A short play cycle
A short play cycle
Hey, friend. I’m a little worn out from politics, though not from the gratitude; after waking for three straight mornings without my usual chest tightness and my first thought being Donald Trump, I found I woke this morning fighting mad at Democratic leadership, but that’s for next week.
I spent all day yesterday cooking cabbage, potatoes, and carrots from the farmer’s market, tossing in hunks of ham and an onion, simmering it all in chicken broth and water. I made thick split pea soup. All my food for the week, and I’m grateful.
The reduction in panic has freed my mind, and I started thinking about objects. Patti Smith writes in M Train about her favorite coat, a spring-weight black wool coat given to her by a poet she knew maybe twenty years before, moth holes along the seam in places; and one day, inexplicably, it was gone. She says, “So foolish, lamenting a coat, such a small thing in the grand scheme.” Primo Levi, a survivor of the Holocaust, says in the play, Primo, which I saw many years ago on Broadway with Anthony Sher, something to the effect that it’s impossible to imagine losing “everything,” so instead he asks us to recall how it affects you when you cannot find something small, a handkerchief, say. You know how we obsess—where is it? How will we get along now?
How is it an object becomes important like this? You know, in the grand scheme.
Smith recalls other objects lost throughout the book—the book is in many ways a meditation on loss (and the lethargy that accompanies it), so many things, from something as small a well-loved copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle left in an airport restroom, to something as catastrophic as her just-purchased fixer upper bungalow in the Rockaways courtesy of Superstorm Sandy.
Do you have that wish sometimes, to go back or just have in front of you some lost, long-ago object? It’s a strange desire, I think, but sometimes it just comes on you. I don’t know why. Maybe just to touch the thing, to draw energy from it. With Christmas coming, for example, I had a memory this week of a foot-tall white ceramic Christmas tree from when I was a little kid. I haven’t thought of it in decades, probably. It never lit up that I remember—but my mom, Lynne, used to put it out every year on a tabletop somewhere; I think it was her traveling Christmas tree when she was a Navy WAVE. Of course we kids smashed it at some point—at least I guess we did. I haven’t seen it in years and years.
Two years ago, I lost a sterling silver hair stick that I’d worn in my bun since about 1995, some thirty years, and I know it happened in a rainstorm somewhere caught in my hood between my apartment and the 7 Train. I sketched it obsessively until I kind of captured it; I sent the sketch to the maker, still in business, but I never heard back. Just one of those things—we had a good run.
Other memories of objects are far sillier—my red smiley face rug in my tiny childhood bedroom. How did I even come to recall it?
And what is it I’m looking for? Hell if I know.
Yesterday and today, the weather being lovely, I made a special point of choosing clothes in fall colors, good hats, jackets, scarves, bags. The right pins. I enjoy this, assembling wearable objects, and it’s not so much that I chase compliments as I like to show an effort, put something hopeful out in the world. And the spooky thing was, I was invisible. At the market, around town, I was unable to make eye contact let alone engage with a single stranger, to feel I was of the world, we were here together. It’s like I was wrapped so well in the colors of fall, the blend into the season was too complete.
No one talked about Midterms, I heard no joy anywhere; life just went on. I realize how lucky that is, to be able to say that. But there’s this hollowness.
My littlest nephew turned 6 this week, and his mom made him a dinosaur cake. I went out Friday night with my friends Frances and Jim, Italian food and the revival of a Moliere play, The Imaginary Invalid, adapted by and starring Bill Irwin. It was just wonderful.
Life lost, life found. Something about art. Collecting memories.
My former student (and now friend) Darin sent this song to me as a closeout to a hard week, and it’s what I needed. Books, music, theater, friends, objects with memory—shouldn’t everyone have those things without starving and living in fear all the fucking time?
Louis Price sings, “A Change Is Gonna Come”:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfGJQXZp0Q-/?dlrf=bXFhMDQ1dWJpbm1l
Here’s to better times, with love.
