Weather Watch

I'm sitting on my deck, the sky turning dark, day to night in minutes, rolling thunder in the distance. The wind kicks up, followed by a frenzy of rain, churning up memories of late-summer hurricanes, Donna a biggie in 1960 when I was growing up in Brooklyn, Bob the first time a male name was used, 1979. Resistance to male names was riddled with sexism − God knows the weather can be unpredictable, fickle, just like a woman − and took the form of a silly quip ('ever hear of a him-icane?), oddly semantic in nature. In actuality, hurricanes were first named for saints, then longitude-latitude positions, which became a little unwieldy for quick communications. It was a novel by George R. Stewart, Storm, published in 1941 (and reissued in 2003) that spawned the practice of giving hurricanes female names. The fictional storm is given the name Maria, and the novel takes readers through the twelve days of her life. She lives on, too, in the Lerner and Lowe classic, "They Call the Wind Maria," inspired by the novel.

The other day at a barbecue the talk turned to the heat spell we've been having, no end in sight, is global warming the culprit? I made the point, between sips of my margarita, that we'd had a beautiful spring. Some unusual highs and lows for the season, yes, but so many beautiful cool nights and sunny days filled with flowers that seemed especially vibrant. There was agreement, and with it some reservation. Winter, sandwiched between spring and autumn, seems endless. And summer, even with the sky still light at eight in the evening, so fleeting.

The rain stops, I decide to go for a walk, only to be caught in an unexpected shower. Did I say 'unexpected'? Didn't I check www.weather.com, the hourly breakdown, and see that promise of sun poking through the clouds? My instinct is to pick up the pace, get home before my sneakers start squishing. A picture comes to mind, of people I once read about who run into the rain, smiling, instead of avoiding it. I ease back into a comfortable stride. How much is really necessary, or even possible, to 'know before you go'?

Happiness

Mother's Day 2010: A long annoying beep wakes me, an alarm system's battery back-up out of whack. The power outage that began last night shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. Before going to bed I saw the sky light up. It's the kind of thing that happens when intense winds send tree limbs falling onto power lines. Is there a message here?

My cell phone tells me I have a voicemail, Happy Mother's Day from my daughter, far away (Los Angeles). A voicemail is not quite the same as a live voice, but at the precise time she calls I'm in some cell phone dead zone, and besides, the card already arrived, a Golden Retriever puppy nestled against her mother's snout, image and words compressed into the thought, all that really counts. I think about my own mother, gone longer than I like to remember, who would probably cringe at the thought of cell phones and e-mail. Some years I miss her more than ever. Sometimes I think she died in April to remind me that renewal is not a figment of my imagination. My first Mother's Day without her was a milestone for my daughter: she rode a two wheeler for the first time. I ran alongside her, my hand on the bicycle seat. Then I let her fly.

A headline from my Google Reader catches my eye, Huffington Post, 7 Simple Ways to Be Happier. I follow the link to the full feed, intrigued as ever by reductive approaches to a better way of being, even if I'm not buying. Maybe even more intrigued in light of the book sitting on my desk, Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by Richard Powers in which he casts his brilliant eye on the question of genetic enhancement in general and the happiness gene in particular, at the same time exploring the blurring of fact and fiction in a technology-driven world. The 'happiness' article tells me that women are more wired to worry than men (duh!). If the article is essentially a rehash of what many years of yoga and my own growing consciousness of mindful living continue to teach me, it's also a reminder that sometimes we need to look out before we can look in. At the same time, I resist this commodification of what strikes me as simple common sense. When my mother was dying, she wondered why it took a lifetime to just smell the roses. No meditation teacher suggesting that “simply being aware of what is happening right now, without wishing it were different” or finding yourself a "joy buddy" as ways of increasing happiness could have made the insight more profound. Do physical exercise? Sing or dance? Be still? Any prescriptive that strikes one's fancy is bound to bring some happiness, so long as it doesn't become just that, a prescriptive. Old patterns die hard; new ones take a long time, for some a lifetime, before there can be a true shift in perspective.

A day before Mother's Day I was walking my dog and I stopped to chat with a neighbor. We talked about Mother's Day, the busy restaurants booked solid, all those fathers knowing best, all those daughters and sons doing what they believe they do so well in the interest of honoring mom. How about letting them all go out, we joked, and we stay home, two mothers sharing a quiet afternoon and a glass of wine?

Every Picture Tells a Story

Mother and Child, James Litaker

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an art exhibition premised on the Greek notion of ekphrasis,which is essentially a written representation of a piece of art, a response of sorts. Stare at a picture long enough and a story may well take shape. If not a story, then a poem maybe. Representational or abstract, a piece of art can strike an emotional chord. Memories are jarred. Images become words, which in turn become images all their own.


No Moment Will Ever Be like This One
after James Litaker

Ouch! says the girl, to herself. If she complains, her mother will only pull harder, hurting her more. It’s the nature of the comb, her mother will say. Something to be endured. Just for once she wishes her mother would let her go to school with her hair loose. A classroom is no place for unruly hair, her mother will say.

Already nine and hungering to be nineteen, says the mother, to herself. She runs her fingers through strands of her daughter’s hair, a soft tangle that reminds her of nothing so much as the swift passage of time. The more impatient her daughter seems, the more the mother is inclined to slow down, teach her a lesson about beauty, the kind that comes with precision, the rhythmic comb and weave, comb and weave of a perfect braid. Now she stops, just to savor the moment. To the girl this feels like punishment, maybe even torture, a braid that gets longer with each twist. To the mother it is a kind of release, a morning ritual that gets her through the day, each and every one the same, with its hopes for her daughter, maybe a teacher or a secretary or a beautician; anything but standing behind the counter of a delicatessen, dishing out macaroni salad or ladling soup into a container, slapping slices of turkey or ham onto bread slathered with mayonnaise or mustard, sometimes both. She feels like a surgeon, cutting through the bread. There is nothing so unnatural as making sandwiches through a filter of latex.

She picks up the pace again, comb and weave, comb and weave. Pictures her daughter at nineteen, braids gone, hair cascading to her shoulders.

A Day (almost) like Any Other

Last night I went outside with my dog. The light under the deck was shining on me in a way that cast a shadow against a tree on the slope of our hill. It made me look twelve-feet tall.

Two days ago I turned sixty. I tried to make it a day like any other, a typical Saturday beginning with a Pilates class. There is a core of women I've grown fond of at the gym. We do Pilates together. We talk about our grown children (and grandchildren). Today, though, we talked about what it means to be sixty. Don't go gray, said one of them. It sucks the color from your face. What are you doing to celebrate? asked another. No party, I said. Some close friends and family would gather at my home. We would make a meal together, drink some wine.

I thought I was clever in marking other decades, with big parties at twenty-nine, thirty-nine, forty-nine. When fifty-nine rolled around, I could not muster the 'dance-the-night-away spirit.' The years pass quickly enough; sixty would be here in the wink of an eye. Try as I might to talk myself into not making too much of it, there is something about turning sixty (without trying to color it as the new forty) that begs honoring, if not out-and-out celebration.

A week before the big day I was riding a wave of buoyancy. Years of doing yoga have given me a particular frame of reference for understanding that everything comes, in its time. I am nothing if not a warrior, but even warriors know that effort needs to give way to grace. There is lightness (do I daresay light?) in some of my poses. If this is what it means to be sixty, I'll take it. Another wave sends me crashing down, into the grip of an unsettling deflation: the dentist finds a red spot on my gum (nothing suspicious but let's have a look in a week); the dermatologist says not to worry about the keratosis (but we'll have to treat it); the gynecologist does her best to reassure me that Vagifem is safe (but for how long?).

In one of Jon Kabat-Zinn's meditation tapes, he uses the lake as symbol for a deep resource of clarity. There may be turbulence on the surface, but with mindfulness and attention, it is possible to access the clarity beneath. In my own moments of clarity, I can see those swings of buoyancy and deflation as nothing more than part of a whole. Some days are simply better than others. Some years, markers that they are of past and future, loss and gain, are as bitter as they are sweet.

Optimism
by Jane Hirschfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.

I know It's Only Rock 'n' Roll . . .

In the Canary Islands, descendants of an aboriginal people called the Guanches communicate via an ancient whistling language. As Diane Ackerman eloquently tells it in A Natural History of the Senses, "They trill and warble a little like quails and other birds, but more elaborately, and, from as far away as nine miles they hear one another and converse as their ancestors did." She writes, too, about the aboriginals in Australia who have to travel across a maze of invisible roads, or Songlines. And she posits a simple yet profound question: what evolutionary advantage does music afford?

Two weeks ago I sat sixth row center at a benefit concert for the Playing for Change foundation. I had seen the video of street musicians from around the world performing the same song – Stand by Me – and I was thrilled at the chance to see at least some of them perform live at Town Hall in New York. Music is nothing if not a uniting force. But it's one thing to produce and edit snippets of musical performances from diverse parts of the world (some punctuated with videos of Bono, Keb' Mo, and Bob Marley), another thing altogether to unite the musicians (minus the star power) for a concert. Granda Elliott, who hails from New Orleans, is an unqualified national treasure. Clarence Bekker (Amsterdam) has an infectious charm, not to mention a powerful voice brought to harmonizing subtlety when he sang with Titi Tsira (Guguletu, South Africa) and Mermans Kenkosenki (Matadi, Congo). If the performance was less than polished, more like a jam session, utter joy pervaded. The musicians danced, they sang, they played guitar and percussion and harmonica. They smiled. They wore shoes that looked spanking new.

One week ago I was lucky enough to have landed two tickets to night #2 of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Benefit Concert at Madison Square Garden. I was not so up close and personal, but it doesn't matter all that much at the Garden. The monitors provide all the close-ups you need, and besides, it's mostly about sound in this cavernous arena. The lights dim, out comes Tom Hanks, more to remind us of why we're there than to tell us about who we're going to hear. Not that introductions are needed. Jerry Lee Lewis makes his way to the front of the stage, piano at the ready, Great Balls of Fire. It's the only song he plays, and it's all he needs to. Aretha follows, all diva in red and pearls. She brings Annie Lennox onstage to join her for Chain of Fools, followed by Lenny Kravitz in a duet of Think.

It gets even better.

Between sets the screens roll in a photo montage, a continuum of images taking us back to the roots of rock and through its evolutionary shifts. The audience is abuzz. Who's playing next? Who's filling in for Eric Clapton, forced to bow out because of gallstone surgery? Is Mick Jagger really going to duet with Bono? Some extreme Clapton fans are rumored to want their money back. Too bad for them if they insisted. Jeff Beck, who would have been a surprise guest playing with Clapton, filled in with his phenomenal group, including Tal Wilkenfeld, the dynamic twenty-three-year-old Australian bass player who happens to be female. So even if the reality of hearing/seeing Clapton and U2 on the same night, on the same stage was what lured me to the second night of the concert, for my money – and from the standpoint of pure music – Jeff Beck's set would turn out to be my favorite, electrifying in every sense of the word. Sting joining him for a rendition of People Get Ready. Buddy Guy belting out Let Me Love You to a background of dueling guitars. Jeff Beck sending megawatt vibrations to the highest reaches of the Garden, accompanied by Billy Gibbons, playing Foxy Lady.

It gets even better.

You don't have to be a fan of heavy metal music to appreciate Metallica. Especially after seeing the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which underscores the passion that gives rise to any type of music. More especially after hearing Metallica play Sweet Jane with Lou Reed, and Iron Man with Ozzie Osbourne, and, in what may have been one of the most inspired pairings of the night, You Really Got Me with Ray Davies of the Kinks.

Did I say it gets even better?

U2 opens their set with Vertigo and Magnificent and a great deal of anticipation about surprise guests (Mick Jagger? Sir Paul McCartney?). Knowing that Bruce Springsteen headlined the first night, and knowing how much he loves playing to his fans, I harbor a secret feeling (wish?) that he might show up the second night. When he walks onto the stage, escorted by Patti Smith, and they launch into Because the Night, with Bono, the power of rock 'n' roll reaches a fevered pitch. Patti leaves the stage, Bruce stays, for a riveting I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, with Roy Bittan and U2. The party keeps heating up, with Black Eyed Peas bringing a hip hop edge to Mysterious Ways. Once Black Eyed Peas (minus Fergie) leave the stage and she coos those first haunting notes of Gimme Shelter, the final guest of the night, who is really no surprise at all, struts onto the stage.

The show comes to an end, I leave the Garden, walking on air. Singing to myself. Thinking, it doesn't get much better.

Lazy Hazy Days

Midsummer night: I stand outside on my deck, stare up at the moon through the trees, follow the music. To the left I tune into the percussive cicadas, to the right a chorus of tree frogs, in-between the rhythmic whistle of crickets. We call them 'lazy, hazy days,' but summer always seems so fleeting, as if time truly does speed up. Was it always that way? Or does adulthood bring a shift in perspective, a different way of sensing time? Ray Kurzweil's Law of Time and Chaos suggests that our perception of time is measured in 'milestone' events. In the world of childhood, there are so many of these events and intervals between them shorter; hence, there's an ever-present sense of being 'in the moment,' when time does seem to move more slowly. The older we get, the fewer the milestone events and the greater the intervals between them, which contributes to the perception of time speeding up.

Fleeting as summertime may feel, it is also a very full season, thick with leaves and flowers, the air redolent with memories of summers past: the joys of sun and sand and floating on a wave; the craving for peaches and fresh corn and watermelon; the trips to and from the library, arms filled with books, every one of which will be devoured in this season of leisure. Even decades later, when years are no longer measured in semesters, summer reading still takes its place as something distinct from the rest of the year. There are summers when all I want is to get through past issues of The New Yorker and those gems of literary journals that have piled up. Other summers demand nothing more than temptation-rich breezy novels. Still others bring a longing to revisit something rich, Anna Karenina or The Odyssey. Today I think I'll read some Mary Oliver poems, tomorrow who knows what?

Moments come and go, lost in thoughtlessness or stuck in a wheel of perseveration. To persevere is to see ahead, value the effort as much as the light (even lightness) that eventually comes; to perseverate is to be caught up in a moment that has passed. Persevere has a softness, an open-ended breathiness; perseverate is the linguistic equivalent of anxiety.

Midsummer day: the blue heron who makes visitations to a pond on my road stops me in my tracks. She is grace in stillness, poetry in motion. She does not persevere, she does not perseverate. Her field of awareness must include me, even at a distance, but she is singular in her purpose right now, the epitome of patience, a master of timing. The longer I watch, the more commanding is her presence. With swiftness and skill, she plucks a small fish from the pond and swallows it. And with a wingspan that carries with it all things mythical and prehistoric, she takes flight.

Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond
Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn't a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

From What Do We Know (DaCapo Press, 2002)

A Piece of Paradise

Sometimes I wonder if it was the image that came first, not the word. The link between the two is intrinsic, a chicken-and-egg conundrum that rests more on riddle than solution. Both have the power to conjure; one is worth a thousand of the other.

Sometimes words are not enough, or they're too much. It's a deeply philosophical notion to try to grasp the 'beingness' of something. Cliches too often get in the way.

Sometimes a cliche is a point of entry. I lie in a hammock overlooking a vineyard, Moon Mountain, Sonoma. There are hawks circling the sky, birds darting from tree to tree, a lizard sizing me up. My husband is in the swimming pool, ours alone. I think about trips to Napa Valley over the years, the lush rolling hills, the air filled with lilies, the winery tours and tastings that make Napa/Sonoma a tourist mecca. To call the landscape intoxicating is to push a cliche to its limit. Yet there's no other word that captures it all so perfectly. It is a word that trips off the tongue, stumbles across syllables. Makes you linger.

Sometimes words slip away, the spirit rises, the image both contained and illuminated now, nothing separating It from me.