Bones of the Father

It turns out that when you are cremated, not all your bones are burned to ash. I discovered this when, curious, I opened the box full of dad.

For a long time after he died, I wore his bone shards in a silver locket around my neck. When I finally grew tired of being haunted, I removed the locket and tucked it away. Today, seven years later, I found it again.




That endless wild roaring sea of grief (irreducible so I once thought) become the dry rattle of fragment against silver.



9/365

I Call Bullshit

Of all the smarmy, overwrought, misguided memes to come to light on social media over the past year or two, this one has to be the most loathesome (it's a link, in case you'd like to view it):

"abused" woman takes photos "every day for a year" to illustrate how harrowing it is when a stunning model's pristine beauty is marred by some special effects makeup

I guess the generic piano music (which, by the way, can be heard on countless heart-wrenching meme-ish vids, my God that composer is getting royalty checks as numerous as crocodile tears) makes this somehow worthwhile? or is it the lonely heartbreak of the glamorous "victim," so lovely that we either want to help her or bed her?

Domestic violence is a problem, OBVIOUSLY, but trumped-up pretty manipulation isn't going to help one damn bit.

Battered women, like rape victims, suffer from this sort of portrayal. It's the difference between watching hot chicks in knickers get slaughtered in films, and going to the scene of a real murder. One is titillating, the frisson of horror is almost fun, hell you might even get off on it, and the other one...

well, the real thing, most people probably can't handle.

Hence the popularity of these attractively manufactured gut punches. I call bullshit.



8/365

Once Upon a Time, I Was a Nursing Mother

It amazes me that, in three-and-a-half long years of nursing my daughter, there were exactly two photos taken. The first, minutes after she was born: I have the most comical pained expression, captured by my mother, as Ella latches on (powerfully, I might add) for the first of uncountable times.

The other photo is this.




She was so tiny and hungry. Sometimes she nursed all day and all night, in the early days.

I always intended to nurse past a year old, but I had no idea that I would still be nursing my baby years later, long past her babyhood, and well into the time of a walking talking school-attending little girl.

I nursed Ella day in and day out, night after night, through illness, bad days, blizzards, hot summers, in subways, on trains, in restaurants, at zoos, concerts, empty grad school classrooms. I nursed her to soothe hurts and hurt feelings, tantrums and nightmares, tummyaches and sore throats. I nursed her when I didn't feel like it, and I nursed her in the quiet early dawn when there was nothing I'd rather be doing.

I nursed her when she could only ask for the breast with little guttural whimpers and ostentatious sucking sounds, and I nursed her when she could walk right up to me in her little mary janes and say, "mama, would you mind please nursing me?"

In three and a half years, though it became less frequent, we never missed one single day of nursing.

I don't really miss it, the tight way I was bound to her. It wasn't easy. Sometimes, in my worst moments, I imagined Ella and I were like Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins, claustrophobic and entwined. Then sometimes I was afraid I would lose something irretrievable when I weaned her. And I thought surely I would be like a soldier with phantom limb twinges, that the ghost of my nursing baby would haunt me forever, the pull at my nipples felt at odd moments like a visceral flashback.

And yet, it was okay in the end, the weaning, that separation. I got my breasts back all to myself (with more than a sigh of relief), she learned other ways to soothe herself, and is an independent and self-confident girl.

I think it was the best and rightest thing I have done in my life.



7/365

Christ Topped from the Bottom

I'm a good Jewish woman, and, like most of my breed, have long harbored a secret crush on Christ.

He was hot, you know. If iconography through the ages is any indication. Physically hot, all that hiking around the desert: tan, lean. Spiritual yet manly. Well-spoken (though we don't really know that for sure, do we). Eternally 33 years old, like Edward Cullen but with more depth and less biting. Probably smelled of patchouli oil. Or myrrh. He was a god in the lowercase lay sense of the word.

So I finally had a chance to view Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" last night. I'd call the film a depraved perversion, but it would be like pointing out that my caramel gelato was delicious. So obvious that it should not need saying.

And yet...

So many people were thrown into a state of frenzied excitement by that movie. Which is fine, really it is, but if you were excited by it, please own up to your own base nature and recognize that the film was a piece of hardcore s/m b&d porn. Slow-motion homoerotic beatings, moans of agony/ecstasy, extremely good-looking women kneeling in pools of bodily fluid. I swear I saw Jesus giving the Marys (including his own mother) an erotic come-hither look through his mutilated eyelids.

The money shot was surely Mary, kissing Jesus' bloody feet, and coming away with smeared mouth, a weird half-smile on her face. Come ON. That obscene image alone is worth the price of admission. That is, if you are a complete Godless pervert.

So yeah. I could sit here and deconstruct all day, but in the end it boils down to this:

Gibson's Christ was a very hot sexual victim. He wore his gore well. He took it all, deep.

But in the end, he gave the smirk of the vindicated masochist and topped, in the biggest and most epic way possible, from the bottom.





p.s. I know I am YEARS late to this party, but what the hell.

Imperfections

Intimacy, to me, is all about discovering imperfection and loving not despite, but because of.




The flawed being is the real one. The one I want to know. Real love never comes from bland smooth fearful risk-less sameness, but from the challenge of the individual; it is built on the true revelation of "all things counter, original, spare, strange."





(photo: my pigeon-toed feet; quote: Gerard Manly Hopkins)

post 5/365

The Bachelorette

A week of alone time. I hardly know where to begin. Nap? Knit? Eat an entire container of caramel gelato? Watch terrible Lifetime movies? Slasher films? Write erotica? Read erotica? Gaze into the fire? Road trip? Write letters? Talk on the phone for hours? Sort buttons?




So far all I have really committed to is napping, and not doing the dishes.



4/365

Avatar

Facebook is stupid.

But it forces front and center the fascinating sociological phenomenon of the Profile Picture.

I look around the virtual Grand Central Station at all the little square avatars milling there, and I think about the (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconcious) questions people put to themselves as they stare into the virtual mirror every morning:

"How do I see myself today? how do I want to see myself and how do I want to be seen?

Do I want to be a minx, a mother, a grandmother, papa, party girl, dog lover, man of God, poet, cop, soldier, longshoreman?

Do I want to be what I really am now or do I want to be what I wish for or what I am missing?

Do I want to take the form of my own children? My cat? A cartoon? An ancestor?

Am I come-hither, a human invitation? Am I a little wild or am I sensible? Am I hail-fellow-well-met? Am I open? A mystery? Am I innocent, feigning worldliness? Or worldly hiding in innocence? Am I my own youth? Am I psychic pain, personified? Or am I funny and loveable? Do I wear a shroud, or do I wear a smile? And do I show my teeth, smirk, or remain enigmatic? Am I clear, blurry, windswept, in shadow or light-flooded?

Am I technicolor? Moody black & white?

I promise you this, though: I EXIST."





3/365

Trash

My latest, arguably finest, trash score. No way to resist a book whose jacket blurb begins: "In a time when steak, vodka, and Benzedrine were the three main staples of a healthy diet..."

I think I might like to try that time on for awhile. Damn the prissy rigors of organic lowfat milk, kindly eggs, firm tofu, brussels sprouts, chickens raised so tenderly that you can almost taste their goodwill in every bite of stew.

Damn my bourgeois aspirations, the tyrannical rules of clean living and morality; a behavioral code that transforms the slightest wisp of transparent tobacco smoke, drifting on the breeze, into a twisted dark corruption.

Instead I will call people "baby" and flick my ash and eat my steak and wash down the Benzedrine with long pulls on the vodka.








(Post 2/365 for my personal bloggy challenge: a photo and a post every day for a year, following the lead, copycat that I am, of several blogger friends.)

Taste

I have been cooking a lot. Poaching and sautéeing and crushing and searing and deglazing, chopping, roasting. Microplaning garlic and lemon zest. Toasting pine nuts. Folding light batter. Shaping little savory spheres.

The dishes pile up. They are washed. Put away. The counters wiped down. I begin again.

Cooking fills me up, I want to take care of people and this is a way to do it. Dinners served, leftovers packed into lunches.

But it makes me very melancholy too, when I think of all the women taking care of their people, before me and after I'm gone.

I try to remember, when I feel this way, what Grandma Eva wrote on the back of her card for Herring Canape. A single instruction stands out, a bold command:

"Taste."

Stop a moment, still the thoughts, the worries, the sense of pressing time, and just take a mouthful, right in the immediacy of Now. Taste.

Numbers

I had been going since always to his little store. Often on a morning we stopped in for my mother's New York Times, and a penny candy or two; we would leave hand in hand, I, chattering about something or other, never mind that my mouth was full of waxy chocolatey impossible tootsie roll, I talked on anyway and she listened as we walked the Brooklyn streets toward some other dull and comfortable errand.

That day, it was very hot. The little store, close and hot, drifting dust caught and held motionless in a broad shaft of sunlight from the open door. He leaned on the scratched glass countertop, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, and as he chatted lightly to my mother, and as she answered lightly, in the way of all small talk everywhere, I caught sight of his bare wrist and I couldn't look away. I knew what it was; at that time, only one generation removed from the terrible Thing, all Jewish boys and girls knew the meaning of the mark.

Perhaps there was a glance of understanding between them, my young Jewish mother from Brooklyn and the old Jewish newspaper man who had come great distances from another place entirely. Perhaps I imagined that glance. But he let me look and he let me touch it, didn't flinch when I reached out without thinking.

And then he said the name, the name of his Camp. It sounded strange, that single word, as it fell from his mouth into the frozen moment. It was a weighted object, and I caught it in my hands before it could land, and I tucked it in my pocket, and there it remains to this very day.

"You are a good girl," he told me as we left. "A good girl for your mama."

Once more in the bright sunshine, I cried. Not the childish noisy tears of Notice Me, but a deep quiet crying that was beyond the reach of little soothing kisses and all possible succour. She took my hand, as she always did. That day, there were no other errands.

May his memory be, forever, a blessing.