apartment in Sugar Hill was my Ark for a while, but now, I have found a better Ark. The plants come onboard.


This week, I got the good news that one of my songs is playing on a French radio station. I am amazed and delighted that the audience for my little song, heard before now by a half dozen people, has just exploded by tens of thousands. I am touched by this evidence of my own blossoming and I think that the Great Gardener is taking pleasure in me right now.

Dark and Rainy. Alone. Together.

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The dark and rainy Sunday followed the week of tornadoes. It was also the week Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge and I couldn't get him off my mind.

My apartment in Manhattan is 30 blocks from the GWB and you can see the span from my roof. I used to go up there in the early in the morning, around 6 AM just to close my eyes and feel the G-forces of the 40 thousand vehicles that pass over it into Manhattan at rush hour. My friend, the Argentine painter Daniela Mizrahi lived for years almost underneath the GWB in her little studio apartment which always smelled of paint, bread, smoke and car exhaust. The building, which clung like a bat to the black cliffs over the Hudson River, had a perfect view of the terrible and awesome Bridge, all lit up and roaring 24 hours a day.

I remember one particularly emotional night with Danu when we burnt some love letters on the pavement in the street. It was a necessary act, the act of destroying the component parts of a sadness. This is the kind of thing one needs friends to help with: Identify the formerly beloved object as poisonous and dispose of it.

The pages of the letters caught on fire quickly but then, not yet incinerated, were swept down the street by the wind and we ran after them yelling, trying to get them back so that we didn't set a building or car on fire by mistake. Slowly we captured the smoldering pages, ripped them up into smaller pieces and then burned them again (yes, some love letters take forever to burn, especially when written by depressing people.) The small orange embers were taken by the updrafts and swirled into the black sky, disappearing high into the great vacio beneath the GWB where they were extinguished in the nothingness. I thought, that is where love dies, in the darkness, under a bridge. I thought too that this neighborhood was too oversized for my diminutive friend, too cold and too lonely. That place was as lonely as a lost glove on a wet sidewalk, and I always felt afraid to leave her there.

Photo by Karol Du Clos

Perhaps because of that I cannot stop thinking of Tyler, standing on the bridge, hearing the interminable low drone of the traffic, breathing in the intoxicating gasses of the traffic and gazing into the great black vacio below the Bridge. So high, so very high, and so very cold. Did he hear any music in the low drone of the traffic, in the roar of the singing metal? Or did he only hear the beating of his own disappointed heart?

The suicide rate tells a depressing tale:  "Throughout the world, about 2000 people kill themselves each day. That's about 80 per hour, three quarters of a million a year. In the U.S., there are more than 80 deaths from suicide every day, 30,000 every year. This is the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crash every fifth day. From another perspective, you are more likely to kill yourself than be killed by someone else." (Geo Stone, Suicide and Attempted Suicide).  


It does not comfort me at all to know that I am more likely to kill myself than to be killed by someone else. Not at all. Such facts are odd and cruel and I am not sure that they even matter.


It does matter, though,  that when I sat down on the sofa and told FF that I felt sad, he put his arm around me and understood. Man, do I feel lucky in those moments that I know how to go and say that I feel sad to my husband, and I feel lucky that he is there to wrap his big, strong arms around me. Later that night, FF told me that one of his former tennis students who was a father and husband once parked his car near a bridge, a bridge that FF crossed every day on the way to work in those days; the man took of his shoes and socks, folding his socks neatly inside the shoes, and he jumped to his death. He folded his socks neatly.  These are the things we do, even in our desperation. As if somehow a folded sock might leave a quiet fragment of order behind in the onrushing chaos of self-annihilation.


It also matters that Tyler was only 18, in his first month at Rutgers. It matters that he was a talented musician, and that his room mate had been torturing him by spying on his intimate encounters in his dorm room. It matters that Tyler was gay, because if he had been heterosexual instead these encounters would have more likely entitled him to bragging rights than to shame.


"No one can make you inferior without your consent," wrote the fabulous and heroic Eleanor Roosevelt. Why did Tyler consent? Why couldn't he get mad as hell at his torturers, at society and at the people at the school who didn't respond to his call for help? Why did he instead turn his anger in on himself? No one gets to know now, and that is the thing about suicide: It ends the conversation.