Wood and Clay, Bricks and Mortar, Iron and Steel, Silver and Gold

I see it was exactly eight years ago that I started this blog. At the time, my goal was simply to put sentences together. It remains so today, though it seems I manage to do it much less often. And it's no easier.

I sometimes feel like I'm entering an empty room every time I sit down to blog—or attempt to—whereas back then, a mere eight years ago in human years, I had a regular little community of readers and fellow bloggers almost right from the start: friends, friends of friends, people who stumbled across my Mantelpiece by accident. A conversation of sorts took place on any given evening. (In my memory it's always evening in bloggerland.) Commenting on one another's musings, linking back and forth, idly checking acquaintances' sites for new posts. It was cheerful and stimulating and revealing and fun.

Then friendships changed—fell away or morphed. Parents fell, got sick, were hospitalized, moved out of their longtime home. Work ramped up. Facebook came along. Like an attention-sucking extrovert at a perfectly good party, it grabbed the spotlight from humble blogging, at least in my circle. Now there are a lot of empty houses in my neighborhood. And noisy parties in that sprawling highrise down the street.

Yet here I am, still stepping into my quiet room, with occasional friendly visitors. The light is bright, the floors polished, the furnishings spare, but there's lots of space to move around.

I don't write about the minutiae of my day as much I did in what you might call the Mantelpiece's heyday. I guess I find myself going within more often than not, though it has never been a conscious choice.

The sentences are still there to be put together, those bridges made of—and between—words.

*Yes, I know this is Tower, not London, Bridge.

London Bridge* is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with wood and clay,
Wood and clay, wood and clay,
Build it up with wood and clay,
My fair Lady.

Wood and clay will wash away,
Wash away, wash away,
Wood and clay will wash away,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with bricks and mortar,
Bricks and mortar, bricks and mortar,
Build it up with bricks and mortar,
My fair Lady.

Bricks and mortar will not stay,
Will not stay, will not stay,
Bricks and mortar will not stay,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with iron and steel,
Iron and steel, iron and steel,
Build it up with iron and steel,
My fair Lady.

Iron and steel will bend and bow,
Bend and bow, bend and bow,
Iron and steel will bend and bow,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair Lady.

Silver and gold will be stolen away,
Stolen away, stolen away,
Silver and gold will be stolen away,
My fair Lady.

Set a man to watch all nigh,
Watch all night, watch all night,
Set a man to watch all night,
My fair Lady.

Suppose the man should fall asleep,
Fall asleep, fall asleep,
Suppose the man should fall asleep?
My fair Lady.

Give him a pipe to smoke all night,
Smoke all night, smoke all night,
Give him a pipe to smoke all night,
My fair Lady.

Dear Friends

I had to edit my holiday letter down at the last minute when I realized that the type, reduced to fit on one page, was too hard to read and there really was just too much of it for anyone to put on a mantelpiece with the other cards. But maybe not too long for this mantelpiece. Here is the unedited version (and yet also slightly expurgated for the purpose of my semi-anonymous blog), which gives a fuller picture of my experience of 2010 than the version my friends and family received in the mail. Happy New Year to anyone reading this.

***

This is the first holiday letter I’ve ever written, but all the kids seem to be doing it now and since I continue to resist Facebook, it’s the least I can do to update you in a more substantive way than my brief notes of years past. 
 

Sometimes it seems it seems my whole life is dictated by the cyclical nature of my job. For about a week and a half every month, work is very intense. My job is almost completely portable, and I often work in the evening or on weekends during those periods. When people express concern about getting a late-night e-mail from me, I say that editing with a fire in the fireplace, a cup of tea, and my dog at my side beats working in a spooky, abandoned office at 11 p.m. I think of my job as solving problems, small and not so small, which is very satisfying.

I continue to teach, though I’ve been on a break since June and will return in March. I’ve come to believe my true calling is more as a teacher than as a writer. I did, however, complete an essay in November and have already had it rejected. So—two accomplishments checked off my list (ha ha).

In the spring, I had grand jury duty, which took me out of the office three days a week for two months. Even I’m a little amazed I managed to get my job done. It was an educational experience despite the fact that 75 percent of it was repetitious and tedious. Also despite the fact that most of the other 22 jurors were cliquish and sophomoric. We heard nearly 200 cases, almost all drug-related, many presented in less than 15 minutes. I was most surprised to learn that prosecutors in DC Superior Court are, by and large, just as young and attractive as they are on Law & Order.

During this time, my mother—who has had dementia for 13 years and been in assisted living since 2008—fell and broke a bone while wandering at 6 in the morning. After rehab, she moved into “memory care,” which has turned out to be a mostly positive step for her and she’s doing well relative to the unrelenting nature of her condition. Dad lives in the building’s general population and can see her whenever he wants, as can I and my siblings. My partner D. and I take him to the Silver Diner every weekend. I’ve slowly become better at not measuring the success of such an outing by Dad’s talkativeness or silence or by any particular words of appreciation but by the pleasure with which he devours his All American Burger Basket and the curiosity in his eyes as he surveys the people, lights, and activity around him. 
 

Both of my parents have passed age 90, and my father’s own dementia, which began more recently, has started to progress more noticeably. It occurs to me that my brother and two sisters and I are now the caretakers of our parents’ memories. With most of Mom and Dad’s pasts lost to them or jumbled, we likely know all we will ever know of them—their childhoods, their travels, our own births. These stories we’ve memorized or simply absorbed over the years are entrusted to us for safekeeping as surely as the snapshots of fuzzy-headed toddlers on beaches, the letters and diaries, the pictures of a newly married couple slicing a cake nearly 60 years ago. 
 

The four of us have been getting the family house ready to sell sometime in the near future—sorting through possessions, holding a yard sale, making repairs. One thing I know for sure: I’m lucky to have siblings I get along with, and I can’t imagine how such tasks would be bearable otherwise. 
 

My partner D.’s older sister passed away in November, and if I didn’t already appreciate the gift of having siblings I love and respect, D.’s relationship with her would be a lesson. He was her caregiver for the last 11 years since he moved her up to Washington from Florida, just as he had been for a period in the 1980s when he moved her to be near him in New York. One of the first things he ever told me when we met three years ago was that she protected him when they were kids, and he owed her the same when she became sick. That’s when I knew he was a generous and worthwhile man.

We’ve had a lot of fun this year, from seeing the extraordinarily moving and imaginative play War Horse in London (coming to Broadway in the spring) to trips to three of our other favorite places—Provincetown (three times, with another coming up at New Year's), Vermont, and New York City—to trolling flea markets and antiques shops whenever and wherever we can. His job as a dance professor and director of the arts scholarship program keep him very busy, and he’s a much-loved mentor to many young people present and past.

D. and I each have homes we love—his house in the suburbs (less than five minutes from where I grew up) with its lovingly tended gardens, my House at Pooh Corner condo in the city. I recently sent Doug a passage from a New York Times article about this year’s National Book Award winner in fiction, Jaimy Gordon: “Ms. Gordon, 66, has taught writing for almost 30 years at Western Michigan University and lives by herself in a two-story house next to a lake here. Her husband, Peter Blickle, 17 years her junior, teaches German at the university and lives by another lake, about a 20-minute walk away. His wife goes over there most evenings with her dog and they have a glass of schnapps.”

The subject line of my e-mail was “See, we’re not so strange.” D. replied: “I wish we had the lake and the 20 minute walk instead of a 20 minute drive! Let’s do the schnapps.” The truth is we’re not schnapps drinkers, but we share a pot of tea every time we get together.

This month marks the end of my first year of being vegan—the most fun and profound development of the year, full of discoveries, creativity, and good food. Like many, I never thought I’d be able to be vegan, even as it became harder to argue against it. Then I read the nonfiction book Eating Animals by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. The fact that Foer may not even be vegan himself (he never says so, though he is vegetarian) speaks to the power of his writing in that it had the effect of changing my life. I sensed before reading it that it was what I needed to make the leap. I wanted the push. 
 

In some ways, my life feels more expansive than ever, in others more stripped down. Without denying the stresses and uncertainties of life, both impressions feel welcome. I wish you happy endings and beginnings of your own.

Only This

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

This weekend, I hand-delivered a card bearing the image at left to my 90-year-old father. Inside were small notes from D. and me. It was part of a little project I began at the start of my 50th year about two weeks ago involving getting back to writing to people on paper—not directly related to my feelings about Facebook, but you could say there's a connection. (I might write more about the project in a future post.)

This print is "Circle Raven" by Yoshiko Yamamoto— one of many beautiful letterpress designs from the Arts and Crafts Press.

The card got Dad and D. and me talking about ravens and crows and their ilk. My father has always had a curious mind, to say the least, but these days there's more curiosity than retention, more silence than response—you often have to simply trust that he's taking information in and let go of expectations about to what use his mind may be putting it.

I had recently bought him a large-print book of poems because his eyesight is bad and he's so bored and he used to be someone who cared about poetry. I don't think he's read much of the book, so given what we were talking about, I decided to read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" aloud to him.

I have to say I absorbed only about half of it myself—it was the first time I'd read it in at least 35 years—but the rhythms were a blast to feel on my tongue and vocal chords, a tour de force of language offered to a man whose world was once nothing but language. (He is—was—a polyglot linguist whose specialty was Russian.)

As I read, Dad leaned forward, appearing to listen intently. Every time I got to the refrain "Nevermore," which ends the last four stanzas, he looked up and joined in with heart—"Nevermore!"—finding, it seemed, a place of memory within him still. A place where a single familiar, archaic word was stored from adolescence, or childhood, or even deeper back, a place where words themselves originate, where he would have found me at that moment as well.

Exactly 300 Words on Why I Won't Join Facebook

I loathe the competitiveness inherent in listing how many “friends” you have; I dislike the idea of asking someone to friend you as well as accepting or rejecting someone’s request. That feels like high school. I've done high school.

Last year, I was contacted by someone I’ve been mostly out of touch with since we were 20 except for occasional contact, when we catch up and then find we have zero to say. This time, she ended with: “If you don't have Facebook, get it! That is an order, even if you think it is stupid. I've reconnected with people 30 years after high school! I am so excited to have you back in my life!” I replied, filling her in on my life and echoing the love, but explained I wouldn’t be joining (avoiding the details here). I never heard back.

I don’t like devaluing the word “friend” to encompass everything from true intimate to acquaintance to professional contact to person you once knew half a lifetime ago but may have nothing in common with anymore.

Mixing worlds makes me uncomfortable. Though I realize you have some control over what’s public, I wouldn’t want coworkers to see how I interact with my friends, nor would I want to edit my interactions with the latter.

Googling someone is great—I do it too. But I don’t want to be found any more easily than I already can be (i.e., easily, and I don’t mean through this blog, which is virtually anonymous). One of my favorite things is coming home, drawing the curtains, turning on the lights, and feeling no one can find me. (I’m talking feeling, not reality.)

And this profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker only made me more confident in my decision.

Acceptance

Vladimir: "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever."

Estragon: "Me too." -- Waiting for Godot

Today D. finally e-mailed me this photo he took of us last May in London as we waited to see a production of Waiting for Godot starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. It's one of my favorite pictures of the two of us (I'm on the right).

I show it for no other reason than I need an anchor for my mind, which tonight refuses to alight on any single idea -- as it has refused for the last couple of weeks.

I just frittered away a couple of hours -- a fire burning and then dying in the fireplace, my dog sleeping and then waking beside me (breath in, breath out) -- trying to gain entry into coherent thoughts about friends falling away, relationships shifting, once-common interests diverging. Without planning to, I found myself Googling names and images, here and there coming across someone's familiar but drastically changed (or not at all drastically changed) appearance -- and, when I did, feeling little more than mild surprise or amusement, tempered by a curious sort of spongy distance from whichever potential This Is Your Life panelist it happened to be.

It is this detachment, among other things, that has kept me from joining Facebook: I believe that it's a rare, rare case where an old, lost friendship can be revived beyond the superficial level. What's more, my antipathy toward small talk is such that I'm reluctant to invite more of it into my life.

My long-held attitude toward organized reunions (i.e., that you should attend any and all that you have the chance to) is even changing, much to my surprise. My high school had an all-class reunion last spring that I was planning to attend, until I lost interest as the date approached. I haven't even considered going to this year's edition.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about a friend of almost 30 years with whom I currently seem to be on pause. We've had no contact for the last six months (possibly the longest we've ever gone) -- this after a perfectly pleasant evening with her and her husband and two little girls in which nothing untoward happened other than the fact that it became starkly apparent to me (and, I'm convinced, to her) that we were, figuratively, gazing in almost completely non-intersecting directions.

This is the friend who introduced me to Joni Mitchell's album Blue, the two of us sitting on a cold linoleum dorm-room floor, listening to it over and over again: I remember that time that you told me, you said love is touching souls . . .

Tonight I don't even quite know where I am. I feel a bit reclusive, a bit wistful yet non-sentimental, a bit at a loss for words.

D. leaves for a few days in LA tomorrow, a trip to see friends. I'm going to the theater on Thursday to see a new play with a friend of my own. He's a more recent friend than those I was Googling tonight. Someone who has helped see me through -- helped see me -- these last several years of change and reorientation.

So there you have it -- my bookends for this directionless and confused musing: nights at the theater. A curtain parting, a curtain closing, ideas to contemplate as I make my way back home.