DOAEN 6: The Bottom Line
I keep reminding myself to vist FemiMacus and write a check for the $25.00 that I owe them for last week's pedicure. Remarkably, they do not accept ATM or credit cards and I had no checks with me at the time, having finished writing all my monthly bills and since I do not subscribe to an online banking service, my last Luddite holdout because for some reason I am convinced that my account numbers will be hacked by hucksters; well, you know what I'm trying to say here. I'm feeling guilty and need to go by Park Avenue one day this week to clear both my name and reputation from the soapy registers of local manicure parlors.

"What's the big deal," you maybe ask. Black marks weigh heavily upon my personal credit record. And I can't stop being a throwback to another century when there were standards of acceptable behavior that weren't updated online every hour by the local Webmaster. Certain precepts were chiseled in stone way back then: the Ten Commandments, the golden mean about doing unto others, playing fair and square, and so forth, phrases that are broken links now to another seemingly innocent place and time. Now I keep up, subscribing to lists so I can stay abreast of new content. I also read daily cascades of email that arrive at no special hour in my ever expanding and contracting mailbox that would even overwhelm the Queen of Contractions, Martha Graham. I am on an unending treadmill that ceases only when I deliberately refuse to take my laptop along for the ride, which doesn't happen often, because I actually enjoy this electronic high.

"So what are you whining about?" you maybe ask. Well, I'm not so much whining as reflecting, which was Hamlet's big hang-up although he lacked a good Sunday morning breakfast of coffee, eggs and potatoes. It's what I do best, given my job that keeps me in front of a computer for most of the day with occasional breaks for rides on the elevator. But today isn't like that at all, Virginia. Today I'm thinking about my weekend, this unbelievable thing that has happened in my life which stands outside the doors of email. Something that has caused me to believe that love possibly can exist in this world, or that maybe I've done enough leg work and taken enough Pilates classes to know the real thing when I feel it, which is my bottom line.

To be continued (I hope).

DOAEN 5: Creating the Links
Maybe Jerusalem needs to wait. After all, I have to request time off from work, and then there's the Oral History Association that's having its 41th Annual Meeting here in Oaktown. Downtown at the Marriott where there are apples for the picking at the front desk for the asking you get a smile and directions up the escalator to where everything's happening in a honeycomb of rooms. It's autumn in New York except it's the Bay Area and trees are shifting their color palette, and I laugh to recall when I first moved here I couldn't tell autumn from madam, but now it's obvious with light changing and Southern California burning, more than 500,000 residents being evacuated from their homes and President Bush and the Gobernator surveying the damage from private helicopters. More political spectacle. Tony from FemiMacus where I sat today getting a pedicure, my favorite part is the end when my foot becomes a candle dipped into wax, said that his twin girls are up from the University of San Diego and my daughter says that her friend from San Diego State has taken refuge in one of the UC Davis dorms. Some people say that the corporations have deliberately burned down Southern California the way New Orleans was sacrificed to the Crips & and Bloods, but I'm still witholding judgment myself, someone who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal and watches how Rupert Murdoch is needling the NY Times about their low stock evaluation and inability to balance their portfolio, someone who's been working with a web team from Chevron these last several weeks since my employer, AC Transit, is testing 22 biodiesel and gas-to-liquid fuel buses for the next six months. I get to create the links. At the Oral History workshop this afternoon on the Problem of Place in Post-Holocaust Life, Shana Penn said that in today's Poland there are Jewish Identity Crisis Hotlines for young people who are trying to connect the dots. Walking back to work from the Marriott, I passed City Hall, the second day of demonstrations against police brutality. People chanted, "No justice, no peace." There was a police officer on the opposite side of the street and I waited for the light to turn green before I crossed, despite my New York inclination to go whenever I see an opening, but I didn't want to openly flaunt his authority. But given the demonstration, I probably could've gotten away with it.

Music: Herbie Hancock, "River, the joni letters"
What's Been Happening: sending out Halloween cards to the kids of my nieces and nephews
On a Personal Level: fighting a cold
Keywords:
Bay Area Aerosol Heritage Assn.
the hinge generation
a foreigh tourist who speaks the language

DOAEN 4: The Harvard Moon Does Not Shine on Me
I need coverage as I duck between cars and hide from breaking news that rains over me in casualties and partial prisoner swaps. I'm roaming. From meeting to meeting I hear the same thing. It's falling apart. It's going to pieces. There's no hiding from media blab living here in corporate headquarters inside our own cubicles stocked with emergency blow-up rations for the Big One. Where we're entitled to have our own opinions, but none of the facts, which makes us stupid and fat and lazy and very monolingual. I genre to the best of my ability and try to make it work. What else can I do? That's all we can do. So I rename myself. I am now DoAnne after my blog entries which rhymes with Joanne who has a large chain of fabric stores named after her, at least here in the Bay Area where the autumn rains have arrived early and the fog sits in ruffles over the Bay like a bag of soggy potato chips that someone has spilled on the table. So I intend to repattern myself. I'm not sure what that means except I know it will require a trip to the store and that makes me happy because I've been born and bred to be a good consumer. But will the civic center hold, a question probed by Alexis de Tocqueville some time ago when Benjamin Franklin held the winning hand and the new nation didn't want to hear about it. Still doesn't. But I'm getting too old to just sit around and let the grains of sand run out, even Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz knew she had to fly with the monkies, so I vow as Big Momma of the Empty Nesters to fight for truth and justice and the Palestinian state. Then maybe to find a way as a diaspora Jew to understand the humor of a God who does this number about the "chosen people," puts us through hell for thousands of years to burn off any impurities, fixes us up in a nice little place to have Israel become as vile and intolerant as the next country. Feh! What kind of plague is this? So I spend time on the Internet fishing around for the cheapest round-trip ticket to Jerusalem and then go to the store to get a strong cup of coffee. When I see my friend sitting in the cafe, I feel better.

Music: Frank Black, "Teenager of the Year"
What's Been Happening: Monday
On a Personal Level: Coordinating daughter's birthday weekend
Keywords:
where the miles are
genre to the best of your ability
Harvard moon
partial prisoner swap

DOAEN 3: Identity Theft
I sit on the couch reading books with the cats purring beneath the living room table as the dishwasher thrashes in the background, turn the page and realize I haven't watched television for a week. How long has it been? Open the refrigerator and there's several jars of pickles on the side door that face nothing else. I turn on the television, just to make sure I have the right remote attitude. Later that very same week when I realized I hadn't watched television, I bought a pair of black leather pants online and wore them for real because now I am Bad Momma of the Empty-Nesters.

Where did she come from hidden in Purdah all those years of Motherhood, which was its own special trip? But suddenly she's more recognizable, this woman who always has been my drive and my friend, who wishes to realize her obsessions through me. I feel okay about being a vehicle for someone else's obsessions. I'm a woman, aren't I? But that doesn't mean I have to like it. On the other hand I think it would be more correct to say that I have a gay relationship with myself, and like any good one (Benny Goodman), we're always working on it together. I heard growing up that if you can't love yourself, you can't really love someone else. Which has been my starting point. It's just that I haven't gotten very far.

Music playing: Dance of the Dead
What's been happening: Symposium at UC Berkeley "Continuous Bodies" performance, Space and Technology
On a Personal Level: More of the same :>}
Key Words:
call center operators
identity theft
data surveillance
datasphere
mode-switching
sell some books from inside a trench coat

Ballad of D.Q.

Chorus:
The pressure was real high
with the 2.0 release,
meant to fix all bugs, or die,
tech support would have some peace.

Engineers worked day and night
studying their code,
product managers counted bytes
in pizza-eating mode.

And D.Q., the boy from Alameda,
who put start-ups on the map,
he grabbed a slice of pizza
saying, "Don't give me any crap."

Until deadlines are met,
he promised to stay in the trenches,
software QA'd, security tested,
no one sitting on the benches.

Each week D.Q. e-mailed
a variation of the old,
his message never failed:
keep all new features on hold.

Marketing never heard,
only knew what they had to know,
they'd already given their word,
the product was scheduled to go.

The hour it came for the product to ship,
a month before the big holiday purse.
"Where was D.Q? Can you believe this shit?"
Maybe he had the flu or something worse.

But let me tell you what I saw
I'll give you the entire poop,
when I took the elevator down to the 31st floor
to meet with the core technology group

There was D.Q. telling the marketing folk
to extend the deadline, or be a fool,
he slipped a skateboard beneath his coat
saying, "Good-bye. It's been real cool."

So next time you walk down Mission Street
running to catch the bus or the BART home,
the kid zipping up pavement on his feet,
could be D.Q. on the roam.

The kid who got tired of programming,
tired of deadlines, tired of being a sap,
the head geek who's surfing
on a skateboard, and never coming back.

Partners in Crime
Kids walk to school along the freeway overpass.
I drive my car beneath them going to work.

Jelly rolls of turf in a pick-up truck.
Green spikes on a brown scalp to be planted somewhere.

A bright blot outlines joggers around Lake Merritt.
Their water bottles are catching sunlight.

I can't tell anyone what you did to me last night.
How you held me close and what you whispered in my ear.

DOAEN 2
Almost an entire week has gone by since she's left for college, and today is payday with one of those virtual pieces of paper slipped beneath the door that says a certain amount of money has been deposited on my behalf into a bank account. What's important is that the money is there and not particularly how it got placed there, but even as I write those words I shudder as I hear the moral implications of my statement which sounds entirely too Machiavellian although I understand that the guy got a bad rap and his world view was actually more than the end justifying the means which is how his work has been handed down throughout the ages although his emphasis on the skill of applying morality to practical political life lesser so the case and I think of Arnold Schwartzenegger and wish him success in brokering a Northwest passage of medical insurance in the state of California particularly to further the national discourse on this issue. Last night I heard Immaculee Ilibagiza speak at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, author of "Left to Tell," story of how she survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994 by hiding in a 4 by 6 foot bathroom for 91 days with seven other women and went on to develop a profound personal relationship with God, faith, and hope for the survival of the planet in the midst of brutalizing war. Even her name with all those Is and As rolls off the English-speaking tongue like some dazzling miracle on a Cirque du Soleil scale with visceral joy and beauty, which seems to be the kind of thing us human beings respond to from the center of our beings, and there's nothing virtual about it.

My daughter is at college. I'm here and my memories of her are real.

Diary of an Empty Nester (DOAEN 1)
I think writing with a typewriter or a pencil when I first started was a different kind of writing for me, more physical in its sensibility, while writing with a computer is another experience eliminating a tactile energy that goes into forming words by pressing a pen to paper or by striking the hammer of a keyboard; with the computer I hear the musical sound of words in my head, which makes laptop writing a more private experience, after all it's happening within a small theater that sits a half foot away from me with few interruptions having to do with the rolling of paper on a platen, or the sharpening of a pencil, it's more about the flow of words, forming words on a screen instead of on a sheet of paper, which in some ways makes the creation of meaning more direct, faster, but how has that changed anything, a question from an empty nester at a time when I have the luxury of indulging myself in such thoughts listening to jazz playing after midnight in my living room while I lay on the couch rather than deciding what sandwiches to prepare for lunch, not that I was ever a sandwich maker because the truth is I've always found it a bother to prepare something I didn't enjoy eating so I got as far as peanut butter and jelly and then stopped, but on the other hand, writing letters was always easy, and I can remember learning language, which is what took me to forming letters like some iconography of my soul.

Third Floor Dorm
In those last several weeks you let me tell you
not to get home after midnight.
You smiled without saying anything.
We both knew it was already too late.

I brought your old clothes stored in the trunk
to Goodwill so we'd have room
to pack your things for college:
an old soccer ball, tennis shoes, a pullover,

nothing remarkable except
you removed everything from plastic bags
to reassure me you weren't throwing away stuff.
I saw there was nothing to rescue.

We needed to rent a U-haul. You didn't start packing
until I'd finished my third cup of coffee.
Your boyfriend helped. Good thing too.
By then we discovered you were on the third floor of the dorm,

as he pulled the dolly upstairs
only a few weeks before his court date
and the chance of jail time, even with a reduced sentence.
One of those stupid mistakes.

On the way outside to the commons,
you held hands with him, fingers threading.
More boxes.
We each carried our own weight.

Your boyfriend rebolted the bed higher
so you'd have more storage space.
We put on sheets. You and I looked at each other
from the corners.

Maybe tomorrow
I'll cook a pot of soup
to have for the week,
or maybe not.

Kedushat
I am dressed in white linen to celebrate the New Year but know that in Japan, white is the color of mourning, the color of Hiroshima, while black contains all spectrum of possibility. I am feeling brown, not shitty, but filled with the mulch of my many years, as I throw in greens, aerating myself with hope in the event that one of these days things will turn out right. I can only wonder how I smell, even though I use politically correct cosmetics that have not been tested on animals, and not really cosmetics, but more oils and lotion, and rosemary with its sharp clean scent that starches my nostrils open as I rub its essence into my scalp and touch my bush that has burned itself to a gray ash.

Moon Draught
balancing a cup of coffee
white porcelain handle
held between fingers
dappled light
from outside my patio window
in these moments before
moon disappears
and the boxcar of my day
rattles along its rails
the same way
cats meow me out of bed
for their appointed
bowl of food and fresh water

they are hungry and can do nothing
until I walk to the closet
measure a cup of food
refill their water bowl
as we both return
to our designated corners
coffee and cat food
inaugurating the day

last night the sun in the sky
appeared blood red
sinking inside a pile-up of black clouds
from fires in the south burning
around Morgan Hill
and in the north from Tahoe

there will always be fire
coffee and cat food
and then
there's that morning sun again
as I backtrack
to wanting you next to me
like a star of new shoots

The Summer of Love and Walter Lowenfels
What I remember about the radical poet, Walter Lowenfels, was his vast generosity, and commitment to the word. He wrote a book entitled, The Revolution is to be Human, a slogan which has guided my life and work. He believed that change comes from young people and nurtured those friendships throughout his lifetime, encouraging new writers at the time like Clarence Major, Marge Piercy, and Ishmael Reed. Walter also confronted the New York Times Book Review section, and wrote an editorial which was called “The White Poetry Mafia,” accusing the establishment of failing to review and publish a burgeoning group of new Black writers.

He had come from a wealthy family of butter manufacturers, but gave up the soft life to throw in his lot with the literary expatriates in Europe including Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Throughout his lifetime he was a member of the American Communist Party, able to reconcile his discomfort with bureaucracy with a greater commitment to change.


Visting Walter on the Hudson
Between 1966 and 1971 when I attended the City College of New York, on occasional Saturdays I’d take the railroad from Grand Central Station in New York City and visit Walter and his wife Lillian in their Peekskill, New York cottage. Once I’d arrived at the station, I’d call. In a few minutes he’d pick me up in a light blue car, almost shaking his hand loose from his wrist waving to me through the window. Then we’d drive back to the cottage where he parked between several trees, and flung open the front door. Our afternoon had begun.

For hours Walter held court in a kitchen alcove talking about different poets, anthologies he was putting together, the birds outside his window, fruit and cheese, all with equal knowledge. He was a hummingbird sampling everything within his field of energy. “Do you know this writer?” he asked. “Do you know this music?” he inquired. I sadly shook my head and accepted whatever he pushed across the table for me to examine, only able to turn a few pages before he leaped to the next subject.

Walter vibrated with palpable energy, hovering in that conversion place between matter and energy, a black beret angled over a nest of wispy grey threads that resisted encampment. He’d always serve me something to drink, lemonade or coffee, whatever was available in the kitchen, a small and narrow space which seemed to have been imported from a trailer with coffee grounds spread everywhere.

Meeting Lillian Lowenfels
His wife, Lillian, daughter of a Yiddish scholar and humorist, occasionally summoned Walter from their bedroom, or emerged herself sitting in a wheelchair. By the time I’d met Lillian, she had suffered several strokes and seemed to be held together by pillows and white cord. Her face was frozen in a permanent grimace. She always stayed for just a short time. Walter solicitously escorted her back to their bedroom. “Lillian, be careful how you move. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Lillian translated Spanish poetry and had co-edited as well as financed some of Walter’s anthologies. When he returned to the kitchen he’d point to several photographs on the piano mantle of a dark-haired siren and say, “She was so beautiful before she got sick,” as if to ask me to see beyond the woman whose body was occupied by pain.

I’d first met Walter during a Communist Party convention in New York City. During those years I’d attended so many meetings, I can’t remember the particulars, except to see a large hall with bridge tables covered in white tablecloths. It was toward the end of the summer, hopelessly hot without air conditioning. I was getting tired of speeches. I was a newly recruited youth. I wanted to be in the company of worldwide revolutionary artists who had caught my attention: Neruda, Casals, Picasso, all Pablos -- Berthold Brecht, Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, the Hollywood 10 and many others who’d been called to testify in front of the witch-hunting McCarthy Committee including Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Stella Adler.

Walter was also circling the back of the hall. "Are you Lenore?" he asked, extending his hand.

Technology and Language
I’d just gotten to know Walter who was involved in editing the Cultural Commission’s publication, “Dialog Magazine,” a mash-up of the “New Masses,” which itself was modeled upon “The Masses,” published between 1911 and 1917. Walter had gotten wind of fresh blood around the Cultural Commission and always eager to befriend a young person, invited me within his circle. This was more toward the latter years of his life. (He died in 1976.) Walter was beginning to embark on a series of anthologies, excited by the success of The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest published in 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Walter published my first poem which ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. He wrote about it a lot in a great many of his books. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
                  fireboxes
                  Cooper-Bessemer compressors
                  magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
                  from exploding out of this typewriter,
                  desk, window, through the pines, down the
                  Little Egg Harbor River, across the
                  Continental Shelf...” 

Or from The Poetry of My Politics, Volume 2 of My Many Lives self-published in 1968:

“My campaign against nostalgia has its base in language, i.e., to use the language of today for today’s emotions: the clean, new, scientific word, woven into the fabric of the poem so quietly the reader doesn’t sense anything but the contemporary pulse modulation. That’s the test of language – that it is alive with today’s electronics – not Ben Franklin’s kite key.”

Summer of Love
So why am I thinking of Walter?

This Labor Day Weekend past, I attended the 40th anniversary Summer of Love celebration together with 40,000 other people in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, everyone dressed in a version of the sixties, tie-dyed, tattooed, and carrying cell phones. There were clouds of a sweet-smelling substance emanating from different points from within the crowd.

Just imagine. More than 40,000 people who had streamed to the park, finding their way on public transportation or struggling with parking, babies carried on shoulders, men and women who’d been the flower children of yesteryear either as part of the Haight-Ashbury scene, a movement that put free community clinics on the map, or who had been located someplace else, and members of a younger generation now wanting to sniff the air in more ways than one; everyone hoping to reconnect with something that had been magical, to feel the spark, to be alive once again with hope. How do I know? I saw it on all of our faces. Then there was the music, lead guitarists or saxophonists from different bands, or almost fully constituted bands and by listening to them, we time traveled back to that era.

There was an ongoing effort to make the day-long celebration more than an exercise in nostalgia, people at the podium addressing a need to keep the resistance going. However, no one mentioned the word, revolution, at least none that I heard. I thought that was curious. Maybe the terrorists of the world and George Bush have co-opted that word for their own use. Or maybe we’ve become tired of hearing it.

Have we become jaded? Do we no longer believe that change can happen, or is that kind of thing only reserved for Hillary Clinton being elected president?

As for Walter, I miss his courage. I miss his ability to constantly reinvent his work and play with language. I miss his insistence on being relevant and honest about love and politics.

Today I know he’d be involved with computers, zipping along on a high-speed connection to the Internet, exploring new metaphors and keeping his light burning in face of humanity’s ongoing war with itself. I think if he was around he’d explore the meaning of this new global consciousness, how we are serving up each others culture and language through a medium that concentrates the world into a gateway that moves as we move through our lives.

In a world of literary dog-eat-dog, Walter helped anyone who was dedicated to the Word.

He heaped food on me, the first thing any young writer needs, the first thing anyone needs.

Empty Nest
Everyone's asking about my empty nest and how it came to be
After 25 years of raising kids, this is what's in front of me –
a condo with a futon, a cable TV, a computer on DSL,
a kitchen with granite counter top and a litter box with its special smell.

I'm not saying I'm lonely, or want my kids to move back in.
I'm not saying the clock's ticking louder than it's ever been.
I'm not saying I expect to hear a good morning from down the hall.
I'm not saying I can't stand the quiet.
No, I'm not saying that at all.

This place has been good to my family,
not like my last roost upon a hill,
where I stayed up in a plum tree
hosing water on the evening fire drill.

Now the sirens in my life are over,
no more red lights at a cross-walk.
First things first have become second.
Tomatoes are ripening, time for sauce.

Time to build another nest, my last baby gone,
it won't be fancy, but near a stream,
one that I'm betting my last feather on,
betting my last feather on.

Party at Leona Canyon
Flowers with whiskers mewl through the night,
dance with leaves and by ten they're real tight.

Some wear latex to fish for a catch,
some want money to buy an eye patch.

Some turn around and say squeeze my chin,
pick up a rock and say stuff again.

I was there when they crept to the stream,
closed their eyes and scrolled through their dreams.

U.S. Soldier With Traumatic Stress Disorder Syndrome, Post Iraq
Deeper down the tubes there's an out-of-box experience,
a self-healing fiber optic ring that offers more response time
to whatever microbrew ales you ought to be in pixels.

They removed guns pointed at our heads because
we were from the same country where the weapons were manufactured,
not because she was so good at polishing her lip with a thumbnail.

The algebra of justice knows nothing about triangulation,
only tit for tat and how we waited all night for day
as we recited bed-time stories for the dead.

God told Oprah he didn't want to pretend he's something he's not,
said his favorite team is the Purple Cobras
and his favorite hangout a little airplane hanger in Missouri,

the same place where dead bees once turned honey into sunlight
and where people now double-park for coffee or run in to get
dry cleaning and where I remain in the country of my jet lag

not knowing where I am, but knowing at the same turntable,
this has not been a good day for love or socially acceptable
narcotics. I'm in your time zone now, baby. Bad credit, no problema.

Winterwren Spring
Manzanita and red madrone
where a reflection of water flickers
on granite rock covered in its own mossy screen
for an afternoon showing of Newt Time
with catamarans of water striders floating above
the stars two newts undulating their tails around each other
throwing burbly kisses beneath a trickling stream;

now I have no idea what they're doing but I can guess
it's X-rated and none of my business
the sun shifts and the pool sinks into darkness
in these Days and Lives of my fifties
when I'll not keep my private parts to myself
finding new oils to rub the insides of my insides down with
for no audience.

Song of the Rip Tide

You ripped songs from my heart,
and copied them over to yours.

I've heard how you set them to play all.
Don't you know that's not legal?

You're not playing fair with me.
Everyone I've known always leaves.

Don't leave me now.
See me standing on the corner

with my laptop in my backpack?
Don't leave me now.

Only

Only in nothingness there is unity.
Here the off-ramp loops around.

Only beneath a glass does a butterfly
become a sepulcher of wings.

Only in the quiet of my living room
does night air breathe pagan song.

Ode to Norma Leftwich

Norma, you who dared tell me what to do and knew I'd listen,
girlfriend of 50 years since the first day of second grade
when you tapped me on the shoulder to borrow a pencil
and I gave you one with an eraser.

You were a half head taller than me with three braids,
one that reached out of your forehead and over an eyebrow
you could arch into a Whitestone Bridge
whenever we needed to make a quick exit.

You were half a parallelogram and I was your other half
creating each other from the stones of our youth,
writing our names on the sidewalk in pastel chalk
washed away in thunderstorms and smelling of clean pavement.

We held hands on the subway,
rode to Manhattan and discovered ourselves in the Egyptian Room
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, far from
the polluted shores of the Bronx River, by Hunts Point Avenue
filled with the smell of the Cafe Bustelo plant and the stench of garbage.

Your father was a probation officer on the Grand Concourse
who became the first Black Senator from New York State.
My Dad made arch supports in a shop near Bellevue Hospital.
Let's face it. If you'd been white we would've never met
to sun ourselves on Orchard Beach throughout the summer
until no one could tell the difference.

We stayed in each other's sight, looked around corners
and noticed what was there before making a move.
You gave me your birthstone ring before we parted for high school
and told me to never forget you,
Norma, who, like me, said goodbye to everyone whose eyes
were closed before they could be opened.

Lulu's Story
Some kids have mobiles. I’d look up at the world through bars. What Grandmother did was to find an extra refrigerator shelf from a junk shop and put it over my bed like a lid. She said she didn’t want me to fall out.

The shelf had not been well cleaned by the junk store owner. Yellow bits of dried goop dripped down toward me like so many stalactites, crusted over with ancient droppings from another place and time. It was like living in my own apartment building, above me was my Grandmother’s drawer of underwear, below me, her sweaters. From the time I was around three months old I stared at a refrigerator shelf after my mother, Hilda, had dropped me off at Grandmother’s house for good.

Once I learned how to sit up, I could see my Grandmother's bed that was without the same bars which covered my own sleeping quarters; however, a strangely shaped bag attached to a long-nosed tail was draped across her headboard.

There was nothing on her bed I could see that resembled a blanket, which next to the refrigerator shelf was the other constant in my life, a piece of green cotton hemmed in by a darker moss green satin with a coolness that I liked to rub against my gums. The room consisted primarily of her bed, a lamp table, and the chest of drawers, the floor covered in brown linoleum-looking tile that faded around the edge of the room to white.

Of course, back then I didn’t have words for these things—they were sensations and feelings, a conviction about stripes, which is how everything appeared as I lay on my back.

My vision was segmented; I reconstructed pieces—a dress hanging from the closet door looked like flagged swatches of blue and white. The goop on the shelf, probably freeze-dried orange juice, gave me something to look at, a texture that moved whenever I blinked my eyes, whereas the plaster cracks in my Grandmother’s bedroom ceiling never changed. There was also the white moon of her washbasin, always on the floor, and the lace doilies that hung over a chest of drawers. I carefully studied the crocheted pattern that wrapped itself into petals, but it was the refrigerator shelf that captured my attention mostly because it shared my existence the way nothing else in my Grandmother’s room did. I clutched the blanket to my side and reached out with my fingers, and tried to touch the bars.

I always knew that I wanted to make music--if I could find a way for the waxy orange and the brown crusts to make sounds, they would keep me company while Grandmother sat on the toilet in the bathroom until I heard the water gurgle and the lid fall down, two sounds that signaled her appearance above me. When I looked up, there she was through the grille. She bent down toward me and removed the shelf. I saw her full face now, flesh dug deep into a trench of wrinkles that moved from the corners of her hazel eyes toward her chin, the line of her lips snaked upward trying to camouflage a mouth. But nothing about the refrigerator bars had prepared me to understand how some event in my Grandmother’s life had caused those two halves of her lips to break apart.

Whenever she held me I knew it was to feed me, but the refrigerator bars gave me love. Whenever she shook the green blanket over me at night it was to keep me warm, but the refrigerator bars gave me comfort. Whenever she called my name, “Lulu, Lulu,” it was to get my attention, but she didn’t hear the sound of my name washing over itself. She was too busy covering herself with liquids and creams, tickling smells that caused my brown hairs to stand up and cast shadows along the length of my arm; her lamp table was covered with bottles, jars, tubes, and faces in photographs whose names she'd intone to herself in a quiet prayer, Moishe, Leah.

Sometimes Grandmother’d pick me up, bounce me around several times, and wait for a response that I wasn't able to give, like a doll whom you expect to cry “Mama, Mama,” when you push a button on its back. I wanted to please her and smiled. I can remember her eyes softening as she pulled me closer. Mostly all she’d say was, “I’mprotactingudarklink.” Then she’d put me down and walk away. After she left, I sucked on my hands and fingers and they tasted good.

Later I discovered my feet that propelled themselves upward from my hip sockets and lunged forward. One day as I lay on my back, my toes were wild bandits pressed against the cold metal; I couldn’t stop moving them until I actually balanced the refrigerator grille on the soles of my feet, and watched the metal shelf turn around, spin, then drop, clink on the tiled floor. I was so happy, my feet touched and rubbed against each other. I heard them squeak. I hugged their softness. I told myself, “Lulu, remember this.”

It was Chanel who remembered. She was the girl inside my head Chanel. She always knew I wanted to make music. She’s the reason I’m being interviewed today on satellite hookup. I’ve waited to tell my story because it took a lifetime to understand the shape of my desire.