Spindlegirl

Taxi dance

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:40:36 -0500

Originally posted 03.24.2006

About two months ago, in anticipation of being able to run longer than 20 minutes again some day, I bought an MP3 player. Not an iPod, which has become the label for all of these things irrespective of brand (like Kleenex or Walkman), but a more PC-compatible (so I was told) version. It’s lipstick red and about the size of a cigarette lighter and about as satisfying to hold—the single triple-A battery gives it a little heft.

My first day with the thing tipped me into addictland in about half an hour. Press shuffle and personally selected tunes from a variety of genres pour into my ears and dance across my brain’s pleasure center. Like finding all my favorite songs on a jukebox in a dive bar with a good tap selection, affable bartender, and an amusing old man clientele. (But without the beer, bartender, or old coots. Oh well.)

The giddiness faded, however, as it will with any type of high. Shuffle wasn’t so random. There’s no way the same song came up by chance four times in an hour (like the way I keep getting called for jury duty). And some never get played (when I programmed in “Farewell Angelina,” I had no idea I’d never hear it again). And then it broke, sort of—shutting off anytime I tried to manipulate the volume—so I had to fix it, and in doing so lost all the tunes originally programmed because I couldn’t figure out how to save the G drive material to my, um, wherever those things should go.

But there’s still some love for the thing. It’s good company, and encourages buoyancy in my step. And I do get some satisfaction in identifying fellow MP3 travelers, identifiable by the white cords and ear buds.

Somewhat troubling, though, is the one step further removed from fear of death that this device brings me. I’ve never really feared the end, although in happier times it makes me sad to reflect on that inevitability. But fear is an anticipatory feeling, one that you can’t have if you don’t see it coming.

Like I didn’t see the taxi I stepped in front of during my lunchtime ramble a couple of days ago. I guess I wouldn’t be writing this if the driver hadn’t seen me and hit the brakes. It wasn’t a particularly strange intersection, so I was kind of mystified as to how this cab came to be there all of a sudden, driver shaking his fist and giving me a sound ‘what for’ (I couldn’t really hear more than repeated use of the word “idiot”). But I had been deeply enjoying Caravan, and, with my coat hood up, was pretty shut off from anything outside of my own tiny little sphere of sensation.

Once I got over the embarrassment (how can a runner who’s mindful of bicyclists morph into an otherwise oblivious pedestrian), I was…how to put this without sounding morbid? Relieved and a little pleased by the thought that I could be released with so little concern. Dispatched without anxiety. And the humor angle: getting splattered by a New York taxi on the day of my sixth anniversary in the big city—the irony is delicious.

Carrying that MP3 player is obviously a hazard. The device has eroded my commuter reading time (those New Yorkers are really piling up) and softened the burden of thoughtfulness (I’m getting stupider). It has made me more vulnerable as I walk around by hobbling my awareness. But considering the cycle of thought that has gripped my brain going on, oh, three months or so, I’m not sure this is all bad. So for now I think I’ll just continue this dumbed down game of chicken, and if it kills me, let it do so while I’m singing along.

Morning routine

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:36:47 -0500

Originally posted 03.13.2006

Salt water, hot, is the first

defense, saline swill

in a cobalt class,

a sleek little cylinder that sits sinkside

amid the clutter of

our personal things: brushes, razors,

soaps and creams.

The cabinet painted thick,

barely latches,

hardly holds and seldom catches

the morning fumble from fingers aching with caffeine and

last night’s lack of restraint—

—too much play and not enough give.

A tiny sore tingles

to catch hold and live out

its full painful promise:

nuisance canker,

where teeth met in a sudden bite,

a glancing pinch

of flesh too thin,

concentration’s sacrifice.

Tribeca Walk

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:33:48 -0500

Originally posted 03.13.2006

Heels clack on pavement wet with runoff,

flowing fresh under a

chain-link fence.

How can there be melt-water where there

wasn’t any snow?

All the histories of April

hang by a thread, the weight

in my chest a pendulum

barely swinging.

Gentle rocks, the traffic flows

without malice,

a lullaby of city sound.

Stress fracture

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:30:47 -0500

Originally posted 03.01.2006

Six weeks after I stopped running, five weeks after a bone scan inconclusively revealed a stress fracture in my right tibia, nothing seems to have changed. The physiatrist who diagnosed the break told me to get physical therapy and come back in another six weeks. That I’m not ready to run yet. That if I run the way I used to, I’ll just break myself again.

I have pretty mixed feelings about that. Running stopped being a reward in itself, if it ever was one, some time ago. Really, from the get go, I started running not because I loved to run but because I didn’t like being so woefully non-physical. A stick, not a carrot. It was, probably at some level, a way to gain a tiny bit of respect from my peers. Also, running was what my father did. When I started running, the summer before 8th grade, I would sneak out in the morning before my parents or brother were up because I didn’t want anyone to know I was doing it. It’s possible that I was afraid I would quit and be held accountable for that failure, but mostly I remember a deep adolescent embarrassment over this deliberate attempt to become fit. Throughout childhood I’d been rebelliously reluctant to move. Running changed everything.

The shift from casual runner/hasher to local elite athlete was sort of like the first shift, from bookworm/sloth to active kid. About one-third of my acquaintances know me only as a runner, and as a formidable one. I’m as strongly identified with my running as I am with my hair; the thought of giving up competition is as identity-threatening as the notion of shaving my head. But everything changes, everyone shifts (or they should. Right?). It’s really little more than pride, when you think of it, clinging to the 8-mile average.

But I’ve certainly enjoyed the approval.

The ring and I: a roomful of cheating hearts

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:37:01 -0500

Originally posted 02.23.2006

I was pretty uncomfortable by myself at the Happy Endings reading series last night. Best I can tell, I was the only person in the room who didn’t know at least three other people there, as the bulk of them seemed to have graduated college together. The readings were from a couple of new books: The Encyclopedia of Exes and Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader. In a fit of irony, I wore my wedding band. This may have had something to do with the receipt of a Valentine from an old flame, an old flame with a wife. A wife and then a girlfriend, which demoted me back then to…what? Second mistress twice removed? The other other woman, a status so fringy it couldn’t keep a stripper warm.

I never looked or felt the part—doesn’t that role belong to those who are flirty, flaky, overly romantic, and inclined to disregard the consequences of their own actions? Besides, the only home I’ve ever wrecked was my own, and infidelity had nothing to do with it. But, although I’ve never wallowed in guilt over my romantic conduct, the understanding that something as good as my love (I’d like to think my love is good) could be highly destructive, well, smarts. Which is how I arrived at this lower east side reading, hoping to hear some intelligent justification for why other and otherwise nice people do things like I’ve done.

So that much I got, at least as far as intelligence goes. From the first reading from the second book mentioned above, what must have been the intro. That to turn your back on the desire is in itself a lie. That chastising the cheater isn’t the solution when it’s the institution itself that has broken down. And much more better and convincing stuff than I can reproduce right here. But nice—nice I did not find.

Writers, writers. So much drama. One of them brought her partner and her lover up to the mic for a lingering smooch (each reader had been required to take a public risk, as if reading your work before an audience isn’t risk enough). Despite the few jaw-droppingly good readings, and the impressive credentials of each reader (lots of MFAs and published books and a poetry award nomination), the overall tone was, ‘we’re all superior, no need to actually try.’ The MC was increasingly drunk (not in itself unlaudable) and annoying with repetitive self-deprecation (not at all laudable). Still, I attempted to thank her afterward for bringing together that group of readers, most of whom I’d enjoyed at one level or another. But she never gave me an in to say hi and thanks, and I regretted not having a cigarette to light at the door. (Which would have been way too hip, anyway.)

Even asking the guy outside, the one who seemed friendly, which way was west so I could get the 4 train at City Hall, and he told me the D was near, and also the F, but not so near, the 4, and yes that way was west, was so horribly awkward. I smiled, nodded, “4 yes, City Hall. West, that way, thanks,” and broke for getmeouttahere, plugged into my MP3 player and the lyrical world of ne’er do wells, dim lights, thick smoke….

I turned onto Mott and made my way down through Chinatown, past all those places I’ll probably never step into. It was a mistake to stick to Mott and not jog few more blocks west, cause I got lost at the vanishing point of Center Street, and spent a frustrating 20 minutes or more circling around, trying to determine which way the bridge went, and what happened to City Hall, the wedding building, which had been in such clear sight only a moment before. It’s huge, but had disappeared completely, swallowed by neighboring projects and the glare of streetlights that obscure more than they reveal to a person with night-shy eyes. I had to ask a couple of cops (thank god the base of the bridge hosts a sizeable collection of them), make a couple of wrong turns and backtracks knowing I had only 8 dollars in my wallet and had to get home by wit and not by cab. But I managed to secure my spot at last on a downtown train, albeit frustrated, discouraged, fatigued, a peg shorter than I’d started the night.

After such an ordeal, I treated myself to a nightcap at Mooneys, where my ring and I were ignored by a far friendlier crowd. Adulterous or not, and who knows how literate (I’d venture plenty literate), they were certainly drunk enough, plenty smoky, and somehow welcoming even by the backs of their heads.

Nice?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:32:51 -0500

Originally posted 01.26.2006

So, I went to the gym last night to redirect my monthly payments to a different account. This was taken care of by a staff member I’ve seen there in the past—pleasant, friendly, maybe a little too friendly. I’ve always been a little on my guard around him because I feel like he’s either trying to flirt with me or sell me something. But last night was a little different. He was pretty deflated. Still nice, even friendly, but the sort of perkiness I associate with him was just gone.

It turns out he’d done some damage to small bones in the ball of his foot while running around in street shoes during the strike. Now he has to wear well-cushioned shoes and lay off high-impact activities for a couple of months. So he was wearing sneakers, in a gym, mind, and he got yelled at by a superior because sales staff, or whatever he is, aren’t supposed to wear sneaks to work. In a gym!

On top of that he’s just got the winter blues. He grew up in Guyana, and he’s really struggling with the low light and the cold of even this mild winter. New York itself isn’t agreeing with him either. I know this because he said so, and also because he’s identified me several times as a really nice person, as someone who stands out as nice.

This is a little surprising to me, because I don't feel as though I’m particularly nice, especially not lately. Polite, sure, but nice? I spent four hours in a conference room yesterday trying to figure out how to trip the sprinkler system so I could escape—wondering if I’d survive an 8th floor defenestration.

Whatever. I feel kind of bad knowing that this guy’s been treated so shabbily that the absence of a scowl or harsh words makes a person nice.

As the flood waters recede

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:56:49 -0500

Originally posted 01.20.2006

Sitting on the 4 train on this mid-January day, I feel I could reach through the pages of this magazine into a New Orleans day, end of April, beginning of May. What year, which one of the last four?

The first was a sweet suspension of responsibility after a solitary road trip the length of a river, minus miles on either end, the Boundary Waters, the Gulf of Mexico. I never quite got my geographical bearings, but discovered lizards sunning midday in the courtyard. Learned how to pronounce Tchoupitoulas. Dragged a toe through the piles of powdered sugar beneath a table at the Café du Monde. Wondered how a place so flat could have such depth.

Or the last time, there as not the girlfriend anymore, but so firmly woven into the fabric of that family of contingents that it maybe didn’t matter. Autonomous as I’d been on that first drive down, but this time running instead, for miles, trusting that all roads lead, eventually, to Esplanade.

I’d been through the grief of the end of that relationship, through the nights of bolstering my empty frame with pillows and saying goodnight to the still air around me. Through the awkward dates with new men, wondering what on earth I could say to someone who hadn’t written a book of Bill Monroe transcriptions.

And now I’m revisiting that grief as he visits it seemingly for the first time. It took a year and a half for the reality to hit him in full. I can’t tell at this point where my own grief is coming from: if it’s new, old, missing him or what we were, for losses preceding that, for my parents, or if it’s just my own meshugas, the way I’m wired.

It took about six months, maybe more, before the sound of a mandolin didn’t make the bridge of my nose ache. There is no way for me to pick apart what happened when that city got washed away—what part empathy, personal loss, ridiculous sentimentality (loving something more than it deserves, L?). And now, I can’t tell what’s left, or if I want any part of it.

Strike!

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:53:08 -0500

Originally posted 12.20.2005

So, here I am, sitting at my desk at the DOH feeling slightly grimy in layers of running clothes and raggedy sweaters that I stuffed into a backpack early this morning before heading out for my first ever run-to-work. It was kind of neat, actually. Anticipating heavy congestion on the Brooklyn Bridge, I started out around 6:30 a.m. Most mornings, I shoehorn myself into a subway car for a brief but claustrophobic commute; today, I was powered only by my own steam, blessedly solitary for the first two thirds of my three-mile jog.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My options were to work from home; walk, bike, or run; or at the very worst, take a vacation day. I wonder how many of the 7 million commuters in this crazy city have so many choices. As usual, it’s the already vulnerable who will be hurt the most, the hourly wage-earners who don’t have vacation days, so many of whom live in the outer reaches of their boroughs.

My sympathies are mixed. On the one hand, I hear a coworker rant about the Transport Workers Union (TWU)’s lack of consideration for the people of New York, what Peter S. Kalikow, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) called “a slap in the face to all MTA customers and New Yorkers.”

“The MTA should just fire everybody and replace them,” said A. “Plenty of people out there would give their right arm to make, what do they earn? 50K a year?” A friend who earns far less at her various and sundry jobs, has no health insurance, pension, or vacation, feels the same. But E lays heavily on the education/wealth disparity: these working class people make a lot more than she, with her masters degree from a rather fancy institution, does, and yet they aren’t satisfied. How dare they.

The other take on it is that they’re fighting to keep what they already have. Not so much that they’re asking for more aside from reasonable cost of living raises (ahem, far more than any c.o.l. raise this city employee will ever see), but that they’re asking to maintain for future employees what current employees already have: retirement at 55, a pension contribution of 2% rather than the 6% the MTA is pushing for.

A pissed off guy in the Times was quoted as saying, “It’s ridiculous. If you look at what they’re asking for, that’s 50 years ago. Pensions don’t work like that any more.”

But why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why do we just acquiesce to this idea that workers get screwed and that’s just the way it is; things are worse than they used to be, we all work longer hours for a smaller dollar, and security is a thing of the past. That we should count ourselves lucky just to have a job at all.

I do count myself lucky to have a job. So, so lucky. But I like this job. I get paid as much as one of those blue-collar laborers mentioned above (and I don’t even have a masters degree. Just a bachelors. (Shhhhh.) I have benefits and…oh yeah, I’m a Teamster. I don’t really know what that means, but I think it has something to do with my rights being protected more than they would be if I wasn’t one.

Well. I know a lot of you who check in with spindlegirl live and commute in NY, and most (probably all) of you are more well-versed on this topic than I. So if there was ever a blog entry that invited your comments, this is the one.

What do you think?

Things are good

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:48:45 -0500

Originally posted 11.29.2005

We are gliding fast to the end of my darling month, my favorite, and I’m neither fully satisfied nor ready for December. No, my chilly, quiet gray month was happy and light, warm and relatively sober, well-nourished, friendly, and loving. And sort of loud.

So, there’s a little cognitive dissonance going on here.

I’m pretty happy, I guess, and I have been for a while. All those people who told me I needed to meditate or medicate, search deep within myself, or turn things over to the universe, just believe, put enough positive energy out there, blah blah blah. Well, they were just as wrong as I thought they were. What I needed was a job with some respect and security and I got it. And now I almost never cry anymore. Which isn’t to say I’ve become chipper or can-do; I’m still reserved and skeptical, drawn slightly sleazeward.

But the keen, desperate pain of the last, how many years? Has gone mute. Rubbed out like an errant hash mark on a city sidewalk. Maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit on my job security here, but after talks with both of what could loosely be called my bosses, it’s reasonable to conclude that I have no reason to fear being severed from this regular paycheck. Or from daily interactions with pleasant coworkers. Or from a routine upon which I can indulge my need for structure.

This is what my day looks like now: I get up and I run or I don’t; I select something to wear, sometimes from the rotation of things I’ve always liked that have barely seen the light of day in years; I ride a crowded subway in, which gives me something innocuous to complain about; depending on the timing of my arrival, I’ll say hi to a coworker or not, get an apple or not….

And so it progresses in a mundane and predictable way, and I do the things that 9-5ers do to keep from getting bored. In my case, it usually involves geeking out over combined elements of my work as a medical editor, like looking up rules of grammar in the AMA (American Medical Association) Manual of Style and giggling over the examples that elucidate what to do with quotation marks depending on other punctuation used:

Why bother to perform autopsies at all if the main finding is invariably “edema and congestion of the viscera”?

The clinician continues to ask, “Why did he die?”

“I’ll lend you my stethoscope for the clinic,”—then she remembered the last time she had lent it and said, “On second thought, I’ll be needing it myself.”

And eventually it’s time to go home, and so I return to my pretty neighborhood, where I can now afford organic broccoli from the inconvenience store. I haven’t started eating out, or buying $8 martinis, and my entertainment still consists mainly of Tea Lounge happy hours, DVD rentals, and occasional musical expeditions to Barbes or Bar Tabac. But that’s what I’m comfortable with for now. Comfortable, and trying to get used to it.

Wall? What wall? NYC Marathon 2005

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:44:32 -0500

Originally posted 11.10.2005

I’d like to apologize right off the bat—this year’s marathon write-up will not be as amusing as last year’s because there’s just no room in it for self-deprecation. Simply put, I trained really hard, the elements worked in my favor, and I had an awesome race, exceeding my highest expectations.

I arrived at Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, early. Really early. Before dawn. There weren’t many of us there at that point, and fog and dark concealed most of the staging area from view. But I knew that within a few hours the three athletes’ villages would fill with runners from around the world: about 37,000 of them, nearly enough to fill out my Wisconsin hometown or my alma mater’s undergraduate population.

I was comfortable at first, sitting on a curb chatting with a couple of out-of-town runners who’d been on my bus from lower Manhattan. But as dawn broke, it somehow got colder. Either that or whatever warmth I’d carried from my Brooklyn bedroom had dispersed, leaving me with icy hands and chattering teeth. I piled on nearly every item I’d brought with me, including a small cardigan, which I wrapped around my head like a turban, and carried cups of coffee to warm my hands.

For 20 minutes or so, I enjoyed a blues band tearing it up at the entertainment stage. They were good, but the setting was surreal. This music and energy, the stuff of summer weekend festivals and sultry, beery nights, was now bathed in the thin light of an early November morning, punctuated by the smell of Ben Gay and Icy Hot. Hats off to the musicians, not typically morning people—perhaps they’d been up all night.

With a little more than an hour to go, I dropped my bag off at its corresponding truck and made my way over to the elite local corral. Here, the crowd was a lot smaller, so it was easy to find my teammates congregated on a small patch of ground, passing around a tube of Vaseline (to prevent chafing) and a waterproof marker. I sat down with my legs comfortably folded under me, noting that I wouldn’t be able to sit like that again for a while.

As I looked around, it struck me that we were all, well, touchingly cute. The women at the local elite corral are mostly over 30 and mostly serious competitors, intrepid athletes who log endless miles, many of them in the dark, no strangers to the pain and stink of the sport, the sweat, snot, spit and injuries—every ugly little thing the body does when pushed to its limits. But there they were with ribbons in their hair, waterproof mascara, pretty little earrings and necklaces. I myself was wearing my first piece of jewelry: a cursive “M” in a circle in gold on a baby-fine chain. When I was a very little girl, this was worn on special occasions, holidays and birthdays, anytime there might be a party dress involved. On race day, the little charm rested just below the hollow of my throat, a small glint of vanity above my baggy white singlet and voluminous black shorts (team uniform).

We were called to the start-before-the-start, those of us with three-digit race numbers brought forward, arms linked, until we stood under the banner of balloons. Here, under rush-hour subway conditions, my pre-race giddiness took a jittery, bitter edge: love only for my teammates, irritation toward everyone else, especially the Italians in front of me, in particular the loud one whose ponytail kept assaulting my nose. By the time the National Anthem was being belted out by a singer I couldn’t see, I was laughing with annoyance—I can’t stand the Star Spangled Banner, sentimental war ditty that it is. But at last the cannon boomed and we were off with a whoop and holler.

The first two miles were pretty uncomfortable. My shins ached and my ankles were stiff. But within the first mile I’d found Marie, which was pretty much the extent of my racing strategy. Marie’s a seasoned marathoner, a metronomic distance runner who helped me land a PR (personal record) in a half-marathon last summer. She’s also my hero in running: a tireless cheerleader for the sport, an Achilles volunteer, and something of a local celebrity. To know her is to admire her, and I do.

But I’d also been a little worried about her. Already lean as a snake, she’d dropped about 10 pounds in the weeks before the race, weight she could ill-afford to lose: we were all cold in Fort Wadsworth, but Marie was shivering visibly, her teeth chattering even in the crush of bodies at the start. So while I was looking to her for support and guidance and the comfort of her presence, it struck me that I might be the stronger of us, a thought that didn’t make me very comfortable. Not that I’m averse to being supportive rather than supported, but I also felt, out of deference, that I had no right to have a better race than she.

We left the Verrazano and turned into Bay Ridge, the first of the crowd of 2 million spectators, the guy on his third-floor balcony with a cowbell, the first of the bands (again, hats off to the musicians, rocking both watchers and runners well before noon). The little pains of my first two miles melted away in the miles up 4th Avenue, and I took water and Gatorade when available, and learned a valuable lesson about the latter: it doesn’t sting the eyes, though it will cause lashes to stick together.

When my watch hit the hour mark, I tore into my first gel. Last year I waited until mile 16 to do this, far too long. But now I know, following Marie’s example, to take one every hour. It’s not easy to eat while you’re running, even if you don’t have to chew: it takes a bit more focus to swallow a gel than to down a liquid; they’re hard to breathe around.

Through Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, we kept up a pace that would get us to the finish line ahead of my goal, and spot on for Marie’s. As we passed through water stations, she handed off Gatorades to me, sustenance I might otherwise have overlooked. We drew close to the Pulaski Bridge, the half-way point, and she said, “this is where you reassess, and I know now I’m not going to have the race I wanted.” It made me sad to hear. I was having better than the race I’d expected, largely from what I’d learned from Marie: high volume distance in training, dietary supplements during the race, Gatorade over water.

As we came to the end of the Queensboro, Marie realized she’d lost one of her gels. Counting on picking one up at mile 18 (where the marathon officially distributes them) and hungry, she’d eaten one of her three before the start. I passed her one of my remaining two, delighted to have an opportunity to help her out for a change. It’s so rare for me to be the one in any situation who has something extra: an extra sweater, sandwich, umbrella. A nice change of pace for me to provide a rescue, however small. And that is pretty much where my pace did indeed change.

Somewhere around 17, I started into a surge that would continue until nearly mile 24. Passing mile 20 in the Bronx, I laughed. Wall? There would be no wall for me. Most of the signage I passed at that point was of the “hang in there” variety. I didn’t need it. Beaming at the crowd, I conducted them, scooping my arms over my head, into a wave of cheers every few blocks. “Look at that gal with the braids,” I heard, and “You go, smiley!” (For the record, no one has ever called me ‘smiley.’)

The last two miles in the park were harder. My smile flagged, and acceleration was impossible. But there wasn’t really any pain, just heaviness in my legs, and a distraction as my head tried to remember how long it takes me to run 200 yards. I passed the finish line with a huge grin, and was hugged by the guy who’d crossed nearly in tandem with me, in 3:10:39.

What’s next? I don’t know. I’m curious to see if I could still have a strong race with less training because, frankly, I don’t want to train that hard again. I sacrificed a lot for that marathon, and my life got pretty out of balance for a while. But after an experience like that, there’s no way I could retire from the marathon, which had sort of been my intention (at first, I wanted to do only one, but I did it so poorly I had to do it again to improve on it…). So, to those of you who scoffed when I said NYC 2005 would be the last, well, you’re probably right.

Also, a big thank you to everyone who called before and after the race to wish me well, to everyone who turned out to cheer, to my coach and teammates for their endless advice and inspiration, to my coworkers for their support and interest, to the H3 for helping me keep a sense of humor, and to my roommate for putting up with everything the roommate of a marathon runner puts up with.

Coil and recoil

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:38:02 -0500

Originally posted 11.01.2005

Here we have the first day of my favorite month, my very dear grey, my lovely drear, which I begin by loving first for what it isn’t. It isn’t summer, lush and overblown and bright. And it isn’t for summer people, who are probably the majority—all those who like walking on the beach and getting caught in the rain. (I too like getting caught in the rain, but in the city, in an alley, with an umbrella. A big one. Preferably while watching rats.) It isn’t for grilling out or bike rides or lingering in a crowd.

The pitch and vibration of November are perfect for someone of darkling temperament: July is too bright, April too soggy, and February has little going for it save being short. But what November lacks in open-faced friendliness, it more than makes up for in sensuality.

I love November’s honest light, more true and less of an assault than summer’s burning gold, revealing late-autumn’s topaz hues in leaf-shed clarity. The leaves will fall, some driven by rain, others merely by their natural end, and many will leave behind imprints, ghostly photo-fossils in memento mori. This month the sky will descend, heavy with migrating birds, smoky and thick at the horizon. It smells of wood fires and seed pods—the same ones we’ll shake and rattle during the Bacchanalian watermelon dance six months from now—and of cold rain, dusty sweet decay, and first snow. What crosses the tongue as we toe into winter are tastes that make the rest of the year worth it: amber scotches, sherry, and cognac; black coffee and Russian caravan; acorn squash and sweet potatoes: all things deeply orange and yellow, even the greens tingeing purple. And it’s the best month to thank yourself for giving up vegetarianism in one word: roasts.

But what’s best is the way November touches skin, seeping in through plackets and cuffs, up hems and sleeves, through even the thickest thatch of hair to the scalp. It touches softly, without insistence, a trial kiss. Like love from a stranger, a polite benevolence that asks for no return.

A Com-for-ta-ble place

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:35:15 -0500

Originally posted 10.26.2005

Last night, sorely in need of a trim, I put my head once again in the hands of my capable hair lady, Holly, who consistently pulls off a feat no other New York hairdresser has managed to accomplish: cut my hair without making me cry.

Once upon a time, I put great faith in the transformative promise of a good cut. As a child, I loved having my hair cut, the raggedy ends held up in a comb and trimmed even, then released to flop wetly against my cheek. Loved watching other people’s haircuts, too, sitting rapt while the stylist deftly manipulated some lady’s willful curls into a smooth pageboy. After a particularly important cut I received in 8th grade (the one that took me from girl-next-door with braces to girl-next-door with hip, slightly edgy for La Crosse, haircut), I started to view all women as falling into two groups: those whose hair worked, and those whose lives would be changed if they would just give up on that pathetic, stringy, lank collection of dead cells parted down the middle and clasped back in cheap barrettes doing absolutely nothing for their long faces except to make them look even more horsey and sallow.

Hard to believe that was me. The last time I gave anyone with scissors permission to do anything they wanted (and meant it) was, oh, letsee here, 1992? And I think it was more along the lines of, ‘this perm didn’t work. Let’s cut it off and start over.’ And earlier than that, in the spring of 1989, I went from waist-length to chin-length without a whimper. With a smile, even.

But now, when I slide into a new chair, face the hairdresser in the mirror, and say, ‘if I were to give you carte blanche with those shears, what would you do?’ and they inevitably tilted their heads and squint and place their hands, palms down, about two inches below my shoulders and say, ‘first we’d bring it up to here and then, hmm, maybe some piece-y bits around the face…’. Nope. You lost me at ‘up to here.’

It’s ridiculous, this stuff. It gets trapped in subway doors (really), car windows (yes indeed) and my fly (don’t ask). It clogs drains. Some days it veers dangerously into Bradyland; others, Laura Ingallsworld. Also, I’m troubled by the suspicion that without it I’d be invisible. Sexless. To wit: it doesn’t matter what else I’m wearing (glasses, saddle shoes, sweatpants), if the hair is down, I’ll solicit male attention whether I want it or not. The reverse is also true: stilettos with fishnets, red lipstick, a top that borders on bondage wear…and a chignon. Nothing. Not even eye contact. The bums don’t even ask me for change. So at some level I’d like to defy convention and slice it off. See what happens. See if the rest of me carries any weight at all.

But I’m a little too far gone for that. About two years ago a sweet friend bought me an expensive cut in a chic midtown salon. For what seemed an eternity this handsome man with an impenetrable accent fussed and straightened and snipped and adjusted…. And at the end my hair was shiny. It was swingy. It was…shorter on one side. After the adjustment at least three inches (seven months’ growth, people) were gone. I did manage to get to the subway before crying. At least credit me that.

So now I’ve got Holly. She’s Indian and she knows long hair. I went to her two years ago for eyebrow threading (yes, I need it; I’ll show you a picture of my brother if you want to know why). She’s kind of bossy and declarative and rather possessive (‘You pluck your eyebrows? Not any more. They belong to me now you do not touch them’), which is oddly welcome in this life where it seems like I’m responsible for making up the rules for almost everything I do.

Often, when she’s done trimming or coloring my hair, she’ll play with it. But unlike Suzy, my favorite hairdresser from the Madison days, who used me as a model to try out complicated, long-hair styles she saw at trade shows (“this one was used in ‘The Titanic’”), Holly makes me feel like a younger cousin sitting, perhaps, at the kitchen table, picking at a plate of broken papadam.

She likes braids, specifically, and while she usually gives me one more-or-less sophisticated plait ending in a ringlet, last night she twisted the mess into two, starting at the temple. It was cute, sort of—I looked like a 10-year-old schoolgirl with laugh lines. As she arranged the braids over my shoulders, she caught my eye in the mirror and grinned. “I think we have come to a very com-for-ta-ble place in our relationship,” she said, in her delightfully clear and rapid accent. Dry-eyed, I nodded. I couldn’t agree with her more.

Tempered bliss

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:06:35 -0500

Originally posted 10.19.2005

Last night I found such incredible bliss, an ecstatic mix of simple delights that form a happiness so deeply satisfying I can barely imagine anything better. Perhaps people who delight in their children experience something even brighter, but I’ll have to leave that open for guessing.

All together in one spot: people I adore, live music to listen to and to play, a taste of good food, sip of good wine, the visual cheer of a candlelit bistro with windows open to a spirited street, reaquaintence with friends not forgotten (Izzy! Sterling!), enthusiastic praise from formidable musicians, and the promise of more to come.

This happens more and more often to me these days, as the financial freedom granted by a steady job has made me, well, better company. That is, I can afford the H3, the glass of wine, and I no longer have to field the question: how is the job search going? (Right up there with: been playing out much? Still seeing that guy?)

But even this, well, maybe it’s just been so long in coming. I cannot take such joy for granted, and so there is always a slice of me standing outside myself, watching the good time and whispering in my ear: this will never happen again. Not this way. Not these people. Never again this moment.

As though I’m just a visitor even in my own life, renting this body, borrowing these friends, trying this town on for size, and that I’ll have to go. And I, who used to be the last to leave the on-in or the jam, who would linger after races, or stay to close the bar, do just that: go. I have to get up early, I have to run…or maybe it’s something else.

Toeing the edge of joy, perhaps, I’m just a little afraid to do more than test the water, for fear of finding that my trial membership has expired, my visa run out, my lease revoked. And I wake hours before I need to, wondering what it takes to truely believe that any of this is mine, and wishing I could filter the last line of this poem from the 3am synapse loop.

— from The Traveler Has Regrets, GS Fraser

Night with its many stars

Can warn travelers

There’s only time to kill

And nothing much to say:

But the blue lights on the hill,

The white lights in the bay

Told us the meal was laid

And that the bed was made

And that we could not stay.

Waveland Mississippi

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:02:58 -0500

Originally posted 10.08.2005

Excerpt from an interview with an orthopedic trauma surgeon who worked on a mobile hospital unit treating victims of the hurricanes.

“This is my read on things: if you’re a law abiding citizen and you need to work within the confines of established rules, you shouldn’t be there the first two weeks, because there are no rules. There’s no electricity, there’s no food, there’s no water, there’re no showers. In the first wave of deployment you need to pick up the people who can work problems, who can come up with innovative ways to solve problems and get things done, and I think that we had a lot of those people in the first two weeks. I was amazed by the innovation.

“The first night we were staying at the hospital, there was no light. We were in a Kmart parking lot and there were dead bodies on the Kmart roof and there were dead bodies inside the strip mall buildings. There’d been a 35-foot tidal surge where we were, so everything was under water. So one of our paramedics combined with one of these local evacuees who was living in a tent in the parking lot to recognize that we had generators, and there were these light poles that never did go under water, because they were high enough, but they just weren’t working because there was no city electricity. So they opened up the light poles, disconnected the power lines that weren’t working and connected the generators and turned them on. Then we had the only area in Waveland that had light, and that was within three hours. So we could then work at night at the hospital. And that was just somebody thinking smart and out of the box that allowed that to happen. We probably violated all kinds of rules, but who cares.”

Sleeping in

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:42 -0500

Originally posted 09.30.2005

I blew off my run this morning. It would have been eight miles, probably incorporating two-thirds of the clockwise park loop and a swing around the cemetery, dawn only beginning to break in the last few miles. But I stayed in bed, in the comfort of soft cotton sweatpants and a fuzzy sweater, smooth sheets, down pillows.

Crazy, crazy girl.

It felt like taking care of myself, this counter to what most people consider productive self-care. Even worse, I skipped breakfast. No cold yogurt with frozen blueberries, chopped walnuts, a handful of granola. Just coffee in a teacup, brewed from a wasp-waisted mocha pot, four ounces, five, black as death and slightly chewy.

My little rebellion. How I’d rather live, so minimalistically. Less output, less intake. All that shopping and chopping and cooking, the vegetables and proteins and grains. It’s exhausting. And all to support one superfluous activity, marathon training. All those calories burned and I still can’t allow a scone for breakfast. So what’s the point?

I remember the bliss of that trip seven years ago, my suspension from reality, 10 days in Edinburgh during which I subsisted on a daily egg, an orange, a half-pint of Guinness, and whatever handful else. And I walked and slept. It was a regression, of course, but tempting in recollection; a deviation from the immoderation that now defines me. Always this battle between the type A and the type Zzzz.

My running shoes are in a bag at my feet, and I’ll probably attempt to make up the run late-afternoon when I’m uptown picking up the race packet for a half-marathon I don’t want to do. And the hunger will never really flood my stomach, but will only distract my head so that I nibble and nosh on whatever’s close at hand, never really satisfying. Nowhere near that egg, that orange, and that half-pint of Guinness.

Stella!

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:55:00 -0500

Originally posted 09.29.2005

Stella is a name that used to conjure up certain images: the tragic-romantic Stella Kowalski; Stella by Starlight. Short for Estelle, who has a bit of a mustache problem and is somebody’s great-aunt, Stella I always pictured as solid, but definitely girlish, the object of someone’s long-time affection.

But three years ago I moved to Brooklyn and Stella became the wall of stubbornness between me and the execution of basic household maintenance. The hand that holds the phone that calls the plumber belongs to this woman, 10 days older than water, short but vast, who lives on the third floor and climbs the stairs with a three-pronged cane.

My heart goes out to the old woman. She has suffered tremendous losses in her life and she’s doing a job she shouldn’t have to do any more: tending to an old building as falling apart as she is. But why, when one of her favorite tenants has a complaint, must she become part of it?

Two days after I accepted the fact that the kitchen sink would never empty itself again, despite heavy doses of caustic treatment, I return from work to find the sink still plugged, no note or message from Stella or the plumber. She answers on the third ring and, before I reiterate the problem, says she wants to look at it.

I’m familiar with her M.O. No matter what the damage is, Stella must investigate and attempt a repair herself. So she painstakingly pulls herself up the last flight of stairs, lumbers into my kitchen, and declares the drain not a problem. “The water will go down dear. It just takes a while.” When I tell her that the water has been there overnight, she grasps the long plastic chopstick at sink side and desultorily pokes it into the drain. After a few more minutes of peering into the sink, like a cat at a mouse hole, she admits defeat and says she’ll call a plumber. A real one.

This is kind of a surprise, because Stella will usually call in a bevy of non-pros, who usually make the problem worse (and more expensive), before enlisting an expert. I wish I had a dime for everyone who tried to fix our toilet last year. Likewise, I wouldn’t mind financial compensation for every day that we had no electricity in the living room two years ago, or for every winter’s day we went without heat or hot water. “Just put on a sweater,” she says. “Spring will be here soon.”

On her way out, I show Stella the other problem: the pull chain for the bathroom’s sole light fixture no longer pulls. “Michael will be back in a couple of weeks,” she says, referring to the exasperated young handyman who lives, about three weeks out of the year, on the ground floor. (The rest of the time, he lives in Rome, where Stella can’t call him.)

“That’s really not acceptable Stella,” I say. “We have to turn it on and off by tightening or loosening the bulb. We can’t put the shade back up.”

“Michael can fix it,” she says, affecting selective deafness. “He’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

Life goes on

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:52:50 -0500

Originally posted 09.27.2005

After my last post, I haven't known what to write. Nothing seems that important in light of the devastation of the Gulf; this former resident of a northern Mississippi state is suffering some sort of survivor’s guilt. I sent money. Discussed taking a paid leave to volunteer down there, though I don’t know what I could do.

But we get on with it, right? My obsession with online newspaper accounts of the flood has ebbed; my brain is no longer 80% New Orleans-centric. (Note: even before the flood, that city occupied room, a lot of it, for years. Any given day, at least 15% of my being is listening for a brass band, my skin remembering the bloom of humidity in late-spring Louisiana.)

I’m more than a month into my job now. Feeling at turns completely useless and wondering whatever the hell did they do without me. I’ve been at peak mileage for marathon training that same length of time and I’m living in what I can only guess to be an athlete’s body. Really. Not just thin, not just fit. It’s all tough and resiliant. The calves seem like someone else’s.

There was a man in my life, but there isn’t any more. He wanted too much too soon, in startling contrast with the one before him, who wanted less than I could possibly not give. I do feel like the gods of romance are having their fun with me, and would appreciate them to knock it off. They sent me Mr. De Boer 13 years ago; haven’t I paid my dues already?

Ah, and the music. I’m giving it far less than I want, but it’s still working out. It’s really starting to flow, to be an extension of me. I can do it now when I’m tired. There’s a strength that didn’t used to be.

So. Enough about me. How are y’all? Leave a comment (unless you’re the spambot that attaches links to porn sites, in which case, please desist) and let me know how you’re doing. I have no idea who visits this blog these days.

The flood

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:00:00 -0500

Originally posted 09.05.2005

The first time I rode a bike through Treme, a light spray of pebbles struck my backside. I looked over my shoulder and saw a group of children standing in the street, empty handed, watching me. They weren’t menacing, but they weren’t laughing either; the message was clear: I wasn’t just a tourist, but a trespasser, and I wasn’t welcome.

The New Orleans Jazz and Cultural Heritage Festival was the lure that had drawn me, but just as I often find I prefer the cookie to its eponymous chocolate chips, so I found the city, and found more of it every year. This past year in particular, as a more serious distance runner, each morning covering greater swaths of city and park areas, moving outward in a concentric circle from my lodgings. Through the Quarter, up and down the river walk, the downtown, along Esplanade, weaving in and out of side streets at their odd angles off the main thoroughfare. Even through Treme, where it was too early for rock-tossing children, and the men standing on the corners at 6:30 paid me little mind. I started getting to the fest grounds later and leaving earlier, spending time alone outside of the weekend, searching for and finding quiet spots, my own private New Orleans.

One early evening, I treated myself to a glass of wine at a bar on Rampart Street, around the corner from Gentry House on St. Ann’s (the street from which, as you head out of the Quarter, you see the arch of Armstrong Park in a bit of an optical illusion, as though it brandished the street itself). The bartender was a pretty young woman with a big smile, all “welcome to New Orleans, is this your first visit?” and a walking calendar of events for attractions that might interest me: music and barbecues, all-day line-up and all you can eat.

I guess it was obvious, despite my desire to either belong completely or to be a fly on the wall, that I was still a visitor. A tourist: viewer, listener, voyeur. There to take pictures, spend money, support the economy. I was certainly happy enough to engage when appropriate, to rent my bike from French Quarter Bikes; to pack myself off to the Music Factory for a little Astral Project, or my yearly reunion with Mr. Bohren; pick up a coupon for a $1 Abita at Ol’ Toone’s; my annual coffee and beignet at Café du Monde, despite my dislike of chicory.

I don’t know much about how my friends there are faring, except that they’re alive. Some fled the city; others stayed behind and will probably be evacuated. I am utterly heartbroken over the devastation wrought by this disaster, admittedly more so than I would be if I weren’t so emotionally attached to that strange and beautiful city. Having witnessed the poverty there and the vulnerability of the infrastructure of many neighborhoods, I can’t imagine what will be left standing.

I also can’t imagine the impact that this catastrophe will have on the music that is so strongly identified with that part of the country, so uniquely American and so important to our cultural identity. New Orleans and the surrounding areas are the strongholds of Cajun and Zydeco, cornerstones of southern roots music, not to mention the area’s unique brand of R&B and its ongoing jazz tradition. We’ve learned that both Fats Domino and Irma Thomas have turned up, and I found through his Web site that Spencer and family fled to Oklahoma. But it will be some time before we know the status of more obscure musicians. And there will be those we’ll never know.

I feel tremendously fortunate to have seen New Orleans the way it was, and to have had the chance to fall in love with it as I did. I’m worried about my people there, and about the integrity of that historical town. But there’s something more, perhaps deeply selfish, that pulls my heart apart. I’m a creature of habit, even on vacation, always searching for the home I can’t quite find. One of the little paths I’ve worn has been swept away, and I don’t know what I’ll do without it.

McCoy Tyner at Castle Clinton

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:57:11 -0500

Originally posted 08.07.2005

Todd and I met up Thursday night to hear a free concert at Castle Clinton: McCoy Tyner and his trio. I was afraid this might be like every other attempt we’ve made to see each other this summer, the last minute call, lack of direction, and ultimate failure in meeting. The, I was there, where were you? outcome. Especially since I couldn’t remember exactly where Castle Clinton is, as I can never find anything in a park, and didn’t know if he was there already, or on his way, or stuck in traffic, or parked in Jersey City and waiting for the PATH. And he doesn’t have a cell phone.

But we managed to find each other and were among the last few people in, finding standing room only at the back, where the sound was muddy and the audience a lower caliber of jazz listener. The ones who talk a lot and line up their beer cans. But free is free, and McCoy Tyner is McCoy Tyner, with those fourths and modes. Some of my favorite stuff in jazz, right there, even without a violinist.

Afterwards, we sat on a bench outside the castle and caught up. His mom and sister and nieces are on a cruise, which he feels his mom was bullied into. She doesn’t want to go on a ridiculously big boat and eat her way through a 10-day vacation under the Caribbean glare. But the rest of the family doesn’t see it that way: who doesn’t like a cruise? It’s for her own good.

He’s lost weight since the near heart attack. “You think?” he asks? “Oh yeah you have,” I said, looking at his belly. Or where it used to be. “Aren’t your pants falling off?” He admits they’ve gotten loose. Salads are the center of his diet now. And his mom gave him a Foreman grill, and Nancy gave him a seasoning rub and chutneys she made in her kitchen. Lots of people checking up on him, making sure he’s got the right things around to eat. The way women take care of men, sons who left home long ago, bachelor friends on their own.

We watched the fountain outside the castle. It’s flush with the ground and consists of water jets in a pattern that spurt and collapse at various levels. It’s programmed into a little show, and if you watch long enough you know what’s coming, what’s the pattern. It’s clearly designed to encourage interaction, and it succeeds. Children dart in and out of the jets, soaked and giggling; lovers smooch over the bubbling water.

I make a motion to leave and he says, “not until you run through the fountain.” A dare? He knows I have no sense of play. No kids in my life, no dogs, I’m out of practice. I can run across fields, up and down hills, over fences, calling on-on all the way, but actual frolicking is not part of my lifestyle. Still, I feel I’ve been challenged to show my sense of humor. And the fountain is inviting. So I pull off my sandals, bundle up my skirt, and dash into fountain just as the jets collapse. A few of them burst upward at apparently random intervals, but not near me, and after a couple of minutes walking around dry from the ankles up, I return to Todd’s side at the bench.

“I guess it saw you coming,” he said.

Where's my compass?

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:53:00 -0500

Originally posted 01.17.2005

The first night back, I sleep a solid eight hours tucked between the cool, silky cotton sheets on my childhood bed, the low-throttled window fan kicking in a sweet-smelling midsummer breeze. No Flatbush sirens, no whine from the Blockbuster air conditioner, no ambient city light, no wonder I sleep so well.

I make arrangements with my dad over breakfast to walk him home from his office at lunchtime. Since his retirement this spring, he’s had to give up his own office where he’s written and counseled students and graded papers for some 35 years, but the university set aside space for him to write in the corner of a small library.

So, what is it with men and directionals? “Walk in the front doors,” he says, “and take the elevator to the third floor.” So far, so good. “Then head west toward the Minnesota bluffs.”

Head west toward the Minnesota bluffs. See, if it were me, I’d say turn right and walk down the hall, but there’s something admittedly intrepid about heading toward the great rock formations of a river valley. Or even just the river itself, as though I were tracking game along its banks, or searching for the wreckage of the War Eagle (a steam boat that went down in 1870 after an unusually long run of 16 years). But when you step off an elevator inside an office building, it’s pretty hard to determine west from a hole in the ground, so I just turned right and walked down the hall until I found him.

It’s not a bad setup. He’s got a desk for his laptop and a side-table for his materials and two speakers from the late 60s that host one photo apiece: the black and white profile fiddler Rick shot of me at a bluegrass jam, fiddling (natch), and my brother’s high school senior picture, a.k.a., the last-known decent picture taken of Ethan.

The problem is the library itself. Or the content therein. It was set up by dad’s colleague Bendickson, and all the materials have to do with morbidity. Funeral rites throughout the ages. Drug addiction and death. Suicide as a hobby. No one has stopped into this library in the two months since dad’s been set up there, and it seems unlikely to me that anyone ever will.

Not a healthy place for a man who is presently wallowing in woes of the flesh. The cancer, he says, is the least of his concerns, though I don’t know if I buy that. What’s really got him fussed up is the blood pressure, the insomnia, and the back pain, which has him in anguish. The way he describes it, as we leave the building (and head southeast, toward 20th street) is that his spine, particularly the lower lumbar area, is disintegrating. Collapsing. This makes no sense to me. He doesn’t have osteoporosis or any degenerative disease, and it seems to me if your spine were crumbling you’d be in a wheelchair. But that’s what he says, and I have no doubt that, whatever the actual condition, he’s in a lot of pain.

He’s been falling apart physically for years. The accumulation of daily bad habits and overwork: too much alcohol, punishing workouts, no social network, unresolved heartaches and regrets. He used to run 8 miles a day, sometimes alternating with a one-mile swim. As the running became problematic, this gave way to long bike rides. Nothing wrong with being physically active, but I don’t know if he ever enjoyed it. It was more penance than pleasure or poetry. Now he can walk a little bit.

“It’s not much, but this walk, to and from the office, twice a day, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?” he asks me as we amble along 18th street. He has three different routes, he tells me, to keep it interesting. And this street, still paved in brick, is his favorite. One-way, the walk is maybe 2/3 of a mile. It’s better than nothing, as exercise goes, but not by much. “Can you walk any faster?” I ask, “get your heart rate up a little?” But he says it hurts too much when he pushes the pace.

“I wish I’d been more sympathetic to my mom,” he said. “I thought she was just being lazy, the way she wouldn’t leave her house to get any exercise. Or do anything. But she never really let on how bad it was. Stoic.”

Yeah, stoic. She pickled herself pretty thoroughly in stoicism and Scotch.

This condition, he tells me, is hereditary. As is the blood pressure. (And the pickling?) I can’t quite believe this could be my future. That my body, so resilient and adaptable, so straight and pain-free, will ever bear more than the weight of battered vanity. At 36, I run better and faster than ever, have more dexterity and strength in my hands, and less pain in my body than I did ten years ago. Is this descent inevitable? Will my time on top of the mountain be so brief?

He talks about trying to let go of the desire for expertise in some field, to be the foremost scholar on something, because there will always be someone ahead of him, no matter what topic, even the political development of Latin America, which he feels is woefully under-studied and misunderstood. “Because, you see, you want to leave a legacy of your time here,” he says.

I know. I’m his daughter. “The imposter complex,” I tell him. “The things I’m good at feel too easy, like I’m not trying hard enough, or going deep enough, or understanding thoroughly enough. But if we all felt that way, nothing would ever get done. And no one would be able to drive a car.”

I tell him that, although he may not have nailed down one particular area in a way that satisfies his legacy lust, the breadth and interconnectedness of his knowledge (from two decades of reading the Economist, he says), make him my favorite authority on almost everything. “When people ask me what you do, well, “anthropologist” just doesn’t work. It seems too small a discipline to incorporate all of what I think you are: economist, historian, political scientist, scholar.”

This description lifts his cloud for a little while, and maybe he was able to see himself through my eyes, which, though only recently 20/20 in the literal sense, have always seen the world around me as honestly and diplomatically as possible. This he has known of me all my life.