She was standing on a wooden chair at the far
edge of Union Square Park, New York,
not far from a statue of George Washington.
It was New Year's Eve day.
As people passed by she called out,
"Whatever you do,
don't look back."

She said it again and again,
in an actor's voice, with dramatic pauses.
"Whatever you do,
don't look back."

Many walked quickly by. Several people stopped.
They asked what the words meant.
"Whatever you need them to mean," she said.
One man wanted to know why she chose to
stand there on her chair.
I wondered about the chair too. It had a cane seat.
It looked at like it would be more at home in a kitchen
or a farmhouse.
Had she dragged it across
many avenues to stand there at the edge of a set of stairs, and
the edge of the village at this very busy crossroads on December 31?
Why?
Performance art? A dare? A plaintive reminder to let the past go?
A nudge to look forward?
A coda for 2012?

It was thirty four degrees out with a bracing wind. Nearby a couple of guys
were engrossed in a game of chess. A group of friends met in the middle of
the park, one wearing a New Year's tiara. A man sold noisemakers, horns
and 2013 glasses in bright red and neon lime. We walked down Broadway.
I could still hear her: "Whatever you do, don't look back."

Maybe it was an act but she sounded earnest.
I wasn't entirely with the "Whatever you do" part of her statement,
I happen to like looking back. But it was a good thought
for the new year.
Yesterday? Last year? Let it be for a bit.
Revel in the right now.
And check out all that unfolds next.

Good Books ~ 2012

If the books I loved best this year had one common thread, it was that they were populated by good men.

The Book Thief.  We were in Chicago and The Book Thief  was their big city/ all city read. I’d started it once years earlier and didn't get far. This time I was struck immediately. The voice reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer’s in that the author Markus Zusak is a chance-taker, a writer whose words collect and gather and move about in ways that are new, a writer who has Death narrate the book, Death who sees and speaks in colors. The focus of the book is Liesel who comes to live with a sharp-tongued foster mother named Rosa Hubermann and her foster father or Papa, Hans Hubermann. He was, to the world, “an unspecial person,”  barely visible, but Liesel saw immediately all he was, that his eyes were made of “kindness and silver” and that “Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.” He made the book for me.

Hans played the accordion, breathing it to life; he taught Liesel to read, encouraged her art, told funny stories, kept her safe as the Holocaust raged on around them.  “Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness” (Zusak 35).

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  I’d heard about this book on NPR and liked the premise, that a man in his 60’s, whose life had grown quite small, whose marriage had been foundering for years, receives a letter from an old friend. She tells him she is dying and while he sets off to the post to mail a letter to her, he decides to keep walking. He later decides that he will walk all the 500 miles to see her, telling her to wait, to stay alive until he can get there.  The book unfolds at a walker’s pace, a lovely, sometimes sad, always thoughtful meandering, as if we are walking along with him, seeing the sights, meeting the people he does. His world begins to expand. So does his wife Maureen’s; she is back home.

Harold made me think about how having faith in something or someone can prop us up and push us forward. He reminded me too about that magic part of living, that there are second chances and third and fourth chances too. What will we make of them?

The Round House. Joe, who narrates Louise Erdrich’s new novel, wants to be a good man as he grows but he also wants to avenge a crime against his mother. From the start he is earnest; he’s real. He is thirteen, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, wrapped securely in his family of three, mother, father, Joe.  Something tragic happens to upend who they each are and all that they are together.  The world beyond the reservation won’t step in; justice, he feels, is left up to him. His is a heartbreaking and messy quest, a terrible but understandable yearning to fix what is broken.
 
The last good man I met (again) this reading season was Fezziwig  in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I like rereading the novella every few years around the holidays, mostly for him. Scrooge is being escorted back to his earlier life by the ghost of Christmas past. He stops in where he was once a clerk, at Fezziwig’s firm. It’s Christmas Eve and old Fezziwig cries, “Hilli-ho,” and gets his two young clerks to stop working and to clear the place out for a party for the office and for friends and family from all around. There’s dancing, and more dancing “and cake…a great piece of Cold roast … mince pies…” (Dickens 42) and unfettered joy all around. After the party, Ebenezer and the other clerk talk and talk about what a man that Fezziwig is.

The ghost can’t make sense of it and says, “A small matter to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

               Scrooge, looking down at the scene says, “Small!”

               “Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money. ..Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”  the spirit asks.
              “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count `em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (44).

           “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome…" That line, these characters, will walk around with me for a while.

Snowed in
with a warm cup of coconut coffee.

In the far distance, a foghorn.
The steady snowfall fills in the rest,
muting the few cars that pass.
The light around the streetlamp is
softer; the holiday lights a hazy
gold, a quieter blue.

Poems in parks, poems on street corners,
poems splashed across the inside of a subway
car. I love a little verse tossed into 
the landscape.   

She Brought Pie

Is there anything this good country doesn't have?

It turns out it has a pie lady, Beth Howard, who traveled from Eldon, Iowa to bring pies to Newtown.  When her husband died several years ago, she found her sorrows eased when she made pies. Since then she opened a pie stand, wrote a memoir about pie baking and when she heard what happened in Newtown, she posted a message on Facebook that day: perhaps pies could help in some way. According to stories that have run in papers across the country, she loaded up her RV with crates of apples and other ingredients, many donated, and she stopped off for home baked pies in a small town along the way, made by people who said they’d bake too. When she arrived, she passed out slices to anyone who wanted one and then baked more. She taught high school students and little ones how to make a fine crust.

It made me think of a line from To Kill a Mockingbird,  “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.” 

I thought about how Howard made this town, more than 1,000 miles from her own home, her neighborhood. She did what people do when someone becomes ill or, in this case, falls on the hardest of times. They bring soup by;  they drop a casserole off on the front porch.

“Heard you could use a lift,” they say, only without the words.

I've passed this statue twice now and each time I had to stop back and
just stand near it for a while, near the peace collected there and the 
contentment too.  

Let's hear it for uncles, those December 23rd, 24th shoppers. Back in those long ago times before smart phones and online shopping and just about everything open on a holiday, the uncles would pull up to the mall about 20 minutes before closing, and they, and a couple hundred other guys, would wing it. Some years if there were a  couple too many parties to stop  by, they'd do their shopping that morning at the only place open, the local news stand.

Christmas would be well underway and they'd pull up with one of those ice cream yule logs or maybe a couple six packs. While the aunts and grandparents knew exactly what it was you wanted it and had searched high and low for it over a series of days and weeks, and jingle and jangled up the presents in wrapping paper and bows, the uncles would have a small paper bag for each kid.

In the bag there might be a Mad magazine or a couple of comics, or some little wry gift that let you know they knew just where you were at that moment. There'd be skinny boxes of pretzels and fistfuls of caps to snap out in the driveway, setting the cats off sprinting for the bushes. They'd have picked out a candy bar and about seven or eight packs of gum.  Chew it all right now if you feel like it, the uncles would say, and you did.

I've always been the type who believes in good,
that it exists, that it matters, that good can win. 

This past week I lost faith in that. 

And then...
there were those people who brought dogs to cheer children and 
others who brought blankets to warm those standing out in 
the cold as the President spoke,
and the person who called the coffee shop this week to say, ` Please buy a 
cup of coffee for everyone who comes in to your shop today, on me' 
and there were the students and teachers in a nearby town who 
made a green and white paper chain `link of love' with lines 
of hope and support to string along the walls of the new school -
so much kindness from each corner of the world.      

I thought about that burly man in the red coat and cap who we search 
for in the skies, year after year, still hoping. And sure enough, in 
the midst of the saddest days in our state, he is here. 

As newsman Francis Church wrote to Virginia O'Hanlon in 
The New York Sun when her own young faith was tested 
in a different way, 

 "Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. 

Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence...Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see."

The beach was hushed on this late afternoon in December. The sun would be
around for just a little while longer but out on the sandbar a solitary man
continued clamming. The sky changed colors again and again and he
worked on.

                                    The Empire State Building, done up in blue light,
                                      peeked out from behind the mist and fog 
                                      over Bryant Park last night. 

Thinking of books today as all the notable and best books of 2012 get bandied about. I like to hear what my friends and family are reading and take many of my recommendations from them. But I always look forward to these best of lists, to copying down the titles of the National Book Awards finalists, to hear the authors talking about their work on NPR.

Three books on these best of lists intrigued me most: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, The Round House by Louis Erdrich and Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. I have heard that Boo's book is one of the best pieces of reporting and writing in years and years. I just got Salvage the Bones out from the library, after hearing so much about it, and fifteen pages in, I am in.

I stayed up way, way too late one night a week ago finishing The Round House. I'd heard her interviewed on NPR talking about the book and how it centers on justice and revenge. She had a lot to say about revenge and how it never gets anyone to a better place and I wondered about that. I can't shake the story or the family of three at the heart of the book.

Thinking about books reminded me of this fellow, one of the two lions outside the New York Public Library. I am not sure if he is Patience or Fortitude but I have such an affection for him. I often stop by just to look at the two lions and that library. An elegant home to books if there ever was one and a touchstone for me whenever we begin our city wanderings.

We went to Europe for the first time two summers ago and I still smile thinking of it. We arrived on a 100-degree day. After staying up all night on the overnight flight, far too excited to sleep, and then finding out our hotel had no water and moving our small suitcases to another hotel, we hopped on one of those double decker buses and rode all over Rome. We wanted to take it in before we’d set out all over on foot. Everywhere there were marvels, art and more art, markets, sidewalk cafes where life just stopped as the city whirred by, fashionable, beautiful people riding on scooters, zipping in and out of traffic; men in suits, walking through a park and stopping to stand at a kiosk for an espresso.

I carried a tiny book of Italian words and phrases. I love falling into conversations with people everywhere and there even more so. I am certain, though, that perhaps seven of my hundreds of words were understood by the lovely people of Rome. We took a train that passed through fields of sunflowers on our way to Florence and spent our days in markets, churches, museums, walking past the Arno River and mostly along the cobblestone streets, each piazza full of sculptures and vibrant people and fragrant foods and cappuccino.

But the very best part of the trip came when we traveled on three different trains to get to Ostra and Senigallia to see my husband’s family.

His cousin Laura is the bridge across waters and between generations. She lives on the land where my husband’s grandmother grew up and where her parents, grandmother and sister live. She lives with her husband and children in the house next door. Behind them are fields of sunflowers that stretch for acres. She works at a nursery and her mother tends a sprawling garden and chickens.

Laura grew up on stories of America, her father’s aunt and uncle had left the family farm when they were very young and came here. She had to see it and soon enough, she did. She loves the United States fully, with utter and absolute enthusiasm. She loves it so much that her father had a sculptor friend of theirs sculpt the Statue of Liberty. Just outside her front door stands a seven-foot tall stone sculpture of Lady Liberty.

Laura is a modern gal who has traveled everywhere but her roots run so very deep. She adores her family and every last branch of it that extends outward. She is the keeper of the connections. She and her family showed us the seaside and the hills, the country road that led to my husband's grandmother's first schoolhouse. She arranged a party for us and crowds of people gathered at their family farm, around long tables with sunflowers in jars at the center. There was endless food and so many of my husband’s – our - cousins and aunts and uncles to meet and know and love.

And now the keeper of connections is my friend and pen/email pal. I send her photos of her beloved New York whenever we are in the city. Though her English is fantastic, she writes in Italian, she says,  so mine will get better. I pull out that tiny phrasebook and try not to resort to Google translate. She writes often to hear tales from this side of the ocean and to tell us the news of her family and home. If Connecticut is in the news, she writes to be sure all is well.

Last Christmas she sent Italian honey and olive oil. This Christmas I sent little ornaments for their tree and she responded in this way today: Vi mandiamo tanti, tanti, tanti baci!!!!!!!!!!!Love Laura and Your Family in Italy GRAZIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:))))))))))) Being an exclamation point gal myself, I love her all the more for every last one.

When someone asks, so what did you bring back from Italy? I think about the pretty watercolor painting and a good friend, so many miles away.

Age

In the category of “it ain’t over til it’s over and then some,” I just read the niftiest news in The New York Times.  Cicely Tyson, 78, will be back on Broadway for the first time in almost 30 years and Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will be back together on stage in the West End of London next fall.  Jones, who is 81, and Redgrave, 75, will play a pair of lovers in Much Ado About Nothing.  

  

I remember once seeing Shirley MacLaine singing and dancing on an awards show. At the time she was 50 and I was in my 30’s. I experienced some kind of seismic shift in my sensibilities about age at that very moment. I thought I knew what 50 looked like but this woman did not look or dance like whatever I thought 50 was. She seemed 35. I was wise enough then, I guess, to know that was really cool. Fifty didn’t have to be any certain thing.

Nor do 81, 78, or 75. 

I saw this tree yesterday morning, on a grey, chilly day and it made me
think of this line from a song, "It's just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today."

I had to think for a minute, where was that line from?  I remembered it was from "Hejira," one of Joni Mitchell's most beautiful songs. It's funny how a line from a song I first heard perhaps 25 years ago would float up into my consciousness as I looked at a tree.

I went back and listened to "Hejira" again and marveled at Joni Mitchell. "Hejira" is of those songs you can't listen to if you're standing on ground that's even the least bit wobbly; the song is that heavy with ache (until the very last line!)

At the start of the song, she speaks of a break-up, "I'm sitting in some cafe, a defector from the petty wars that shell shock love away."

Then she writes,

"I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl."

It's a lucky thing that someone like Joni Mitchell writes down words and turns them into songs we take with us.

Driftwood.
I like the sound of the journey that lives in its name,
the sea taking it for a ride, marking it up
and smoothing away the bark.

But this was no piece of driftwood, it was a tree that arrived
one morning on the beach.
Where had it once been rooted? Had the storm taken it?
Why did it look like it was reaching out to the water,
poised to return to its wandering?