Tag: New York City

The Woman Mind: A stroll in our political landscape

When I got off the 7 train in Queens last night around 11:45 PM, damp and chill after a wintry weather day (I’d gone into the city to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway last evening with a friend visiting from out of town, and all I could think during a scene showing Death Eaters, was “Oh, look, ICE,” but everyone else was just super excited that the grown up Draco Malfoy was being reprised by the movies’ Tom Felton—he was delightful), I crossed the boulevard to a bodega to pick up pita chips and hummus for a late night snack (the show was three hours long, dinner was five hours before). Inside the bodega were an assortment of loud males: one older white guy, very Queens working class; two Black guys around 30-40 years old; and a younger Hispanic guy. They were guys, if you know what I mean—you rarely see guys on television or in movies anymore, and I think this is a shame. Gym-cut, professionally groomed, and models of the self-care craze, actors today really have a hard time being interesting, but they do attract some chicks and the agents, and it’s all about the bucks.

Behind the counter was a young Middle Eastern cashier/manager (not really a guy type, more composed and elegant) staring at this one talkative Black guy standing by the white guy. I found my chips, my hummus, and when I went up to pay for them in this cramped deli area, I was barely noticed by the cashier; you could see that the talkative guy was either on something or off meds, was too-calmly ranting about something, and would not be talked down or moved off topic. I put my purchases up on the raised counter, but the cashier/manager kept his eyes fixed on the talkative guy; the old white guy was trying to be a casual peacemaker, but the cashier/manager said, “I don’t want to talk to that guy anymore,” his eyes wide, a little frightened, because that talkative guy was clearly this close to exploding, and the other two customers were really confused; they all seemed to know each other but it didn’t matter. I managed to get the purchase acknowledged, paid cash, tried to say, “I don’t need a bag,” but the stuff was being bagged on autopilot, eyes never on me, and I simply took it and my long-coming (but correct) change and booked it out the door and up the street.

By the way, for the men reading this, this is what it’s like for women to live in the world all the time: because there is never not a threat of imminent violence, we have to stay vigilant; if we aren’t the targets of violence at a certain moment, it’s because we simply don’t exist (I can promise you not one of those men saw the old lady buying hummus) or there are other women experiencing violence somewhere in the vicinity. Even when women aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m about to raped,” we can’t walk down any street by day or night, or enter or leave our cars or homes, without knowing “this could be the day.” Renee Good’s murder is one of a string of these inevitable events; the officer will face no consequences (unfortunately for us the decent, the martyr role won’t stick, as Good was not only a woman but a liberal activist and a lesbian, and so America on the whole is okay with her murder).

Back to the bodega: if there’s an emotionally charged dispute of some kind going on, not even with yelling—and not one of these men registered the imminent threat except the cashier/manager, who has seen this too many times, no doubt, and me—all any woman would want to do is escape this. Guys (straight, I’d qualify) are, unfortunately, almost universally unteachable when it comes to these situations if they don’t have high level empathy already (in my limited life experience).

These males in the bodega were at once too blind, too self-involved, and too emotional to figure a way out of whatever this situation was, a situation which suggested at worst drug-addled paranoia, at best bruised ego, rather than any actual injustice. Petty stuff.

This morning, I happened on a post by a woman whose voice I’ve come to value deeply, a fabric artist named Orsola de Castro, who speaks sense on all matters of patriarchy, and today’s post seemed to dovetail with my late-night Queens bodega experience, by way of a totally different subject: AI. This has to do with temperament not just of “guys” up there but of educated “men” in suits. Patriarchy has a common thread of blind ego.

Male inventors, de Castro notes, have pushed women to the margins in the AI field, thinking (dubious word) that they can just throw money and ideas and tech at AI and it will naturally sort itself out, which is beyond stupid. Women are natural teachers; men are not. I’ll let Ms. de Castro explain:

(Meanwhile, as I type this, Microsoft Word keeps popping up to offer to “rewrite” my creative work for me, figuring some male tech guy’s coding can read and render my thinking better than I could. It’s not only tragic; it may in fact prove our annihilation as a species on this planet. This is not a digression.)

And women’s safety as well as freedom comes down to bodily autonomy and human (male) respect for that. In another post, Ms. de Castro uses pop music woo songs to discuss a view on ballad writing to bed women, that all that came about because patriarchy—not women, but patriarchy—put women in towers, in chastity belts, valued virginity over sensuality and then tied themselves, the men, into knots because they had no access to us women. And who’s fault is that?

By extension, as we sit by and watch these out-of-control U.S. patriarchs with no imagination or empathy or real intelligence whatsoever make scorched earth of our geopolitical alliances, we know the women were and have been right about everything—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris the most recent big examples: men on the whole are too emotional, too limited, too narcissistic, too greedy, too short-sighted to be in power. And the women, as leaders, would have acted with thoughtful decision, which is not to say perfection. No one is that. But women don’t fight the system, they dismantle it and rebuild it. See Jessie Cae on Instagram:

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), the most recent example, was no sooner sworn in than she acted for the good of all, as per her office.

Something there is that doesn’t love the thought of a woman in power, even from other women, until they see a woman in power and she’s good at it. (Note: Kristi Noem is MAGA’s fantasy of a woman in power, in that she has none, but does the whole sexy swagger fantasy thing for the public at the altar of the Top Dog.)

Another post I saw on Instagram today had to do with what happens when a clueless patriarchal institution reaches out to take a pulse and is freaked by the response, their own work coming back to smite them:

Here’s real power, and power to the purpose: The key is providing what is sustainable. “Sustenance is the root of sustainability.” We have to stop “the eighty men in the one bus” with all the world’s money and return to the politics of caring. According to Vandana Shiva:

“Non-sustainability is violence against the earth,” Shiva says, and when the men’s only response is, “We’ll move to Mars instead,” I want to send them NOW.

Sending love on a rainy cold Sunday in New York during the revolution,

Miss O’

Screenshot

The View Beyond a Sky That Stops

Swearing to serve and protect

This New Year’s evening at 12:01 AM, newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will be sworn into office by New York Attorney General Letitia James. I cannot recall the world watching a New York City mayoral election before, but then, America has not been engaged in a civil war since 1865, this time with a transparently corrupt U.S. president trying to break up the union, smashing it into pieces using a Bible as a cudgel.

Mayor-elect Mamdani will swear in on a holy Quran, and our treasured Under the Desk News correspondent V Spehar explains what you can say to your MAGA community as they freak out:

@underthedesknews

Following her list of all the various volumes politicians have chosen to swear in on, V asks us what we would swear in on, and there is no question that I would swear in on my boxed edition of Truman Capote’s personal story “A Christmas Memory.” I can’t imagine a more American story, centering on a young queer white boy in Alabama, abandoned by his divorced mother and being raised by evangelical relatives. The one true protection he has is his cousin, a much older woman, a bit balmy and childlike, who truly loves and cares for young Truman, known to her as Buddy.

The memory set around Christmas, from the baking of fruitcakes to the finding of a tree, couldn’t be more Hallmark on its surface, but far less shiny and much more emotionally complicated, particularly the details of abject poverty that most Americans would fail to understand today. Back then, and this was my parents’ time, being poor was nothing to be ashamed of (though what would be familiar is the forces of corporations doing everything possible to keep Americans as down as was possible and still get them into the factories and mines to work, but this isn’t part of the story).

Below is a selection after the baking has commenced (with whiskey for the soaking obtained earlier in the story from Mr. Haha Jones, a Native American riverside cafe owner who sells moonshine illegally (this being Prohibition), Capote casually revealing more complexities and hypocrisies of life in the United States).

Strangers “seem to us our truest friends.” That, to me, is a kind of American ideal, born out of the hatred too many of us experience from those closest to us. Connections to distant places, gratitude to presidents and knife grinders and passers-through equally, Indian or Black or white—all the people of their lives, accepted and shown appreciation, despite the despotic rule of the Christian relatives they try to forget. And their little dog, Queenie, is unforgettable, too.

It’s a beautiful, human story, focused on love between friends. Every year for many Decembers, my friend Barry Hoff would stage “A Lovely Little Reading” of this story, complete with fruitcake he baked himself, for a gathering of friends on the third floor of the now closed Hourglass Tavern on W. 46th Street, shuttered by extortionist rent, something we are counting on Mayor Mamdani to address for the good of all of us.

I always took for granted the tradition of swearing on a book, a bible, though I never realized I could choose what book I wanted (I hope you watch V’s video). Were you to take office, what book would you swear on?

“The only photo we ever had taken”: Truman Capote was friends with Nell Harper Lee, a neighbor, who used him as model for Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped Truman do his research for his classic true crime story In Cold Blood.

Sending out love and high hopes this New Year’s Eve, as I fittingly watch a Marx Brothers Marathon on TCM, the absurdity of which satire is all too contemporary,

Miss O’

Gratitude

(Even when you keep missing a beat)

How have you been? How was Thanksgiving? Mine was really nice, thanks, celebrating with friends (my age) who also lost their mom, two days before last Christmas. In honor of my mom, I made a version of Lynne’s homemade stuffing, and my dad and Jeff tried to make a version, too. Foods are touchstones. I hope you were able to make and enjoy some delicious touchstones, too, in the midst of feelings.

This year has been hard, hard, hard on far too many people on this earth and much of the world suffering is the hands of three white male power mongering thugs in their 70s (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu), and their minions, and I have this problem where I feel guilty even thinking about personal joy or grief amidst all the suffering. (As you know, I live alone for a reason.) And I’m struggling with myself, as we do. It’s funny to keep doing this at 61, but here we are.

To calm myself and try to recover a sense of why I’m alive, on the Monday for part of my time before reflection week over Thanksgiving (see what we might call “The White Blog”), I spent a day bookstore haunting, walking from W. 10th Street in Greenwich Village over to E. 2nd Street and Avenue B in the East Village (Alphabet City). At my first stop, the Three Lives & Company Booksellers, a lovely small corner door shop, I found and bought Patti Smith’s latest memoir, as well as another copy of Truman Capote’s Christmas classic in case, as the store manager agreed, “In case you need a gift in the hopper.”

Book store people get you. The same woman who rang me up helped a man whose female partner brought him in to help him take up reading as a hobby. (I had to sit with that, like reading was a rarefied activity.) He liked war and history; I wanted to recommend the Capote, but I didn’t interfere. I recently read that in the United States, only around 14% of adults read for pleasure. That really hurts me. Even my dad, Bernie, who didn’t graduate from high school, read the newspaper every day. I told you this: My mom, Lynne, bought him Travels with Charlie, and he liked it, but The Godfather was the book that hooked him. And this lack of American reading reminded me of something back nearly thirty years ago, in summer, a cousin and his wife and four kids were visiting, staying in the upstairs rooms in my parents’ small house—this was back when I was still teaching in Virginia, and my brother Pat lived there too. My brother Jeff lived in an apartment then and took the day off, and we all gathered to take my relatives into D.C. for the day. While we waited for them to come downstairs, my mom sat in her chair, my dad in his, Pat on the loveseat, Jeff in the corner chair, I in a side chair, each of us with a section or pages of The Washington Post (back when it was a real newspaper). We read. My cousin came downstairs into the little living room and stood still. Gradually, we looked up, “Oh, hey, John,” and he stood staring. I asked, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” What? “A family reading.” Though this was a weekday, we knew such times generally and all of my growing up as “Sunday.” (At Christmastime, we all listened together, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” That would’ve made his head explode.)

Patti’s memoir (I’m up to page 113, savoring it each night so as not to have it end) is essentially a beautiful love letter filled with gratitude to everyone who helped her become. And Patti (I feel I can call her that) has made videos on Substack, posted also on Instagram, and she talks about living in gratitude. I feel every word. In her latest (hyperlinked above) she talks about finishing her tour for the 50th Anniversary of Horses, which I told you I was lucky enough to see at the Beacon here in New York.

One of the first people to help Patti Smith find her voice in the early years after she came to New York at age 19 was the budding playwright and musician Sam Shepard. I remember reading Shepard’s plays in college, after he’d won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child. I realize now that he’d only been a real voice in the theater for ten years when I first read him—that’s wild to me. He seemed so old and established. But then, when I saw Patti Smith’s cover for the album Horses, I couldn’t have known she was only 28 to my 11. She was worlds away.

In truth, I didn’t discover or really attend to Patti Smith at all until reading her memoir Just Kids. I’d heard “Gloria,” and “Because the Night,” and of course I knew who she was, had seen Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of her, but she scared me. Sam Shepard scared me too—I designed costumes for of his two one-acts, Cowboys #2 and Red Cross, when I was in college, ca. 1984, and his writing was out there. (I was part of an acting ensemble for Savage/Love, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, but we never got to perform it.) Smith’s memoir/fantasia The Year of the Monkey in part chronicles her time nursing Shepard as he was dying of ALS, spending days typing up his final book as he dictated it from a wheelchair. (I told you about his observation, “Patti Lee, we are a Beckett play.”)

Sam Shepard’s advice that has served her a lifetime. We could all take a memo.

When I read of Patti’s childhood, I feel embraced by love, recalling my own best parts of childhood. She writes like no one I’ve read—she’s as idiosyncratic on the page as on vinyl, and it’s just wonderful.

One of Smith’s childhood memories is of reading Oscar Wilde’s “fairy tale,” “The Selfish Giant.” When I became obsessed with Oscar Wilde at age 15, my mom gave me a collection of his stories for children, so I reread this particular tale the other night. I remember that I was turned off by the religious turn the tale took; but Smith spent part of her youth as a Jehovah’s Witness and took religion seriously, until she couldn’t anymore. By contrast, I grew up free from religion as a part of my life but still had questions about God. (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was a favorite book.) But I knew the feeling of that first book, that first story, the one that sparked the love of reading, the need to read more.

Patti Smith’s favorite story, “The Selfish Giant,” and mine, The Little House.. What’s yours?

I know, I feel, I see how important reading is—for so many reasons beyond the stuff you learn. I was thinking about my cousin’s surprise at seeing a family reading together; now I imagine it’s families scrolling on phones, and while that is not dissimilar, the act is different. Scrolling is not meditation, somehow, but something that distances people. (There’s data on this.) There’s a calmness that comes when engaging quietly with print text. Something in the tactile element and the way our brains have spent centuries adjusting to the act of reading, and even better, surrounded by some books that everyone can see on display—it’s a shared experience even when it’s solitary. It’s not about algorithms, is what I mean.

And Patti Smith is so different from me, reading her memoir reminds me that sharing the particulars of our lives can lead to universals, in that we see ourselves as human. But I can love that Patti and I share a love of something Wildean, even if mine is his whole creative life. And like me, Smith has touchstone artists—hers Diego Rivera and Arthur Rimbaud; mine Katharine Hepburn and Virginia Woolf. Their art gave us our own humanity, opened the gate, turned on a light, pick a metaphor.

It’s such a lousy time to be human right now—“lousy” is hardly the word—and yet I know I need to walk around grateful. By some miracle on Friday, for example, I found my way through to finishing a major project at work, could see my way to the end, I mean, and was so relieved, that as I took my afternoon walk I fairly floated. It’s such a human thing. Even Patti Smith makes the finishing of her tour—a 50th anniversary tour as a superstar—sound so human, and then she had a tooth seen to at the dentist, talked about moderating a talk back after the opening of the new Frankenstein and talking to Guillermo Del Toro like he’s a person, because he is, an artist like her, but a person. Creatives living their creative lives pausing at moments to scream, “Fuck Trump.” Like the rest of us.

We’re all doing our best, getting on with the work of our worlds. Loving our friends, our families, telling them that. Expressing gratitude for a good chair, a coat that keeps us warm, a hat that stays on in the wind. An orange. A book.

I’ll ruminate on all the horrors of our country again soon—I think I’m waiting for an idea of what we need to do, besides not quit. Remember was Sam said to Patti, “If you miss a beat, invent another.”

Sending love,

Miss O’

East 3rd Street, NYC, should you like to visit there.

A Life in the Theater

On character, tragic flaws, and hope

Nov 09, 2025

On November 9, 2010, 1st Lt. Robert M. Kelly, USMC, was killed in Afghanistan. Robert had been a student of mine at Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge, Virginia, along with his older brother, John, both of them the sons of Gen. John Kelly (Maj. Kelly, when I first knew him; I attended the ceremony when he became Col. Kelly). Both John and Robert were in the Drama Club, and very different kids, John doing technical theater (lighting), Robert hanging around until he scored a legendary turn as Juliet in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged (with a cast not of three but of thousands) his senior year, a performance that caused his father to laugh harder than I’d ever seen him do. Interestingly, son John (now a colonel in the USMC himself) was naturally funnier, but ironically it was Robert’s relative seriousness and deeply felt empathy that made him a great comic actor.

I got the news of Robert’s death 15 years ago through missed connections all day, brother John trying to reach me, my return calls back going to voicemail; I thought something might have happened to Alan, another former student and John’s best friend; finally I got hold of Alan while at a play lab at the Pythian on the Upper West Side, where cell reception as terrible and I had to go out to the street to reckon with the truth. I didn’t know Robert had even been deployed; apparently it was a sudden decision to send his unit over, and maybe only a week had passed since his arrival, an IED doing the job.

Robert’s funeral and burial at Arlington, just eleven years after his graduation, seven years after I’d left teaching and had moved to New York, was attended by well over a hundred people, many from Gar-Field, teachers, students, friends, parents, along with his family. Hard to process even now. I was reminded of all this yesterday when my friend and retired department chair Tom texted to remind me, thinking only ten years had gone by. (I knew it was longer because my cell phone had been a flip phone. Isn’t that a particularly millennial reason to remember a date?)

So tragedy is on the brain this morning.

Biblical sky drama over Queens.

Last Saturday I went to see a West End-Broadway transfer production of Oedipus, a new adaptation and direction by Robert Icke (say Ike), with friends Frances and Jim, who got the tickets for us (or else I might have foolishly missed it). The lesson of Oedipus is, famously, “One always meets one’s fate in the path one takes to try to avoid it.” In the Greek version, the Oracle at Delphi prophesizes that the baby born to King Laius and Jocasta will one day kill his father and marry his mother; Jocasta then, to spare her son, orders her servant to kill the baby. Instead, the loving servant places the baby in the woods, where he is found by an older couple from the country who raise him as their own, no one the wiser. Until eighteen years go by…

In this update, Mark Strong plays Oedipus as a political candidate on the night of a highly consequential election (intimations of Trump v. Democracy), and all the action takes place during the two hours between polls closing and the announcement of the winner (a big clock on the stage counting down—Aristotle in Poetics says that any good drama should play out in no more nor less than two hours, and Icke takes on the challenge). In a filmed sequence as the show’s opening exposition, a confident, sexy Oedipus, standing outside what looks to be the British Parliament building, tells the press that he knows people question why he, a foreigner, should lead them, and he promises (without warning to anyone in his circle) to “release my birth certificate.” It brings up Obama, Mamdani, all the prejudices of our times, and if you know the story of Oedipus, it’s the perfect setup for an adaptation. (Icke must have shrieked and shaken with freakout when he thought of it—hoping no one else saw that obvious and genius connection up to now.)

Oedipus—handsome, smart, gifted, loving, and progressive—has one fatal flaw: hubris. He really believes he is in complete control, fully in possession of himself, knows who he is, knows who everyone is in his life. The next two hours unravel in the revelations we know from the Greek tragedy, all so believable and so timely, with Lesley Manville’s Jocasta ripping your heart out, her (updated for our more enlightened times, shades of Epstein) story of being raped by old Laius at 13, forced to give up the baby to die because he’s married; Laius later marrying her and leaving her a widow who later meets Oedipus, falls wildly in love, and marries him, giving him three children, she then in middle age. At the play’s opening, Oedipus is 52; Jocasta, we only later realize, is 65; their children are college age. In short order, despite a landslide victory, their children are about to lose everything, Jocasta her life, and the nation the promise of a brilliant leader. (The best part was sitting next to someone who didn’t know the story—lots of people don’t—and hearing the gasp.)

How does any brain process such a trauma? Frances and Jim and I staggered through the tourist minefield that is Times Square to the quiet of an Italian restaurant to process it, all of truly gutted, Aristotle’s catharsis manifest. In enduring tragedy, and in catharsis, we not only heal, we are cleansed.

A cleansing view, fall in Central Park.

This morning I watched a YouTube video sent by my friend Ryan last night of researcher and “No. 1 Brain Scientist” Jill Bolte Taylor in conversation with podcaster Steven Bartlett, talking about the “four characters” in our brain’s left and right hemispheres. As a result of a stroke at age 37 in 1996, Bolte Taylor’s Harvard-ladder academic career ended, and the next eight years were about recovering the functionality of her left hemisphere, the part of our brains that does numbers, controls language, helps us plan and think. During those eight years, she worked to use her right hemisphere to help her rebuild the cellular connections in the left, and the result was a huge new life focused on even deeper brain work while living on a boat and not in a lab, connected to nature and to the universe, using her whole brain. I highly recommend the video, which I watched at 4:30 this morning (because old), and her “four characters” of the brain put me in mind of not only all our society’s conflicts but also of all the characters necessary to have an effective drama:

1. Character One: Left side, thinking: the planner, analyzer, counter, linguist

2. Character Two: Left side, emotional: the grudge holder, trauma re-liver, pain protector

3. Character Three: Right side, emotional: the explorer, the curious one, the playful one

4. Character Four: Right side, thinking: the connector of experiences, keeper of wisdom

Just as a drama needs all these characters for conflict and resolution (my take), humans need all four in balance to be whole. I took loads of notes, and if you watch the video, you can too, but Bolte Taylor’s message of a society out of balance resonated most with me. Most of our lives seem to be spent lived only on the Left side, she says, holding grudges and reliving trauma as we strive for perfection and knock ourselves out to make money. It’s killing our brain cells, it’s killing us individually, and it’s killing the planet.

To wit: Sec. of Defense (he says “War” but it’s not official) Pete Hegseth announced this week that the United States is no longer a peace-seeking nation, but rather, our military preparation will be solely focused on wars. We know from Republican spokespeople, such as Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Elon Musk, that “empathy is weakness” (a negation of the brain’s right hemisphere) is a guiding principle for their politics. The Conservative Movement is totally, then, left-hemisphere in the brain, focused on self-interest, self-protection, generational trauma on a tape loop. It’s not sustainable, but it has to be gotten through and past, somehow.

What I think Conservatives fear most about education, about learning the truth about our history, is what the play Oedipus shows so shockingly: when you uncover the truth about yourself, you are destined for destruction. But what the audience learns is that no life is an honest life if it’s built on lies, when your armor is a birth certificate and the woman who raised you as your mother, and lied about it, thinks it’s “only paper.” And I’m struck by all these paradoxes—the fear we have of knowing the truth, and yet the impossibility of living an honest, full, happy life without it.

As your Miss O’ has long said, if your belief system cannot withstand challenges to the point that your response is to stifle and even kill to stop those challenges, you don’t have a belief system—you only have fear.

What Oedipus lacks is balance—for him, in his ignorance, life has been pretty great. He is empathetic but only intellectually. (I think this same hubris applies to a lot of America’s Liberals, if I’m honest.) Oedipus’s mistake, his hubris, was to be blindly fearless, blindly on the side of the common man (because he was raised by fine, working class parents) without knowing his own life’s truth—he was the product of rape by a lecherous pedophile of a king, and he married his own mother because of the coverup. At the end of the play, Oedipus blinds himself, and as the cult-prophet Teiresias tells him, when you learn, you will go blind; and when you are blind, you will see properly.

In a similar way, Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke—the near-total collapse of the brain of a preeminent brain scientist—made her work expand into realms she could not have imagined during her eight years of recovery.

And this all got me thinking again:

We have to release the Epstein files. Virginia Giuffre’s death cannot be in vain.

We have to embrace our nation’s original sin, slavery, teach it properly, reckon with it, so our nation can progress in smarter, healthier ways.

We must demand the resignation of Pete Hegseth, and work to be a peaceable nation, so that there are no more 1st Lt. Robert Kellys dying on foreign soil; and you’ll pardon me for not grieving Dick Cheney.

This is a heavy lot for a Sunday morning.

I’m sitting here on this November day, in my kitchen rocker, worried again about whether or not I need a new refrigerator (thermostat being weird) and a new Mac (battery not fully charging), seeing it’s after 9 AM and I really need to dress and go out and about before it rains. And these mundanities of life require our attention, our presence, to live fully, ever balanced against all those huge mega truths.

On my personal day on Friday, I found myself in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, lighting candles (one for my mom, one for my friend Richard’s mom, and a third for the ancestors), which I hope was not hypocritical from irreligious me. It was nice to sit and meditate in the midst of the most famous cathedral in the biggest city with the most consequential mayoral election perhaps ever, and be present to my mom and memory.

The next time I’m there, I’ll light a candle for Robert.

Sending love and balance,

Miss O’

What’s Not Lost in Translation

Moments in my chaotic New York City week

So all the ick news first, aside from all the Musk-Trump criminal dismantling of every living institution in America so that it’s close to unrecognizable (taking over the Kennedy Center? The National Archives? closing what Department?), I learned at work this week that the two editors I supervise applied for a transfer to another (lately resurrected) department where they’d previously worked because they can do what they are best at there (I choose to believe it’s not about me) and got it, and that I will have to finish a huge project probably alone, the timing being what it is; then, at my ophthalmologist’s office for a checkup, I learned that not only am I at the beginning (and still reversible) stages of diabetic retinopathy, but also that I owe an outstanding balance of nearly $500 (of deductible-meeting crap) from visits over the past four years because their billing department never sent me the bills; and then I learned from my CPA that my company inexplicably failed to take out the correct amount of tax (and all week I’ve tried to correct it for this year, but the system doesn’t work, and we no longer have humans working in HR (take that in) and I am screaming into screens) and so instead of getting a refund, I in fact owe some $1,500; and the tendinitis in my write-hand (punny ha ha) wrist is so bad still after three months, medicines, and PT, that I would have to spring for a cortisone shot (sweet, sweet relief after the injection site pain and, obviously, the bill). Poor fucking me.

Thank you, internet.

But one day this week—I think it was the eye appointment day, Wednesday, when I returned home with dilated eyes and shock at hemorrhaging money—on the way into the city, a Black female conductor announced at every stop (because the N-W-R-Q lines still do not have recorded voices to announce stops, and I love that) something to this effect: “Ladies and gentlemen, let the passengers off first, let’s help each other out, everybody, let the people off first before you try to get on. Move into the middle, people, help everyone out, we’re all together here.” Love her heart. On the way back to Queens that same day, a Black male conductor did much the same, adding on occasion, “It’s not about the price of groceries, everybody, just help each other out here and move all the way into the car.” This same conductor also used the intercom to explain the location of every staircase, connection, and elevator at every single stop. A total doll.

And if you are like me, you can’t help but look up and down the train car, men, women, children, every color and shape and gender and age and religion and background and profession, staring into phones, or not; bundled up, world weary, and it hits you all over again that the reason “white middle America” is afraid of brown and black shadows is because they literally have no idea how New York works. It’s not perfect, never that, but it works. Look at us. Us. Right here in this train car, crowded, or not, for miles of stops along our way. Not yelling at or killing each other. All of us just being.

Also in my travels, I found myself thinking about a poet friend who lives in a rural area, who years ago, when I mentioned how much I loved the movie Lost in Translation could only grunt in disgust. When I asked why, she said of the lead characters, “All they did was squander an opportunity to see Japan.” I had to think for a second, because I was remembering the filming of Bill Murray’s whisky commercial, the Tokyo karaoke bar, the hotel bar nights, Scarlett Johannson’s quiet excursion to a Japanese garden and learning flower arranging, and of course the hilarious trip to the ER so Bill Murray can get Scarlett’s broken toe seen to—all these relationships and stories they will have to tell about, or not, when they return home. What did my friend mean, “squandered”? I started thinking. I guess another view is they didn’t really do all that much…and then it hit me. I said, not at all angry, but with a sense of discovery, “You’ve never traveled outside the country, have you?” She looked at me suspiciously, and slowly shook her head, as if her response to a movie shouldn’t depend on having had the experience. More to the point, though, she had almost never, within or out of the country, traveled alone. And there it is.

What was lost in translation for her in watching Lost in Translation is the feeling of sudden paralysis brought on by the jetlag stupor you feel combined with being quickly overstimulated in a new place while on no sleep, while being both excited by the prospects and daunted by selecting the best thing to do right now. The one universal is a bed (never one you can check into before 3:00 PM) and a bar or cafe, and heading to either one can give you a chance to sort of recover your wits (if you know how to manage the currency), but when you are alone with no one to bounce ideas off of, being in a new city, whatever the language, can be pretty isolating. One time, visiting London, I spent nearly one entire first day just sitting alone on a bench in Tavistock Square, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf had lived (in a no longer existing building, bombed out in WWII), underdressed (a cold day for summer) and disoriented, and in those days, a teetotaler. I could barely make myself try to find a place to have tea. If I did eat or have tea, I don’t remember. I remember a white-gray sky, damp chill air, and just watching people against green trees and grass and gray buildings.

Did I squander my first day in London? Not at all. Oddly, that first day of “doing nothing” is still the one I remember most vividly and fondly, whatever the discomfort and confusion. I was there, in the heart of London, on my own, unremarkable, on an ordinary day. Not bad.

As a result of my many NYC train treks this week, it also dawned on me that perhaps the reason I needed to leave Facebook, finally, was that my life in New York can be one of overstimulation even on the dullest days, and that Facebook had become more overstimulation, not sure which way to look, who I’m forgetting to check in on, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m just not wired for all that anymore. I know that many people can simply sit on a virtual Facebook bench and do nothing, or idly and dispassionately watch the goings on, not unlike I did in Tavistock Square or Scarlett and Bill did in Tokyo. You do you, as the kids say. However we engage, or don’t, we are all in it together, so move to the middle of car and let everybody onto the train. And remember to give people their space (remarkably, New Yorkers do know how to give you yours, even by a fraction of an inch, and if only the whole country could cotton on, that would be great). After all, everyone here with you is simultaneously present in a pubic place and also living a very private drama of their own.

One of Miss O’s many, many notebooks.

All of this is just to say, dear friend, given all that you are going through in your personal life and against whatever landscape this letter finds you, I know that you may merely glance at or dip into this post, and I completely understand. Thanks for reading at all, and whatever you do, don’t strain yourself. Enjoy your Sunday. Let me hear from you when you get a chance.

It’s been a long three weeks. Encouragement!

I keep humming, all the time lately, “It’s You I Like.” Like a mantra.

Love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few weeks ago I published part of a play I’ve been working on, but I don’t know if WordPress is the best outlet for me. Thanks to all who read it, in any case!