Category: FRIENDSHIP

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THE BEST WAY TO FIND YOUR PATH.. ROAMING

ADVENTURESS IN LIVINGNESS this week ends with new directions in living. Before that happens, you have to get lost, detached, and miserable. It messes up your social life, your routines, your comfort, and your partner.  I don’t have one, so it’s all up to me.

Men wonder why women change so often, why we are spirited unicorns one day, and mules the next. It comes from the universal need to roam, to feel new sensations and passions, and to find more things to love. Even our closets are overflowing with love: “I love those shoes, I love that coat.” We replace our wardrobes because we need more garments to love.

At the crossroads of some moment in time, I stopped loving material things, my reflection, and went looking for a deeper direction of sensation.

It started last year, when my life was tangled up in two projects that were not progressing. As long as someone didn’t raise the curtain on my imaginary life, I stayed right there, like a gearshift left in neutral. When failure and rejection continued to knock me on the shoulder, I welcomed the familiar knock and remained stationary.

The exact moment I decided to shift gears was a painful one. I let go of both projects that were obstructing my motion. I have extracted the nature of the projects because it really is irrelevant. After I let go, and watched those long-term efforts just dangle from boxes, notebooks, and letters of correspondence, the straight of my back curved. Where is my direction? Where are any of us going anyway, except away from that moment we have no control?

 If I asked why this happened, and that happened, I was then distracted by some woman in the car next to me who was having more fun in her convertible talking on her cell phone. Routines were becoming burdens, and my favorite places of comfort were boring. Encouragement came from writing columns, reading letters, and those long, solitary road trips in the night.  I felt like I was sleeping, but even in that state of detachment people were finding me, and shaking me up.

 I remembered one of the faintest memories of my childhood. I cannot even recall the place I was, or who was there; most certainly, it was not my father and mother. We were camping out and I was in a sleeping bag on the hard gravel ground. It was so unfamiliar to me, the simplicity of the natural surroundings, the heavy black balm of tranquility, and the brightness of each star. I lied awake most of the night talking to my fellow campers, and at some point they said to go to sleep. I could not close my eyes. The adventure had swept me into a state of alertness, the kind that makes you feel extraterrestrial. That night must have taught me to welcome new adventures. Sometimes they have ruined months of my life, but most definitely, at the end, I sprung up with a new line of faith.

 Again, I am leaving out particulars because it is not the direction I took or what I’ve chosen. After all, it could be anything. We all want to roam, and love, and find some nugget of truth at the end of the road. I think women need to roam more now than men.

THUNDER THOUGHTS ON WRITING,READERS,AMTRAK,AND RELOCATION

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ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS began with lightning and thunder. My bed braced against the window didn’t alarm me like when I first moved here, and the storms startled me with their voluminous sound. After five years, the fears of weather, creaking noises, bats, mice, or a running deer as I drive have sifted through the thread of experience.   As the first attempt to accept relocation coming, I am unwinding with you, not at you, because you’re all closer to me than you think.

I begin late on Friday, watching a half-lit scene with descending sunlight, the other bathed in asphalt gray,  the solid remains of this week’s punishing climate. Who cares about that after the news this week? I imagine every parent was stung in a way they may never have felt before. Everyone loves children, even those who didn’t have them, cherish their innocence and liberating emotions. I asked a friend, how it affected him, he replied, “ I didn’t know I can’t watch the news.”  

“ You never watch the news?”

“ Some stuff on social media.”

“ The Mystic Camp tragedy didn’t come up?.”

“ No.. what happened?”. So I gave him some of the details, and when his expression turned dour, I stopped. Something another friend mentioned to me was Duty to Bare Witness, as we were talking about the Ukraine War.  Some call it tragedy trolling, I suppose that’s another kind of news watching.  Between the bubble wrap and boxing of what I think I’ll take, I listen to some news. I realize I’m not such an immoral person after listening to cantankerous battles on the hill.  

This city is drowsily awaiting the start of the Saratoga Race Track today.  It is a sacrosanct epic convergence of rich and poor, doused in jewels or leather neck chokers. I love loyalty, and this event dates back to the 1880’s. It’s the oldest race track in the country. When I had a press pass, and didn’t wait in lines to attend, interview, and observe the festivities, it just can’t be forgotten. I’m familiar with the groups that oppose horse racing, viewing it as a degenerate sport that harms both horses and gamblers.  I understand that, considering my father was a gambler and horse lover, but it goes on for thousands who feel different. Can we not allow one to enjoy the other not?.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Sifting through collectibles, I found my letter to Amtrak. Many  years ago,  I wrote to the executives at Amtrak with this idea: Give a writer a free ride for a long journey, and allow them to write about it. Then, engage reporters at the different stops to show up and give the writer a pass to visit the city or town and meet the nuances that no one knew about. I felt pressed to seek escape, ‘I’m going to live on Amtrak!’ The idea blossomed over some cabernet, and I lingered there in the kitchen, while I cooked up this idea, of riding Amtrak across America, while writing about subjects I choose from a long list, and develop it into a documentary, and a book.    I realized how much effort it would take to launch and live this idea that was born in the kitchen over a bottle of cab. I spent the day researching and looking at the bedroom suites on Amtrak. I went to sleep imagining myself on the train, and the inherent comedy that would roll out, from living in a room the size of shoe box. I watched movies about trains, and started reading Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. Del Mar, watching the Amtrak.

There I am on Amtrak, with a laptop and a recorder,  strolling through the aisles, interviewing people, and then I’m in some unfamiliar city, hopping from one place to another, and writing in cafes and adventuring. The illusion became real, like a dream that represents reality. I do see myself on such an adventure.   I must sculpt new routines, learn how to do the things I’m not used to doing.  I wrote to Amtrak, and I did not get a response. Several years later, they invited a writer to do what I had suggested. As the day descends into afternoon, I am perched in between, clinging to the wisdom of my posse, whom I call on for solace, for answers, for encouragement, and you readers, who keep me adventuring in writing.

CHAOS IN NOISE CLUTTER & RELOCATION

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I RECUSE MYSELF FROM NOISE, LOUD TALKERS, LOUD LAUGHTER, LOUD MACHINERY. I RECUSE MYSELF FROM CLUTTER, AS I DISASSEMBLE MY HOME, AND PLACE BOXES AND BUBBLE WRAP IN EVERY ROOM, SO I AM PREPARED TO PACK. I’M DOING BETTER THAN 2018 AND 2019, WHEN I DISASSEMBLED AND REASSEMBLED HOMES 5 TIMES. NOW I FEEL LIKE GIVING IT ALL AWAY, AND LEAVING WITH TWO SUITCASES. THE INCREDIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, A FILM, BUT IT APPLIES TO MY STATE OF MIND. I LOVED COLLECTING EVERY ITEM, BOOK, RECORD, PRINT, BRIC-A-BRAC, AND FURNITURE I CHOSE. AT THAT MOMENT, I LOVED IT. BUT BREAKING UP WITH POSSESSIONS IS LIKE BREAKING A RELATIONSHIP. IT’S TIME, WHEN IT COMES, UNPREPARED, ANXIETY AND APPREHENSION TAKE AWAY SLEEPING SWEETLY AND WAKING UP SMILING. THE PASSAGE FROM ONE ERA TO THE NEXT TAKES WHAT I’M NOT SURE I HAVE, BUT MUST.

DODGER’S BASEMENT STORAGE.

THE THINKING SOLDIER Perhaps the architecture of intention was always more delicate than either of us admitted.. a scaffolding of hopes not yet tempered by time or circumstance. I won’t dispute the imagery you’ve painted.. it’s poignant, even beautiful in its grief.. As for the vision, I never dismissed the idea. But reality tends to interrupt our grandest scripts with a more cryptic hand. And no, camouflage isn’t my language, even if silence sometimes serves as armor.. If what you received sowed doubt, I understand. But not all absences are betrayals. Some are simply the byproduct of lives caught in divergent orbits, trying and failing to converge..

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FROM MY UNNAMED SOLDIER

WRITING FROM YAHOO TO BOO HOO

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ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS FALLS ON. An unusual time to be writing at four in the afternoon. The clouds drew me up to my writing desk, where layers of clouds forms teased me into believing it wasn’t hot and humid outside.  I decided to write the column.

I knew I shouldn’t write on my laptop because it is deconstructing. I can’t part with this laptop until I outline my next book. The sky drew me to the desk, and so I worked around internet outages.

I only had a few paragraphs from the afternoon, and when I returned to the column after dinner, the whole piece took another course, and I was writing not what I intended, but it was like sailing on a perfect course.   It was writing without the editor, meaning the inner editor that sometimes swoops down and cuts your nails off. I was writing about many things that happened. When I finished, I went to save the document and the laptop responded negatively. It vanished.  I thought about trying to recapture the column, trying to reinvent the stream of consciousness that seemed to be marathoning through my soul.

There were so many voices speaking all at once. I had to figure out how to connect the moment the leaves reminded me of Saratoga Springs,  and how we must place our print on the tablet, on the screen, and dismiss the reader who judges where writing takes us. Sometimes,  a reader knows me from the halcyon days, when my light was neon and my spirit a flame. They don’t want to see me now, draped in muted gray and hardship hardened. “Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.” Jimmy Cox 

 

GERMANY READERSHIP RISING THANK YOU GERMANY

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I posted a column on Sunday, The Mind Hike. When I checked my stats, it was rising like a new sun, and hit a record-breaking 127 views! That has not happened since I published my book in 2017. I did not optimize the column or take any steps to increase readership. Today it is up to 126. Whomever you are, thank you so very much for reading my columns.

MOODY BLUES TUESDAY

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           MATISSE

Writing somberly is parallel to writer’s block. It’s not a block, really, more like a resistance to engaging feelings.  If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions, and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover! I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays, I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, shoveling snow, and researching acronyms because the news uses them so often.

The vortex of discontent is a punctured life. The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter.  I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. My collection of records and CDs accompanies the scenery. When I’m sorrowful, I listen to Ennio Morricone; when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it is Turandot or some other Opera. When I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa, or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Annie Lenox. 

      I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow, the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks. Everything I’ve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin, I will listen to Begin the Beguine. 

“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theater.  

    Henry miller writes in his book, “ Henry Miller on Writing” “Whoever greatly suffers must be, I suppose a sublime combination of a sadist and masochist.’  I suppose that a few of my friends have aligned me as such, and now that I write this, as in all writing, answers blink at you, and then the soul receives them like a wafer of wonder. Perhaps I am, but where that evolved and manifested, I have no time to think about it because the sun is out. I must sit in my newly designed sunroom, a small book library alcove that receives the sun at noon.  When I returned with my phone to snap a photograph, the sun disappeared like a footprint in the sky. Every moment needs attention. It’s twenty degrees outdoors. I am modestly adjusted and receive a thousand weekly warnings to get a flu shot. My doctor has tried persuading me to get a flu shot for three years.  I responded that I’d never had the flu and that my last cold was in 2012. He chuckled and asked the next question. 

WRITING WITH NATURE

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In one of my books on writing, I read that most writers face the demon in the middle of the novel. The beginning is a gallop, and the end is a relief, but the middle wiggles in and out of your grasp. The middle of our lives reflects this same obscurity.    

The middle of a life span reflects all we have accomplished and all we have left incomplete. This is what they call a mid-life crisis. I get it every year.  I’ve finally accepted that my constant relocation, reinventing, and restlessness will not be solved. At the bottom of the restlessness is the fear of finding rest more enjoyable than movement. This flotation of comedy rotated around me last night while I stood out on the porch observing the peacefulness. The scenery of this street is a comforting, historical beauty that comes from the harmony of architecture and nature. The flow of villagers downtown is along two main two-lane streets; all the shops, services, and restaurants are a patchwork, and all the business owners know each other.  

I chose Sunday to shut down all communication with the mainland, take the longest bath I can stand, and write. I need a rest, like a chaise lounge on a spacious veranda with honeysuckle, wisteria, and lavender.  If you are an artist, the limit is not the sky; it’s everywhere. Nature’s artistry is a full-time exhibition in the Northeast. The view now is of tumbling clouds rolling over; they move slowly, like dough, across the road, while squirrels dart about.  Outdoors is where we see the best of life.

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MOTHER’S DAY REMEMBRANCE

MY BEST FRIEND, Lucille Casey was a woman who threw the dice all her life. She gambled on her instincts as if they were already tested and approved. She never told me much about herself. When I learned of her struggles as a young woman and her chosen life, she became more real than when I’d known her. During the years we were friends, she handed out selected stories, abbreviated and censored.  Being the inquisitive character I am, the shallowness of her stories bated me.  I had to pry the truth out from other people who had known her.  

            Casey’s first gamble was at sixteen years old. She sent in a photograph of herself for the Redbook Magazine modeling contest. If she’d won, the Powers Modeling Agency in New York City would grant her an audition as a model.  Casey was living in East Orange, New Jersey with her mother and sister. Her father had died suddenly, leaving the family without a financier. Casey’s mother was lost without her husband and unsuited to join the workplace. Casey didn’t tell her mother about the contest until she received the letter of congratulations.

            John Robert Powers met Casey in his office on East 56th Street and signed her as a Powers Girl. She was stunning to look at, photographed like a movie star, and was modest. John Powers did not look for aggressive, pouty-lipped fearlessness. The Powers Girls were captioned “Long Stemmed American Beauties” because they were wholesome, beautiful, tasteful, courteous, and virtuous. They were so far from the runway models of today that it is almost a reversal of the industry.  

The models of the thirties were ordained to set the highest example of classic good breeding and education. John not only schooled them in fashion, and individual taste, he instructed them in moral integrity, independence, and community service. Casey went to school at John Robert Powers and became one of the top ten models in New York.  

            She was a blue-black-haired Irish beauty, with emerald green eyes and perfect teeth. She stood only 5’ 7″  in those days that was fairly standard. When I knew her, she was still thin and beautiful but she did not fuss about herself or spend a lot of time at her vanity. As a Powers model, Casey had a long line of gentlemen callers. Powers Girls were invited to all the nightclub and dinner show openings, sporting events, community galas, and fund-raisers.  Social engagements were part of her job. Casey was not a woman of idle chat, in fact, a lot of people thought of her as restrained and unfriendly, maybe even snobbish. I think it was more secrecy. People were always prying into her life because it looked glamorous. There was another side to that glamour she didn’t want to put in the mirror.  

            One evening Casey had a dancing engagement at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. She was on stage with some other dancers when a certain gentleman noticed her. The next chapter of Casey’s life began that night. At twenty-two years old, she fell in love with a man thirteen years older, of the Jewish faith, who lived in Hollywood. The consequences of her love forced her to change and adapt to a new lifestyle and different people.

            She did not bury or rescind her love after she learned he was Bugsy Siegel’s partner and best friend and that Allen was a part of the Jewish Mafia. She asked him to reform his criminal activities. He agreed, provided she would marry him. We all know at twenty-two a woman believes she can change a man, and a man lets her think she can.  Without that dream, many lovers would not have found their mates.

            Casey did marry her love and spent her life trying to keep her children from harm and Allen from going to prison.  I met her husband just after he tried to reform, and was beaten down by the FBI. I called him Daddy.  

CHANGE IS COMING

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Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

Some of us are not rushing to wave the I made it flag. Some favor holding back until the other elements of our character life are solid;  our fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb. I have to trust in the pattern of our lives; the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. I am discovering the shame and greed, the absolute indifference to my security, and finances.

Gravity has dropped, and so has my sense of structure, health, and self-discipline. Making a bed was too tedious, and grocery shopping was needless because I didn’t care about food; I like tuna sandwiches with avocado and bananas for breakfast. The comfort comes from writing, cloud watching, and phone calls with friends.   

The loss of direction and ambiguity lurking in the future is a place any person can find themselves in, especially those sensitive and artistic, without a map, familiar signs, and a plan. You have to ride it all the way to a new horizon.

It is a day later; the sky is unchanged, and the cloud cover is still nailed to the sky.  In random conversations, I have heard of people’s hardships, sacrifices, and compromises.  I tell myself not to be too sentimental , but it’s a useless force, I am sentiment. Don’t open those links to real estate values, how much money you need to retire. Open the link to redesign my interior life using new colors, textures, and backgrounds.

FRIENDS AND FONDNESS OF THE PAST

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  I ‘m thinking about Loren, one of the most original characters in my life. He developed a vernacular unlike anyone I’ve met. It came from growing up in the hood of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Later exclusive Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, and then returning to Santa Fe. Joined the upper class clientele as a chauffeur. His vernacular was impressive as it collated honesty, and a wit sharp as a razors edge. Loren visits three times a week at least. Snow means silence and hermitizing. I  can’t wait to open the door to Luxury Limo Loren and make him brunch.  We harmonize for hours; on tones of fretful fear, wicked secrets, confessions and laughter. The delicious crust of survival and our similarities.

If I write down the pleasantries surrounding my life, the blessings rise up and give me a softened comfort.  The sweet peace may vanish the next day, or be intercepted by the news, a wreck in the street, an unexpected phone call. The crossroads of everyday life comes and goes. Between all of these uncontrollable incidents we are writing stories that some day will be told in conversation, or written in journals and books. The essence of our changing lives is universal.

POP-UP POEM

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He pushed her on a swing, so high she touched the sky, viewed the world through his eyes, lived for a time without lies, then as mystically as he appeared, he let go of the swing, and she fell on her wing, broken but with the will to begin again. A broken heart hasn’t stopped her from loving him.

For ten days, just thinking of her spoken words, how they made their way to his ears and returned the sounds she so wanted to hear. When he stopped contacting her, she wiped her tears as some people find love at the core of their fears.