The Writer and the Wanderer

Texts from Larry during a recent delay at Miami airport:

2012-01-19T18:01:00.006-05:00

Below is a series of actual texts I received from my husband as he was trying to get from Miami to Key West:
AM IN MIAMI. LEAVING 4 KW. 9:32 a.m.
AM DELAYED 9:4 5A.M. BLECH! HOPING TO LEAVE MIAMI AT NOON NOW. 10:45 A.M.
LOVE U 10:48 A.M.
CREW FROM FREEPORT HASN'T ARRIVED YET.
A REAL S...T SHOW 10:59 A.M.
DUNNO HALF HOUR AGO PLANE HADN'T LEFT FREEPORT.
IT'S MANANA STYLE, BABY. 11:04 A.M.
CAN'T W8 2CU 11:06 A.M
NOPE 11:11 A.M.
LATEST DEPARTURE IS 11;30 BUT I AM NOT OPTIMISTIC 11:15 A.M.
JUST NOW 11:21 A.M.
SOON THEY SAY WILL TEXT MORE WHEN I KNOW 11:23 A.M.
BOARDING 11:49 A.M.
I WAS MISINFORMED. 11:54 A.M.
STILL DELAYED 11:56 A.M.
LATEST EST DEPARTURE 12:30 HAVE MOJITOS READY 12:01 P.M.
NOW 1P.M. AM PLOWING AHEAD WITH STUDENT WORK. AT LEAST MOST WILL BE DONE. 12:15 P.M.
LATEST IS 2/P/M. HOW DO YOU SPELL JETBLUE? 1:30 P.M.
AM BOARDING 1:36 P.M.
K 1:37 P.M.
JUST SITTING ON TARMAC. 1:59 P.M.
LEAVING. 2:05 P.M.
LAND HO 2:44 P.M.

Sunset sail, Key West

2012-01-11T16:01:00.002-05:00

The Seat Guru

2011-11-21T10:45:00.011-05:00

Last night I was on a plane back from Milwaukee, packed with cheeseheads (Packers fan) and Orothodox Jews. The Packers had just won and the Orthodox were traveling in large family groups, probably heading to New York for the holidays. I, of course, could not have known this when I book my flight and reserved my seat.

However, that morning, as I was printing out my boarding pass, I did what I always do. I checked the seating chart for the plane. I noticed that I was seated near the front, which I like, but that every seat in the first ten rows was taken. Towards the back there was plenty of room. A red flag went up. "Traveling sports team." "High School field trip."

Not knowing what lay ahead I immediately changed my seat to an empty row, albeit near the back, but one where I felt I had a fighting chance at some peace and quiet with which to work and maybe even a little room to spread out.

My seating needs, however, are always quite specific. An aisel on the right hand side of the plane facing the cockpit in the middle of coach. Why the specificity? Once when I was making this request, the ticket person asked me this same question. In fact, she said, sometimes other people asked for the aisel on the right hand side. Why is that? she wondered.

Because they're left handed, I explained. Left-handed people hate to bump other people. We need to protect our wings (ie. arms, not those of the plane type). As to the middle of coach. Have you ever sat near the bathrooms? Or the galley where the crew chats away all night?

Anyway last night as I approached the gate, I knew I'd made the right move. Dozens of Packers fans, many wearing spongey cheesehead hats were waiting to board. As were the Orthodox Jewish families (I feel it's all right to say this as I am Jewish, but I was very glad not to be sitting at the end of a row amidst a family of say, eight small children.

I was Zone 7, in the back, Row 22. Three seats all to myself and lots of room to grow.

My husband often thinks we are "lucky" when it comes to getting good seats on planes. "Boy, amazing how we got those bulkheads," he said on a trip to France as we traveled with two children. Amazing. I spent quite a bit of time on the phone actually with the airlines before this occurred.

Or he thinks I'm obsessed. Why do I fight so hard to get those two little seats on the side in the middle of coach? He stopped asking that question when once on a flight to Palermo we were in the middle of this time large Sicilian families who all wanted to sit next to one another but solved the problem by shouting across the rows to their family members throughout the flight.

Am I a little claustrophobic? Yes. I can't bear being trapped between two strangers or pressed against a window when I can't escape. And a little obsessive? That was well.

But am I more comfortable when I fly. Definitely. And my husband can attest to this too.

By the way a small travel tip: The Seat Guru is an actual website where you can see the configuration of any plane before you book your seats. I use it ALL the time!!!

Au Levain d'Antan - Rue des Abbesses

2011-10-29T12:47:00.006-04:00

So this brioche - well not exactly the one featured here - but the brioche made at this boulanger won the best in Paris prize. So did their baguettes, both of which Larry and I sampled. Of the baguettes there were 165 entries. Now I am trying to understand how a baguettes or brioche competition is judged. I get wine, cheese, tea, even dogs. But how can you judge, let alone sample, bread.

We tried to do our own tasting test. The bread was very crunchy on the outside and nice and soft on the inside. This, we decided, was a crucial feature. After that we were stumped. And beyond that we could bear eating any more bread.

I couldn't help wondering if, as with wine and tea, you spit the bread out. Well, you must. Otherwise you'd explode. But spitting out bread, I dunno. It seemed kind of gross.

Still we very much enjoyed the bread and the brioche and the amazing croissants from the bakery right across from where we were living and more or less everything else we tasted, sampled, and alas, never spit out.

Paris in the fall...

2011-10-29T11:26:00.005-04:00

Some images from Paris in the fall...

Housebound...

2011-10-29T11:10:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago at my gym I mentioned to the guy who works at the front desk, (I'll call him D), that I'd be away on vacation. "Where are you going?" D, who is a tall, handsome man from another country, asked me and I said Paris. Then he asked if I could bring something back for him. "Just a little souvenir," he said. "A small Eiffel Tower."

"Of course," I told him and off I went on my vacation. D and I have a kind of friendship that revolves around the gym and the fact that I speak his language. We have joked together. I saw that he wanted me to bring him this and I set out to do it.

As you can imagine in Paris there are thousands of little Eiffel Tower souvenirs sold on every corner, yet I set about my task in a serious way. Whenever I came to a souvenir shop or the bookstalls along the Seine, I searched for an Eiffel Tower for D. I rejected keychains and holograms. In the end I landed on just what he asked me. A small, two-inch tall tower.

It was about a week after my return that I managed to get to the gym. D was there, but I'd forgotten to bring the tower. "I'll bring it tomorrow," I told him and his face lit up. "You remembered," he said.

The next day I did bring it by. I put it on the counter in front of him and again his fact lit up. He turned it in his hands. He liked it he told me. Something occurred to me at that moment so I asked him if he collected souvenirs like this. "Yes," he told me, "whenever someone tells him they are going away, I ask them to bring me back something small. I have a collection..."

Then he went on, "You see," he said, "I cannot travel. I can leave the country but I cannot return." He explained to me then his visa issues, that he had been waiting for a long time for them to be resolved. That he has been living in this limbo for a while. "So I like to have these souvenirs to make me think about the places where I haven't been."

I had just returned from a glorious week away while D only traveled by looking at the souvenirs that graced his dining room table and of the journeys he took in that the world in miniature he had created for himself.

Travel Disconnect

2011-10-24T04:42:00.007-04:00

Travel, for all of its pleasures, has its disconnects as well. Which, of course, can be a certain kind of pleasure as well, but of a different breed. Travel puts us face to face with certain realities we might never encounter and at times, such as the other day in Paris, these realities can be diametrically opposed.

We'd been walking for a long time and were ready for lunch so we sat down at Cafe Panis for a meal. It's right across from Notre Dame and we knew we were taking a chance. Tourists would be everywhere and, as fate would have it, we sat down beside a nice couple from Athens, Ohio who asked us to take their picture which we did. Then we asked them to take ours and pretty soon we were having a conversation.

We hadn't gotten very far when they asked us where we were from and when we said New York, they asked where we were on 9/11. Larry and I both tensed. Here we were in Paris, a glorious October afternoon, having a glass of Chardonnay and onion soup, and two strangers are asking us about the worst day in our lives.

"I was there," Larry said.

The man sat back a little as did his wife, a triage nurse, it turned out, "You mean there?" They'd never expected this response.

"I worked downtown," Larry replied. He didn't go into the rest of it, nor did I. How for five hours I had no idea where my husband was. How he did worked right across the street and was in fact standing beside the Winter Garden as the towers came down. Neither he nor I explained that he was very very lucky to be alive.

I expected the conversation to go on from there and was relieved when they seemed to respectfully skirt it. I could tell they wanted to know more. But I could also tell that they realized we were on vacation and we didn't want to "go" there.

Our lunch was finished. They were nice and, as often happens on the road, we said our good-byes and wandered on. I bought a hat. We stopped at Shakespeare & Co. where Larry picked up a novel he'd been wanting to read. Larry was cold and getting sick so we took some steps down to the lower level walk along the banks of the Seine to the end of the Ile de la Cite.

Here it was sunny and there was no wind. We ambled. We talked about our lives, our plans. Then right at the tip of the island we sat down, just resting for a moment in the sun.

It wasn't long before a very cute pit bull puppy came sniffing around behind us. He was curious, going around a tree, checking out a man's backpack, and we were amused. Then its owner came by and struck it on its back with its leash. We heard the slap. I turned away but soon I heard another and another. The young man was perhaps trying to discipline his young dog, but in the wrong way.

I know this because we've been trying to train our hound puppy for weeks now. Cheese treats work. My French which had been coming back more and more was almost fluent. And I couldn't bear the thought of another slap on that poor puppy's back.

"I'm going to tell him about cheese treats," I told Larry who nodded because at times I can be a little crazy and I was at this moment.

"Sure, go ahead."

I got up and found the young man at a tree behind me, once more about to slap his dog. He was with a group of three or four friends and, there is no other way to say this, but because it is part of the story I must, they were clearly from North Africa. I said what a cute puppy. Can I pet him? Do you give him cheese treats?

The guy laughed. Fromage. Pourquois pas. After a moment I asked the young man his dog's name. The man gave me a blank stare. "Atta," he said.

"Oh," I replied, momentarily stunned, "that's a nice name."

Atta, of course, as most of the world, but surely any New Yorker, especially survivors of 9/11 knows was the leader of 9/11 contingent that flew into the World Trade Towers. He has also been elevated to a martyr but much of the anti-American elements of the Arab world.

Atta, I thought. I hadn't really figured that the dog would be named Atta. I was suddenly a long way from cheese treats and some discomfort over a man, beating his dog.

Walking home, Larry reminded me of the couple from Athens, Ohio who wanted to know about 9/11, then respectfully declined to ask. And how just an hour later we were speaking with an angry man with a dog named Atta.

Two experiences of the same momemt, diametrically opposed. We walked over the small bridges on the Ile St. Louis, thinking how we were living in a bipolar world. A world whose polarity would not have been made clear were we not in another country, away, raw and exposed. It was certainly not something that would happen at home.

Cafe Culture

2011-10-21T13:17:00.008-04:00

I am trying to deconstruct the reasons why I actually love Paris and why I am contemplating for the first time since 1968 when I took my exams in a restaurant and was more or less airlifted back to New York (a decision I have always regretted)living here again. I never thought I'd want to live in Paris. I had a million reasons most of which boiled down to the French being too grouchy.

But on this trip I am seeing something else. Or perhaps it is what I am not seeing. I have been here a week and I realize that I do not see people running around with big papercups filled with coffee. Indeed I don't see anyone running around with coffee at all. Instead they are sitting with friends or alone, drinking it out of ceramic cups. They are sitting in the sun. They are reading a book. They are chatting. And they are drinking coffee without being in motion.

I have been thinking a lot about the cafe culture (and the fact that it is called a culture). And I remember something I learned in 2008 - my last trip here when I was in a wheelchair. Larry and I realized that it was fairly easy to get in and out of cafes. They all open up right on to the street and they are set on corners.

It turns out this isn't an accident of fate but actually a carefully conceived urban design. When the city was developed a few hundred years ago, cafes already existed on corners. They were drinking houses, places to socialize, etc. And somewhere along the line it was decided that they should be protected. That is on corners where cafes exist (and I believe there are over 1000) a cafe will always exist. A GAP or Prada isn't going to come in and take over that corner.

This is why some cafes such as the Wepler where we stopped in for oysters and searching for the ghost of Henry Miller who was conspicuously absent (and if you reread the open scene of Quiet Nights in Clichy you will perhaps see why)has existed on the same corner for almost a 100 years.

Cafes and their locations are essentially grandfathered into the city design. Landmarked. In this brilliant move of urban planning Paris will never become a mall.

But New York. Why can't it work there? Or in other cities? Because of real estate, because of the need to do sales of coffee in volume (ie papercups), because our particular brand of capitalism requires us to keep moving.

And the French, who certainly have their own capitalism, also have culture, a way of life, that contrary to our own is literally designed for them to stop. And maybe that's what culture is. It's not just the elites or intellectuals or students either. Today a Thursday coming home at six o'clock, a cold crisp evening, every cafe was literally packed.

In my neighborhood in Brooklyn there is a beautiful fountain at Grand Army Plaza. A gorgeous gushing shoot of water and its loneliness saddens me every time I drive by. I have this vision, foolish perhaps I know, of cafes all around it. I long for it in fact. Of meeting friends in the late afternoon, of bringing a book or my journal, and just for an hour or so in the course of our busy lives also coming to a halt as we sip our cafe cremes.

I love Paris...

2011-10-21T00:35:00.002-04:00

It has been a long time since I wandered the streets of Paris...I had forgotten how much I love being here and why.

THE FRENCH PARADOX

2011-10-19T14:55:00.004-04:00

In the past week or so that I’ve been in France I’ve encountered what I am considering the new French paradox. It has nothing to do with why French women, who eat cheese and fois gras and beef steak, are thin and American women who diet all the time are fat. This paradox is about giving and receiving directions. It has to do with the fact that when you are in a place where you are unfamiliar, people give you directions as if you are supposed to know where you are.

This is perhaps more prevalent for me in France because, for better or for worse, my French is quite good or at least my accent is - good enough so that when I ask for directions people assume that I actually know more or less where I am going and I am only asking for a little boost to my confidance. Or so that I can practice my French by asking needless directions regarding just where the Rue du Parc Royal or the nearest ATM or the Sorbonne really is.

The French think I just need a bit of encouragement. Oh it’s only two feet away. You could walk there in your slippers. Just go straight; you can’t miss it. You know where the Rue de Perle is, right? So just keep climbing, then at the top of the street, turn right. You can see our terrace from there. But in fact you can miss it. You can’t get there in your slippers. Unless you have escaped from an insane asylum. And as to the terrace you can see it if you know what you are looking for.

Then they rattle off numbers of streets addresses and codes you need to get inside a building and whatever else and tell you, “but there is nothing simpler.” They might as well as be talking about brain surgery or solid state physics. Just make an incision along the base of the skull. Il y a rien plus simple.

Really the problem is that I speak with such confidence. I rarely stammer or appear to hesitate. I don’t even seem lost. I nod my head and smile and say “bien sur” seven or eight times. Or on the phone until it is just assumed that I understand exactly where I am going and what I am supposed to do to get there.

Here is a case in point...The other night we were going to have dinner with Jean-Michel (my French “brother”). Four decades ago I lived with Jean-Mi and his mother, Joelle, and we have seen them often over the years. Every few years we go to his place in the Marais and so it makes sense that I'd remember more or less where he is. And this year in fact we have rented an apartment "just two feet" from his place.

On the phone he rattled off his address which I understood as #6 and the code to his building which I understood as 2087. After many missteps and stopping and asking at least two people who used their SmartPhones to help us find his street, we finally arrived at #6 and I punched in the code and bingo we were in the courtyard, but nothingn looked familiar. In fact I had the sense that I’d never been here before.

Now #16 had looked quite familiar, but the code didn’t work there. And, after several more queries on the street and a phone call from a drunk Frenchman's phone it turned out that I had the wrong address, but, by a strange twist of fate, I had the correct building code. It was like something out of some weird film noir.

When we finally arrived for dinner, an hour late, Jean-Michel laughed. Oh, you know, there was no rush. You could have taken your time.

And so it goes. We missed the start of a film when the gendarme told us to just keep going, then make a left. You can't miss it, he said. Or when we found ourselves hopelessly lost in a subway maze. Oh just go back the way you came, then climb the stairs to the left, not the right. The bank? It is just down there. All these helpful directions left us wandering, bewildered, through charming neighborhoods, down many winding streets.

The next time a person in New York seems lost I will take him by the hand and lead him there myself. If he tries to repay me in some way for my trouble, I will explain that this is my contribution to karma. The next time I am in your country perhaps someone will not listen to my voice but to the pleading in my eyes, perhaps that person will take me by the hand and show me the way so that I do not find myself meandering, lost, hopelessly, down all those winding, not to mention charming little streets.

Or I will send Larry out to do ask the way next time because his French is not that good and perhaps the French will speak slowly and maybe even show him the way.

On traveling light...

2011-10-18T18:06:00.005-04:00

It wasn't really my intention to travel light to Paris. That is, not this light. I had packed carefully. My suitcase of clothes and, as always, my backpack containing my journal, books to read, a folder of work to do, medications, chargers, hair brush, make up, assorted drugs and earplugs and what have you for the plane. But when we got to Newark Airport and I looked at the luggage in our car my backpack - the one item I never forget and never travel without, the one thing I consider to be essential not only to my journeys, but to life itself - wasn't in the car.

It seemed impossible. How could this happen? It is true that Larry packed the car. On the other hand I had walked right by my backpack on the way out the door because I wanted to dispose of a rotten avocado. An avocado? And for that all of my best laid plans - really months of planning - was pretty much out the door.

What did we have? Well, Larry had our passports because at the last minute I had given them to him. And he had my laptop which I only use for Internet and my camera. And that was it. I had nothing to read. No journal to write on. No pills that I actually need. Not the Murakami novel I'd intended to read.

I was hysterical. I said I couldn't go. I tried dozens of ways to retrieve my backpack including having a car service try and race it to the airport only to have the car get stuck in the Holland Tunnel.

As the plane took off, I was beside myself. At the airport, at my daughter's suggestion, I had gone into a bookstore and purchase a slim notebook, but not the kind I normally write in or paint in. I had one novel with me in my luggage - also a slim volume of Richard Yates. A backup novel.

I had no sleeping pill or earplugs for the plane, not short stories or ideas to work on, not the children's books I'd intended to work on.

I was for the first two days bereft, miserable, angry, laying blame. And finally resigned that I had to do what I had been avoiding for so many years.

That is, have a vacation. Travel just for the hell of it. Sit and stare into space. Sleep late. Stare at the Seine. Not look as the scraps of old short stories that had been sitting on my desk in lumps like unrising bread.

While it is true that trying to figure out how to get medication that I needed proved arduous, it is also true that wandering around the Belleville neighborhood of France and finding myself on the footsteps of the house where Edith Piaf was born - a more or less serendiptious event - probably wouldn't have happened if I had all my stuff with me.

Neither would a day of wandering along the Seine where Hong Kongese honeymooners posed for photo ops and someone was filming a music video and an old French singer crooned and lovers kissed and I just sat, head tilted back, basking in the sun. I'm not sure I would have gone every night to a different film at the Cinematheque or spent hours just hanging out in a cafe across the street from the apartment we'd rented.

As I watched all my plans disappear with the backpack left at home, a whole other trip evolved. Nothing I'd anticipated or perhaps even wanted, but the truth I found myself less burdened, less weighed down by the freight of my life.

Was I angry? Yes. Did I try and blame my nearest and dearest? I'll plead the fifth. But the truth is in time I let my anger go. I stopped dwelling on what I'd left behind and focused more on what I had with me. I felt lighter, more at ease.

I let it go. What I thought I needed. What I had to have. What I wanted. My expectations. Some notes I couldn't do without. A book I had to read. Lipstick, eyemake up. Some things I purchased. Others I forgot about. I stopped being angry. I started to have a good time.

Unencumbered and, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, I was in truth traveling light.

My Umbrella: A tale of Atonement

2011-09-28T07:53:00.005-04:00

While this is not a conventional story of a journey and writing, it does involve journeys of various types. And it seems appropriate to write this now because the Jewish High Holidays are approaching and it is, of course the time to atone. God forgives us automatically on this day, but it is for us to forgive and seek forgiveness from others. We must make our own amends. Yet each year as Yom Kippur approaches, I am reminded of what happened to my umbrella. And, the truth is, I cannot approach my synagogue or say my prayers without recalling its fate. And so I cannot ever entirely forgive.

It was a pale blue umbrella I had purchased with my daughter a number of years ago in Prague and it contained scenes of the Castle, Old Towne Square, Charles Bridge. It cost, as my daughter recently reminded me, about forty dollars, not the usual three or five dollars of a street umbrella in New York (the kind that lasts through about one storm and whose remains are strewn across city streets). But I never really thought much about the cost of the umbrella. It reminded me of Prague - a place I love. And I loved walking beneath its sky blue cover on rainy days.

One Yom Kippur eve, as I was about to head up to Temple, I saw that it was pouring. I could have easily taken any old black umbrella in our umbrella stand, but I grabbed my Prague umbrella instead. My reasoning being that in a sea of black umbrellas it would be easy to locate mine as the service came to a close (which on Yom Kippur it really doesn't; it just resumes in the morning). As the service concluded, we filed out. The sanctuary was, of course, packed, and it was raining so it took people time to gather up their umbrellas and make their way back out into the world to begin their fasts and ask God’s forgiveness.

But when at last I approached the sea of umbrella all the greeted me was darkness. Black umbrellas everywhere. And a blue one not in sight. How is this possible? I asked myself. Someone must have made a mistake. But how do you mistake your black New York city umbrella with a bright blue one from Prague. Or perhaps they forgot their umbrella. Somehow they would return it to me. But, as I walked home with rain splattering me on the head, I came to the only conclusion. Someone, on the holiest night of all for the Jews, the night when we ask God to forgive us for our sins, had stolen my umbrella.

It became a minor obsession of mine. Wandering the neighborhood on rainy days in search of the blue skies of Prague. But after a while I realized that my thief wouldn’t walk around the neighborhood with it. She (because I came to think of my thief as a she) would take it with her in a car service to the opera. But she couldn’t chance a trip to the corner store.

I have tried to be philosophical about my umbrella. I recall for me the most moving moment in Les Miserables. When Jean Valjean has stolen the priest's silver candlesticks and is captured by the police who bring him to the priest's door. And in a moment of grace that changes Jean Valjean forever the priest tells the officer that he had given Jean Valjean the candlesticks. They were a gift. I wonder if I'd be so magnanimous.

I try to imagine what went through my thief's mind as he or she picked up my blue umbrella from a sea of black ones. I do think of the thief as a woman because the umbrella was rather girlie, but it could have been a man. At any rate I wonder. What did she think as she reached for it? Did the question of sin and atonement cross her mind? The breaking of one of God's commandments. Was it an impulse or something she's done before? And did it occur to her that I might be only a few steps behind as she dashed out into the windy, sodden night. Anyway she must have figured she had another year to atone for this theft, maybe even find a way of returning it. No questions asked.

I am reminded of an incident that happened to my husband once on an airplane. He was boarding and, as he put his suitcase overhead, he put the newspapers he'd just purchased down on the seat behind him. When he turned, he found a couple, sitting in those seats and they were reading his papers. "Excuse," my husband said, "I'm sorry, but I just put those down." They looked at him oddly and told him that they had purchased them and they owned them. Of course my husband knew they were lying. He argued, but they wouldn't budge and, rather than slow down the entire plane, he gave up on his newspapers. But he told me that what riled him the most was seeing the two of them, giggling among themselves at the fast one they'd just pulled off.

Because the truth is when something like this happens the universe feels a little less safe. Our ability to deny just how dangerous and indifferent the world can be, Our world view is slightly shaky, a tiny bit off our axis, really never to return. I still wonder at the impulse to steal a pretty blue umbrella even as you are trying to atone for your sins. Now I know why at Christmas the baby Jesus is chained down in the Nativity scene near my house. But I wish I didn’t.

I have at long last forgiven my thief. Perhaps it was an honest mistake, which seems doubtful, or a desperate act. Like the priest with Jean Valjean if my thief were captured I'd give it to her now. I hope it has given her pleasure. I hope it has kept her dry.

Wheelchair and Mime at the Tour Eiffel

2011-09-05T20:10:00.004-04:00

This is a picture I took of my wheelchair and a Pharoah mime when we went to Paris in 2008 after I broke my leg. Larry and I went to Europe with the "full catastrophe." Crutches, air cast, cane, and the wheelchair to whom we gave a name. Duncan. "Have you seen Duncan?" I asked my daughter in Dublin as I dragged myself up a set of stairs at Gogerty's to hear a set. "Who's Duncan," my daughter replied. In Paris Larry bumped me up and down the streets. At some point I decided to document Duncan's excursions. In fact there are very few pictures of me and Larry on that trip to Europe ten weeks after breaking my leg, but I have many of Duncan.

2011-09-05T15:45:00.001-04:00

"Drop everything and hit the road."

Arthur Rimbaud

A Moveable Feast

2011-09-05T15:44:00.011-04:00

"To a man looking for fresh eyes, everything about Paris fascinates." Brassai wrote these words in his memoir about Henry Miller, The Paris Years. Because I am heading to Paris in October, for the first time in three years, these words ring very true.

The last time I was in Paris I was in a wheelchair which I had affectionately named Duncan. Trust me it was no way to travel. Clomping along the cobbled streets and narrow sidestreets of Paris. Now I am going back to do what it was that Miller loved to do, and what Paris is one of the greatest cities in the world for. Walk.

As a girl I lived in Paris in 1967-68. It was a lonely, cold, glorious, insane time. I studied cooking and failed my French class. I lived in an old working class neighborhood with Joelle, my dear French mother, recently deceased. It was in the 13th Arrondisement. The district of Paris that Miller refers to as the most putrid, impoverished, decadent, hungry, filthy, redolent and so on neighborhoods of the entire city.

I don't know if this is true though when I lived there it was a solid working class neighborhood with shift workers coming and going as I can and went from my classes.

Why Paris? Why French? Why me? When I was a girl, growing up in suburban Illinois, my mother (who had never been to Europe) began a crusade to have French taught in the public school. She believed that children in 6th or 7th grade should start learning a language and for her it was French.

My mother longed to travel. She named our dog Renoir. She had the heart for France and, I believe, if she'd been born in a different era, she would have developed a fashion line and gone to Paris all the time. Instead she was locked into girl scout meetings and Flag Day marching bands.

But she wanted me to learn French. Once a week she sent me to see Monsieur La Tate. Monsieur La Tate had a very strange, sad tic that made his head flash back and forth all the time and clearly he hadn't seen his life's destiny as being my instructor in rudimentary French. None the less I went. I was dutiful. And I learned.

In high school we were given an aptitude test in language. The test was weirdly administered in Kurdish. You had half an hour to memorize Kurdish grammar and vocabulary, then you took the test. In all my years of testing I never scored higher than I did on that language aptitude exam.

I went into AP French. My mother got our local school to start teaching French and in college for reasons even as I write these remain obscure (though perhaps not to Dr. Freud) I became a French scholar. A degree I would never complete at the graduate level, but still I learned.

In 1967 I sailed on the SS France. My mother stood on the dock. Before leaving me, she said, "You take yourself with you." I arrived in Paris in time to become part of the student revolts of 1968. Paris got under my skin.

Miller understood what Paris had to offer him. He referred to the city as "mother, mistress, home and muse. As Brassai says, Miller tried to understand how Paris worked its magic on him, but the answers were "innumerable, intangible and ineffable."

On his first trip he didn't fall in love with the city, but when he returned for the second time the city grabbed him by the throat. He cut his writerly teeth here. After spending his days and nights in its bars and cafes, Miller wrote in "Remember to Remember": One needs no artificial stimulation in Paris to create. The air is saturated with creation."

Miller never read books for their meaning. He read a book because it touched something inside of him that made him think and feel and write more. Later in his life he admitted that he had read at least five thousand books in his life and perhaps fifty of them really mattered.

I picked up this Brassai book because it was sitting on my bedstand. Larry thinks he bought it at St. Marks as something good to take away with us to Paris. And I am devouring it as I would a meal. I am dogearring, underlining, making big check marks everywhere. It is becoming one of those books that matter to me.

I envy Miller. He went to Paris. He had no money, no resources, no hope as he writes in the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer. "I am the happiest man alive."

Journey's End

2011-08-22T12:13:00.001-04:00

Fire Island. calm

2011-08-22T09:25:00.005-04:00

It seems as if we always end the summer on Fire Island. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it has become a family ritual since Kate was small. Once we stayed in a room above a Chinese restaurant on Ocean Beach. Now we stay with friends.

There are a mated pair of swans at Fair Harbor and we see them every year. Sometimes they have cygnets. Other times they do not. This year they didn't. A few years ago Larry and I went out for a weekend alone (someone lent us their house) and we saw that the female swan had been left alone with the cygnets and she seemed to be searching for her mate. Every day we went down to the dock to see if he had returned and every day she was alone. On our last day just hours before we were to leave we went down one last time. We knew we'd be disappointed and saddened by what we saw and we were. We sat, sipping our coffee on the dock, seeing the female swimming alone. Then suddenly she made a noise. A loud, flapping noise. We looked up and in the distance we saw a swan, swimming towards the dock, and the female raced across the surface of the water to greet him. It was truly a greeting, as any human who loved someone would.

This year the couple had no babies with them this year. But then neither did Larry and I. Still we hung out at the dock as we always do. It is nice to have rituals. For holidays, for the major events in our lives, and for the end of summer too.

One ritual that's come to mean a lot. As my ferry, Voyager, was pulling away, children leaped from the dock. It's a superstition. If the children jump from the dock, you'll be back next year.

I feel I am getting closer...

2011-08-09T16:51:00.000-04:00

to this not resembling a bowl of fruit.

Fruit bowl - Gloria's kitchen. Umbria

2011-08-09T14:58:00.003-04:00

As my husband pointed out to me last night, this still looks like a bowl of fruit. (See yesterday's blog post). But I don't care. I like it and it reminds of that gorgeous bowl that Gloria had in the center of her kitchen table in her country house in Umbria and I like to be reminded of such things.

On Art and Memory - Rilke and Joan Mitchell

2011-08-08T09:57:00.005-04:00

I am reading the new biography of Joan Mitchell, a painter I worship for many reasons. I love her work. It just speaks to me over and over again. Then there is the Chicago connection and the fact that she was the first wife of my cousin, the legendary Barney Rosset. But mainly I love the work. I love the way she strips everything down. The way she recalls the yellow satin curtains of her childhood and the lake (Lake Michigan, of course) and the steel blue sky and trees and a piano and it all becomes in its own way part of everything Joan does. With color. As she said to someone once, "It all comes out of the tube."

Today I've decided I'm going to paint. I'm going to take this image of the bowl of fruit from Gloria's house in Umbria and try and break it down. Not do what is expected. Which is to make a beautiful watercolor of this beautiful bowl. A bowl I can't quite get out of my head because it represents summer and Italy and a kind of balance with the world.

But I am also going to try and take what Joan took from poets such as Rilke who was one of her favorites, I am learning, and one of mine. We both love the same quote and I will quote it here on memories:

"You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memoires themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

This is how a great lake become a splotch of blue. How a childhood loss becomes a ringing bell. We must experience, grieve, forget, and then remember, but in this way memory like fossil fuels is experience transformed.

Somehow this thought brings me to perhaps one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. At the Savage Beauty show at the MET which alas closed yesterday. The tiny hologram of Kate Moss in white - a ghost image that rises and falls and disappears, so tiny you can hold it on your hand. What was Alexander McQueen, that mad genius, thinking of when he created this tiny whiteness of a woman. His own mother whose death seems to have precipitated his own?

This image could only have emerged from some very deep place which is perhaps that place where all art begins.

So I am going to try and paint this bowl of fruit. But I am not going to try and paint it as a bowl of fruit.

Enchanted June

2011-08-07T22:05:00.000-04:00

Enchanted June

2011-08-07T16:38:00.002-04:00

Just a few images of our week in Umbria. Ten graduate students and me and Gloria, our wonderful hostess. Hope to do it again next year. Every year. It was beautiful. Vineyards, olive trees, Todi on the hill, a full eclipse of the moon. Who could ask for more?

2011-08-03T12:14:00.003-04:00

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” - Wendell Berry

La Dolce Far Niente

2011-07-27T09:59:00.001-04:00

On my first day in Rome in early June I found myself for the first time in over a year with nothing to do. No obligations. Nothing was required of me. I had to be nowhere. So I decided to do just that. Nothing. Whatever happened would happen. My only goal was to remain in the shade.

Because I lived in Rome many years ago and I return often I felt no need to go sightseeing. In fact that was exactly what I didn't want to do. No tourists. Just me in the back streets where the Romans live.

I wandered for about an hour down into the area of Rome called Piazza Madonna dei Monte. The day was already hot and at a restaurant/cafe called Il Covo I plunked myself down under an arbor. I had front row viewing of the piazza. I took out my journal, my paints, my camera and I went to work. Doing nothing.

After an orange juice and iced coffee, I was still sitting, but I was starting to focus on something before me which was a drinking fountain. It was right in the middle of the piazza and the water was in constant flow. I later learned that these fountains are called Big Nose because they look like, well, big noses.

I began to watch the people coming and going who stopped and took a sip at this fountain. Some bent forward and drank from it. Some washed hands, their fruit, or their feet. Others filled water bottles or dunked their heads. Dogs came to lap. Children to play. Old people to a brief respite from the sun.

It wasn't really a decision but I just began photographing everyone who stopped at the fountain. The fountain for me started to become a kind of real thing - like a person. I felt sorry for it when it was alone or ignored. I was happy when people drank. And the fountain seemed happy to.

By the end of the day I had gone through several espressos, a bowl of pasta, a glass of wine, two bottles of mineral water and taken about a hundred shots. I loved it. I had a great time.

Later when I returned to New York I recalled that wonderful day. As I fought my way into a crowded subway, I thought about how this city where I live is all about moving people from one place to another. New York is about movement. And Rome is all about not moving. Rome is a place where all seats face the piazza and you are more than welcome to stay.

Oh Canada

2011-07-25T17:01:00.007-04:00

When it was 104 in New York, I was swimming in Lake Huron. I didn't even know that sewer plants were on fire and records were being set. It was sweet up there with Larry's family. Nice to have another country to go to and I am liking Ontario more and more. I can see why Alice Munro sticks around. At least where we were in Saubel Beach, time seemed to be standing still. My Illinois landscape, along the shores of Lake Michigan, was so similar to this. The same really. On Friday Ted and Lynn, Larry's brother and sister-in-law made a great barbecue. Nieces, nephews, everyone was there. Lots of chicken and corn. Grilled salmon and a Sunset swim. Kate made the best zucchini salad ever. I played pinball with Larry and Kate. They won. I didn't care. We got a milkshake at 11pm. Tasted like childhood. Tasted like home.

Samantha Jean - R.I.P.

2011-07-08T17:54:00.003-04:00

This was just one of those moments while floating down the Mississippi. Samantha Jean and Tom, frolicing in the river. I was somewhere downstream, fighting the current and trying to swim back, when this picture was taken. When I finally flung myself on to the beach, Tom and Jerry looked at me, perplexed. "Where were you?"

"I was shouting for help," I told them, but they were busy taking this snap.

"Must'a been to our bad ears," Jerry replied. Both he and Tom had bad left ears.

Samantha Jean was our mascot. A real river rat terrier. Crazy creature, she growled and snapped at me at first. I couldn't believe I'd be sailing with her in a houseboat for four weeks. We grew to trust me over cheese and salami bits that I snuck her when she was on the fly deck through a small window hatch. During the worst of the storms she trembled under my bunk.

We made friends. Tom loved her. He carried her everywhere. He'd never leave her alone on the ship. They slept together in his sleeping bag every night.

In the end Samantha Jean traveled well. She had a good long live and a great trip. She was a good swimmer. And a good sport. She will be missed.

On travel and wine

2011-06-28T16:36:00.011-04:00

My last night in Rome I sat with friends, ordering dinner along the banks of the Tiber River. Giovanni, my host, ordered a ribolla and, when I asked him about it, he told me that it was about 80% ribolla grape and 10 or 20% chardonnay. I was impressed that he had this information on the tip of his tongue so I asked how he knew so much. "Did you study about wine?" I asked him.

And Giovanni turned to me in that charming way of his and said, "I never study the great pleasures of life." We both laughed and we both knew what he meant.

But, despite what Giovanni says, I took a wine class last week. WINE 101. Wines from the Piedmonte region of Italy. I headed off to my local wine store, Red, White, and Bubbly (highly recommnended) where I walked into a room of about eight people and was given a seat with ten glasses in front of me. Tyrone, our local West Indian sommalier, was pouring.

It occurred to me from the start that I might be in trouble. For years I thought I should quit drinking. Give up wine. Probably I drink a little too much, like it more than I should. So I tried. I made one or two efforts and then realized it was pointless. As the Italians, or is it the French say, a day without wine is like a day without sun. I found that if I drink in moderation I'm fine. But the ten glasses before me, even just for a tasting, seemed daunting.

Still I couldn't agree more with that old saying. The truth is I love the taste of a great rose, a buttery chardonnay, a berry-on-the-nose pinot noir. I really don't know how to talk about wine that much and I'm not sure I care. But what fascinates me, as it does with literature, is landscape.

Terroir. Specific wines come from specific regions. The rain, the soil, the sun. It changes the whole thing. Similarly I have found with stories. The narratives that came out of the island country of Greece are not the same as came from the sweeps of Russia, the expanse of America, the tiny, tidy island life of England. The same with wine. What grows one way in volcani Sicily won't be the same wine on the North Fork of Long Island.

I guess what draws me to wine is somewhat what has drawn me to journeys. Maps. Terrain. So giving up wine would be the equivalent of giving up stories. And that would be the equivalent of giving up on journeys. And it is so intertwined I can no longer tell the one from the other. Nor do I particularly want to.

So I am not really going to learn more about wine per se. I am really going to learn about geography. What makes one region produce something different from another? And what exactly are all those different kinds of grapes?

In fact the class did not disappoint. I knew I'd come to the right place when our teacher, Tyrone, told us that every bottle of wine contains a story. When you open it, you can tell if it was hot or dry that summer. If it rained a lot. You can smell the earth from which that wine grew. A bottle of wine is a time capsule. It contains our past.

I graduated from Wine 101 and staggered in to the night with my fellow classmates. I learned that wines can smell like diesel, barnyard, cat piss, and pencil shavings. And then there are the hints of bitter apple, berry, mushroom, bacon? Beyond the story in the bottle, each sip requires a lot of imagination.

I don't plan to study the great pleasures of life. But it can't hurt to understand a little more. So now each sip is a small journey to another place, another time. Each sip, even on my terrace or local bistro, takes me away.

Child's Play

2011-06-28T09:51:00.005-04:00

After ten days in Umbria and Rome (about which I will write soon), I returned to New York. I have two months ahead of me during which I am only going to focus on my own work and this feels like a true gift from the gods. I wanted, and kept, my calendar very empty. But I had one thing written on it for the day after I got back. "Prodigy of Color" at the Agora Gallery. I had read about Aelita Andre before leaving and her show was closing on Saturday. I had only a few hours to see it.

It was a hot afternoon as we set out and I was very tired. Jet-lagged, achy from the long flight. Not entirely in the best mood for some personal reasons and missing the pines, the light, the beauty at every corner of Rome.

New York seemed gray, dreary. Where was the piazza? The fountain I'd stared at for hours at a time. The macchiato and cornetti I savored each morning. But we pushed on to the gallery and there we entered the space where Aelita's work is being shown.

It is a room of vibrant colors, bright canvases with interesting compositions and playful objects (no surprise there) such as colored cotton balls, glitter, masks, and plastic farm animals glued on. I am going to be honest here. I can't say that I love the work. But I was, and am, utterly fascinated by the process.

Aelita Andre is an abstract expressionist who has had recent global success. When her work was shown to the director of the Agora gallery, he was immediately impressed and decided to represent her. He didn't know that she was four years old. But she is.

As an article about her in ARTisSpectrum says, Aelita paints from a preconscious place. She is not aware of her critics because she hasn't had any. She doesn't know what bad reviews are. And, what strikes me most, she isn't afraid of failure because she has no idea what failure is.

That is a notion that is difficult for any artist who is not nineteen (or four) years old to comprehend. To sit down to work and just allow your creative energies to flow. To not fear who will see it and what they might say. To never think of the market place. To inhabit a timeless space.

I know this sounds ridiculous but I wanted to see her work because, in part, I wanted to make this my summer goal - though already the notion of a goal implies intention and intention isn't what Aelita is about. She is about instinct. Intuition. Going with her gut. Unihibited. Completely and utterly unfettered. This is what she's about.

Larry jokingly likened her work to those elephant paintings which are also abstract and which duped one art critic into calling them a fresh vision. But in a sense why is it wrong to compare it to elephant art? Elephants have been shown to have high communication skills, lots of emotions, a work ethic, family ties, and are able to recognize themselves in mirrors (which is a sign of consciouness; dolphins and African grays can do this too and that's about it for the animal kingdom).

So why shouldn't an elephant, or a small child, paint from that preconscious place, unfettered, and, the most significant thing for me, unafraid?

Fear is a bad companion to wake up to or have to live with. At Sarah Lawrence graduation Ariana Huffington addressed this quite well. She said fear is like living with a bad roommate. She also said that failure isn't the opposite of success, but rather a step on the road to success (see post from May 23).

But what if, for the summer say, for just a few weeks of our life we eliminated all notions of success and failure. What if we like the Tahitians turn our notion of art into "doing the best we can." Or as Beckett wrote, fail better.

I don't know what's ahead for this little girl. I don't know if she'll be making art in ten or twenty years. I am going to amssume that her success now is a somewhat freakish, but real, thing. The beauty is she knows nothing (though she is said to admire Picasso and Dali). But she knows nothing of what the world can, and will, do to an artist's spirit.

Last night a friend shared with me a recent success. He was very happy about it and, for the first time, opened up to how difficult it had been. I told him, "We all have to go through something." It is not a straight shot to wherever we are.

Eventually we have to show our work to our editors, our agents, our galleries. There will be opinions and, yes, failures. But what if, just for a brief moment in time, we forget about time. We forget that things may or may not work out.

What if, as Aelita seems able to do, we just allow ourselves to have fun?
What if we go into our little rooms and make a mess and not worry, at least for now, about who is going to clean it up?

The Pines of Rome

2011-06-25T18:36:00.002-04:00

Since I was a girl, traveling with my mother to Rome for the first time, I'd always believed that these pines were a species of tree. It was only years later after I came to understand the Italian aesthetic that I understand that actually they are pruned like this. To preserve the shade yet let the light in.

It is hard for me to walk among these pines and not think of my mother who loved them. Or remember that it was in this very park that I heard catcalls for the first time and had no idea what they were. Or that they were intended for me.

Phone Home

2011-06-24T20:49:00.003-04:00

One of those random things I love about traveling. Ran into this odd couple at Rome airport. Hard to explain what they are really (well, I know what they are, but I prefer the mystery of others not being able to make much sense out of this weird image). Just another day on the road.

What I love about Rome...

2011-06-22T17:39:00.003-04:00

When Italians ask me directions. In Italy.
When motorcycles go down one way streets, the wrong way.
When business men in a hurry pause so I can take a picture.
When a dog wanders into a cafe and its owner, dressed in pencil skirt and heels, comes to get it, then walk on.
When people wash their fruit, their faces, their hands, their hair from a fountain.
When they do nothing all day.
When I do nothing all day...

Pictures to come. Next week...

A Hot Day in Cold Spring

2011-06-01T10:14:00.008-04:00

Over Memorial Day some friends invited us up to their place near Cold Spring. We were excited to go, but we also dreaded the thought of the traffic, heading home after the long weekend. Since Larry and I are on a "staycation," it seems as if we could do what we wanted and we both came to the same conclusion at the same time. "Let's spend the night in Cold Spring," Larry suggested, just as I was about to say exactly the same thing.

That's the way it is with couples some time, isn't it? You know one another. Yu know what you both like. And we knew we didn't need to rush back and we didn't want to spend four hours, honking our horn.

There's a hotel right on the Hudson, the Hudson House. The reviews we read weren't so great, but we'd seen that hotel many times and it's right on the water, above a little park. We'd have this little canon to look down on and lots of revolutionary war history. George Washington stopped here for a drink and liked the water. Hence the name, Cold Spring.

So we had a delightful day with our friends, then went to our hotel. It turned out, as it often seems to happen with us (because we tend to go again the flow) that we were the only guests. It was a little spooky, I must admit. Returning from some burger place, the Depot, on the MetroNorth train line, and I loved to see the trains, packed, heading back to the city. And those other sort of mournful trains, heading out.

We walked back under a viaduct and went and stood by the river. Above us a flagpole banged in the wind. Across the river a long freight train, lit only by the headlights of its engine, snaked along the river's edge. A strange and haunting site. Then we returned to the hotel where we were the only guests. Perfect place for a crime, it seemed to me.

I teased Larry a bit about ghosts (I have a way of staring into space that frightens him). I told him that the hotel had a ghost (I made up some grim story) and if he heard a knock in the night, not to open the door. Then I did some silly knocking antics while he was brushing his teeth.

We slept in the lumpy bed. In the morning we were up and had a lovely breakfast on the porch. And it was then that I envisioned another ghost. That of Kate, circa 1998. We had come to Cold Spring to hang out for a day and Kate had lain on the rocks, reading a book, right across from where we were sitting. So I took out my watercolors and painted this image of her. It is actually my first, and perhaps only, image of a human figure.

I missed my daughter. Not the daughter who lives in DC, works as press liaison for a great not-for-profit, has a terrific chef boyfriend, and cantankerous hound. Not that daughter of whom I am very proud. I missed the one who was little once. Who lay in the crevice of two rocks to read on a lazy afternoon in another life, it almost seems. And I had a strong feeling that that little girl still haunted this place.

It was Memorial Day weekend, after all. A time ripe for remembering.

After breakfast we went down to a local spot on the Hudson. A beach just half a mile out of town and a short walk over a railroad bridge. On our walk Larry and I found a dead butterfly with blue wings, the pod, I think, of a poplar tree. I kept them.

Just before leaving, I swam in the Hudson as another freight train was passing across the way. The water was clear and cold. Later I mentioned this to a friend who lives in Cold Spring. "You swam in the Hudson?" he said. Apparently nobody who knows better does that. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

After the wedding: On detours and surprises.

2011-05-29T11:25:00.010-04:00

Yesterday Larry and I went to a beautiful wedding. It was way uptown at the Union Theological Seminary. Held in a magnificent chapel, the guests sat in a circle and the minister said some moving things about why we were sitting in a circle, rather than in the tradition type of seating. How we were encompassing the bride and groom in a circle of love. It sounds a little hookey as I write this, but the way it was said...we were all touched.

After the reception Larry and I left by a backdoor. If we'd gone out the way we'd come in then what follows would never have happened, but we came out on to, I believe, Claremont Avenue and right in front of us was the Riverside Church.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, I went to this church all the time. I'd go just to sit and be quiet or to hear a concert. I'd go for a lecture and occasionally a memorial service. But Larry had never been inside. It was a beautiful early evening and we had no other plans. We weren't in a hurry to get home. "Would you like to see the chapel?" I asked him.

Now we aren't big on churches. We don't really visit them in Europe the way other people do. I generally find them rather cold, impersonal places, but I've never felt this way at Riverside (Or at Chartres or Notre Dame or a few others either). At any rate we went in. The receptionist told us we only had a little time. So we climbed the stairs.

Once inside we were almost the only people there. There weren't any worshippers, it seemed. Just a few tourists with their cameras flashing and some rather loud group that seemed to be church officials. We sat in the middle, staring at the deep blue stained glass; the stone-carved altar, all done, I believe, by one man.

As we were sitting, I heard music. A recording, I assumed, of a piano sonata or concerto. A deeply romantic, powerful sound engulfed the hollow of the church. I was looking for a speaker and wondering why they'd put music on, just as the church was about to close.

A man approached us. He had a portfolio in his hand. He thought we were tourists, which I suppose in a way we were, and he started lecturing to us about the history of the church and showing us pictures he drew of the faces at the altar.

But I was still drawn to this music. Was it Horowitz? Emanuel Ax? Was it Rachmaninoff? Chopin? I wanted to know. Then as the man was lecturing to us, I noticed that right ahead of me, perhaps twenty rows from where I was seated, a young man was seated at the Steinway grand piano. He had pulled the cover back a little and, in fact, he was playing.

I excused myself to the man who was giving us the history of the altar sculpture and made my way up to the front rows. I quietly took a seat and watched as this young man, perhaps in his mid to late 20's played with as much grace and talent as I'd ever heard anyone. His girlfriend stood behind him. She smiled at me as I sat down.

Larry followed a few moments later. He sat behind me. I assumed that this young man was practicing for some performance later that evening. That he was testing the piano. Whatever he was doing, it didn't matter. I was sitting just few away from a master and I found myself propelled into whatever that space is - that kind of timeless, opened ended space - where art can take us.

Proust, of course, wrote about this. When Swann is transported by that little piece of music that makes him fall in love with Odette (a woman who was not "even to my taste; wasn't of my style"). So I was having one of those Proustian moments - not falling in love with a man, but with a moment.

Then we heard the shouting. "You gotta stop. I'm gonna lose my job." A woman in a guard uniform came racing up. "You can't do that. I'm gonna lose my job." She had some kind of clamps in her hand and the young man, nodding at her, asked for just a few more minutes. "You can't have another second. I gotta lock this thing up." And she proceeded to clamp the piano down.

With that the man stopped and stepped away. It was then that I realized that he had just decided to play that piano in the Riverside Church. He had pulled back the cover on that Steinway and began.

"Excuse me," I said to him as he rose, "but can you tell me what you were playing?" He said it was a Liszt sonota, for B minor. A thirty minute piece. "That was only a small part of it," he told me.

"So is this what you do?" I asked him as he rose. "Are you a concert pianist?" He nodded, taking his girlfriend's hand.

"Yes..." he replied, "Unfortunately."

"Unfortunately..." I wanted to ask him why he said that, but of course I understood. I know how art can be as much a curse, and perhaps more so, than a blessing.

This moment recalled another. I am a girl myself, not much older than this young man. I am on a train going from Lyons to Milan and a man sits across from me. He is old and tired and he has a very bad hip. His face is filled with suffering and pain. He begins to talk to me. He is a musician. He hates the musical life. He is always on the road. Never with his family. His misery just seems to go on and on. When we reach Milan, he tells me his name. "Antonio Janigro." At that time, along with Pablo Casals, one of the world's most famous cellists.

So I understood why he said unfortunately. I've said this myself too from time to time. I am a writer...alas. A blessing, yes, but at the same time, a curse.

Larry and I strolled out behind them. As we walked, I thought to myself how any time we take a detour, any time we are surprised, it is a kind of journey isn't it.

And at the same time, Henry James echoed through my mind. His words on the artist. "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

We seemed to be following the young couple as they walked,arm in arm, through the Sakura Park just across from Riverside Church. But we weren't. We were walking the same too, just behind them as they turned off and disappeared into the International House. The student residence where, once, in another life it seems, I was a student too.

On Fearlessness...

2011-05-21T12:21:00.007-04:00

My blog has been dormant for a few months now. I've been overwhelmed with work and found myself with little time to reflect. But yesterday at Sarah Lawrence graduation Arianna Huffington gave a wonderful speech. It was hilarious, smart, true, and at times very wise. Beyond telling the grads that they looked fabulous and that it was important for them to get more sleep, she also shared some of her wisdom, offering words that were particularly important to me.

That's because lately I've been waking up, trembling. My husband recognizes it right away. He tells me I have fear in my eyes. And he's right. My teaching year is ending and summer is about to begin. So what am I afraid of? The night train to Jabalpur, a tiger in the jungle, these are behind me.

No, this fear is inside. I've been posing that question that must plague most artists. What if I fail? Do I have the strength to keep doing what I do? Can I still write? Can I still tell a story? And, perhaps the most difficult, why is it that I feel as if every day I must begin again.

But Arianna spoke fearlessness. She said that fearlessness isn't about not being afraid because we are all afraid. It's about not letting fear get in the way of doing what you really want to do. I recall many years ago a young Cuban artist gave me this advice: When your ego gets in the way of your art, you are doomed for all eternity. Hum. Those were harsh words, but I did have a Rapture dream last night. I dreamt that an earthquake shook my house; the sun had moved closer to the earth. Clearly something is making me afraid. And it's not the end of the world. But fear...that comes always feeling as if our egos (and not our souls) are on the line.

A metaphor comes to mind. This past week I cooked dinner at home every night. Just for Larry and me. I rarely give that much thought or planning to a meal. I just look in the fridge or pantry and see what I have, what I need. A meal takes shape in my mind. It's not premeditated (See my blog entry from several months ago on writing being a crime of passion; not a premeditated act)

The first night I made an amazing turkey saussage boulagnaise, the next night lemony rock shrimp with orzo and dill. The third night sauteed chicken thighs with roasted broccolini, cauliflower, and potatoes. I must admit that each meal was delicious. Perfectly prepared. As my husband said, "You could serve these to anyone."

But the next night some of my students were coming over and I contemplated making them dinner. I started to think about it. To worry about it. I didn't ask myself what did I have to work with. Instead I began asking those questions: What would they like? How should I make it? And I found myself starting to get anxious. Would they like it? How much work would it take?

And I realized that I wasn't going to make dinner for them because already some judgments had come into play. And when judgment gets in your way, everything becomes over-thought. Considered. And what to me makes for creativity - which is spontaneity - goes down the drain.

Again quoting Arianna - failure isn't the opposite of success. But one step on the way to success. Fear, Arianna told us she once conveyed to Stephen Colbert, was an obnoxious roommate who took over her house if she let it. He asked her if he could crash there.

Everyone feels it. Before I get on a plane, before I give a reading or a talk, before I sit down to write, there it is, my obnoxious roommate. But I can't let him get in the way of what I want to do. I make the journey. I face the audience. I shut the door. I sit down. And I get back to work.

Arianna said that someone should event a GPS for the soul. Finding the way, the thread back into ourselves. Because it is only in making that connection that we can really be free.

Which might just be the opposite of fear.

On Hand Drawn Maps

2011-05-19T12:29:00.000-04:00

Yesterday a package arrived. My dear student, Carina, sent me a birthday gift. A volume of hand drawn maps, published by the Hand Drawn Maps Association (handmaps.org). Well, I don't think Carina knew this, but I have long been interested in hand drawn maps - as I am in diaries and journals and anything where we reveal a bit of ourselves, a kind of road map to our inner selves.

In fact just ending today is the wonderful maps of diaries at the Morgan Library. I went to this exhibit several times. I just loved to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's first scribble about an idea of an adultrous woman with the letter A pinned to her dress. Or Tennessee Williams, filled with fear and doubts, even as both Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were being performed on Broadway.

I love the inner workings of the artists or the travelers mind. Where are we going? How will we get there? Personally I hate GPS. I never want to actually know, let alone have someone tell me, how to get somewhere. I'd rather get lost a thousand times than let someone, or some thing, show me the way.

We don't learn by other people maps. We only learn from our own.

A few years ago I had a dream. I dreamt that I could fly all over the world. And I could never get lost. Because my belly button provided navigational redial. All I had to do was push it and it would enable me to fly home.

I feel that in many ways the artist and the traveler are both dreamers. We fly through the world either literally or through the imagination. Yet somehow we know how to get home.

When my cousin, Marianne, and I were small, we spoke in a language of our own. We had a kind of place too that we vaguely referred to as Ishkabibel. A few years ago for her birthday I drew her the map as I saw it. My grandmother's old metal elephant that served as a doorstopper, the narrow confines of the world we traveled in from Chicago where she lived to the suburbs where she came to visit me. The language we spoke (Burble), the unknown, unchartered territories.

This was the only map I knew - or needed - for a very long time.

Thinking about Journals

2011-04-09T09:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I took the G train - a train I'd never been on - and rode over to Pratt. I've lived in New York more than thirty years and here I was, having a new adventure. Two people asked me for directions. I'm a New Yorker now yet I knew nothing. Finally when I arrived, I found Pratt was beautiful. Wonderful old buildings, public art and sculptures, famous cats that roam and are cared for by the "CHIEF ENGINEER" of the boiler room (where a sign reads "Do Not Let The Cats Out."

I wanted to sit down and make some notes in my journal, but I didn't have time. Even as I approached what I believed to be a sculpture and turned out to be a pile of unmelted snow, I wanted to jot it down. Because if I don't jot it down I forget it. It's as simple as that. I began thinking about my journals and the roles they have played in my life life. The role of journals in general. I know I've written about this before, but it is a topic I keep returnign to.

I began keeping them in 1967 when I went to France (which is a whole lifetime ago, it seems). My father gave me a diary with me named embossed in gold. Inside he wrote, "This book with its blank pages if for you to bring to life during your Paris year. Your special thoughts, your precious experiences can be relieved in future years and shared with those close to you...At the year's end life will become more meaningful for you. If our prayers were answered, you will find the true beauty of life."

I did not have the year my father hoped I would have. It was fraught, filled with loneliness, some pointless love affairs, and tedious studies. I did take a cooking class which I enjoyed, though when I missed one class to go to Naples and visit my college roommate, I was dragged through the streets of Paris and made a spectacle of to my program. My dear friend, Mark, still refers to this as "L'Affaire Mary Morris."

Anyway I wrote about it. I wrote about all of it and have never stopped. When I go to my shelf of journals this one, perhaps the one in which I am the most unhappy, is always the first. I return to it from time to time. I return to them all.

My father set me off on a journey - one he didn't anticipate. He thought he was sending me to France. Instead he helped me find my voice. He was not always the easiest man, but I think somehow he knew something about me. It is he, afterall, and not my mother who dedicates this first journal of many.

For years these journals were really more like diaries, what I did, or didn't do, with my day. But as I began to write more and more they became the place where everything began. All my writing starts here. Well, it might get scribbled first on the tiny notebooks I always carry, or the napkin or placemat in front of me, or on my hand, but eventually it will make it into the journal. Perhaps the next day or so.

This is how and where ideas take hold.

Perhaps a decade ago or more I began to include visual materials - Polaroids, sketches, crayon drawings, collage. Whatever. Now I like them even more. They are fun to do, but, for whatever reason, I never work in them, not really when I am home.

It seems as if my journals only happen when I am on the road.

This journal shown above is my Vienna journal and the drawing was done in a cafe. I am proud of this picture because it was shown at a diary exhibit that included the only facsimili of Anne Frank's diary. Anne's diary is directly above mine. I cannot describe the feeling I had when I saw it there.

I have never lost a journal. I've lost many many things - cameras, sweaters, tickets, lovers - but a journal never. I've hidden them from Soviet border guards and used one as collateral to rent a paddleboat on the Vlatava River. I left one once on a train in France and a young man ran off, bringing it to me. I kissed him on the lips. I'm not sure if he got back on that train, but I can still see him, standing there.

A morning with coffee and my journal

2011-04-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

The best laid plans...

2011-03-19T15:28:00.001-04:00

On Monday of last week we were making plans to head to Paris for two weeks in June, then I was going on to Italy for a workshop. And today less than a week later all of that has imploded. It turns out that Larry may be allergic to the cat in the Paris apartment where we were to stay and Italy, well, that's another story for over a glass of wine, not on my blog.

I'm frustrated and annoyed; it's true. But I also know that this is just one of the rules of travel. Expect the best; prepare for the worst. My father used to say don't worry about something until it happens. A great line I always felt, worthy of Yogi Berra. Or, as a flight attendant recently said, "shift happens."

How many times have I been on my way somewhere when something else happened. A snowstorm, an illness, somebody finking out. There was the baggage handler's strike in Barcelona and the snowstorm up north that left me, heavy sigh, stuck in Key West.

And then there are other things - the people we love, the losses. What we cannot account for in this world. When I was about to start my sabbatical and had a million travel plans, I was worried about - no, obsessed over - the jury duty summons I'd received. What if I got put on a jury? What if it was a long trial? Criminal? Murder? Would I be free in four weeks? Six?

But before I got to go to jury duty to find out, I fell ice skating and broke my leg, hence cancelling all my plans for the next three months and turning my sabbatical into disability. Indeed three months into my injury Larry and I did go to Europe, but armed with wheelchair and crutches as this picture before the Eiffel Tower depicts. I have hobbled away in my "walking" cast (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) to take it.

So why worry about those delays and detours along the road? Things change. Perhaps they cause us anxiety because they make us aware of something we'd prefer not to be aware of. That life is uncertain. We have little control over it. We have little control over anything. So we can bemoan a flight delay, a snowstorm, a sinus infection that keeps us from flying. But in truth there are greater delays and inconveniences ahead.

So, to quote my father again, "roll with the punches." The Buddhists understand that holding on to either the good or the bad just leads to suffering. It is best when we can to let go.

Meanwhile Larry and I are thinking that our holiday might be in Canada - where he's from and where we rarely venture. Or maybe just a staycation, right here where we live, but have so little time to visit because we are so busy making plans for all the things we think we are going to do.

Bagel shop, Mumbai

2011-03-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

After the Quake...

2011-03-15T17:32:00.006-04:00

I was going to post soemthing funny today - some anecdotes I've been thinking of, but somehow it didn't seem right. It didn't seem like the time for humor. My mind has been thinking about something else.

For several years now I have taught Haruki Murakami's wonderful collection of linked stories, "After the Quake." The stories all in some way connect back to the Kobe earthquake without exactly evoking it or calling it by name. It is an elegant, thoughtful collection, but one that has also given me pause in the wake of the events of the past week. The 8.9 earthquake, the tsunami, and now, the nuclear meltdown.

It is, as my friend Russell Bank noted on FB today, as if the world we live in has come to resemble Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." I find Japan to be in a darkness we can hardly imagine. To have everything taken from you in seconds. To have 10,000 people literally washed away. To be afraid of the very air you breathe.

In 1993 I traveled to Japan. We stayed in a ryokan in Kyoto. Traveled up to Hokkeido and also went to Hiroshima. I went with a friend who was what is called a hibakshu - a survivor of Hiroshima. As we stood on the Peace Bridge, he told me what he'd seen the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He had a strange, nervous laugh as he desccribes things that no one should ever have to see.

My friend, Mr. Tobita-san, a wonderful translator, is now gone. He suffered, as many survivors did, from a cancer that found him late in his life.

A neighbor called me this morning about something else, then mentioned that her sister was on her way to Japan for a long-planned holiday. My first words were to tell her sister not to go. How can anyone have a holiday amidst so much suffering.

A number of years ago I had been asked by the NYTimes to write a piece about the Big Island of Hawaii. I was thrilled by the assignment and spent several weeks, planning my itinerary, booking at some amazing B&Bs. And then just days before I was to leave 9/11 happened. My Hawaii trip was over a week away but I knew I wouldn't go. I knew I couldn't go.

There are times to travel and have fun, seeing the world. And there are other times when we just have to stop and think about what all of this means. I always loved that old 60th song (was it Joan Baez or Dylan who wrote it). "There but for fortune." Really we just dodged this bullet. It could happen to any of us. Anywhere. Anytime.

Mumbai, January 17, 2011

2011-03-08T21:38:00.002-05:00

Bed, Bath and Beyond???

2011-03-07T11:16:00.002-05:00

My last day in India, roaming around Mumbai. I was hanging out in Bandara, a lively hip neighborhood when I spotted these two men, sleeping on the street. Beside them a handcart and in it some parcel, wrapped in a Bed, Bath and Beyond bag. For me this image said it all - Third World meets First World, rich and poor, disenfranchised and corporate, pre-industrial, post-industrial. All of these contradictions made up India for me. Somehow it made sense that at rush hour oxen freed of their yokes stroll home on the national highway, that in the middle of a dirt hovel an electric sewing machine, and this.

Bed, Bath and Beyond actually holds a funny place in my heart. When my father died, the funeral home FedExed his ashes to me. However, I'd forgotten they were coming and I was expecting another delivery. The chiropractor next door called me personally about my delivery. He said, "I have something for you."
"Is it from Bed, Bath, and Beyond," I asked him.
He hesitated. "Well...it's from Beyond."

This anecdote has nothing to do with this picture except it resonates in my memory and gave this moment a special poignancy. Also I had learned via my friend, Naresh, who hosted me in Mumbia, that a famous Bollywood star who lived around the corner from him in Mumbia had driven up on to a sidewalk in the early hours one morning and ran over four bakery workers who were getting some shut-eye in the street. I walked by the home of that Bollywood star who is out on bail, pending trial, which may never happen, and saw dozens of people, waiting on the street by the Arabian Sea, hoping for a glimpse of their handsome celebrity.

Somehow my father and the runover bakery workers by the Bollywood star and these two men asleep right here in broad daylight, it made me feel how fragile and vulnerable we all are. And how life is filled with contradictions.

Tea for....Fifty????

2011-03-06T18:40:00.004-05:00

When I arrived in Kolkata, I was incredibly sick. Basically I stayed in bed, ate, back to bed. I regret that I didn't see more of the city. I did go on two more or less touristy outings with a guide my hosts found for me. The Maiden, that famous grazing land (Kolkata's Central Park except you can graze your livestock here) I only breezed by it in a taxi. The Victoria Museum - same.

I did see a few things. Some famous monuments, the famous university that Tagore, India's poet laureate began. Those I saw with a guide. But being with her was like spending the day with the Encyclopedia. If we passed a man, bathing on the street under a spigot and I commented, oh there's a man bathing, she told me the history of Kolkata's water supply. I remained silent and sullen in the backseat, my ears throbbing with pain.

It was an odd visit in a house with fourteen servants and a poor chihuahua with a broken leg. But on my last day my hosts invited me to a tea tasting. Full disclosure - they are tea merchants and growers and have a huge tea garden in the north. I felt kind of bad going to a tea tasting (I actually didn't know what it entailed) because of my illness, but I had already begun to suspect (correctly) that it was a sinus infection and hence not contagious. Still I was miserable.

I arrived at the tea tasting and found that, well, I was the only person tasting tea. This had all been arranged for me. I was both flabbergasted and chagrined. I tried hard not to cough and convince the tea tasting expert that I was all right.

He moved from cup after cup of tea. "Look at this. Do you see this? It is too pink. That is not good. This is rosy. Not good. This is beige. It looks like mud. Do you see the difference?"

Actually I saw no difference, but I wanted him to be happy.

"Now this one. This is golden."

I still couldn't tell the difference so he handed me a cup. "Now taste," he told me, tasting himself. He then made an odd sound and heaved the tea from his mouth into a spitoon. So this was kind of like wine tasting but for tea.

I tasted what he handed me. I wanted to be polite. "Oh, this is very good," I told him.

"No, no," he said. "This is the poor quality tea."

Oh, dear, I thought. I know nothing of this world.

So the afternoon went until we were done and headed over to the home of my host's parents. They lived in a huge house with many servants. I was led into a lovely sitting room where my gracious hosts offered me, of course, a delicious cup of tea.

Pilgrims, making an offering

2011-03-05T18:33:00.000-05:00

Same foggy morning on the Ganges.

Man Bathing in the Ganges

2011-03-05T18:28:00.000-05:00

Images of Varanasi

2011-03-05T17:11:00.001-05:00

Men bathing in the Ganges. Dipping into the holy waters on a freezing day.

An offering on the Ganges

2011-02-25T16:31:00.006-05:00

My second morning in Varanasi I went on the river in a small boat. It was a foggy morning, as they all seem to be, and my boatman went along the coast. I saw the various ghats, the people bathing in the waters, the laundry being done along the shores. The water buffalo that roam freely.

Then I saw a man, half naked, riding in another small row boat. The man sat motionless, eyes on the horizon. It was as if he was in a trance, but then I understood that he was praying.

After a while the rower stopped and the man stood up. He held this offering in his hands, facing the sun. He made a blessing, bowed, then placed the offering into the Ganges. I was told that he was honoring a departing soul. I took this picture when it floated by my boat.

Later that day I watched a young boy of perhaps only ten, his head shaved in mourning, dressed only in loin cloth, light his father's pyre.

The colors of India!

2011-02-24T15:40:00.005-05:00

"The only thing standing in your way...

2011-02-05T13:45:00.009-05:00

is yourself."

This is a line from BLACK SWAN which I just saw and which blew me away. It's kind of like THE SHINING for dance. A wonderful, brilliant, disturbing film. But it got me thinking about the burden of perfection. Something that I think all creative people struggle with. I know I have.

We want approval. We want everything to be just right. Alice Miller writes about this in "The Drama of the Gifted Child." We give up when we think we can't. Instead of just loving the thing for itself, we love it because of how others see us. And in the end, as every Buddhist knows, this can only lead to suffering and misery. One of the things I loved about BLACK SWAN was how Nina's counterpoint just loved to dance for the sake of it. Not caring if she was a solo artist or in the choir. She did it for th sheer pleasure of doing it.

And then there's perfection's other side. Doubt. I think doubt is good for the artist. As are flaws. Auden once asked what was the point of a perfect poem. There'd be no reason to write any more. Everything must be flawed. That's the whole point. You must give yourself over to your art - even if it's not perfect.

The other day I was standing in front of an amazing Jackson Pollock at MOMA. I read that after he finished this painting, he asked Lee Krasner, his wife, "Is this art?" He was the most famous painter in America at that time and he was plagued with self-doubt.

My childhood friend, David Lauderstein, just wrote to me and shared this anecdote. He's a musician and was working on a composition, but he was filled with doubts about where to begin. So his teacher said, "Include your doubts."

As I've mentioned before in this blog, the Tahitians have no word for art. The closest they come is something that translates to "I'm doing the best I can." Isn't that all we can do or be expected of us? It is only then that we feel free to make mistakes and go out of our comfort zone.

This photo is a blury picture of a tiger that I took while sitting on a moving elephant's back. It's not a good picture, obviously, but I rather liked its abstract quality. It's kind of dreamy. And, under the circumstances, it was the best that I could do.

As the artistic director of the ballet in BLACK SWAN says, "Perfection is not just about control. It's also about letting go."

But perhaps no one has ever expressed this sentiment better than Henry James when he wrote in The Middle Years (1893): We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Landscape as watercolor - for my cousin, Donna

2011-01-23T14:54:00.003-05:00

6:30 a.m., a freezing morning, a game park in India. This image presents itself. The mist rising on a pond. My cousin, Donna, paints watercolors that look like this. Nothing stirring, silent. It's all about to happen. I often feel this way about landscapes. They are filled with anticipation. This morning was so beautiful. I made the driver stop here for a long time, though he was hardly reluctant to do so. He too loved this place. Birds were everywhere. Brilliant green bee-eaters, turquoise and orange kingfisher, the incredible turquoise and black roller bird. Spotted deer grazed nearby. No signs of tigers. Just this peaceful moment in the morning before everything begins again in the world.

Tiger, tiger...

2011-01-22T08:33:00.004-05:00

Apparently you don't go looking for a tiger. You look for signs of a tiger. It took five days, six safaris,two game parks some beginning in the freeezing dawn, but I got to see this beautiful beast. I had excellent guides. One I liked in particular, Ajay. He never said much. All he seemed to do really was listen for things I was never able to hear. The alarm calls of other animals, movements in the bush, pugmarks on the ground. I'd hear something and he'd just say, "No, that's just a juvenile spotted deer, calling its mother." It can take days to spot a tiger. It can never happen. I had just about given up hope when she appeared. On my last safari. As my guide said, rather eloquently I thought, "You saw her because you can to see everything. People who just come looking for tigers, they see nothing." For those wondering I am perhaps 40feet away in an open jeep when I got this shot. Part of it was just luck. I caught her just as she was about to disappear into the bush. More pictures to follow, but this is my favorite of her. And now I gotta get some sleep...

Portrait of a Woman

2011-01-20T02:30:00.002-05:00

In a village in central India I visited this indigenous tribal people - the Baagha. They are forest people. Their belief system is animism. They worship the rain, the trees, and the tiger. They have no running water, no electricity. They draw water from their wells. They forage for food. Some among them capture rats and mice in the fields that they roast as delicacies. This woman was willing to pose for me in her doorway which acted as a perfect frame.

Crossing the Street in Mumbai

2011-01-19T08:39:00.005-05:00

Since arriving in India in early January I've been trying to cross the street. The first night in Delhi at my b&b I told my host I was hungry and she said that there was a good restaurant just across the road. She offered to show me the way so she walked me to the road and pointed. "It's just there," she said and left me.

For twenty minutes I stood frozen. No one stopped for the red light. No one stopped for the "walk" sign. Basically no one stopped. I watched a few locals weave their way in and out of cars, trucks, taxis, rickshaws, but it seems I am made of lesser stock. Finally I gave up, returned to the b&b and with tears in my eyes ordered in.

I can't say that things have improved. In Varanasi a fellow hotel guest told me that someone told her to cross the road as if you are a sacred cow. That is, just walk into traffic and hope for the best. In Calcutta I never even tried.

But now I am Mumbai and more or less on my own. This morning I decided to take a walk. I would be brave. Look both ways and venture out. Again I failed. I paused for so long at one corner that two rickshaws stopped to see if I wanted a ride.

Then a red street dog came and stood next to me. I watched as the dog looked both ways, ventured out, dodged a few vehicles, ignored one or two screeching brakes and made it across. If a dog can do this, well, then I can, right?

So I looked but the wrong way. A rickshaw almost ran me down. I tried again, stuck out my hand like a native, cars weaved around me, but at last I have made it to a bagel shop with WiFi where I am writing this from the other side.

On the road...still

2011-01-17T09:33:00.002-05:00

So I survived the night train to Varanasi, tribal men, roaches, a woman sleeping in my berth, watched women bathe in the Ganges and a boy light his father's pyre, saw a python taken out of a sack, had my hands hennaed, learned that jars of pickles are not allowed on airplanes. People speak to me in Hindi and Bengali and expect me to understand. Women in saffron and orange saris, carrying their laundry to the river. In India...will post more soon.

My India Journal

2011-01-10T21:36:00.000-05:00

The journey has begun...

2010-12-13T13:40:00.007-05:00

The other morning bright and early I got up to go get my visa to India. It was a freezing cold morning and I'd bundled up. I had a reservation and, surprisingly for me, I arrived on time, only to find a line out the door. I thought the fact that I had a 10:40 reservation would be relevant, but apparently it was not. The guy before me had a 9:40 reservation. It was going to be a long morning and I had to get to work.

I was perhaps fifteenth in line so I thought I should go up and tell the Hispanic guard with the walkie talkie and wire in his ear that I had an appointment. A woman in a fur coat with a red-dyed fur hat was putting on her mascara behind me and I asked her if she'd hold my place. "I'm not in line," she told me in a thick Russian accent.

As I approached the guard, a Russian man (the husband of the woman in fur, it turns out)with a lot of dandruff was shouting at the guard about not having an appointment but needing a visa. The Russian man was going into a long, complicated story about his documents and his need to travel, but the guard would have none of it. "Go to the back of the line, sir."

Just then an elderly Indian man approached and said that he too had to get a visa and he couldn't wait. "Do you have a reservation, sir?" the guard asked. The man replied he did not but he required a visa. "But do you have a reservation." Once more the man said he did not. This elderly gentlemen was nicely dressed with a cap on his head that looked "ethnic" to me. I'm not sure how else to describe it, but the matter took a kind of cultural turn. This gentleman began shouting at the security guard.

Meanwhile the Russian was still trying to explain his problem, but the guard began shouting back at the Indian gentleman that he needed a reservation. Around me a Sikh in an orange turban was yelling into his cellphone in a language I did not know. Other people of Indian descent were also on their phone, some crying, some begging for documents from family members. "I need my birth certificate," I heard one girl sob. "Fax it to me."

When the elderly gentleman refused to take no for an answer, the guard called upstairs for backup. "I need help down here," he said. When a woman appeared, he shouted in Spanish, "I need some one to tell this crazy asshole to go away." I'm not sure who understood him, but I did.

Finally the manager of the visa venue came outside in his shirt sleeves on a freezing day. "No walk-ins, absolutely no walk-ins. You must have a reservation," he shouted in a distinctly German accent to the angry elderly gentleman and the Russian man who were now both screaming.

There was lots of rumbling from the crowd. Some people left. Many did not have a reservation. The line shortened.

Things settled down. After about half an hour, I was first in line. I was told to turn off my cellphone and prepare my documents, which I did. Then I got upstairs where there were two more very long lines, one that snaked around, and one where you had to wait to get your documents examined.

After about fifteen minutes a woman asked me to come up to the front. She looked over everything. Said all was in order, but I didn't have enough pages in my passport for the India visa and therefore I was denied.

"What do you mean?"

"You need visa pages in your passport. You have only one page available. You need two."

"But no where did it say I needed two."

"Well, you do."

This is what I get for traveling so much.

I was told I had to go to the US passport office and there I would be issued new pages or a new passport, depending on what I preferred, but that I would have to make an appointment for this and that could take several days (which it did). Before leaving I thought I should make another appointment for my visa, but on the way to the computers, I ran into the manager who asked me my problem and I explained about my passport pages.

He nodded, then made a sweeping gesture of the room that was filled with the troubled, turmoiled masses, snaking slowly around in their lines. "Why don't you just mail your application in?"

"May I?"

"Why would you ever want to come back here again?" The question for him was clearly rhetorical, but I couldn't help but note the disdain in his voice. His message to me was coded. Because it was clear to him that I was white and educated and many who frequented his establishment were not.

I made a mental note that I would not mail my application; I would return in person if I could.

As I walked out, the Hispanic bouncer asked me why I was leaving so soon. "My passport doesn't have enough pages."

He shook his head, his voice filled with pity. "That's a bummer," he said.

On the packed subway, heading to Grand Central, I needed to write some of this down, but I had nothing to write on. So I took out a piece of paper and tried to scribble notes on the pole. A young man of mixed race asked if I wanted to sit down. "No, thank you. I'm getting off at the next stop."

"But you're trying to write on that pole." I shugged and he held up his hand to me. Not knowing what else to do, I high fived him. He looked a little stunned, then he burst out laughing. "I was holding it up for you to write on it," he said.

As we pulled into Grand Central, I wished him a good day. On the train to work I nibble from the snack bag Larry had prepared for me. My purse is always filled with all kinds of things - gloves, water bottles, snacks, pens, life savers. I wasn't paying that much attention. I was reading and nibbling. Then I ate a dog treat. Apparently I also had a bag of these.

I sat back, gazing as the train crossed the Harlem River, a part of my commute to work I always love. So, I thought, the journey has begun...

A Room with a View

2010-12-07T11:02:00.004-05:00

This morning I was working on my itinerary to India. I wrote to the travel agent who is helping me and told her that in Varanasi I wanted a room with a view. I thought about this a lot after I wrote it. While traveling, I am hardly in my room. And yet, like so many of us, always want a room with a view.

Last spring in Istanbul my husband and I moved downstairs three times because the first room with a view was only available for two nights, the second, one floor lower, for the next two, and then, when he left me and went home, I found myself living on the street level. As Larry said, "we're moving down in the world." But what makes us suffer the inconvience of moving just for a fleeting glance of the Sea of Marmara.

Well, everything, I guess. We all want a perspective. A vista on the world. I am the kind of person who will panic in a stuck elevator or an MRI. But give me a view and I can breathe - if I can see the world. This was never made more real to me than when I agreed to wear a Winnie the Pooh suit at a children's book fair. The mask went over my head and I literally stopped breathing. Someone had to take over.

"Don't fence me in," has sort of been my motto for a long time. We all need it. Open spaces. A sense of freedom. Last summer L and I stayed in the south of Spain in an apartment that was billed as beach-front, which it was, but, for reasons to complex to go into, it actually had no window that looked out on it. The living room in fact was completely enclosed. My fantasy of standing on a balcony, looking out at the Mediterranean, dashed.

E.M. Forster understood this as much as anyone. When Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett arrive at their pensione in Florence, only to learn that the room with a view that had been promised to them was not available, the women are crestfallen. "I wanted so to see the Arno," Lucy says. It is of course Lucy's search for a room with a view that leads her to opening her spirit, to visiting the Santa Croce with no Baedeker, to experiencing life in its rawness, and, ultimately, to opening her heart and falling in love, as we all knew and hoped she would, with George.

In Forster's book there are many views and not just of the Arno. One character comes to "view" another in a new and special way. Someone does something with the "view" to doing something different.

So despite the annoyance I have sometimes caused my family (in the Caymans when I made us switch from a room with a pounding AC and a view of the parking lot to one that at sand level that looked at the Caribbean; in Istanbul when I made us change room three times just for a glimpse of the sea) they have in the end come to see the pleasure in seeing. Visual openness can lead to an openess of heart and spirit. And the two will go hand in hand.

I am excited for the journey ahead. I am looking forward to my view of the Ganges. And beyond.

Traveling in the Shadows...

2010-12-05T20:34:00.004-05:00

For a long time I have been interested in negative space. Not what is before us, but what is not. Not the object, but the space around it. For me many journeys are like this. It is not what is in the itinerary, but what happens in between. Not what we planned for, but what we didn't anticipate. There's a quote by Henry Miller that expresses this is another way. Miller says that our lives are shaped as much by those who refuse to love us as by those who do. This is a kind of emotional negative space. Not what is, but what isn't. Not what we see, but what is implied.

On our recent trip to Morocco we hired a guide. From the minute I laid eyes on him I knew it wasn't going to be a good match. I wanted stories. All he could tell me were facts. It was obvious from his demeanor that he had told these facts over and over and they meant nothing to him. When we were near the presidential palace, he asked if I wanted to take a picture. I didn't. I'm not interested in snapshots. But out of politeness I complied. In the middle of my snapping the picture, he took the camera from me and pushed the button himself.

He wanted me to see what he saw. What he assumed every tourist wants to see. He would not have understood if I told him that what I wanted only exists in the shadows.

The Journey as Surreal...

2010-12-01T21:43:00.006-05:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that to him there was no such thing as magical realism. What people saw as magical in his books actually happened to him. Part of his youth was spent growing up in a large house where many relatives had died. When Gabriel was bad, his grandparents never punished him. They just locked him in a room with so and sos ghost.

To me every day life can be quite surreal. I recall the swimming pool my friend Carol and I found in the middle of the Mexican desert. Pristine, full of water, but when we got in to swim in the cool, soothing waters, a campesino arrived and told us that we couldn't swim in his patron's pool. Where the campesino came from and where his patron was remain mysteries to me. Apparently the patron didn't have the funds yet to build the house, but he had dug and filled the pool.

This picture above reflects one such moment. Larry and I were late to get the ferry to North Africa. We raced to Algeciras which had the slow ferry (as opposed to Tarifa that had the "fast" ferry; I wanted to sail into North Africa the way the Phoenicians did). At the terminal we learned that there was a ferry leaving in ten minutes and another in two hours, which meant that with the time difference if we took the later ferry we'd arrive in the middle of the night.

We tried to grab two tickets, but two Moroccan men were having visa issues in front of us. Finally they stepped out of the way as we purchased our tickets to Tangier. The ticket clerk phoned the ship's captain to say that two passengers were on the way. As we were led, racing to the huge vessel which could easily hold a few thousand people, I asked the woman guiding us if we were the last passengers. "No," she told me, "you are the only passengers."

I made her repeat it twice. "Unicos??"

As you can see from this photo, except for a few truckers who had cargo in the hold, we are in fact the only passengers. We are standing alone in this enormous ship's cafe. Two hours later we docked in what would not be Tangier ("I was misinformed" - one of the many lines from Casablanca I recall)but a place call Port du Med. We ambled alone down the gangplank to greet the solitary customs official who waited for us in an empty parking lot.

In the 1930's Andre Breton went to Mexico to teach surrealism to the Mexicans. He wanted a table on which he could do his work and he asked a carpenter if he could make him such a table. Breton drew for the carpenter an architectural drawing of a table - diamond shaped, two short legs in front, long in back. A few days later the man returned with a diamond shaped table built to architectural perfection with long legs in back and short in the front.

Shortly thereafter Breton left Mexico and returned to France. When asked why he was leaving, Breton is reported to have said, "I have nothing to teach the Mexicans about surrealism."

Gibraltar behind me; North Africa ahead...

2010-11-30T04:48:00.002-05:00

Here I am in the middle of the Straits, between Europe and Africa, sailing into Tangier as the Phoenicians did. Well, almost. On a cargo ship. We were the only passengers on board.

My two goals as a traveler -

2010-11-27T12:10:00.001-05:00

Aimless wandering

and sitting still.

My journal and me...

2010-11-26T20:54:00.003-05:00

Every journal I write and draw in takes on a character of its own. Normally I find a journal I like - leatherbound, with lines, without - and use that same journal for several years. But lately I've been given journals as gifts such as the one in this picture.

It was given to me by the wonderful students in my writer and wanderers class. They put a map of the world on the cover, made dots where they'd each been, then each did a page of original artwork and writing. It was a bon voyage gift because we were saying good-bye as a class, but I was also going off on some adventures of my own.

At first I had trouble using this journal. To me it was a precious gift, one I was afraid of damaging in some way. I'm not sure when it was - maybe on the fast train to Malaga, maybe on the ferry to Morocco. Or many right here at the Cafe Centrale at the medina in Tangier that this journal became mine.

By I know that from this moment on - this cup of coffee, this morning of writing and drawing - I lived inside this book as I have on almost every journey I've ever taken. I can't call them trips. Trips are something else - they seem shorter and planned. When people say "have a good trip," the assumption is that you're going to actually arrive in a specific place. But a journey. Ulysses went on a journey. Gulliver, Ismael. These were all journeys. They are open-ended. There is room for error.

I don't think I've ever taken a trip in my life. I've lived in the detours and the surprises. Nothing planned has ever mattered to me that much in the end. It's always the unanticipated that I love.

So this journal. It took a little while, but I lost my fear of damaging it. Of hurting it in some way.

I think it was right here that morning in Tangier after a good cup of Morccan coffee that this journal, and this journey, became mine.

There's No Place Like Home...

2010-11-09T16:07:00.007-05:00

I've often wondered if I clicked my ruby slippers together, where would I end up? Back in Illinois where I grew up, in Boston where I came of age, in New York where I've lived my adult life. Would it be Paris where first slept with a man, albeit a crazy Italian bakers son who marched through the Champs de Mars as 2a.m. singing the Bella Ciao partisan song or Mexico where I learned some lessons that have never left me? Rome when I became a writer? Basque Country where I dream of living?

What is home now and where is it? At times I feel badly that I really don't know. If someone said, decide. Where would I land? Where would any of us land? As I got off the plane from Iowa this weekend and watched all the travelers with their wheelies, I thought how we are all moving all the time. We are global villagers. We know how to pack, roll our luggage. We know when to power down our phones. We don't stand on docks any more with our steamer trunks and entourages.

So where is home? Where the heart is? Where we were born? In a way this picture on an Iowa crossroads, surrounded by fields, with a sign that reads "BROOKLYN" sums it up for me. Home is a series of intersections and crisscrosses and memories and all the places I've been and people I've known and loved and forgotten and lost. The animals I've seen and the foods I've tasted and the wine I've sipped. It's all the crazy things that have happened or haven't happened or I've wanted to make happen. It's a drunken night in Paris and a full moon setting in the Sahara. A sea cucumber swallowed in Beijing and a remembrance of my grandmother's brisket, tasted so many years later in Tangier. It's all the stories that have zipped through my mind; and the others that made it to paper.

I guess if someone put a gun to my head, I'd say that the Midwest is home. If I clicked my heels together, it's probably where I'd end up. But then I was just there this weekend. I gassed up at a place called Kum & Go. I drove behind a school bus, and almost rearended it, as I read its warning sign: "IT IS UNLAWFUL TO PASS THIS VEHICAL WHEN GIRLS ARE FLASHING." As I passed it, I saw that SCHOOL BUS had been painted over and "TIME WELL WASTED" was in its place.

I stopped at a rest stop outside of Des Moines. When I came back, someone had stuck a fake severed finger on my windshield. It looked very real. I hightailed it out of there fast.

Durham-Dirham-Durham

2010-11-04T22:46:00.009-04:00

I always tell my students that if you don't know your ending go back to your beginning. Or in travelers terms given enough time and space most things will come full circle in this world.

Here's just one small instance. I met my husband, Larry, 23 years ago in Richmond, Virginia. My life was a mess, but he would not be thwarted. On our first date we drove to a theater to see Bull Durham. We always recall that night fondly. Me with my barefeet on the dash of his unairconditioned Honda or whatever it was.

Many years, many journeys later we find ourselves in Morocco where we are spending our dirhams (amused that the abbreviation for dirham for some reason is MAD which I always think means the Madrid airport which in airport jargon it does). We are spending them on food and hotels, on a rental car and trains, on a camel trek and scarves, and on a carpet we had no intention of buying, but paid for it anyway in many many dirhams, just to escape (and now I understand why people sign forced confessions. I would have signed anything to get out of there).

So we are spending our dirhams, recalling Bull Durham, and then realized that our flight home which was on a mileage ticket took us to NY via Marrakech, Madrid, London and then Raleigh-Durham where we missed our flight to JFK and had to spend four hours contemplating whatever if anything this meant in the grand scheme of things and though, exhausted and Larry in fact sick we agreed that it meant nothing there was still a certain symmtry to it all and anyway I like it when something in this world comes full circle even if it took us 24 hours to fly home.

Of course this isn't an end for us but just the start of a new beginning, but it was nice to have that layover in Raleigh-Durham to contemplate this and oh so much more...

Cat lady. Snail salesman. The market in Fez.

2010-11-03T22:34:00.001-04:00

"Been to the desert..."

2010-10-27T20:03:00.009-04:00

In this case a camel with no name.

Apparently they don't give them names, though once Kate rode a camel in the US named Rosalie, which coincidentally is my mother's name. I'm not sure that "America" (the band) had it right. Can't see how a horse would have survive.

We barely did for the six or so hours we were plodding from dune to dune with a brief layover at an oasis where a man in a fez showed up with cold Cokes. It was hot and my camel wasn't nice. Well, I guess I can't blame him.

The town where we stayed was once a French foreign legion outpost and really this was no joke. We could see Algeria. I kept thinking that if something happened to our guide, Mohammed, we would survive.

Though our camels had very very big flat feet. They look as if they are designed to make a lunar landing, which I think in a sense they are. While I can't say I like the creature, I have developed a respect for them.

That night we were exhausted. I am still having difficulty crossing my legs.

Morocco - A Human Face

2010-10-27T08:56:00.003-04:00

Over the next several weeks I will be posting images and text about our trip. I found myself especially moved by the Moroccan people who were overall extremely generous and kind. This man works in the tannery. They have been making leather in this way for the past 1100 years. He stands in a dye pit all day, stomping on hides.
More images of the tannery, and the rest of Morocco, to come soon.

From Thurber to Berber

2010-10-12T10:38:00.008-04:00

Domesticity's getting me down. I feel burdened by the tasks. Maybe it's the hound dog we adopted two weeks ago. As I'm taking shoes out of his mouth or watching him bury bones in my garden, I keep hearing Elvis in my head. Meanwhile at the same I'm packing to go to North Africa, into the desert, as far as I can.

There's a disconnect here. How can I be feeding pig ears to Thurber (named after James Thurber who loved hounds)and reading the map of the Fez medina at the same time? But it seems that I can. I recall how Indiana Jones could teach his classes in archaeology, then take off his glasses, put on a pair of chaps and go chasing the lost Ark.

I can identify. My students don't really know this side of me. As they head to the library or Connecticut for their few days off, I'm going for a camel ride in the Sahara. Once a student of mine went to visit his brother in Hawaii. The brother happened to have a magazine lying around that had a picture of me, dressed in black, riding a white horse through the chaparelle. Apparently the student turned to his brother and said, "I think this is my professor."

I'm not going to lie. I am ready for a change. I need to get away. I've just sprayed bitter green apple into Thurber's mouth so he stops eating my chair. Upstairs I've got my camera charging, my paints and brushes packed, my journal (the beautiful journal my writers and wanderers made for me this spring) ready to go.

I am filled with excitement. Anticipation. And yet I don't want to be cut loose. I don't want to be one of those balloons that floats away into the sky. The truth is I want to be tied to someone's stroller.

I recall speaking to a friend the other day about this. I told her that I'm not interested in just wandering. I don't want to be a nomad with no address. For me it's the tension between here and there, home and away, that makes all of this interesting. And by this I mean life.

Lost in the Desert with a Pen and a Hat

2010-10-03T19:01:00.003-04:00

A recent news story captured my eye. A couple of weeks ago a man was found who'd been lost in the desert for six days. He had no food and water with him and little shade though temperatures had soared close to a hundred degree. Yet beyond being dehydrated and sunburned he was fine. He attributed his survival to the fact that he had a pen with him. And a hat.

The hat did not help him because it provided shade. Rather the man, who had no paper, wrote on it. He wrote notes to his wife and loved ones, advice, instructions, declarations of love and friendship. When he began to run out of space, he devised a code so he could shorten his messages. But still he kept writing. He told his rescuers that if he hadn't been able to write, he would not have survived.

Many writers have attested to the same thing. The poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, survived a Soviet prison but writing her poems on bars of soap, memorizing them, and then taking a shower. She left the prison with dozens of poems, all inside of her.

On a less dramatic note Paul Auster writes in his wonderful essay "Why Write?" about meeting the great Willie Mays and not having a pen with him for an autograph. After that, Auster says he kept a pen in his pocket wherever he goes.

I have often found myself, on the subway or a plane, desperately digging in my bag for a pen. It seems I can survive any long flight or travel delay if I have paper and pen. (I have never tried my hat, but I'm sure if necessity dictated, i would.) If I was lost on a journey, imprisoned, if I was in a situation for which there is no obvious escape, I would survive if I could write about it. Perhaps this is why I write compulsively when wandering. It is how I hold the universe together. In essence it is how I survive.

So the message about the man lost with only his pen and his hat really hit home. It is an allegory of sorts. To wander is to write and to write is to wander. And when we are lost in a desert of our own making, this is especially true.

A Distant Episode: Thoughts before Heading to Morocco

2010-09-30T10:14:00.007-04:00

In two weeks we're heading to Morocco, and I am incredibly excited. For the past three years I've been trying to get to Morocco, but it has been eluding me.

The first time, in 2007, during my sabbatical, I had a trip planned with my daughter, Kate, and Larry. But I broke my leg and spent weeks on my couch, calling every riad and ferry company and hotel, slowly deconstructing the voyage I had been dreaming of.

Two years later Larry and I were going to sail from Tarifa to Tangier, just for a day or so, so I could, quite literally stick my foot in North Africa, but the day before we were to go, we lost our money "bolsa" with all our ids, except our passports inside. So the day we were to go to Tangier, we were cancelling our credit cards instead.

But this time, finally we are going...and I can't wait. I'm not sure exactly where our travels will take us. For the first time in many years we are traveling without plans, without reservations, except the day we arrive and depart. Almost, but not quite, without maps. I've been thinking about spending a day, if time allows, in the Atlas Mountains.

With this in mind I've been reading Bowles, in particular his short stories. Last night I reread the harrowing, "A Distant Episode." Indeed I'd have to say it's one of the most terrifying stories I've ever read, not merely because a man is captured, tortured and turned into the plaything of a desert tribe, but because it seems as if the man wants to be captured.

I've taught this story in my writer/wanderer class as a kind of anti-journey. The bad trip you never want to be on. But still something compells me to read this story over and over. Just as something compells me to want to go farther and farther, pushing myself beyond where I know safety is.

Again I recall what I wrote a couple weeks ago about God's curse on Cain - You will be a restless wanderer. I don't think I'm guilty of fratricide though my brother might disagree. But still something restless lives inside all of us who wish to keep moving. This is why breaking my leg was one of the worst things that's ever happened to me. Because I had to stop.

Still what is the point of the journey? Is it to have creature comforts we can't replicate at home? Or is it to push ourselves past a limit, past our comfort zone. Into a world that is different and far from the one we know?

I don't have an answer. Probably it's a combination of both. All I can say is that last spring, as I saw the lights of North Africa flickering from Cadiz, it was like being beckoned. And when we feel beckoned, as the prophets knew, even if we don't want to, we must answer that call.

2010-09-23T11:33:00.003-04:00

‎"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music--the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." ~ from Henry Miller - one of my favorite wanderers.

You will be a restless wanderer...

2010-09-20T21:21:00.005-04:00

Recently for various reasons I've been reading Genesis. In particular the story of Cain and Abel. We all know this, of course. Cain, the jealous brother, kills Abel. This is really the first crime in the Bible (unless you consider eating from the tree of knowledge a crime). In the Biblical narrative God curses Cain by placing his mark on his forehead and Cain pleads with God that he will be killed if men see his mark. But God assures him that this will not be the case. God's curse is a lifetime of banishment. "You will be a restless wanderer," God says to Cain, thus completing Cain's punishment for the slaying of his brother.

This final phrase of God's curse gave me pause. To me being a restless wanderer has always been a kind of blessing, something I embraced in others and in myself. I have never really tried to understand or analyze the roots of this wanderlust. I've always felt closer to Gulliver (who must escape his Master Bates - joke intended by Swift I am sure on p. 1 of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - and hence sets off on a journey) and Ismael who takes to sea when he feels a sense of malaise coming over him in MOBY DICK. I've always admired the need to get away.

Yet God curses Cain in this way. Thinking about this it occurred to me that the thing about being a wanderer is that there always exists the possibility of return. THE ODYSSEY wouldn't be much of a story if Ulysses wasn't looking for home. Goethe wrote somewhere that being an artist is like being homesick. The artist is always searching for home.

My mind remains somewhat muddled around all of this. But I think the difference between Cain and me (outside of the fact that I haven't killed my brother yet) is that I can return. I recall again those sea turtles eggs in the Gulf Coast. How they were moved to the Atlantic side, packed in their own sand. It is hoped that twenty years from now they will recall the scent of home and return to the beaches where they were spawned.

I have always embraced the restless wanderer in me. And, at the same time, I have always know that I can go home. That, in fact, it awaits me. And this is what God denies Cain. What is the journey if we cannot return? It becomes exile, not a journey at all.

Images from the Storm

2010-09-17T13:59:00.001-04:00

After the storm...

2010-09-17T13:18:00.007-04:00

Last night a storm cut a swath through my neighborhood, riping the tops off trees. This morning we took a walk to see the remnants of the storm. These images reflect what we saw. The destruction stunned me. I've never seen so many trees down. This storm, whatever it was, clearly had a path. In Prospect Park near Grand Army Plaza trees were uprooted, branches down. The crucifix on the church nearby lost its cross. It toppled on a parked car. And an angel in a church yard lost her wings. Right now I'm listening to the sound of buzz saws. A tree, not ours but our neighbors, is being removed. Two doors down and at least sixty feet high. It fell across six backyards. The tree was planted by Rita’s father eighty years ago when he moved into the house. It is the only house Rita has ever known. I loved that tree. Neighbors tell how the sky turned black, then green. The wind came from every direction. A little girl next door told her mother she thought she would die. Our pin oak, which was on of the reasons why we bought this house, escaped without a scratch.

On Getting Lost...and the art of the accidental

2010-09-12T18:52:00.006-04:00

On Saturday morning Larry pointed to the travel section. "Look at this," he said. There was a huge, and I might add, brilliant spread by one of my favorite travel writers, Matt Gross. It was called LOST IN TANGIER. I love the idea of getting lost. Or trying to get lost which Matt struggles with. It's something I try to do myself and also without much success because, for better or worse, I also have a strong sense of direction.

I also loved the way Matt wrote about Tangier because we are going there in just a month. As I was reading, I promised myself that I would not follow in Matt's footsteps because the point of his article was about not doing that. Still I found myself circling cafes he mentioned and booking a room at the Continental. So it was exciting for me to read, but it also became grist for the mill.

Perhaps because the day before the Times had another excellent piece on an artist named Dan Colen, who uses among his mediums, chewing gum, and he's not adverse to having his canvases dragged face down through grassy fields. One line stuck out in this article. It was on how Colen practices the art of the accidental. He not only isn't afraid for random things to occur in the making of his art, he welcomes it. And, beyond welcoming it, he actually goes looking for it.

Matt Gross, who recently stepped down from being "The Frugal Traveler," (and I won't pretend I didn't envy his life for the past five years) tries to get lost. He doesn't want a GPS or Google map or guidebook ruining the pleasure of coming upon an unanticipated alleyway, a café that serves the best coffee you've ever tasted, a neighborhood where you can watch children playing in the streets. He wants to stumble on to that perfect restaurant or hotel. Or the not so perfect as well. I love his chance encounter when he asks a man what it means to be a father.

Similarly for Colen the accidental in a sense is his art. Whether from chewing gum or grassy fields, he doesn't want to know what his art will be before he makes it.

Once again I am struck at how similar the traveler and the artist are. Getting lost is to the traveler what the accidental is to the artist. It is only when you allow yourself the freedom to get lost or as an artist to allow the random to enter your work that you can truly be creative. Perhaps in a sense creativity is just that. Allowing for the surprise. Welcoming the unexpected. The detour is the journey. Just as the character who takes a surprise turn can become the story.

When you can't go on a journey...

2010-09-08T12:35:00.006-04:00

Sometimes there's no place like home. Rastaman, dancing cops, hot dog stands, a wolf in the fountain (a real hot dog???), barefoot musician. Just another day in the 'hood. So when I can't go away, I try to look around. It's amazing what you can find. Of course this was during the West Indian Day Parade. I couldn't stay long enough to see the wild dancers and the floats, but it was nice, no matter what. Great jerk chicken, rice and peas! And you shoulda seen the NYPD Caribbean band!!!

on the Shores of Lake Michigan...

2010-08-25T10:15:00.004-04:00

This is me and Kate, relaxing on the shores of Lake Michigan. We're in Milwaukee, visiting my mom. But someone had dragged a picnic table down to the sea and bolted it to a broken-up concrete dock. Sitting at this beautiful place I thought that I wanted to make time stop. I wanted to stay here forever. A young couple were walking by. Perhaps they weren't older than sixteen. He had a lot of tattooes. She was a petite Asian girl with a fair amount of facial piercings. And I asked them to take our pic w/Kate's phone. Which is what they did. They were very nice about it and told us to have a good day. Which we did.

After Seeing Matisse in Morocco

2010-08-18T15:50:00.000-04:00

I have always been interested on the impact of travel on the artist. How seeing new things makes us produce new things. Flaubert in Egypt, Lady Montague in Turkey, Hemingway in Spain. And so on. Travel gives the artist a new perspective. A different angle on the world. It gets us out of our rut. I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but it is. Perhaps it is just literally so. We see with different eyes.

There is, however, a favorite quote of mine from Proust. Travel isn't about seeing new places. It is about seeing with new eyes. I love this quote. It makes me think about a book I am reading now. A wonderful meditation called "The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating." The bedridden author who cannot go anywhere is given a wild snail by a friend who picked it up in the woods. "I thought you'd enjoy it," the friend said. The narrator then spends the entire book observing her snail. With new eyes as Proust would say. And I'm sure he'd approve of her meditation. It is as beautiful and evocative writing about stasis that I have ever read.

But for those of us who can walk through portals into new worlds the newness of places enriches us. And it was clear it did so for Matisse in Morocco. I have always loved Matisse. In my own paintings, such as the one above, the influence is clear. (I feel influence and imitation are perfectly legitimate artistic endeavors. Enriching in fact. Think about the Picasso/Matisse rivalry. Only wonderful art came of it.)

Back to Matisse, I love his sense of color perhaps more than anything. The way he balances colors. And his blue paintings. The shapes. There are some amazing images in the MoMA show. For me Matisse remains fresh.

The other day Larry and I went to see the Matisse show at MoMA. I had no idea when I went that Matisse had spent time in Morocco and that it had a big influence on his art. The coincidence is that we are going to Morocco in October and it was amazing to see the kind of work - the new colors, composition, the shapes - Matisse brought to the work he did after being in Morocco. And many of these works were completed years after he returned.

It has always been a kind of cliche that travel enriches us. A junior year abroad, a travel to the continent, a journey into farther, less familiar realms. But the fact is, it does. We do see things differently. We gather material with our eyes, our noses, our ears. In Matisse's notebooks and letters we see the sketches he made for what would later become his Morocco paintings, including the famous Les Moroccans. I love seeing the germs of ideas in travel journals.

I feel as if our journey to Morocco has already begun. And we only had to ride the D train to get there.

Les Moroccans - from the MoMA Matisse catalogue

2010-08-18T15:13:00.003-04:00

Matisse conceived this "souvenir of Morocco" in 1912, stretched a canvas for it in 1913, and returned to the composition late in 1915, only to start again on a new canvas in early 1916. Black is the principal agent, at once simplifying, dividing, and joining the three zones of the canvas: the still life of melons and leaves on a gridded pavement, bottom left; the architecture with domed marabout, top left; and the figures, at right. Next to a seated Moroccan shown from behind, the large curving ocher shape and circular form derive from a reclining figure in the sketches. Above the shadowed archway, figures in profile may be discerned in the two windows: at right, the lower part of a seated man; at left, the upper part of a man with raised arms. Matisse built up the surface with thin layers of pigment, the color of the underlying layers modifying those on top. Painter Gino Severini reported that "Matisse said . . . that everything that did not contribute to the balance and rhythm of [this] work, had to be eliminated . . . as you would prune a tree."

I Met A Traveller...

2010-08-11T21:19:00.012-04:00

Yesterday I was leaving Milwaukee, heading back to New York. I'd spent a rather difficult weekend, visiting family, and I was ready to get home. I checked in and had a little time to kill. Not that much, but enough for a glass of wine.

I stopped in at the Brewhouse, but the bar was kind of full. I jockied a bit for position. Then a nice young man with glasses who was reading a book made room for me. He gestured to a chair beside him and I settled in. As I ordered my Pinot Grigio, I noticed that he was reading a very old book of poetry. I could see that its pages were tattered; its binding was leather.

As he sipped his Scotch and chased it with a beer, I couldn't help but comment. "That's a very old book you're reading," I said.

The young man nodded and told me that he'd just picked it up at the unusually fine used book store, "Renaissance Books," that sits in the middle of Milwaukee airport. I never actually know what that bookstore is doing there, but, to the delight of my husband and me, it sells a lot of fine, rare editions - even as it sits beside the Harley Davis memorabilia store with a Starbucks across the way. Whenever I have a lot of time to kill at this airport, I usually spend it in that store. "I like poetry," he said.

We chatted a bit about books and travel. He told me he likes to pick up books wherever he goes. I glanced at the beautifully engraved leather binding, the crumbling yellowed pages. He wondered if it might be a first edition. The thought struck me as well. "You should have it appraised," I told him. "It might be worth something." I told him how my daughter, Kate, had picked up a very rare Gustave Doree illustrated Don Quixote at a stoop sale and it turned out to be quite valuable.

He turned to the frontespiece where the date "1860" had been written in by hand. "Yes," he mused, "You're probably right." He paused. "But I'm going to keep this one." I watched as he fondled the leather cover, protected by an acetane jacket.

"You're right. I think you should."

Somehow we got to talking more about travel and reading and languages and how much he wanted to learn more languages and how he was interested in art and sculpture. Whenever he had time on his hands, which wasn't that often, he looked at art. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going to Delaware to visit his mother. He hadn't seen her in many months because he had been deployed for the past nine months.

"Army?" I asked.

"No, I'm a Marine," he told me.

"Oh, that's great," I replied, turning back to my wine. Then I looked at him again. "Isn't it kind of unusual for a Marine to be reading Shelley?"

He smiled at me, "Yes, it is..." Then he began to talk, telling me how he's a geek Marine. How he's always loved poetry and art (and how he wants to write poetry which didn't come as a surprise). He'd been on Okinawa for the past year. It was a dry, dusty place. I asked him if he'd seen action. "No. I'm an aviation electrician." My mind wandered to St. Exupery - the war pilot who was also a writer. He wrote The Little Prince, of course. The plane he went down in in l943 has recently been recovered.

We spoke a little longer - about keeping journals. I told him that I was a writer and I always kept a journal with me. He asked how he could get his poetry published. I told him to read "Best American Poetry" and send poems to the magazines listed in the back.

He thanked me. "I'm a warrior," he said. "I'm supposed to have a warrior mentality, but I'm conflicted...I'm not sure."

"You should write about that," I told him. I mentioned Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Enri Remarquee, Tim O'Brien. The chroniclers of war. There's a precedent, I told him. And I don't know whose writing about this now.

He smiled. "I will," he told me. "I'm going to write about that..."

I realized I was late. Very late for my plane. We shook hands. His palm was moist, sweaty. A sign of nervousness, I believe. I didn't ask his name and he didn't ask mine as I dashed off, wondering if he'd start sending out his poems. If I'd read a memoir from a conflicted warrior someday...

I raced towards security, begged my way towards the front of the line, put my shoes and belt back on in the area Milwaukee called the "Recombobulation Area" which I loved. I ran to the jetway where I narrowly made my flight. As I tumbled into my sea, the words rushed through my brain...

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.[1]

Perhaps one day my marine will write something like that...

It was one of those chance encounters we have on the road every day. At a cafe in Rome, on a ferry dock in Honduras. You meet someone and share with him something about where you've been, where you're going. A word of advice, or warning might make all the difference. We never know if we've helped a person move past despair, out of doubt into hope. As I said to my friend, Susan, yesterday afternoon, we never know if we've helped someone find a path.

On the flight the woman beside me was sharing a huge bucket of fried chicken with her son. Across the aisel an enormous woman with a woven pink scarf wrapped around her head sang hymns all the way to New York. I didn't really mind. I thought about my Marine. I wondered if our chance encounter would make a difference in his life. He'd made a difference in mine.

The only way out...

2010-08-04T17:30:00.010-04:00

is to write your way out...

Someone said this to me once and I know it's true.

There was a dream I had many years ago. I was living in Cambridge, in grad school, and pretty miserable. I dreamt that I was walking down a Paris street and inside I saw Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, sipping campari and sodas. The name of the cafe was Lascati Ogni Speranza Voi Que Entrate. The "Leave Behind All Hope Ye Who Enter Here." Which is what is written over the Gates of Hell in the Inferno (I was studying Dante at the time).

But I wanted to be a writer so I went inside. I sat at a bistro table and ordered my campari and soda too and as I did my bistro table and I fell into a deep, dark hole in the center of the earth. Clearly there was no way out. Suddenly six men arrived with a coffin which they placed before me. When they left, I understood that my fate was in that coffin. I opened it and the coffin turned into a rolltop desk with paper for eternity.

Shortly thereafter I left graduate school, packed up my few possessions, including my typewriter, and moved to New York.

This is a painting of my friend, Matthea's orange typewriter. I sketched it one day when I was over. I really love her typewriter (the real one). It is small, simple, and bright as a setting sun. It made me think of a journey I took many years ago with my then fiance. We were going to go backpacking through Europe for six weeks, but he decided to bring a typewriter to a friend of his mother's. An old woman, living on an Island in Greece...I'm not going to go into that whole story right now except to say that I wrote about it in my second collection of stories. A story called "The Typewriter."

Writers have to write. Whether it's yellow pads, journals, typewriters, laptops, it is what we do. Someone once gave me the ten ways that you can recognize if you are an alcoholic and they had substituted the word "write" for the word "drink." Do you write in the morning. Do you feel you have to write every day. If you don't write, do you get irritable or even angry.

I answered yes to all. I am sure many of you would as well

As far as I can tell, it is the only way out of the hole.

The Writer and the Wanderer: The Goldilock's Syndrome

2010-08-01T23:16:00.000-04:00

The Writer and the Wanderer: The Goldilock's Syndrome: "Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. As the room came into focus, I saw the bed, walls, windows. ..."

The Goldilock's Syndrome

2010-08-01T21:02:00.010-04:00

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. As the room came into focus, I saw the bed, walls, windows. But where was this room? In a small hotel in Istanbul, in the South of Spain. Was it at my cousins' farm? Was I home? I didn't know where the door was or the way to the bathroom.

Then, slowly, it came to me. I was in Amherst, attending a friend's wedding. But I had been sleeping in so many beds in the last several months that it took a while for me to be sure. I have taken to calling this "The Goldilock's Syndrome." A kind of traveler's cognitive amnesia. A little like "If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium," but not quite.

This comes, I think, from a deeper place. The confusion, at least in my experience, isn't just about place. It is also about time. Am I a little girl again? Do I need to get ready for school? Is my daughter home? And where's the dog. Perhaps because I move around so much, my coordinates in time and space are often confused. Some day I wake up a teenager in love. Fortunately I have never projected myself far in to the future.

Last night at the wedding Larry and I were talking with one of our hosts. He is an optical engineer and he was explaining how he had been working on a lens that sees into the past - millions of years into the past, in fact - at galaxies that existed before life began. And he said there is actually a way that one could see into the future. There is a way that one lens can bounce of another. Like the Navajo, I said. Past, present, future, it all exists in one vast continuum of space and time.

So perhaps I was waking up in that hotel room in Istanbul. An apartment in Paris. Some funky Mexican town. I was sixteen. I was thirty. My heart was broken. I was home. Or I was with my husband, in a B&B in Massachusetts, a little hung over. The bathroom was to my right. The exit was behind me.

Once I located myself in time, I was able to locate myself in space.

But for just a moment I could have been anywhere.

A sea turtle remembers home...

2010-07-28T14:31:00.005-04:00

Last night on the news I heard a fact that stunned me. It was a feature on how rescuers are saving the Gulf sea turtles. They are harvesting the eggs a few days before they are due to hatch and shipping them over to the Atlantic where, if all goes well, in a few days they will emerge unscathed and make their way to the sea. The fact that startled me was this. They pack the eggs in sand from the Gulf so that hopefully the turtles will recall the smell of home and return to the Gulf in twenty years time to breed and lay their eggs once again. I could not believe this detail of nature. That the turtles will recall the smell of their sand and it will lead them home. And in twenty years. Think of all that Ulysseus went through in just ten years.

This proves something that I've always suspected about the traveler. Home imprints itself in us, perhaps even more so than those who never leave, in ways we cannot imagine. I am sure that we have all had dreams of flying. I have them quite a lot, though often it is more like swimming in air. In one dream I feared I would get lost, but then I understood that my belly button was equipped with navigational redial and all I had to do was press it and I'd be home.

For many many years I had a kind of repetitive dream. I was in a jungle, a desert, walking down a Paris Street, and suddenly footprints, a way, a path in the snow would appear, and I'd follow it and it always took me back to 105 Hazel in Highland Park, Illinois where I was raised as a child. Not a particularly happy childhood, yet, for whatever reason (perhaps trauma as Alice Miller, the noted psychologist, might say) I kept going back. In my dreams at any rate.

And it turns out that people tend to buy houses or live in places that evoke some secure part of home. And just recently when visiting my cousins at Plum Farm, I had a long drive to Milwaukee to see my mother. My cousin Donna made me a tuna fish sandwich with pickles in it on white bread. As I was driving, I pulled off into a rest area and ate my sandwich. I mean, it was tuna fish, not the madelaine, but my root are Midwestern, not Combray. Still as I was eating that sandwich, I was eight years old, home from school, at summer camp, wherever a child might be. I was back as surely as if I'd flown there.

So as I write this, I think of those little travelers. The sea turtles. How far they will journey. How big they will grow. And yet imprinted inside of them, forever, is the scent of home.

2010-07-25T13:36:00.000-04:00

Plum Farm again...

2010-07-25T13:24:00.004-04:00

Some friends have asked why I posted Robert Lewis Stevenson. One friend said it was very retro. It's funny because this poem always meant a lot to me. It is not just farewell to the farm, but farewell to childhood, to innocense. To everything...This poem and Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill have stayed in my mind as poems about saying good-bye to our childhood selves. Where time doesn't matter and everything feels infinite and eternal. My father always wanted a farm. He dreamed of owning one. At his memorial service I had my nephew, Bill, read the Stevenson poem. From A Child's Garden of Verses, of course. I can still almost recite that book by heart. I read those poems over and over as a child. "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me..." Anyway below I have written that my cousins sold Plum Farm the day we arrived a couple weeks ago. Places can become like people to us. In today's NYTimes Verlyn Klingkenborn writes about his garden. How a perennial garden is as much about memory as it is about plants. This is for me what happens with places. It is not simply the geography, the architecture, the antiques. It is something we laughed over, the pileated woodpecker that flew by, the times in the sugar shack when I painted all day and no one disturbed. It is meals of grilled steak, corn, tomato and basil salad. Summer menus, great wine, wonderful friends. I love that poignant moment at the end of one of my favorite books, Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather (a novella), when the man who once loved her see a childhood footprint Lucy has left behind in the cement. What could be more poignant than that? And we leave our footprints everywhere we go.

Farewell to the Farm

2010-07-25T00:27:00.004-04:00

Farewell to the Farm
by Robert Louis Stevenson

The coach is at the door at last;
The eager children, mounting fast
And kissing hands, in chorus sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Crack goes the whip, and off we go;
The trees and houses smaller grow;
Last, round the woody turn we sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Plum Farm...Good-bye.

2010-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

A week or so ago we returned from Plum Farm. My cousins' place in Michigan. It was, and still is, a place of beauty and grace. A place to work and read. I could always find a quiet corner. Or show up for cocktails. There is so much to say, but little I can say now. My cousins sold Plum Farm last week. It was the right time for them and for this reason I am happy. But I need to post this last tribute to a place that brought me so much happiness and peace.

How to Trim a Bird's Wings

2010-07-21T21:12:00.008-04:00

I run into people - neighbors, acquaintances - all the time who ask me when I am going away. Or if I've just returned. The truth is, I'm not. I'm back now from Istanbul and Rome, from Canada, and Plum Farm. From the coast of Spain...I am for the foreseeable future HERE. In the heat and humidity and stench of summer in New York. For various reasons I am spending August in the city with a few side trips upstate, Fire Island. I don't want to go to Europe in August anymore and besides it is a good time to work because no one is here and no one wants to be outside anyway. But still...Recently I called Rodrigo, the Brazilian surfer/dog groomer, who taught me how to trim my parrot's wings. Rodrigo grew up around birds. We have an African gray and she submits to this indignation with as much grace and composure as she can muster, but the process leaves me spent. And afterwards she sits on her perch as if she knows that she cannot fly. That she cannot go anywhere. So I wrote this poem about it which essentially is about travel. Or, in this instance, not being able to travel. It would be safe to say that I am identifying with my bird here.

HOW TO TRIM A BIRD'S WINGS

Take a towel
Put it over your bird's head
Be careful; he may bite.
Unfold one wing.
Hold it to the light.
It should be translucent
as glass.
Avoid the blood feathers.
They are young and immature.
Now think of flight.
Imagine yourself,
soaring overhead.
You catch the wind.
The earth is small.
See the tops of trees,
entire lakes.
Doors open;
Pink flowers bloom.
Rest on a sailing ship.
Dry your wings
in the sun.
But for the bird
The process is painless.
Leave two flight feathers
for balance.
Now pick up the scissors
and snip.

Mary Morris

Larry - various views

2010-07-15T20:50:00.005-04:00

I've been traveling a lot this summer. But since returning from Spain and Italy it's been all domestic - Fire Island, Michigan, tomorrow Canada for our niece's wedding. Today the wonderful physical therapist who has been trying to cure various ailments asked me if travel inspired me. If I wrote better because of it. The answer is yes. Everything is better because of it...I'm sort of taking a vacation from my blog. But lately I've been trying to learn how to paint people and recently I did a few paintings of my husband. I am posting these...Both were done during journeys which is, in fact, more or less the only time I paint. I think about how many of us are away now. More on this later...I need to pack.

Rusting dock - Tarifa, Spain - Two Views

2010-07-06T12:03:00.005-04:00

I took this picture on the dock at Tarifa. I knew I wanted to try a watercolor, but when I did, the watercolor just seemed too, well, like the photo. It wasn't working for me. It bothered me for weeks. So I splattered it with paint. It's a new technique I've been playing with. I'm not sure if it exactly right, but I am happier with it now. Ah summer. A great time to do all these things! On Friday I am heading to my favorite place...Plum Farm. It really is my favorite place. I'm not entirely sure why, but I love to go there. To see Mike and Donna and have some time with family, time to read (a great place to read), write, paint, cook, eat, drink, talk...I guess that about covers it. I'll post pictures from there. I have in the past.

Proust and Travel

2010-07-06T04:32:00.005-04:00

Proust wrote that travel isn't about seeing new places, but about seeing with new eyes. I've always felt this is true. I am not a particularly adventurous person, but I love the new perspectives travel gives to me. These images are of three fairly ordinary things - some glasses in our hotel room, a rusted railing in the port of Tarifa, the studio where I stayed in Rome. But each evokes a great deal to me. Each makes me see something differently than I had. In this case these all present themselves as watercolors which I intend to paint. But they also recall moments lived. They are simple things, but they resonate for me. xxx

Just Wildflowers and One Cat

2010-07-01T06:42:00.004-04:00

In Cadiz we paused in the mountains for a long walk. Everywhere there were wildflowers. Hundreds of different kinds. They were everywhere. I couldn't stop taking pictures of them. It was cold in the mountains and a mist was coming in, but it was so beautiful, I couldn't stop. The place was completely quiet. Just the sound of the wind through the mountains. It was one of those places where I would have stayed forever if I could...I've been thinking about this a lot. How sometimes we want to stay somewhere and never move on. Daily life is circular, a routine, but travel, like life, is linear, and it is a hard truth that we must keep moving. But this mountain valley is one of those places where I could have stopped, if time and the setting sun had let me.

World Cup versus Old World

2010-06-24T08:40:00.006-04:00

Here is another view of two cultures crossing in Rome airport. This one is a little blury. I was nervous about taking it and had to shoot very fast and pretend to be looking elsewhere. Anyway I love the way these guys are standing up against this giant illuminated ad for a whole other world.

I can't say that I am specifically following all the World Cup goings on. But I did see America's amazing goal yesterday. I followed the French protest and was rooting with the guy at my gym for Mexico (he's Mexican). Other than that for me it is mostly background noise. The sound of whistles, crowds, announcers. Still I like it. I like it mainly because I see how much other people like it - how excited they get. And that is exciting to me.

I wish I was a linear person, but I'm not. I seem to do things in circles. This is actually from the end of my trip, but, given that it's World Cup time, I thought it was relevant. I will post other pictures from the trip itself. The wild flowers, the food. But for now I'm putting these up because the World Cup is on everywhere. In every New York bar, in the store where I buy my wine, in the gym (duh), but really everywhere. This image reflects for me how there are other realities than soccer and Samsung. I am glad we have both in this world and hope that continues for a very long time.

For the next several weeks I will continue to post more images. I'd love it if you'd share some of yours. You can do it on my Facebook page. Just "friend" me.

Rome airport - a crossing of cultures

2010-06-23T09:12:00.005-04:00

Two weeks ago in Rome airport I was sitting by this giant Samsung ad for the World Cup when I noticed several Orthodox Jews praying. I took several shots, all from the hip as I didn't want them to see me. I will post a few here.

On the plane I overheard two people behind me, talking about these Jews. "What are they?" a woman asked the person sitting next to her who seemed to be a stranger to her. "I think they're some kind of sect. Don't get near them. Don't touch them." "Why?" the other woman asked. "I heard they don't like that." All of which is true, but it was interesting to hear what people who didn't know anything about this group had to say. I was just struck by the contrasts. I will post a few pics of them over the next few days.

I have a lot to say about my time in Rome. I went there for the first time with my mother in the mid-60s and I've found some old pictures from that time. It was my mother who first brought me to Europe. My mother who made me throw my coin in Trevi Fountain. I called her just after I got home and she didn't remember much of our journey together. Not the Baths of Caracalla where we saw Aida, not the Hotel Flora where we stayed. But then I reminded me that, having lunch in LaSpezia over the bay of Genoa, she threw her old cultured pearls into the sea. She laughed, remembering that. "Yes, I did," she said. "I threw my pearls away."

Anyway sitting in Rome airport with time in my hands. Thinking about all of this. And taking this picture.

Meanwhile a word to my readers. I've gone deep into writing mode. A new book that I am quite excited about. So this blog for the summer will be more a visual than a writing experience. I hope to resume the narratives in the fall. But don't go away...And let me know your thoughts about this and anything else.

And on another note I am heading to Morocco in the fall and then India in the winter. I would love tips from any and all!

Happy Trails wherever you go.

Clowning Around in Trastevere

2010-06-21T12:57:00.003-04:00

I spent a lovely afternoon in Trastevere. It was hot so I took a front row street at a cafe where over the course of three hours I ordered a large bottle of mineral water, followed by a single shot of espresso, followed by a nice cold glass of white wine.

It is one of those things I love about Italy and Europe in general. You can sit in one spot all day long and nobody bothers you. No one asks you to leave. I've done this everywhere (though I must admit I found Paris the last time I was there less friendly in this regard).

Anyway in the course of the afternoon a very small man painted all in silver, posed with children, as a gunslinger. This clown came my way. In the evening I went into the church where a gypsy woman begged outside. I was carrying the lunch I hadn't eaten that day and gave it to her along with some change. She said she was hungry and thanked me. It gave me pleasure to see her eat.

Half an hour later as I was leaving the church I saw her on her cell phone, a leather bag slung over her shoulder, as she and another well-dressed woman headed off. Ah, I thought, I fell for that one. I chucked to myself.

Still...I loved this clown.

When in Rome...

2010-06-09T11:13:00.002-04:00

I am having some trouble crossing the streets in Rome. As I watch Romans, I assume that some sort of combination of art and instinct are involved. As vespas and motorcycles and cars and buses hurtle towards me, I try to put my foot into the crosswalk. No one seems to notice or care. Cars either dodge by or slow at the last minute. I began following Romans to see how they did it. I stuck close behind, but they didn't seem much better at it than I. And I am scared to death. Vehicles charge from all angles. Sidewalks suddenly end and form narrow streets where an endless stream of taxis barrels along. It is a bit of a game of chicken. How far can I get? Will they really stop? The number of crushed pigeons in the crosswalks does not bode well. The other day, walking through a particularly narrow and complicated part of Rome with one of my hosts, I told him that I was afraid to cross the street. "So are we," he replied. It seems that last year alone 66 pedestrians were killed as they walked across the street in the crosswalk with hundreds more injured. The wife of the President of the Republic of Italy was herself run down in front of the Presidential mansion. Clearly you are taking your life in your hands. And I have watched confused tourists crossing major intersections in the crosswalk when they don't have the light. I'll admit that there is a certain charm to all of this. The man on his bicycle, no helmet, who glides among traffic through Piazza Venezia. The girl on her vespa, chatting away on her cell phone. To all of them it is just another day in Rome. Meanwhile tonight is my last night. I'm laying low. I'm staying home.

A Look at Moses

2010-06-09T08:22:00.002-04:00

Today I was on my way to the church of St. Peter in Chains (where the chains are in fact on display), when I paused to look at a stand of used books. I had run out of things I wanted to read so thought perhaps I could find something here. As I was browsing, I noticed that the owner of the stand seemed to be humming to himself, a sad song, I thought.

When I looked up, I saw that he was perhaps a once handsome middleaged man with his arm in a big cast. We began to talk and he told me he'd broken his arm in a fall in the bath, but it wasn't his broken arm that was hurting him, though it was, but his heart. In a long, rambling monologue he explained that the woman he loved, the love of his life, had left him on Saturday. She said she was going to the country with a friend for a couple days. Then she stopped answering her phone and, at last, she did and told him that she had moved to Paris.

His arm was hurting, but his heart, he told me, was killing him. He was going to go to Paris. He was going to find her. I didn't know what to say. I told him I'd broken my leg and it had healed. Things get better, I said. I couldn't seem to get around the platitudes, but my own heart was aching for him. After a while I said I had to go. I lied and said friends were waiting for me.

I walked towards the church and up the stairs with a heavy heart of my own. An accordianist under an arm was playing Arrivaderchi, Roma. I dropped some coins into his hat. But as I walked, I missed those I loved. I wanted to go home and hug them close. Instead I went into the church. I had come here specifically to see the Moses which I had seen since I was young and standing in this church with my mother. Now once again I gazed at Moses. His body erect, his gaze turned away, his long white fingers, wrapped around what we have come to know as the Ten Commandments.

The tablets rest under his arm, but it is his face I recall. The face of a man who has spent forty years in the desert, has seen a lot, and now has returned with ten sentences to show for his time away. It came to me as I looked at Moses. I understood what Michaelangelo also must have known. Moses was a writer too. He carried his writing in his enormous, white hands. He too had been burdened by the sadness of others. He was an old man now. He had his own sufferings. I saw it in his eyes even as he clutched his life's work under his arm.

A New Perspective: Reflections on Proust

2010-06-08T16:59:00.003-04:00

I am in Rome now, a city I lived in thirty years ago. As a cab driver said, trying to flatter me, yesterday, I must have been a bambina. Well, that aside, I spent a lot of time tht year with architects and art historians and I learned a few things about this city. Mainly that Rome is all about perspective. Sight lines.

It was as important how you viewed a church from down a hill or a side street as when you were right up in front of it in the piazza. I recall a moment in Florence when an architect stopped and said, as he pointed to a building in the distance, that this was the exact place the architect wanted his creation viewed.

Last week Larry, and I were in Spain and we went out to lunch in a little Basque village called San Juan. Last year for a couple weeks we lived in the village called San Pedro which is just across the narrow channel. For sixty cents a tiny ferry carries you back and forth.

We loved this place so much that we returned again this year. From the village of San Juan there is a walk that goes almost out to sea. We'd been to San Juan many times, but had never taken this walk before. However the previous year we had tried to walk from San Pedro to San Sebastian along the route that pilgrims use to go to Santiago de Compostela. It seemed to be an endless climb up a rocky terrain. In fact at one point we seemed to be walking among the sea gulls.

Now as we walked from the village of San Juan out towards the sea I could see the route we had taken. If I had seen it before, I never would have bothered trying to walk it. But now from a different perspective I saw how far we had gone and what we had tried to do. I am always interested when we see a person, a thing, a place from a different perspective.

A few weeks ago a friend and I were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn where I live. She took me on a trail I'd never taken and, though we came out in a place I knew quite well, I was lost and had no idea where I was because we'd come upon it from a different perspective. Another time recently at a street fair I had the same sensation. And once when neighbors had us over I could see our backyard tree in a way I never had. I saw how it loomed, how beautiful itàs branches were.

It made me think of this favorite quote of mine which I will paraphrase here because I am in Rome and donàt have it with me. But Proust said that travel isn't about seeing new places, but about seeing with new eyes. And I love those moments when it becomes clear to us that this is true. It is what Einstein discovered afterall. That it is all in the eye of the beholder.

But I also couldn't help but feel how this is true about our life in general. At times we think we are lost, but in fact we are just seeing things from a different angle. A book isn't working out, a friendship is faltering, something you were counting on doesn't come through. But there are other ways of looking at these things. Maybe your heart wasn't really in that book. Maybe it was time for that friendship to go. Or maybe you could do something to bring it back. And perhaps what you thought you wanted wasn't the right thing at all.

We have all had these moments and think we are lost inside of them. But if we realize that we are coming upon something that we think we know very well from another point of view, then, as Proust suggests, we can see it with fresh eyes.

And now I am going to go out and roam around Rome! Baci a tutti.

Have assignment - Will travel...

2010-06-02T17:42:00.009-04:00

When I was a girl, I used to watch Palladin every Sunday night before the Ed Sullivan show. And now you know how old I am...Anyway his theme was Have gun - Will travel. Richard Boone starred in it. He was a tough gunslinger who went all over the West, righting wrongs, etc. I always found the have gun/will travel kind of weird. And funny at the same time. Not that Palladin was particularly funny. I can still however hear his theme song, running through my brain. "Palladin, Palladin, riding through the West..." I am at the moment a different kind of gun for hire. I am writing about Cadiz. Sometimes after the fact by writing about it after I'm home. Somestimes before. It's been a number of years since I figured out that I can be paid to go to places I want to see. Sicily, Russia, the Galapagos, to name a few. Once I was paid to sip wine in Napa Valley. Give me an assignment and I will go anywhere. Endlessly restless, we gunslingers need to keep moving. Can't let any grass grow under our feet. The past couple weeks I've been slugging through Spain. My daughter doesn't feel sorry for me. She actually has this way of playing the smallest violin in the world. I mean somebody had to participate in the Way of the Tuna competition in Zahara de les Atunes. Someone had to have a massage in a 14th century Moorish well. Walk through fields of wild flowers, bow to bulls on the beach, glimpse the lights of North Africa. I recall once when I was on assignment for Spa Finder Magazine (I don't mind admitting this) and I had just had a mud bath and an herbal scrub and some other kind of massage and as I was leaving the girl of the desk said, "I hate you. I really do...You have the best job in the world." Tough work yes, but somebody has to do it. I am somewhat addicted to my itinerant life. It feeds a part of me I cannot even explain to anyone, let alone myself. Not a gunslinger, but a pen slinger, I will go wherever the job takes me...And so even now I picture Richard Boone, hands on his holsters, that smirk on his face because who is he kidding. He knows what it's like to get to do what you want to do in this world. And even be paid to do it.