sadi ranson, founder & editorial director of fibonacci editions

for goodness' sake | new work by sadi ranson-polizzotti

solstice, 2009, june 21st - sunday

sadi ranson-polizzotti, author, publicity contact information

author photo

P U B L I C I T Y

contact information

type.fournier@gmail.com

or

gregfreed@gregfreed.com


all ordering or pre-orders should be placed through Twilight Times Books. To contact the press, please use one of the email addresses above and address your note to either Lida Quillen or Greg Freed.

for goodness' sake - new poems by sadi ranson-polizzotti, forthcoming book

Forthcoming From

Twilight Times Books, America
&
Alyscamps, Paris


(for goodness’ sake)

new poems by

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti



In his introduction to Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’s new book of poems entitled (for goodness’ sake), Chris Madoch notes that Ranson’s latest book reads like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” meets “In Cold Blood.”

Here is book of poetry that is, by turns, both daring and delicate. It is, as the cover image suggests (a woman’s exposed neck thrown back and lain bare before us), a work of honesty and surrender, rendering both the narrator and the reader exposed and vulnerable. Ranson-Polizzotti’s writing borders on the recklessly-honest. The choice she offers us: do we go for the jugular and slit her throat or do we offer a kiss and a caress?

Whichever we choose, she is yielding. She is “sapling green”, as she notes, “I am growing.” Always, there is a choice, and if we will not make it, the narrator is quite clear, she will make it for us.

The writing here touches on all of the senses and hits the high note, taking it’s cue from Yeats, reaching, yearning and beckoning to us with all the tastes and sounds and smells of the different seasons as we navigate our world and our lives. This is done spoken almost spoken in one giant mind-breath of prose-poetry reminiscent of Ginsberg with lyrical touches of John Ashbery and other New York School poet influences and more that intertwine like a partita in Ranson’s writing. Still, like Capote, while Ranson has drawn on her influences, and her work is fully owned and occupied by her.

As she writes in the poem *P.S.,

“I occupy this space now.
X. marks the spot.
The next move will be mine.”

about | chris madoch

image by chris madoch

about |

chris madoch is an associate editor of the tant mieux project incorporating tant mieux on cyrano. CHRIS MADOCH- writer and artist/photographer

A maverick Poet for GLBT issues, Madoch has published
what some may consider (perjoratively) "subversive" poetry, alarming fiction, odd articles and he has staged many interesting plays. Known for his often escoriatingly honest writings and editorials, Madoch also edits the new online ezine ‘Queer Times Press’. His visual sense is crucial and utterly cutting-edge. He is writing the introduction to the forthcoming collection of poetry, "For Goodness' Sakes!", due this Spring from Alyscamps, Paris - Twilight Times Books, USA in an international edition. For more information or to contact the editor, please email: je_jeune@yahoo.com, addressed to Editor.

walk this way

These shoes - these shoes have seen so many things, I suppose like anyone's shoes, if we stop to think about it, they would have a story to tell. They have been with me through the good and the bad. The happy the sad. The ecstatic, the heartbreaking. The momentous, the boring... and the vodka-tonic colorless inbetween days that add up to nothing in particular.

These I remember buying in Paris in a small shop near St. Sulpice, a quiet neighborhood, just after I had dropped in to, for whatever reason, even though I am not at all Catholic (or catholic) felt compelled to challenge my French and myself and every ethical thing I had or have and do study my whole life in university and beyond to meet with the very-French and obviously, very Catholic priest, and make a confession of some kind, never mind the fact that A. I felt I had nothing to confess and that B. I don't believe in confession really because I feel strongly if you are going to repent, then don't do a thing in the first place and C. This whole "sin" business just makes me want to pull out a peashooter and spitball the whole lot. If this is offensive to you, I apologize, but I find it offensive that I am judged so harshly by those who would not even know me - when I am an ethical person - so shall we sit in our respective corners and play "nonny nonny boo boo" all day long or shall we try to enter into some kind of dialogue (Socratic?) and reach reasonable conclusions about faith and belief - This, this is not going to happen.

It did not. The minister looked at me with his cloudy hazel eyes that were showing the first white stratus of glaucoma and asked me if I was "sorry" with a lot of "pardons" and me with a lot of "desole, et une autre fois, si'l vous plaits....merci bien..." but we made our way through this confession of sorts, and while i explained that I was not there for absolution (which puzzled him to no end, for why was I there then?) I tried to explain that I was there to serve him my good news, which was that he need not live by the tight restrictive confines of this particular faith. That yes, of course, the choice was and always will be his, but I suppose I was making the point that No longer was this my choice.

I never was a Catholic anyway.... I was always Anglican - in this country, Episcopalian. The high-holy Episcopal, the St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, the Church of the Advent, the Trinity in Copley Square, the Saint Emmanuel, the St. John's in Winthrop, etc etc and the list goes on and on and of course let us not ever forget The Church of the Resurrection which, I believe, is by West 11th. These and many others and my alma - St. Anne's in the UK, which is where it all began.

So back to the shoes. Why the shoes? Because i bought those shoes right next door to St. Sulpice after the so-called confession non-confession where i left absolutely unblessed although it had been offered, and absolutely unrepentant, although this was offered but i felt i had nothing to repent for, and i felt blessed as altar linen regardless. I could have floated away for i was light as helium and my face shone bright white, no doubt - clear as any bell, as any saint. And then I bought the shoes because I had never seen anything so delicate, so beautiful, so absolutely feminine and almost impractical (although they have turned out to be among the most practical shoes I own), in my life.

Since, I have worn them (needless to say), all over Paris - that trip and others. They have walked the broad avenues of New York many, many times in times both good and bad, hard and not so hard, lost and found. They have tapped their way through Grand Central for reunions of the greatest joy, and they have tapped the same corridors past the violinist who plays the aching O Mio Babino Caro and I have wept. These shoes have seen me through a lot.

They have seen me at different publishing houses, at meetings with agents, at meetings with people who would consider themselves important - and who perhaps I might as well, surely a few, I did and still do and feel lucky to have the privilege of having known or knowing still or having met. These shoes have seen me almost arrested in New York City for passing through a gate for not knowing that this was not allowed even though I flashed my MetroCard and a transit cop stopped me and held me for over an hour, asking for my passport (yep, which is illegal in New York City, along with such questions as "Where are you from?" etc etc I was waiting for the "Known associates...." but she had already radioed in the station my social security number so it was only a matter of time before she knew my entire (rather, or somewhat, radical history and all because I went through a fucking gate, I thought). I remember I had these shoes on then when Officer Negrod stopped me, unclipped her cuffs, as if I were a threat to national security.

Hey, you can never be too careful.... Listen, I'm serious about that. I do not underestimate any threat. I remember the day well: It was about 4:30 on July 22nd, 2008 and I had just finished interviewing the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and was on the upper west side of New York city about to get into the subway when I walked through an open gate along with a bunch of other people, flashed my Metro card, which seemed appropriate, when suddenly, at the foot of the stairs, a rather brief looking police woman grabbed (yes grabbed, my arm and asked me why I had gone through the gate). I explained politely what I knew (which was what I knew, which was that I didn't know that I had done anything wrong, etc etc, all of which was true), and asked if she wanted to inspect my bags.

I remember I was wearing my hair pulled back into a sleek pony tail, these shoes, bare legs, a black wrap skirt that fell to the knee, and a taupe silk shift that clung to the body in what I would say were the right places and I had on a pearl choker and pearl earrings. Maybe there is no "type" - anyone could be a terrorist, yes. But did I with my little MacBook and notepad, on my way to the F train look really (come now, really?, let's be honest here) like I was going to blow up, or even had a thought to, or care to, or cross my mind! anything except maybe the gum in my mouth? That would be the only thing I was going to pop.

I get it though. I really do. What I don't get is the discrimination because I had or have an accent. That it is illegal in New York City to ask for another form of identification if someone presents you with an American driver's license (I did), then you cannot ask for further ID. Yet she did. I felt singled out. Make the example of. I wondered if it was the shoes. The shirt? The pony tail?

I flashed back to a girl in school when I was about fifteen who, as I was walking down the hallway one day (and my hair was long then as it is now), said loudly enough that I could hear her, "I'd like to take that fucking pony tail and just grab her by it, fucking thing always swaying back and forth...." And I remember not understanding that hostility either. Does this make me guileless? It doesn't make me stupid - I know this. It means that I do not think whatever way it is that this or that particular person thinks or thought. That a pony tail swinging should be so freakin' upsetting or cause such ire and envy is a source of great mystery to me. But hey... I'm living in the real world.

My shoes - the buckle is broken now. Of course, one cannot have such a history with a pair of shoes like this, all the interviews I have done in these shoes (given and taken as a journalist), and let them slowly dwindle away. No, they have to be fixed. The buckle broke one night this past winter - an absolute deluge was falling. I remember it well, and I walked with a friend through the pouring rain in a desperate attempt to find a taxi (futile, really) after our cheap umbrellas had surrendered to the wind (what do you expect for $5 from the local Korean shop on the corner, or any local shop on the corner in the city - they are built to last about five blocks - a dollar a block, I figure).

So there I am, in my lace and finery (jewels and binoculars, as Dylan says) splashing a path down the avenue arm-in-arm and laughing and freezing and awfully stepping into ankle-deep puddles and there it is, my buckle breaks, just unlooses itself somehow, slips, like the Gordian Knot.

It's funny how under some circumstances this would have been a frustration and would have just pissed me off, but under this, it was simply funny and yet another piece of a sweeter taste that was already in my mouth, honeyed and good. So there was no regret, no remorse, no need to "confess" my broken buckle, no need to run to the church down the street and say "Mon frere, mon frere, vite vite...aidez-moi, j'ai besoin de......" Quoi? What exactly?

Nothing. Spring is coming.
I am making my right way.

Thanks for listening.

s.r.p.

half of me

38th & Madison - May, 2008

I must put forth dual images of myself and neither is correct. There is the perceived strong she-can-handle-anything me (not true) and the she’s-so-fragile me (not true) but never is there the strong yet vulnerable me that even Bob Dylan had met, not knowing me, but someone like me, who was a woman in every respect yet when she breaks, she breaks just like a little girl. I don’t know if there is any other way to break, quite frankly. Do you break like an adult and fake it and pretend everything is fine? Is there some organized way” of having a minor breakdown of which I missed the mass mailing and details because if there is, I don’t know the rules.

I found myself, after months and months of pressure, after accomplishing so much in the past few years that I am honestly proud of. Whether or not anyone else is sort of relevant and sort of not. Yes, I care: but I care more that I did it. That’s the key. You do it for yourself. So after a crisis a year or however long ago, I threw myself headlong into work – unthinking, what about that space, that maybe even an inch or nth of a space, when the work is over – the space between projects – when suddenly everything stops and the work is done and handed over and there you are and the world is spinning and you realize suddenly that you have stopped.

This happened to me, of course unexpectedly, on Madison Avenue the other day, rush hour. I was seeing my friend Jacob, who is a kind man and a jeweler there and whom I have gotten to know because he works across the street from The Morgan Library where I spend and have spent a great deal of my time these past two and one half years for a project. So there I am with Jacob on an 80 degree balmy night and about to visit a dear friend just up the street at Grand Central, my favorite place in the world – Madison and Grand Central and Lex and all because, let’s be honest, we fill these places with memories and they are chock full for us and these are mine and the last time I was in this or that place, things were wholly different. It was the same weather, the same warmth, the same time of day, I had also just seen Jacob when I met a friend and we walked, as we did every day, hand-in-hand to Grand Central through the haze and the humidity, sides bumping and it was just our end of the day routine.

One time, Tom Wolfe crossed our path and I remember thinking, is it good luck or bad luck if Tom Wolfe crosses your path, as if he were a cat. I am a superstitious Scottish girl. It is in my heritage to be such. I am a witch – I consult our family’s book of white magic often. It’s been in the family for eons – it dates back to 18-something and is a rare book and I use it. It works on cosines really and algorithms but to me, it is pure magic. And more, it is always right. Or it seems to be.

I could be wrong.

I digress, as always. So there I was, after a particularly successful trip to New York again, and it’s May and I’m happy and I feel good and I know I look healthy right now and perhaps I can allow myself some light – that someone tells me, You look light, as I’ve been told a thousand times over so I buy it. Okay, I look light. So I leave Jacob, and why is it then that I get a half block and begin to bawl? Why is it that even before I left Jacob, I began crying? Much to his confusion, I just began to cry. I believe it was “Are you going to see your friend?” and he meant my friend from last time. No – I said, A different friend now.

Nobody would be meeting me on this day. Nobody would be waiting for me or me for them or holding my hand or carrying the proverbial books home from school. No. It was just me and my heavy bag and my sun-freckled face and my dress and my Converse sneakers and suddenly I felt stupid and lovesick and years of yearning came flooding in.

Jacob does what he knows how to do – all he can do. He hands me tissues. He says, “It’s okay, it’s okay” knowing it’s not really okay. Then because he knows I collect gold bands and that I show him one that is very sentimental to me and he is one of the few who knows the story, he brings for me a three ring band like a Cartier rolling ring of rose, white, and yellow gold and he says, Please, take – I want you to have it for $35.

It is at least a three-hundred dollar ring, but when he slips it onto my middle finger it fits like Cinderella’s fragile shoe, and the ring makes me cry more. Jacob is lost. I pay him the money because I can’t say No because he won’t let me, so I take this ring and with this ring I leave and I wear it next to my other gold bands on the wedding finger on my right hand (European wedding finger and I am European) and it makes it all the worse. Here I am, a lucky girl: I have everything going for me, so I’m told these days especially. And I am on the corner of 38th and Madison and by now, I am really crying and trying hard not to show it and walking slowly because I can’t carry the weight of my own anything anymore; that which I carry literally, that which I carry figuratively.

I did – that is, before all of this I did. I never let my friend carry my bags really. Sometimes, the biggest ones I could not manage. But it was just having a hand in mine at the end, the beginning, any part of the day really, that made it more bearable somehow, because life can be so unbearable. I do not mean to say that mine is so awful, only that there are considerations that others do not have to consider and that’s fine. I ask for no special accommodation than that handhold, and so there I was, without it, with no consolation, no shelters from the storm anymore, no safe harbor, mix all the metaphors and I felt utterly lost.

A few kind people asked if I was okay. And they say New York is a rude city. Hardly. People stopped, concerned, worried. I told them all the same lie: I am fine. A simple lie, and I put on my big sunglasses and lit a cigarette and said to myself Enough, and Stop and made my way to Grand Central on the main concourse where I did meet my friend and we had drinks and it was lovely. Truly lovely with someone I adore – and was looking, am always looking, forward to seeing, for there are few people with whom one can truly trust and share. So me, the wine, his Cosmopolitan or something like that, and me in my summer-dress and outside we go afterward for a cigarette because even though neither of us “really” smokes, I happen to have cigarettes so why not – so there we are on Lexington, smoking cigarettes by the door of the terminal, trying to give the damn things away to homeless people who are scrounging the ashtrays for half-smoked cigarettes, yet even in that, they will not take a full one form us. They retain their pride. Nothing’s for nothing, they think, and they move on. We decide the best approach then is to plant the cigarettes like tulips in the sand of the “ashtray” and we pop them out as if arranging flowers, ready for the picking. This way, there is no obligation. We leave them there.

He tells me, my friend tells me, after looking at me: my hair, falling down but held in a bun by two pins, falling about a flushed and freckled face and a summer dress and my shoes in my bag and my Converse on my feet because I just have a “thing” which he says is a “Lolita thing” which is attractive, or is to some. I’ve heard that before to. He said that. Always said it was the “juxtaposition” of the feminine of me with such things as my Yankees hat or my Converse. Me in a beautiful silk dress that drops to my blue Converse. That’s me. Unmistakable. Untrying. I’m not cool. I’m not “arty” I’m not anything other than me.

So, back to the beginning: I am vulnerable, I am strong. I am neither, I am both. I am that girl you saw on the street corner on Madison, triumphant in the moment, entering Jacob’s shop with a bright and luminous smile on my face and I am that same girl you saw leave, lost and sobbing, trying hard not to show it, missing everything I do not have and wanting only to rewind or move forward in some way that is possible. I believe anything is possible, but it takes two. It takes two and I am one. I walk alone these days, arms loosely at my side, and my nightmare, so stupid, it takes the form of listening to O Mio Babino Caro – I am listening, trying to get my friend to listen to because it is his, truly his, as I always knew, but he cannot hear, or won’t hear. I can’t say. I only know I am there, standing in the same place with the same aria and the same Converse and looking, later, over the same Harlem River and everything has changed and nothing has changed.

lettre pour un ami

Function: adjective - Epistolary. 1566, English - def. 1. Of or carried on by letters (an epistolary affair...).

I wrote this letter to a friend just this morning - an email - and I realized that I had just said everything I want to say for this editorial, this Word, because it is the truth of the moment. It is, at least, how I feel. So I send it to you in it's entirety, with all of the boring details and the other details that I think are perhaps, worth sharing.

* * * *

Goodmorning love,

Health is holding up okay. I need a bloody root canal, which I am having this Friday and am naturally, less than thrilled about, but what choice? So i am going in for that - people tell me it is not as bad now as it used to be and that, in fact, it is no worse than a filling, which I find hard to believe, but I don't really have much choice in the matter, now do I, so I have to go... ugh.

Great about promoting the Carroll. I've attached the cover for you (two images; i think one is smaller, so you pick) and it would be great if you could build in any links. I have a piece to run on Cyrano, but don't know how to promote the piece. I want to run it on Tant Mieux on Cyrano. It is about Lewis Carroll and is called Love as Nonsense (which I thought you would appreciate - I know that I do... these days, I feel love is nonsense in that it makes no sense, and as Carroll wrote in one of his books, Reason? and Rhyme?

Good questions to ask any lover, because is there ever any reason or rhyme to the things we do to each other when we are together in the moment and after, after the split - no matter what caused it, even if caused by the boom of a third party - it becomes irrelevant because to my mind, someone who truly loved you would regardless "find a way" and I don't mean that in a Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights kind of way (one of Carroll's favorite books - an odd choice for a man who was an ordained Deacon and by all accounts, asexual and died a virgin, yet clearly, from his poetry, he had a clear sense of the romantic and surely it was purely an act of will not to act on it... an act of will... this is key).

So we make ourselves promises: I will not call "x" and further humiliate myself because the lines go both ways; I will no longer think about "x" because no doubt, "x" has moved on and is no longer thinking about variable "y" (that is you) and perhaps there is even a new variable on the scene, let's call that variable "?" for unknown, and we all know that it was variable "f" that came between x and y. F for fuck you, get fucked, fuck off, drop fucking dead, fucking cunt (not a word we are afraid to use in Scotland - it's tossed about so casually that I think no-one could ever say that word to me and offend me at this point: interesting that for the most part, especially in America, I have noticed that when you use the word cunt to apply to a woman she is so offended (and yes, I generalize here) that it seems to me she will practically melt or die of embarrassment or some such). To me, the question is Why? It's really not that big of a deal. We say in Scotland, or even in Tottenham where I was raised, "It's been a cunt of a day" as in, the day stank or sucked or however you want to put it. It was a difficult day would be the translation.

But here, the word "cunt" takes on an entirely different meaning and one is supposed to be leveled flat by it. That is the intent of the person mouthing the word. Screw me for laughing, but I find the whole thing rather absurd. Sort of like the way variable "f" had labeled me a "whore" (and just in case I didn't get the message, I was "whore whore whore" then oh-oh, the big capital letters came out and it was there, in black and white sans serif (bien sur, because she would never use a classy serifed type) and it just said "WHORE WHORE WHORE WE DON'T WELCOME WHORES INTO OUR HOME YOU WHORE." That's five times in the all capital, which I assume was intended to, oh dear, frighten me (it didn't), intimidate me (it didn't), make me believe it (it didn't - labels only stick if you believe them yourself and I do not. I refuse the notion). I know myself as otherwise and it is not as "whore" it is, my friend, au contraire and you and I both know it. Undoubtedly, it is likely that I have been with fewer men in my life than variable "f" (and "f" is for fucking!!).

No. In fact, variable "y" once told me that he was standing before a mirror and he saw my reflection next to his (as did happen in real life very early one morning as we stood before the bedroom mirror when he was zipping my green crochet dress), and he said he saw nothing but "all innocence". "It was strange," he continued, "It took me by surprise. There was just such Goodness."

I can only tell you all of this, mon cher, because I saved both sides of the correspondence for years, so I know verbatim what he wrote. Too bad I didn't tape conversations, though that would be creepy.

Isn't funny the things we miss - a voice. There is so much in a voice. A whole person is formed from a voice. His rich as molasses accented voice that he always claimed was a "whine" which it is hardly. It is thick and rich and most of all, it is what I want to hear. It is how he says my name and likewise, it is my voice his ears longed (and maybe still long) to hear. He wrote, "...the way you say my name...just as I like it). We know what that means. It is held within a sigh, within a moment, within an August or July or any summer day while the linden and the musk trees are in bloom and you sit with your skin summer-damp and humid and you breathe it all in and the subway smells good, and then you can smell the river as you cross it on the metro-north, and then you can smell the privet as you walk up hill and take the long way home and the privet and the mown grass (he used to say "moan grass") smells like him, or some thing you associate with a woman in your life. The city becomes, as one person said, a timebomb. Everywhere you go, because it is a small island, becomes yet another reminder of what was - or if you are still in it - what is. When it is what "is" then it is good and wonderful and joyful and you feel invincible as if it will never end and if you ask me, there is no reason for something that good to end. Not unless one of you wants it to - for reasons I cannot fathom if a third party (again with variable "f") determines to build / construct a wall between the two of you.

A love can be that threatening to someone that they actually think they can "forbid" two grown people from seeing each other. Forbid! That's akin to being "forbidden" to do something as a five-year-old. How preposterous and yet, variable "y" is so intimidated by "f" that this person you so once loved, you thought you knew, suddenly turns into someone totally different. And life as you knew it explodes, or implodes, but the building comes crashing down all around you - your whole world, (so implodes) and the weight of it, the weight of gravity, is just too much to bear and you sit Shiva for months, maybe years, I don't know. I just know that you don't simply "recover" when neither of you ended it. When it is ended by a third variable. But maybe that is just me, love. Maybe that is just my heart - I cannot know "y"s, because I don't know Why. I don't understand any longer the Why of "y". I am utterly lost, confused. Where did the "y" I knew and loved go? And why?

So you see, my friend, I am utterly lost still. Trying to sift through the rubble to see if there are any bodies left and the horrible realization in a dream last night that the only body beneath the rubble is my own and I am looking for myself but it is no longer a search and rescue mission, but a "search and recover" mission. A palpable difference. There is no rescuing anymore (I used to have dreams in which he would rescue me from even my epilepsy... I was being chased by 10,000 bolts of blue and suddenly, a hand would reach out from a giant helicopter and pull me in and it was him. I would be running down the broad avenue, past the United Nations building, my clothes tattered, my ballet-slippered feet bleeding and ripped to shreds and by magic, there he would be, pulling me on board and I would climb in and sit next to him, but in my dream, or maybe in my sleep in real life, I was seizing, and I said nothing, only flipped his palms over and traced the fine lines there - and odd dream, yet so beautiful. It was one of those repeating dreams. I had it over and over and over).

Now, I dream there is a wide-gulf between us. That he is on the other side of the river. Same things - I am running, I am a gamine from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, only I have no-one to dance with, no-one to turn a ramshackle shack into a home for. Nothing. It is gone, he is gone, and as they way in the Song of Solomon, the only worthwhile line in the song, to me, "I walk these broad avenues in search of my beloved..." Yes... That is how the city is for me. A horrible reminder of what was, and what is no more.

So, I am being boring. Have been utterly boring. I will end only by saying that I realize that there is no answer to "?" at the moment, that we have "x and "y" who were and, at least on one side, in love, and then variable "f", that cunty variable that comes between and casts asunder (oh spare me the talk of vows - it's so bloody boring, n'est pas?). So where does that leave you? It leaves you with a future that is so indefinite that you try to move on, but you don't know which way you are going. A time for departure, like Tennessee Williams said, even though you have no idea where you are going and no place to go.

Maybe I shall go back to Woodlawn or something (yet another self-torture), but in a way perhaps a cathartic thing and I will remember all of the good and I will think of the "since then" and the behavior and how I have been discarded like nothing, as if I ought pin a scarlet A on my breast - here, let me brand it in, feel the burn - she's like that. Never!

Gosh, I didn't know I had so much of this on my mind and all in response to your brief and kind email I send you this mornings Philosophy. How funny; how sad.

Life is bittersweet, isn't it. Perhaps this is my editorial for this week - and I won't say anything trite like "you can't enjoy the sweet without the bitter" because that's crap. I can do without the bitter - I've had enough of it. I deserve better and I know it, and frankly, so does, or so should, he. He deserves better, only doesn't believe it.

Well, as Bob Dylan would say in his song, "Tomorrow is a Long Time" which I have been listening to far too much:


If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin',
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin',
Only if she was lyin' by me,
Then I'd lie in my bed once again.

* * *

I send you all of my love, and of course, gazillions of baisers.

S.

spring wrap-up, wrap-out

It is spring. Finally spring arrives and we quickly forget the long and bitter winter, praying that the spring and the summer will usher in something new, something positive. I can say that I love to see the beautiful women suddenly reappear, no longer hidden beneath layers and layers of clothing and fat coats, but to see them, as I see me too, morph into something completely otherwise - strappy shoes, spring silk dresses, loose underthings, slips and silks (if they like me, value what it means to be truly feminine, an almost lost notion, I think that is slowly slipping into an almost art-form).

I have long valued both the feminist and my femininity and never seen them as contradictory. One can be a radical feminist and still wear and want hand-made lace slips from Paris; it doesn't make your intellectual points any less valid. What you wear is, and should be, a reflection of who you are. I do not let others "choose" clothes for me - and despite having worked at a top fashion magazine (Vogue) I remain largely uninfluenced by contemporary standards of so-called beauty, because I live in the backward era, I think, still in the forties (tho I was never there) most of my clothes hail from that era because of a friend whose aunt passed away and left me all of her clothes, that were not in her size.

Why she didn't buy clothes in her right size - a larger size - says something right there about how we are "supposed" to be and how we are perceived. In this case, I benefited and am grateful, but in some sense sadly so, although if my friends aunt could see her clothes now, she would no doubt be happy that someone is wearing her white gloves, her beautiful net hair-snoods (yes, I said snood) and hats, carrying her suede-lined handbags, walking about with the light flutter at the hem of a katydid green dress. If you can pull that off, if you can do that in today's society then it is more than style, but it is about you and who you are. You may or may not stand out, likely one does, but not in some "art girl" way, or any other type, because you refuse all typecasts by being true to yourself and your own taste.

None of this means that I do not wear my Bob Dylan t-shirt with an old pair of Levi's and my cousin's gift of a hat that says "Bronx Baseball" or his Yankees cap. I still do... and they look good. I wear them, as I often wear my dresses, with a pair of Converse slip-ons and that makes all of the difference. He once told me, It is the contrast that makes the sex-appeal and I would agree with that.

Try to be sexy and you will almost certainly fail for there are a million other girls in exactly the same, let's face it, "uniform", and you look no different from the rest. You may "fit in" but is that all you want from life? To fit in? Or do you want to stand apart from the crowd and be glowing and glorious in the moment and more, memorable. I don't see anyone else wearing snoods and white gloves, yet i get more compliments on these things, on me as a whole person, precisely because they are different. What's more, one sees a feminine woman and doesn't expect the candor for which I am known because perhaps this is too forward but here again, it is precisely this contrast that makes it work. So work it...

I'm tired of seeing women - and men - but down. I'm bored with the 'metrosexual' and i was bored with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie years ago and don't see either of them as particularly chic, but instead as cookie cutter versions of what I expect to see on a red-carpet. Paris Hilton is still up to her old tricks, and Nicole Richie looks better because she lost weight and the awful hair extensions that clashed with the rest of her hair, but one senses that both of those things had more to do with a lack of self-confidence; i'll certainly give her her due for now having that confidence and acquiring a certain elegance that far surpasses that of her (ex) friend, Paris, who remains in my mind, essentially what she became known for in the first place - her internet video that is what really made her known. Not her modeling, for she was never particularly good at that, nor stood out the way some models do and have (Kate Moss, for example). No, Paris Hilton will always be the "party girl". Boring. I'm bored. If you're bored, stop reading now.

My point to young women, and even older women, women of any age, is to simply Be. Be not just yourself, but transcend yourself; be beautiful in the moment, try to eke out joy, for life is full of too much pain and you must realize that the moments in which things seem "calm" are always an opportunity for joy. That joy lies not with another person - as I recently and mistakenly thought - believing I could be only joyful with "him" what I realized, what a friend helped me realize, was that joy is and always has been inherent in me; it was yes, brought forth by him and that is no small feat and that symbiosis I doubt I will ever feel again. Maybe that's okay. Most of the time, it doesn't feel okay, but again, life can be difficult and you cannot regain yesterday no matter how much you may want to. It's gone. Nor can you carry forward what another cannot, for myriad reasons, carry forward even if they wish to themselves. Alas, not everyone is like me, or even like you; not everybody will stand up for what they believe in.

Me, I fought and would fight for that relationship still. But I cannot force another to fight the good fight. If one wants to cower in the corner, afraid of a bully, and that is what we are talking about here - a real bully - then who am I to say "jump". It may be the right thing to do, the right thing indeed may be escape and to my mind, he'd be happier and better off running a small chicken farm and other things he or we dreamed of and spoke of. In the final account, he may have meant every word. A lot of people mean what they say and yet they never follow through. Following through takes courage and to some degree, a certain lack of guile and naivte. You have to have faith and take the Ontological leap even if it doesn't always make sense because you have to believe that in the final account, it will make sense. In short, you have to be brave, you have to have courage, for love is the domain of the courageous. A coward, Gandhi said, can never truly love and he was right and this applies to this day. So watch who you spend your time with...

One cannot control the heart, the inner-workings of the mind and love does warp the mind more than a little. We become by turns someone else, we become an amalgam of something else as we mix and blend with another person and share a certain symbiosis that is not to be found elsewhere. I think perhaps this happens only once, and once it is gone, it is gone. This whole "there are many fish in the sea" is true, but it's also crap. Yes, there are many fish in the sea, but can you really, to stretch the metaphor, swim with them; is the cadence the same? If you do not naturally fall in step with another, perhaps it is time to give up the ghost. Or even if you did fall in step and they veered off because of some "STOP" sign, then so be it. They are living in a state of stuck, as someone once put it. I don't want to be there.

To be honest, the warm weather doesn't help me much, but neither did the bitter winter. The winter was empty and hollow and the warm weather is a reminder of what was. I smell privet and think of slow, meandering walks - the long way home. I think of silver-grey viaducts. I think of certain songs. I think a lot... and I try not to, but on some level, perhaps I know it is better to think it through (read: not obsess) but to truly think things through so that you grow as a person, even if the other didn't. There may be no lessons to be learned, not for you anyway. You may have done everything right and been glorious and beautiful and fabulous and as Nelson Mandela said, Who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world any... and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

He was right. I let my light shine and for a while, someone else let their light shine back and I - a fool and yes, naive - took to it as a beacon in the night steering me clear of the rocks when really all it did was draw me to the rocks were I pounded hard against the sea-wall. Sometimes there is nothing to be learned.

I would rather live as I do - risks, naive, guileless, gullible, and in many ways, love like a child because that is the only way I know how to love. Fully and completely, diving headlong into the cool waters where I break water ceilings and see the crystalline drops shining in the sunlight as I emerge, glowing and going and going and going.

All of this by way of saying that perhaps the change is not necessarily necessary on your part, but the change is required of some other or society or an industry and that you are just fine as you are. That being yourself is the best you can be if you allow yourself, if you give yourself permission, to simply be yourself... this is key. Don't forget it.

You can sit Shiva for as long as you want, mourn if you need to, move to Italy and get a job as a professional mourner and cry until you think the tears won't come anymore but they come and come and come, but at least you'll be paid for it and be honoring the dead. In short, put whatever it is you feel to some use... much as I write this now, I know not whether anyone will care, see it, relate, hate, etc. or think pissy pithy thoughts and it doesn't matter if they do think the latter. What really counts is that if I have reached that one person who can relate, then my work is done. I know this and I know whereof I speak, both fortunately and unfortunately.

I heed the roadsigns, but I still drive. As C.S. Lewis said wisely about life, "You play the hand you're dealt; in the end, I still think the game is worthwhile."

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.

spuyten duyvil, bronx, train station

From the train station at Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx, New York - this photograph taken in May or so, 2007, very early morning. Tant Mieux will publish a series of images from Spuyten Duyvil or that area of the Bronx since there seem to be few and far between that we could find on the Web and were not surprised (since we've been there) to discover that it is actually one of the greenest boroughs of New York City.

Spuyten Duyvil is surprisingly beautiful; i know a limited area - the walk from Arlington Avenue to the train tracks that led up a meandering hill as I walked the long way home, a rather incredible experience and so different from what one would expect. There are privet hedges everywhere, lime trees (plain trees, in this country you call them Linden trees - that bloom a glorious green scent), the waxy privet and mown grass scent of its delicate flowers, musk trees in full bloom, houses nestled into the side of the hill as if birds had built their nests there and settled like cliff swallows. I am not American and never knew this side of New York and certainly this isn't the impression one is ever given of the Bronx, so it is in the interest of this that I shall post some of these photographs and make an effort when next in NYC to visit and take more photographs of the general area. For now, these few shall have to suffice, but I found the whole of it most inspiring and therefore it crops up in my poetry as well which you can always find on the Tant Mieux page so feel free to click here or visit Tant Mieux.

Be well, welcome to summer,

s.r.p.

some things hurt more, much more than cars n' girls

I was just listening to the song “Cars n’ Girls” by a group called Prefab Sprout (if you don't know them, they are worth looking up and are an Irish band and well worth the time). The song is their response to Bruce Springsteen and before I can say anything, that is, if it remains that I have anything to say, let me quote from some of the song for you here and remember, the song is intended for Bruce Springsteen, whom I also happen to like, but Paddy-boy’s point is well-taken here (*note that Paddy is the lead-singer for the group);

Brucie dreams life's a highway too many roads bypass my way
Or they never begin. Innocence coming to grief
At the hands of life - Stinkin' car thief, that's my concept of sin
Does heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon ?

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

Life's a drive through a dust bowl, what's it do, do to a young soul
We are deeply concerned, someone stops for directions,
Something responds deep in our engines, we have all been burned
Will heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon ?

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

Little boy got a hot rod, thinks it makes him some kind of new God
Well this is one race he won't win,
'Cos life's no cruise with a cool chick
Too many folks feelin' car sick, but it never pulls in.
Brucie's thoughts - Pretty streamers
- Guess this world needs its dreamers may they never wake up.

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.


I want to sing or say all of this to some people in or in and out of my life right now. I want them to know that some things hurt more, much more than cars n’ girls as Paddy says, because he’s just so fucking right. I say this but I suppose my own situation has to do with relationships - but not a cruise by the beach in a hot-rod summer-romance kind of thing, but something based in reality that was fully and wholly a part of my soul and in this way then, holy.

Something about some relationships that are wholly holy, if you follow... sacred and sacrosant and this may leave you scared, but the force of such relationships can throw you into a full-blown fugue-state; it can mean you fall in love. Meet someone who just knows you - a way of knowing unlike any other as if your two souls were pressed together - and it can be a blessing or a bane or both. It all depends, doesn’t it, on what happens in the final account and whether or not that relationship comes to fruition. If the attraction is that strong, then yes, I believe it is sustainable, it is what you will do about it that counts in there here and the now because the Now, baby, that's all you've got.

Personally, I believe anything is sustainable if you want it to be. That it is your choice. That life takes work, and I think that’s part of the message of this song. Yes, I guess this world does need its dreamers and that’s great, but it also needs the pragmatist who sees all of this joy and potential for joy and knows the means of holding onto it so that it is not just a fast ride in a hot rod or a fork in the road you take for some brief time. One needs to have the courage to dream and the courage to act. It was Ghandi who said that only the truly brave can love. A coward is incapable of love, he said, and I quite agree for pursuing love, a love that is worth it, takes backbone because it may not be an easy road. For the spineless, it is a fork in your love-line that you pay no attention to because that would be just too inconvenient. How insipid.

Life, love, are often inconvenient. Rarely has my life accommodated me, but rather, I accommodate and bend and yield to it and that is okay. One has little choice anyway except to sit there like a slug and do nothing, or remain paralyzed as if stung by a man o’ war jellyfish – and I hate that. I hate that some people are just paralyzed and just sit there waiting for the strong among us to do the work and puzzle our way through stuff, as if we are cutting a swath through the heavy brush for everyone else to cross. Yes, I will offer my hand to help you through. More, if you want to jump and we are in love, then I will surely jump with you because I am that brave. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Brucie's cheap ego-validation and his refusal to acknowledge or pursue a greater kind of love. His idea of "love" is a ride on a roller-coaster at Playland in Rye and then you get off and it's all over. Yes, ride the ferris wheel in Playland, but don't leave off there...it doesn't all end in the Tunnel of Love; there must be something at the otherside. You must, quite simply, have the courage to follow through as in a game of tennis. Ping the ball back. Love-Love.

I am tired. I am weary. As Shakespeare wrote, Love, I have grown weary of this fond chase. Which wasn’t to say “Enough” or “I don’t want you” only, help me out here. Don’t make me do all of the work and let’s stop “dancing in the dark” to quote Bruce and get real. It all sounds so complicated, but life is as complicated or as simple as you make it. You can make it a very complicated thing, or you can leave off and stop trying to define things that are indefinable anything… take a lesson from our Bob Dylan, latest winner of the Pulitzer (and isn’t that about time!) and don’t try to define things. As Dylan noted, “I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.”

Things only require definition when they become known by more than two people. A thing between two people need not be defined, unless one of them feels some absurd, howling need to define, to clarify, I think you know the status of a relationship and what is going on between you and another. If you need to hear it out-loud, then the relationship probably isn’t working out. Clarification is not always necessary; I feel strongly one should just “know” and while yes, a validation is nice and sometimes important, you cannot hinge your actions on that.

I’ve had people ask me to define certain relationships I have had in my life. What sort of “friendship” was it – was it “beyond” friendship – whatever that really means because I do think some relationships absolutely transcend friendship and between people of the opposite sex, but does that necessarily equate with sex? No. Does it mean necessarily that it likewise does not equate with sex? No. It could swing either way. With enough of a soul connection, I think it’s natural to seek out a further physical connection and that grows out of that connection. Most importantly however, I think there really is no need to define unless a third-party gets involved and I don't see what a third-party has to do with two such people who share this bond. So long as there is no third-party, there is no need of definition. It does not require it. It is only when we, or often when we, begin to try and define our relationships that we run into trouble because we question what is essentially a transcendent gift.

I’ve seen this when there is or was no initial “chemistry”; so love can and does “grow” with the right person. What begins as an ordinary friendship, acquaintance will blossom and that person becomes “worth all the time in the world” or one of my favorite expressions, you’re favorite waste of time (thanks to Marshall Crenshaw for that line). If someone makes you feel more alive, invigorated, enlivened again, and you feel your blood move where once it was stagnant, hell, I would and do fight for that. I don’t understand anyone who would not. Who would willingly let that slip away and fall easily back into a “Cars n’ Girls” like life, because there is so much more to life than the simple fling, the girl on the train you see and wonder ‘what would she be like’ etc. etc.

Such things are trite, and I like to believe I don’t or haven’t gotten hooked on anyone this trite, although I am sorry to report that perhaps my choices, in as much as one could call them “choices” were not always so wise. But again, I think you are drawn to who you are and that can be problematic because it conflicts with prior commitments etc. One has to learn how to make myriad vows and keep them all without breaking another and this is tricky business, but it is wholly possible. I believe that.

Believe it or not, I too make oaths, the difference is I keep the oaths that I make; I do not pick and choose one particular person and say, “then I shall keep my oath to him or her”. If I make an oath to a friend, I shall keep that oath as well. And more, if I have a friend who moves beyond the bounds of any ordinary friendship, then I shall keep my promises to that person. I see no conflict there. I think to see conflict is a provincial way of thinking. Yes, provincial and boring, just like the way I began this piece about Brucie dreaming life’s a highway – so many roads bypass his way…

Yup.

for cyrano no. 1

les jambes ~ du matin

dysmorphia

image by j. best

oaths, promises, the gauntlet is down

It's that time of year when one begins to grow bored and not only with the self - because winter is long and unlike in the summer-time, I anyway, feel less dynamic. Energy is lacking, projects seem to move slowly, the sap doesn't rise as it does in the spring - though we long for it - and we move slowly against the wind down the broad avenues of the city or head into the wind of a country field or path. Either way, we are met with obstacle. Small wonder that some animals choose wisely, to hibernate and wait the whole thing out, not showing their face until the winter is passed and the sun is here again. Maybe I like George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" because it so perfectly captures that long cold lonely winter and the coming out of it.

"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent." - Bob Dylan

***

He told me as we were driving along the shoreline on the way to look at a big old house and the sky was grey, "Life can be viewed as tragic or comic," and i didn't believe him then. It sounded cold-hearted and dismissive. I didn't believe him because from the depths of my grief - a very real grief, i could see no comedy or nothing comic in the situation and could not imagine any day when i would. That day would never come. Never.

This, i suppose, or i know, is what all of the broken-hearted with hearts heavy as frozen-winter stones say. We say we will never recover and we mean it. We say we will not let this happen to us again, and I trust we won't. Whatever it was that caused us so much hurt, christ, i hope we have learned enough to not let it happen again, unless it was truly the wrong doing, and one hates this word but it sometimes does apply, "fault" of the other person - and in this case, the case i speak of here, there was fault so i lay it squarely at his feet, not my own and given that what is there for me to learn?

As Dylan said above and what I quoted, people do what they want, and then repent. In this case, he does what he wants or wanted, then tells me, which is funny because Bob changed his name too, but he's thankfully now proud of his Jewish roots as he should be otherwise it's a diss on the rest of us, i think anyway. Just as this person had told me that Nah, no more, he had decided that being Jewish wasn't really what he wanted anymore. It was to be a "WASP like you [me]" that he really wanted" (which is funny because i'm mixed blood anyway; neither here nor there. I could walk in either door, and anyway, i've never been a big believer in organized religion, although i like ritual so i've practiced as an Officiant for years because i love mouthing the words to the Evening Vespers and i like taking confession, even making it, i like the Episcopal Church - i like it because it isn't like other churches. But i digress too much. I suppose all religions have their things to recommend and not recommend, so I can't say much on the matter as i remain ignorant of other religions for the most part.

But "he" wanted to be "like me" (whatever that means - and again, I'll quote Dylan because that's why i chose his photo here because he seems to find the words that I cannot, "I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be." I wear a bracelet on my wrist that twists the old words "What would J.C. {Jesus Christ] do, to say engraved in gold and by Shreve's "What would B.D. do?" I consult it often. And no, the answer is not, "He would just sit down and write a song." You'd be amazed at how helpful this is. It's my own magic eight ball, only smarter. I'd put my faith in Dylan's words more than most. Sorry to anyone I've offended here. I don't mean to. Truly.

So he wanted to be a WASP, like me. That's funny. With my green eyes, blonde hair, freckles, dead-white skin (peau laiteause, as my friend in Paris says). The "sort of hair you constantly have to flick out of your eyes" he said. It all seemed so funny to me; i never took it too seriously, and when he said he needed to go to church for real and have me be not a friend so much be an Officiant in the moment and a true Spiritual Advisor, i naturally fell back into the role and sat in the twilight of the church on Fifth and read from the prayer book and ran through the service privately and although i would not this for anyone, and never have, I held and helped as he cried out demons through the service. That is my job as an officiant. I read the confession of sin in which one can make either a spoken confession or a silent confession. He chose to make a silent confession. All fine with me, i thought.

Did i know that i was part of that silent confession? No. I did not. Had i known, i would never have been the Officiant. I would have been, as I am today and will remain forever, truly disgusted and used. Right, he does what is convenient, then is penitent, then leaves the cool, even cold twilight of the half-lit church and does what is convenient all over again. Of course, it won't be, and was not, the only time he would go back to that church. No matter that he is Jewish. That like me, we two half-Jew. He decides now that, despite the fact that there is not an Episcopal lead in his family, that this on Fifth is his place now. That the God i took him to has taken him away from me. I say then, the hell with that God. I brought him to You and You took him from me. That is Him. That is God. Or perhaps that is human fallibility. I haven't made up my mind.

What i do know is that what i perceived as so tragic when i last went back to that church, alone this time, I sat there on my birthday, sobbing over the loss of something that perhaps i never really had - who knows, right - in the final account, words mean little, even though i deal in them every day, they are my currency and i mean them, to so many people, they simply shoot without thinking. They will say and do anything to get what they want... what is "convenient in the moment." So he said what he said for his own ends then. But when push came to shove, this person was no good friend of mine. I have been kicked to the curb, pushed down, discarded, and no matter if someone else has put the kibosh on it and said "nien, nyet, rien, pas" you "can't", one makes one's own decisions in life and although I can understand tricky and difficult situations, I think it's not unfair at all to ask for some common decency from one who was, I thought, a best-friend. But hey, screw me. So is that tragic or comic? Me sitting in a church on Fifth in New York City on my birthday, rocking back and forth for three hours straight, making not cries, but sobs that sounded like a wounded animal as i sat in a pew before a stone cold altar and thought about how much I hated God in that moment because I did and reading the Song of Songs in the Bible, which I could tell was not popular in the church for the pages remained clean and un-thumbed. I read the story twice over and thought this must be the most beautiful story in here, so why isn't it spoken of more. I read the line, "For I am the Rose of Sharon..." and thought, how odd that i had used that line before, but no doubt it had stuck there from a previous time. But all of the symbolism was there and it made me sad. "His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me." It seemed right after so many years. And since I had no closure (i hate that word) I wanted to see my (ex) friend one last final time to try to understand what had happened. Rather, I knew what had happened, but I had questions and valid ones at that and wanted only to discuss those and to say goodbye properly as one would. We owed each other that, and i felt, he owed me that. At least that. But no, such was the mandate that had come down from on high.

Instead, on that blazing day in September, I left the church on Fifth after the sexton handed me a big wad of tissue for my sobs - and after a young Rector almost approached me to "help" until I flashed him a look and he caught my eye and backed off for that look told him, as Graham Greene once wrote, "I hate your God. I hate him as if he existed." So I left, I "rose now and i "went about the city, the streets and in the broad avenues" I sought him "whom my soul loveth" the words still thick in my head from the Song, and the bell rang high over Manhattan and I smiled through my still pink and damp face thinking of the last time I was there but it was a wry smile and not one of happiness but of irony, but that's another story.

I suppose the point is this, to come full-circle, that what he told me that day, not the him of this story, but another him who was right about life being tragic or comic is true. Life can be one or the other and some things are just truly tragic and there is no comedy in that - auto accidents, suicides, natural disasters, terrorism, there is nothing comic in any of these things. But in some matters, in time, you learn to see something comic about the whole thing. I am not quite there there, but as the days go on, the less my best-friend contacts me, the more he remains static and in place and lets this once-close and what i thought was meaningful, friendship slide, the more I am forced to withdraw back behind my RayBans and into my corner and the iron-gate comes down again, never to open. for him, and perhaps not for anyone for it rarely opens or has opened (as I said, he was the first in twenty years, so it seems doubtful that it will open again...).

I caught myself the other day listening to, of all things, "I Will Survive" by Cake, which is funny because it's meaningful but a parody of the original but still has all of the same wallop and I thought for the first time, "O, fuck you" instead of "O, God, I miss you and I'll die..." O, Blah blah blah... shut up. How boring this grief is. How very boring of me. Then i thought of how he walked. Then I thought of all the times he acted like a coward, how he is acting now and I started to see a flip-side and I thought of what Ghandi said, (who else would quote Dylan and Ghandi in the same article, yet somehow they seem to make sense together,) and I'll end here because Ghandi says it all with here:

"Cowards can never be moral. A coward is incapable of exhibiting love: it is the prerogative of the brave."

thanks for listening,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

september, wednesday, 10. 52 a.m.

Endings are hard. Hard endings, that is that drop you fast and hard like a sack of winter-cold stones.

I took this photograph at six a.m. in New York City on West 11th at my favorite haunt where i used to always meet my best-friend for our three-hour tea talks. Always sitting there over steaming pots of camomile tea with a table-centered jar of honey and me eating spoonfuls of honey that i poured from it, sticky-lipped and smiling and laughing, always always laughing.

But not this time. This time, things caved in on themselves and on this day, which was also my birthday, the most awful September day I can think of (though I've never much liked my birthday anyway, this made it all the worse), I found myself, not by accident, at the same cafe only this time, I went alone at the early hour of the day before I was set to go to The Morgan Library for research on my book.

It was empty there at this early hour. Nobody but me, which gave me all of the room I wanted to take photographs (later that day I was to meet my agent who represents my photography also, so why not take more photographs; if nothing else I am a documentarian as I have said many times in the past - documenting in the last three years some of the happiest times in my life only now to find it crashing down all around me. People come and go, yes, but some people you expect to be in your life forever because every sign points in that direction. What do you do when that is not the case. When they suddenly up and go?

Not only was I in New York for research for my book, but to eulogize and speak at a memorial for a dear, dear friend (author Hans Koning, who if you do not know, you should look for his work Hans Koning (www.hanskoning.net) or Google him. Hans I knew first as an author I published while running my publishing house, Lumen Editions, and from there, my relationship with Hans and subsequently, his family and particularly his lovely wife, Kate, grew. If you want to read what I wrote and read that night, you can find on the web, but to find the original text go to my own home site on Tant Mieux and read O To Be As Cool As Hans Koning. I never met anyone as cool as Hans Koning. I doubt I ever will again. Read and you'll see.

People come and go in our lives and we accept that for the most part because we know that life is nothing if not change. But some people come and go, or they die, and they leave a hole. Yes, we grieve always those we miss, but somehow we manage to move on. Lately, these last, I find myself stuck, unable to quite move on, much as I still find it difficult to move on from losing a sibling. Some things you just never recover from and all of the trite "give it time" and "the indefinite future" that people talk about and "never say never" and etc are mere platitudes that add up to nothing in the face of real grief.

I am not at all ashamed to say that when I was in New York I spent my birthday at St. Thomas's on Fifth Avenue where I thought I would seek some sanctuary. Instead, I found none. I found only a cold and forever twilight-lit church and wondered what kind of God what take from me, take such people from me that I loved so deeply. Yes, that's selfish. Yes, that's part of life. But what if one of them is still living? Yes, that's part of life too, and as everyone's favorite quip, "God doesn't micromanage." Apparently not.

So I sat in the twilight of St. Thomas's on my birthday for three or more hours and I cried, or sobbed more like, sounds of a professional mourner you would hire for funeral of an unpopular deceased and I would be there crying and so there I was, my hands buried in my face, soaking the tissue-thin paper of a prayer book that was doing me little good because at that moment, and perhaps forever now, I have given up on God. I never thought I would say that. I never thought that after so many years of serving the church in the capacity as an Officiant that I would do such a thing, but there you have it - . So that was my birthday, at 1:37 p.m., Fifth Avenue, New York City, 2007.

sometimes, you need perspective to see things as they are. and sometimes that takes distance - physical distance away from any given situation. for me anyway... so i leave. call me a child. an escapist. whatever. i don't care. it's the mature way for me and the only way i can reach any sort of meaningful and i may say, adult decision. perspective. so this is perspetive, New York City, somewhere in the West village, in February, 2007.

les vertes

more than this - the kiss

I keep coming back to this film, and if you don't know this scene, then it is the final scene, or the almost final scene - the bitter before the sweet - the bittersweet - from the film Lost in Translation.

It is the moment we wonder whether or not will happen (or I do) for the entire film. I wonder, or keep wonder, whether or not they will kiss, for there is clearly a 'thing' going on between the two, and never mind the age difference, which may be 13, 14, 15, or more years, but does it matter? It may even be more than that, but i'm not certain that's the point. In fact, I'm quite sure it is not the point.

What I am sure is that each is going through a crisis in life and in their separate loves and having doubt and here they are, somewhere in Tokyo, utterly lost and alone, lost in life, their spouses far away (in Charlotte's case, for that is her name here), her husband may be with her, but he's not 'with' her. He's too busy taking photographs, flirting with stupid action star 'Kelly' and leaving Charlotte to wonder who whe has married. It's even funny when she calls a friend from her hotel room, over-looking the city and hum and buzz and says "John has started using these hair-products, you know... and I went to this shrine, and these monks were chanting, and I didn't feel anything..." Her friend (some friend) on the other end of the long-distance wire, seems clueless to Charlotte's upset, tears, or seriousness and ends the call with "Have the best time..." Charlotte, as she will tell Bob later, is 'stuck.'

Like Bob, who may not be as vocal about his problems - at least not to Charlotte - he too is stuck. He is not connecting with his wife Lydia (even when he seems to genuinely try it fails) and no matter what, both Charlotte and Bob seem or are rather fated to keep crashing and smashing and falling into each other. It's so obvious and inevitable then that they may as well become friends and actually just go somewhere instead of keep up some absurd pretense or ignore the fact that they keep running into each other - why not run into each other ono purpose? That sounds like more fun anyway, yes?

To keep it simple, for I don't want to get too deep into plot more than the main point I wish to make, Bob and Charlotte spend a great deal of time together and in a brief time, there is between them a real and palpable connection. It's the sort of thing that you know it when you see it, and maybe you've even had it in your life and if you have, then you really know it. What you want to know, is who, if anyone, is going to make the move from simple friendship to the validation that both need - perhaps a kiss is all that is needed - that little line - to take that little tiny skip (for that's all it would take here). All it would take on Bob's part would be perhaps just to just hold her hand and kiss her. This doesn't seem sordid to me. It seems sweet and under the circumstances, it seems wholly understandable.

It would mean something; yes, both are married, and if we are to judge in this context then we can overlay all sorts of moral issues, but the situation is too complex for that (and i say this after studying philosophy for most of my life, and seeing now that life is nothing if not shades of grey). What I want, perhaps what every viewer wants, is for something definitive to happen...again, that word validation comes back, because even though we know there is more at work here, we don't know. Does that follow?

We want some declaration. There is an 'almost' hovering here. Bob and Charlotte will fall asleep on the same bed; he will gently hold her foot while she sleeps; he will hold her hand when they run across the street; she will lean her head against his shoulder when she tires; all of this and yet... She will even get jealous when he, and even knows, stupidly sleeps with the hotel lounge act. When Charlotte sulks, and he knows why, he also calls it right when he says, "Wasn't there anyone else there to lavish you with attention?" But it's not a question. It's a statement and not a nice one at that. The point though, is that no matter what Bob may say, he does want to lavish Charlotte with attention and has been. He has grown to love her in some way and she him.

The problem for most people, and this is why perhaps the film is called what it is: Lost in Translation - is that this relationship defies any neat categorization. It's not as simple as Right or Wrong. Sometimes, capital letters do not apply. And you cannot say that it is love or non-love or friendship or non-friendship because it is love and friendship and a love that transcends friendship so the two are by no means "ordinary friends" the way one would be with other friends. They are, in every day parlance, "more than friends."

But the end scene. The one I chose to show you here; this is after Bob has said goodbye to Charlotte at the hotel. It is already now "over." Partings have been said and we think, somewhat disappointed, after all that, then it is after all, just like life. Nothing happened. No, we perhaps did not expect the two to have a wild affair for that would be unfitting, but a kiss - this is all... but that did not happen at the - goodbye-scene - and this much breaks our heart.

It is when Bob's car, on the way to the airport passes the sidewalk and he sees Charlotte that he tells the driver, somewhat impatiently, to stop the car now... and after fumbling with the lock and door, he is free on the street and runs through the crowd to Charlotte. It is certainly unexpected. We certainly do or did not expect it. Charlotte did not, and I doubt Bob himself expected it either. But there you have it and there they are, on a crowded street in Tokyo, now facing each other when he just holds her in his arms and pulls her close and she has to stand on her black ballet-flat tip-toes just to reach his shoulder.

It is then that Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear. We are not privvy to his words and never will be. I can take no guess at what this could be or was and maybe that's just as well because i can fill in the blanks this way and make it my own. Maybe that is what Coppola intended when she wrote that end. I'm not sure. I know that it makes, as you see here, Charlotte tear up, break down almost, and that she holds on as tightly, yet with such gentleness, to her friend.

It is only after this - after he has said what needs to be said - what he has needed to say all along, one thinks, that Bob does what, thank god, we have needed him to do all along - he kisses Charlotte. Not a brief kiss on the cheek, but a full kiss on the mouth that lasts and lasts, with neither wanting to let go as Charlotte stands on the tips of her toes still, reaching up to his mouth while he embraces her.

Thank god, I think. I can breathe. It's not that the whole film is about a kiss. It is rather that the film has been building up to this moment and one thinks at the end that the moment was going to slip by and to watch this so, to think it so the first time is almost painful.

But after this - after the car has stopped, after Bob finds Charlotte on the street, after he whispers what he whispers, after she leans on his shoulder as a friend yet not friend, after they kiss as lovers yet not lovers, after they do what they do have done and will always have as friends but more than this (which is a song that Murray sings in the film - "More Than This" by Roxy Music, during which he looks at Charlotte a great deal - another part of a long, drawn-out flirtation in which both are coy, shy, bashful.)

It is good to know that sometimes, as Milton said of so-called 'backward lovers' that the 'coy shall bashfully yield..." How much it must have taken for Murray (Bob Harris in this role) to step outside of himself and walk up to Charlotte so boldly, and how brave of her to accept what was offered and not freeze, not run, and more, to steady the course the entire way through all of this. To maintain her patience and believe that this was or was not meant to be.

Some things are fated and there is nothing you can do about it no matter how hard you may pull against it. One has to ask anyway, why the need to pull?

Thanks for listening.

s.h.r.p.

be brave | bare your throat

I only know one way to live and that is bravely.

could be ....

disheveled elegance | falling hard in love

What is it about the in-love or the newly in-love that makes them so awkward, yet so elegant in their way. How they seem all elbows, knees and ankles, leaning conspiratorially over tables, having conversations about nothing, about everything, comparing palms and making eye-contact meaning with eyes that gleam in some way that is obvious to all others and if we are in love too then it makes us smile and recall our own beginnings and if not, then we see those others whose bile seems to rise and who seem to practically spit with yellow-green hatred and think such things as “get a room” when a perfectly normal kiss is passed between lovers at a café table. >> more >>> more

les mains - these hands | how much they say

It's true. The old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words, especially in the hands of the right photographer and that doesn't mean the 'best' photographer, just the one for the moment or the one who knows his or her subject well and can really get them, capture them on film; this is a gift, a friend told me, that not every body has. She said that I'm lucky I have I; which was news to me because I've never thought of myself as a photographer of anything other than snapshots and really when push comes to shove, that's all these are, snapshots; just a little more interesting perhaps, but that's all >>more

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a time for departure?

Tennessee Williams said, “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.”

It’s a slippery statement but at this juncture, I can relate in that I feel a need for departure – be it from a relationship or place – it is a departure all the same. The scary thing about departure is that you don’t know where it leads, as Williams says. You know where you were, or you think you know here you were or perhaps you did and now it has been changed, dare I say edited, revised, history rewritten? This happens: people can be conveniently revisionist when it suits, and this hurts. They will take years of a shared history and with one mark of a red-pen and a red swoop erase the whole thing as if it never happened at all. They do this as a way of saying “you never have met” (Reference Bob Dylan: “I Don’t Believe You” who tells us, “I said it’s easily done, you just pick anyone and just act you never have met….” Clearly he too had his run-ins with the type.) But departure – departure is a strong word because it means leaving. It is a verb. It is an action. It means you actually physically or emotionally or both actually divorce yourself from a situation, place, state, person, and you divest certain symbols of their meaning such that the place from which you depart becomes not the fertile land that it once was, but you too, in order to make the leaving less painful, revise and leave in you past a vast tundra with endless horizons and in it, there is you and a whipping wind and the person who once was but is no more (or not as you once saw anyway; now a stranger – the known now then foreign, this is the nature of estrangement.) From this place you must both depart. It is barren of all that it once was. You have both emptied it now. Who started it is really unimportant. The fact is, one of you did, and no matter which one did, both hearts are heavy, both hearts feel the whipping wind. Both may deny any involvement or entanglement to save face; in fact, such is often the case – after all, this is part and parcel of the divesting, “There never was anything…” Thus, philosophically, if a thing never was, how then can it hurt? It cannot. It’s a neat trick, but emotionally, it’s not that simple. This is no more than simple denial. It works for a while, maybe even years, but it wears and wears under the heart is whittled bone thin or until it ceases to exist at all, making it impossible to love or empathize. This is departure. This is a time in our life. And it may recur again and again, depending on your life and circumstance. But again, Williams “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.” The second is the tricky part. We know about the departure. We all know that we have to go. But where? It’s the where that keeps us bound and afraid and in a state of stuck. How to get there from here? I never used to think I was good at reading maps, yet somehow, I navigated all through the Peripherique through central Paris, which is quite tricky during rush-hour. Sure, I know, big deal. But that’s besides the point anyway. The main point is that there is never just one way to get anywhere. These days, I keep seeing signs that say Caution, Detour, Dangerous Turn, Stop!, Bridge Closed or the finality of Dead End… Imagine that! Caution! Children at Play. In the end, it all comes down to you, the navigator. The Map is there for the reading, but yes, there will be obstacles and maps are notoriously wrong and roads ever-changing. Usually, the answer is the simplest. You see an obstacle and you think, “Climb,” when I say Why not just walk around? So why not take the long meandering path? I don’t know where it goes either. I don’t even know I go alone. I’m prepared either way, I suppose. What choice anyhow? It would be nice to have a hand to hold, someone who really cared to help me get from here to there, but perhaps some roads you need to walk alone. There are no cautionary signs here. No signs at all. Not even a detour. Just a route so small that it’s off the map, a tensile thin trail, you find precisely because you are so lost.

unrequited? not quite

Don't worry; it's a candy cigarette, before you begin to lecture or think the wrong thing. Why this image, because it captures the mood of the moment, which is sultry, summer, and yes, i find that these days anyway, i have an attitude that makes me what i've always been called, The enfant terrible.

I'm not sure how i got that reputation or why. Perhaps because i was fortunate to have had a successful publishing imprint at such a young age, published at a young age, and worked where i had worked at a young age (Vogue) so yes, i was the enfant terrible of that world - i was the girl with the Vespa, i was the girl of the moment, but always inside, i was the introvert, desperately trying hard to play the role of the extrovert, and never quite succeeding.

These days; i've given up trying to be what i am not. I am an introvert and though i can interact with people perfectly well and do well in social situations, i still prefer to just sit and quietly go about my business and work things through or think things through. I am only the enfant terrible because i was, from the start, un enfant maudite... One who never played by the rules a as a child, who as an adult, thumbed my nose at the "should and ought" of the world and felt that anything was possible if you set your mind to it and by God, i found out that i was right. That it didn't take a genius; that it took hard work and setting your mind to something because no matter how smart you may think you are - and you may well be - there is always someone smarter. The trick and this is within your control, is to work ten times harder than that person and then and only then will you know the taste of success. For this reason, i work ten times harder, do a thousand things at once, see them all through, and make sure that there are no loose ends; at least -that is what i aim for.

Not a bad aim to have.

On my mind lately has been the past - growing up and youth and the days we played on the wet, dewy grass of the estate my cousins used to watch for a wealthy family who never seemed to be home. I remember running throught the sprinker in my pale cotton slip. I remember the dampness at the back of my neck where my hairline began. I remember my cousin David loving me more than i thought was ever possible. I remember yearning and wanting whenever he or i had to leave and i remember the excitement of seeing him when i did see him , and mostly, i remember feeling very naive around him for he seemed so grown up compared to me.

David: David who took my hand and always gently. David who walked with me through the orchard on the property or adjoining property and climbed trees with me and sat with me and played hand-slap games. David with the same color eyes. David who used to trace my freckles and who noticed how they matched on each thigh as if they had been wet-ink pressed together. My cousin and only cousin whom i counted as such ( i had long written the others off) who loved and wanted me. How it felt so good to be wanted and how curious i was in those days and how shy and afraid at the same time. This much seems natural to me; to have someone so patient is rare and i count myself lucky. I can tell you, nobody would ever take his place, and that's fine. That i love my life now and would not want to go backward in time or that i do not love my partner now because i do and always will.

But oh those summers - those sultry, humid and hot summers in which he taught me how to kiss, at first a game - a test to prepare me for a "real boyfriend" and then a kiss that slipped slowly but surely into something much more than this, and how i was never sorry for it, that it never felt wrong. That for all of the family looks, for all of the attempts at pulling us apart, none succeeded. That we developed a language all our own and no matter that we went to church and confessed what we believed to be our sins, we always committed the same sin over and over again - if you can call it a sin.

I think context is everything; in some cases, this would seem too perverse perhaps, too wrong. Yes, cousins experiment but perhaps not to that extent. But in this situation, in our situation, it made perfect sense; we were there for each other and that is what counted above all else because it seemed to both of us, that nobody else was there - what a relief then, to find each other. What a relief to know that someone - and not just anyone - but someone long desired returned the same feeling. It could last a lifetime. Who knows.

What i do know is this: that love, all kinds of love, comes when we least expect or want it. That love is often inconvinient and rude. That it interupts other relationships without a care in the world. That it is selfish and wanting and yearning and that love will always find a way to get what it wants; that love, yes, is a being unto itself and there is nothing you can do to stop it in its tracks no matter how hard you may try.

Sure, will yourself not to love all you want; pray to the gods as i did. Or pray to God - but it won't change the fact of it. If you land squarely in love, or even squarely in want, you are done for. On the other hand, it is just the beginning and you have something to look forward to - and more often than not, that thing is intense, or has been for me, though my experience, i admit, is limited. Very. Leaving me quite naive in such areas - but i do know love; i have been fortunate to know real love, not just the sort of love that is kind and nice and all kissy kissy and you get married and that is that. But a real tango of love - the sort that brings out a kind of reckless passion that would destroy everything in its path, and in turn, will build endless futures for you as well.

Should you find yourself in this position, falling in love that is, and wondering how on earth this happened or his happening; that you want it to stop, remember you are fighting a useless battle. That love will out in the end and unrequited love is a nice idea, but so is requited love an even better idea - even if that requited love is held in one moment in a kiss ... a real kiss. Then perhaps that is enough to make your love what it needs to be. Perhaps a kiss is enough - "thus with a kiss i die" she said. I think thus with a kiss we awaken - everything changes at that moment; it is the turning point and guilt is a useless emotion, so don't bother with it. Same is true for worry. Forget about them both and focus on what you did get - and if it is in the form of a kiss and only this, then take that for what it is, because there are kisses and then there are kisses. There is a difference.

I don't think i need to say anything more about where i stand on this issue; i think i've made it clear. You live once, or once that you remember. Don't let life pass you by as you sit there wondering what could have been or might have been. I, for one, do not want to be old and live with regret for lost opportunities. I don't think that really, you want to either. The ball is in your court - take life as it comes, but god, take it.

july 25th, 2006 - Hiroshima mon amour?

I recently watched the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, based on the screenplay by one of my favorite authors - Marguerite Duras - whose last book I published while I was Editorial Director at Lumen Editions. I published her book "Ecrire" or in English, simply titled "Writing."

It is rare that a film can cut through the nonsense and to the very core of what it means to fall in love, or perhaps a certain kind of love. I watched as the two characters - who for the most part here, remain nameless (she is the Girl from Nevers and he (Hiroshima, mon amour).

Rarely does or can a film about any sort of infidelity leave you feeling or rooting for the characters but in this case, you watch a slow union, a coming together that seems fated, almost inevitable (as she even says at one point - this has been following her whole life she tells us, an "inevitability") as the two lovers orbit each other and as they occupy a surreal environment as the woman is in Hiroshima to make a film about the war. Yes, she may be 'taken' as it were; otherwise engaged and yet somehow, when the two come together it seems only natural. As she says, and I paraphrase here, that this seemed somehow inevitable, as if she were waiting for this her whole life - a sense of destiny and fate.

The melancholic story of her life; how she fell in love with a German boy during the occupation - how she lived in the French village of Nevers and how, when her youthful affair was discovered, she was then shamed and had no choice but to pay the piper. So it is that her hair is shorn (a mark of shame) and sent to live in the basement where she seems to stay for so long, though how long is unclear. The one bit of hope she has is when a marble, still warm from the touch of another person, rolls in through the window grate and into her cellar. A green marble we imagine, the color of her eyes, which is made apparent in the film and in the screenplay (I preferred the actual book to the film and found it easier to follow and more intense.). Something got lost in the translation of book to film, it seems, as is often the case, even if this were written as a screenplay and intended as such, it is difficult to convey Duras's work in film as witnessed by the film The Lover, for no matter how good or bad you may find the film, it doesn't hold up to the book at all. The atmosphere is difficult to recreate.

Maybe I'm just at a point in my life where I believe in fate of some kind, though I've never been a big believer, I suppose certain and recent events have left me knowing that there are somethings you just cannot control - falling in love is one such thing.

I have found myself squarely in love and all without taking a step in that direction. How it happened I can't say. I just know that one day, and I could even point to the day, I fell in love. I remember how I sat drinking tea with him, how he held out his hand to mine and we pressed our palms together (I cannot remember the pretense, other than the sheer thrill of such touch), and I knew that after that moment, I was in love. And I knew too that he likewise had fallen.

Am I that girl from Nevers? In some ways I was - I had a prior engagement to say the least. I was not expecting to fall in love. I certainly never intended any emotional harm on anyone (yet this seems inevitable if one is otherwise engaged, married, involved.) Extricating yourself from a relationship long before another begins is the wise route to follow, although not always possible.

Nobody need have shorn my head; I did the punishing myself - wore that hairshirt for years and never fully forgave myself for the timing and even the, to be totally honest, the deceit that became a necessary part of our rendezvous - this much, I hated. And no matter how much I prayed (and I did) to forget the boy from Nevers as the case may be, I never could.

But unlike the girl from Nevers - after this, after falling in love again - a more mature love, I have not wavered from this, and cannot imagine ever doing so. I have had many an opportunity, but never once could anyone take his place - not in any way.

But I've digressed as usual.

Much as we may judge the Girl-from-Nevers or Hiroshima, mon amour - I find it virtually impossible, despite the fact that both are married. I know all too well the workings of the heart. I know how love warps the mind, how we find ourselves doing things we swore we would never do. If there is anything to be learned, it is this: always expect the unexpected, but always hope for the best. Be a pessimist if you want - and I am - but be one with hope.

thanks for listening,

s.r.p., summer, 2006


photo credit: Lizzie Tadoinot Parsons

a wink and a nod

Are they green and marbled, or are they hazel? are they rolling...are they moving and if so in which direction... we see the world through different eyes, and thank god for it, because if we all saw the same thing, it would be dead boring.

For my part, i had never met anyone with the same color eyes as mine - or at least, not exactly the same exact color to the T, until recently that is, and then i look and look and look and write and write and write and i see the same eyes that change color on the same day and even though i may not see him, i know that the eyes are the same color as mine. That i am not so alone, or a green eyed, yellow-irised pupil, so the colors change with our mood, and state of mind, mercurial to the last.

i've been told too is that i too am mercurial, that my moods are as changeable as the wind...that i go this way and that; that i move forward and backward at the same time, and sometimes one step up and two steps back. Either way, i'll know there is some person in this world, or at least, one that i've met, who has the same marbled eyes that roll to the grey and weary skies or conversely the skies of blue and stratus, a marvelous marckeral sky seen from the beach - would we see it the same way? would we see it through the same eyes - would the lens then be the same or would we have a different take, us two. My conjecture - i can't say; do any two people ever see things the same way? i doubt it very much... but to be able to see someone reflecting back your own gaze, some friend of mine called this Narcisissm, but not the popular use of the term, but in the real use of the term - that we see ourselves reflected back - it's not about kissing your own reflection, it's about recognition and curiousity perhaps, but not about vanity or arrogance. You may not even like yourself very much and see that in someone else - the proof is in the puddding. Either way, it is amazing to have somene meet your gaze with the same eyes and at the same time.

I am blessed to have this experience i think; i don't think most people do... i don't know how i got my color eyes or how he got his, only that i am glad we both have them and i am glad that we see one and other it is instant recognition. How much more comforting could life be than that?

s.r.p.

true love?

How do we fall in love and why? I suppose now that spring has passed and the full heat of summer has come on, then in some ways, we are in heat ourselves - hot, humid, sweaty, releasing more molecules of who we are to the air. But why love? Infatuation is a different thing altotogher... it lasts for a while, and it is red-hot when it lasts, and then the flame burns bright and is snuffed as quickly as it burns.

That said, the first step to love, of course, though, is infatuation - that intial phase is important and if you're lucky, it will last a lifetime, and that flame will never go out; i'm lucky... our flame has never gone out, tho things wax and wane, such are the tides of any relationship. The ebb and flow of life, of lovers.

I have had few in my life, and have never been single for any period of time that would really "count" - i suppose that makes me a serial monogamist - but during this time, i can say that my husband must surely have desired others, (i can only assume, for monogamy does not come naturally), and as for me, i cannot say with absolute certainty that in my life, i have not felt the same way, so i do know what it means to feel this way, only that it never takes away from my relationship -- or so far has not. that that "rubber band" as my husband has called it, can stretch so far and never break... we share in the term in French "atom crochus" - two atoms that cannot be pulled apart ever.... this much i know to be true... that no matter who may flirt, who may try, no matter how hard, as Crowded House wrote "they come, they come, to build a wall between us, you know but they won't win...."

Never forget that. The lessons we learn from love, we learn that infatuation can lead to true love, and hey even if it doesn't a good flirt never hurt anyone really - unless that deal is just not part of the marriage for reason a or b, a good flirt (even better if you are single), can be good for the soul, the ego, the exercise of the mind - keep it going....do as you will, and what is right for you, just make sure you know what you are doing for love can be a rocky road indeed. I need not tell you that.

speak now... photos say more

Assorted photos and essays from Tant Mieux. These are more rapid-fire thoughts than philosphical treatises, but regardless, we hope you will enjoy them. Please feel free to visit The Tant Mieux Project, of which this is just a small part by clicking here. We are grateful to Carl Johnson as well as Lizzie Tadoinot Parsons and the Parsons Gallery for allowing us to use their work as official Tant Mieux photographers. For questions or to contact Editorial Director Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, use the Contact Link from Tant Mieux. Thanks for visiting and I hope you'll find work here that moves you and that you like. -
sadi ranson-polizzotti, 2006

danseuse

there is not enough joy in life. or not in my life anyway, and so i bring it in by dancing, and yes, by speeding, and although this is not safe, and hardly recommended, and i don't recommend it to anyone and i dont' speed that fast anyway -- i must say, i prefer to dance, to tango with my husband, or just dance alone - but always always to keep the dance in life and interpet that however you like, because life is a two-step cha-cha, a one step tango, a waltz, it is what you want it to be. In this regard, we choose our partners and we go and we swirl and tho there are those who plead "i cannot dance" we wonder about this, or i do anyway, because i believe that anyone can dance under the right circumstances and with the right partner - and i tell them this. Do i believe i'm the right partner? Sometimes and when i say so to someone, when i say, coquettishly, You just haven't found the right partner, by this perhaps i mean, ME, yours truly, and i do mean that.

Dance with me and i'll show you all that life has, because it is in the dance and it is in the tango especially, in the push and the pull of it, especially in the flirt and the passion, and in the early stages it is there, and if you are damn lucky (as i am and i thank god every day for this) then it will last and last and last and will be there forever. No matter how much he protests, he can dance. My husband can dance, and this much i know. If he can, as i would say, baise moi, then he can dance with me too....

Enough said on this front. I keep my dancing shoes on - just in case; i'm always at the ready. Never be caught unprepared.

s.r.p.

Saving Grace and Society

Getting one’s head messed with is a tiring process if nothing else. Not only is it painful for the recipient, but surely, you think this cannot be any fun for the person on the other end doing the doing, unless they’re into some weird Voodoo that you don’t know about and that has changed everything and they’re now using you as their human wax doll, sticking pins in your mind where your emotions are, where you now hurt, where your heart is, a crystal cathedral that shatters into a thousand bits, of glass when the pin touches the high arch and you are done for. It shatters to glittering, glistening pieces and falls to the ground where I lie – pretty, but pretty wretched and hurtful as well.

I am tired, I admit. I am too tired to play games now. I want to live and not pretend we’re in junior high school, I want to do away with gossip and the wrong conclusion and so much judgment because if we turn that mirror around and if we turn it on you (meaning the universal you, not the personal you the reader), then I wonder what we would see. Would we see perfection? Would we really see, if we look deep down, someone better than I or would our foibles just be different?

I can’t say. I can say with certainty that I know my foibles and much as I may not like them or they may bother me, even my own minister finds my adventures in my own world of sin somewhat entertaining telling me they (my sins) are rather “sweet” (his word not mine) But my sin will not be told outside the confines of the confessional (sort of like lawyer client confidentiality) And it cuts both ways. The way you hope that when a friend makes promise to you that they will keep and honor that promise.

I’ve long worn a promise bracelet – a bracelet just of a simple thread that falls off when the promise comes true. At least that’s what I’ve heard form several sources and I chose to believe it and so am never without a thread of something on my wrist. In my dream, I was wearing said thread but with beads on it and suddenly the thread broke and the beads went everywhere, tumbling to the ground like so many minor marbles… I remember in the friend shouting at me to find all of the beads. It was for this person that I had made the promise yet his anger that I could not collect all the beads made him angry, full of fury (and yes, sure, signifying nothing). I could give my dime store analysis about “getting it all together and dhow he feels that I an “disheveled” (hey but at least I’m elegant while being so…That I’m losing my “marbles” so to speak., You could over lay a bunch of interpretations but the simplest one of all is that someone was ungrateful.

Gratitude too is hard to come by. I’ve met people who I thought for sure would be grateful or at least not attack, I’ve written poetry for people – FOR a person and though the poem was no doubt not the work of Keats, it was good and some of the best I have to offer. Instead of thanks what I found was mere confusion either because they could not or would not or willfully misunderstood the poem (likely the latter) or they just expected something material. Isn’t something home made so much better? Aren’t the books, the CDs, the tapes we make – don’t’ these all mean more than any of this other stuff that’s out there?

My point is so simple yet so complicated… we live in a world that is too often lacking in grace and in such a place, it is often difficult to maintain one’s own grace. For example, when the person who cuts you off gives you the finger, or the person who pulls up behind you in truck in the left lane when you’re going 85 or 90 in pouring rain and brights you for not going fast enough and you know that if you can’t get over, that if you have to hit the gas at some point, if they can’t stop in time (and trust me there would not be enough time they are so close), then what would happen? How can you have such grace then in a world in which you are toast?

I can’t answer these questions only pose them and say that we need to be kinder and less sloppy about how we interact with people. That if we would not say it face-to-face, then don’t say it online, if you wouldn’t say it alone don’t say it with your friends and if you wouldn’t do it with your mother watching, then probably it’s something (apart from one thing) that you should not be doing. These may be simple, but they are a start at some simple rules to live by.

A friend told me, I was charming, gracious, and lovely he wrote, but “forgetful.” Forgetful, scatterbrained, dizzied, a dink, a total and utter dizzy broad. I’m sure to him it was a passing comment but as it passed, that bullet skimmed the skin right off shoulder and I tell you, it hurt like hell and this was a so-called friend.

So tell me then, where will you or I be if not alone when It all comes down…? When the chips are on the table and it’s go baby go, one for the money and two for the show now go cat go… who will be there to save you? Certainly my little red threats will help no one as witnessed by my night terror. Instead, my friend will be there alone and on the floor searching for all the marbles he believes I had lost. This time, he tells me, he believes in promises, in hope.

Only then will he understand true grace and that is the worst part of all.

thanks for listening,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

B000920J3W

i dream

I dream.

This is what I do these days. I have a fever and I blow my nose and I sneeze, but mostly, I dream. Don’t misunderstand; these are not night-terrors or bad dreams at all. On the contrary, – these are dreams of harvest, of bees dancing and hanging like mobiles, of orchards ripe and rich with fruit, of apple and a perfect Eden and in it, I am happy and there, carefree and happy and all of the usual problems that plague me seem to have vanished.

More, these dream are full of wisdom: in one, someone says to me, If you do not sleep, you will not have bad dreams (a Yiddish expression and I believe I almost paraphrase here but am very close), but along those lines. The dreams, unlike so many dreams that have no logic or rhyme or reason seem to follow a logical line, rather like Plato’s Meno drawn in the sand, I am sliding down the hypotenuse of life and landing at all odd angles but that’s okay because in these dreams anyway, there is always some one there to catch me and I seem to land squarely on my feet.

In one dream, for example, (and I’ve made no secret of this here on Blogcritics, so here goes), I am being chased by my epilepsy – by 10,000 volts of electricity and there you have it, as I am running down Madison Avenue and finally cross over toward the East, there is a giant black helicopter – a whirlybird as I called them – and an arm outstretched to help save me. When I reach for the arm, I am pulled in and saved by none other than my own cousin. It is a dream of sweetness and of love and in it, I am grateful. I am also grateful when I wake up, yes.

In one dream, I am in a great church and there is the scent of incense filling up the room and I, or rather, we (another family member and I), are penitent but gigging too. We have confessed and are light as air, bright as Klieg as Tungsten, and we glow and glow and glow and yet, like the priest who says to us “… and pray for me too for I am a sinner as well…” he says, following the Book of Common Prayer.

We have everything to hide and nothing to hide. We kiss behind a pew. It is chaste but not chaste, does this make sense? Likely not. But this is my dream.

I can’t sort out what it all means. I cannot tell you what it all means because to do so would be perhaps to tip my hand too much or more or worse perhaps, to jump the gun and speak of that which I do not really know. I do know that I looked all of these things up on Google and discovered all manner of things, all of them good. Pears, orchards, gardens, ripe fruit, apples, ripe pears – and while many of these things relate to my real life, some of them do not and so leave me with a great mystery.

And so it is that I asked my mother today for a family heirloom. She has a big book that dates back to 1919 and is called The Book of White Magic and while it is not the sort of book I would normally turn to, with such dream and with such frequency, I feel I have no choice but to turn to some source (hey, I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours, one of my favorite lines of all –which Dylan changes from time to time, but that’s okay)…


I remember seeing this book as a child and wondering what it was all about and watching as my mother and her best friend would trace the fine lines of text with their fingers in the text and then count back the pages to the “answer.” I recall how the answer was always the right answer. More than anything, that is what I remember is that the book was always right. Not like a Magic 8 Ball right, that you could fit into any slot, but right in the sense that you just knew that the book had you pegged.

It was like when you were a kid and you’d been doing something you shouldn’t have and were then “caught,” like a kid with his or her hand in the cookie jar, hands and mouth sticky with tart au miel… It was forbidden to touch this ancient book for myriad reasons: for one it was old and likely valuable and secondly, it was and is a book of great mystery and one a child simply had no business touching, at least, that was the consensus in my family whenever I tried to touch the book or go near it. I could sometimes ask a question and they grown-ups would humor me by asking the book (again, even as a child, the book was always right…. so that tell me something).

These days, I want to know what these strange and curious dreams means: I want to know about helicopters (well that one was obvious, a savior, to save, someone who offers salvation, but what does it mean then to get on the helicopter and start reading that person’s palm? To flip their soft hand over and trace the fine lines?

What does it mean to dream of being in an orchard, even if you have been in such an orchard, even if you snuck away to said place even recently or not so recently, what does it mean to dream about it again and again? What do bees hanging above you mean – not harming you, not a threat at all, all perhaps memories but nonetheless, why do such thing insert themselves now and why associated with particular people?

Yes, I have done many of these things in my life and some are clearly memories or the present that is the past brought into the present through discussion through love, through so many factors, but what it all means is another factor entirely.

The book tells us only, Ask a direct question – in other words, don’t beat around the bush. Be direct and be concise. I’ve never been one to believe in hocus pocus but this time I believe.

Offer me forbidden fruit, offer, me orchards full of it and I shall collect it in my skirt, offer, me dangerous bees who will not sting but instead become my friends and I wonder, do I really need a book to know what I all means, or is it, like a fairy tale, so intuitive that it’s cloaked in mystery?

Thanks for listening,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

paying it forward

Sometimes, or oftentimes, all it takes is one act of kindness. I remember the film Pay It Forward and thinking at the time in some ways how trite but in others, how wonderful if the entire world did this… if we all paid it forward, the way I felt it was to me today. After all these years of my own paying it forward, and I’m proud and not ashamed to say that, I felt it come back tome ten-fold and what could mean more than that?I suppose my whole life I have, in one way or another, paid it forward – that I have passed on charms, objects, feelings, knowledge, quotes, books, all manner of things that have been of great help to me and although at times it was hard to part with such things, I cannot lie, it was the right thing to do.

I remember in particular one year in which I bought everyone I knew a copy of Henry Beston’s books “Outermost House” about surviving in a self-built cottage on the outer rim of the Cape for over a year and how the book struck me so profoundly (and I admit, I know his daughter, the great poet, Kate Barnes as well, which I found out after the fact of reading the book and hers too which I published when I was a publisher but I digress). I also bought and recommend to many people the book Drinking the Rain by Alix Kates Schulman, another great book along the lines of Thoreau (but more contemporary and in this way perhaps more relevant to those of a certain, perhaps younger age who have been through some serious break-ups or are going through such, for here is a book about learning to be independent again and to me, that is always a good thing…

On an entirely different note, to those of us, or those of you, disenchanted with the world at present, who can blame you: for this I recommend “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis or for those ill or who know someone who is ill, then “A Grief Observed” also by C.S. Lewis. Both were recommended to me by a very very dear friend during a particularly dark time in my life and they both helped me through and gave me back the verbe I desperately needed.

Today, I felt such kindness in return that I could have wept with joy, with partial sorrow but mostly with joy. I had recently passed on a Tibetan flat that had been given to me years ago to help me through a particularly nasty and aggressive form of cancer and also for my epilepsy. I remember all that my dear friend told me was this, When you are done with it, when you are ready, keep it going – in other words, although the film had not yet been released, she was telling me, Pay it forward. It was only recently that I could see fit to do this, as I’ve needed this charm over my door for years.

I finally did pass it on to my cousin e.e. who god knows, with the weight of Atlas on his shoulders, could certainly use it. As my grandmother, a true Catholic, always said to me, If everyone in the world went into a room and put down their cross and could pick up any other and walk back out, they would pick up their own cross and leave.”

What she means by this is that we know our own hardship and hard as it may be – it is ours and we know somehow how to manage it. It is intuitive and for as much as we may complain bitterly, we still would choose ours over someone else’s for as trite as it may sound, (and I do not mean this as competitive suffering) when I look at e.’s life, when I look at all he has to manage, I consider myself fortunate, status epilepticus and all. For all of it, for all of the illness, the emotional pains sometimes, the grief I have felt, I also am grateful for the great joy I have felt at so so so many time and those who have brought me that joy (including my husband, first and foremost and even including e., though he would deny this of course, but even with his own heavy load, he brings me great joy and every day. If only he could see it and believe, though I believe he is beginning to again…)

It’s hard to be away from home. I admit. I love this country a great deal, but to miss Europe, to miss my country is one of the hardest things in the world. I am fortunate to visit every year pretty much and when I do, it is as though the very hills of this verdant green are holding me in her arms the way a (good) mother would hold and nourish her own child, and, of course, invariably, I cry on the plane on the way back to the States. As I said, by now, most of my friends are here, but my true home will always be there (it’s an ex-pat disease likely, lol).

But really – nothing beat support and this is one thing I’ve learned if nothing else, in my great old age and my supposed wisdom. I’ve learned to not only help those younger than I, when I can, or if I think I can, but to try to make them laugh or to let them cry if they need to. In short, to offer up whatever it is they may need.

I am grateful, truly, to have so many do the same for me…. I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I pray all of us Pay it forward… because although it may sound silly, I promise you, it is absolutely not.

Be well and thanks for listening

sadi r-p.

the perfect CD?

For over a week now, I’ve been making CDs for my cousin. No particular requests, just CDs of “good stuff.” This, I find, is a daunting task. How to determine what constitutes “good stuff” exactly… I’ve been running through Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, Sir Sting (but in French), some French pop – Autour de Lucie and Carla Bruni among others – for old time’s sake, New Order’s ”Temptation” and “Bizarre Love Triangle” as well as The Replacements, “Waitress in the Sky”, The Doves “Firesuite” and Moby’s “James Bond.”

You get the idea. I even found a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel, which I like and which reminds me of a group I used to know in university called The Bed Spins and whose lead drummer I used to date hot and heavy and who graduated university to become a geologist at NASA where he discovered the world’s oldest fossil, or so the news tells me.

But making a CD for someone is hard work. I find I keep changing the music. I think I’m finished and then the next download comes through and I’m ready to make revisions. It’s like one of those projects that just never ends, which is typical of me. Or more, a project that can never be perfect enough because the recipient and their opinion is that important to you. That each song, each lyric, just have some significance, and although it’s highly likely the’ll not read into this as much as you do, there is a fleeting chance that they might and since they might, you have to do your level best because you know that for this, you will be judged.

Whether they admit it or not, you will be judged for these seemingly innocuous CDs, the same way a person comes into your house and looks first at your bookshelves and begins to evaluate you. i.e., Do you have Philip Roth? Saul Bellow? Nabokov? I’m pleased to say I pass that particular test (as an Editor, it would be a sin if I did not, but then, I know editors who do not…). We shouldn’t judge in this way, but the truth of the matter is, that we do. We are always judging and placing value based on books, music . Oh sure, deny it, but you do it – even if just a little bit. It’s only natural to some extent, no matter how much like the Dalai Lama we’d like to be and how nonjudgmental.

So far, I had started with one CD that I would make for my cousin. I now have four CDs, and although can rationalize each and every one of them for serving a different purpose and a different kind of music altogether, even I know that this must surely be above and beyond, even if there is some pretty rare and wonderful stuff on there that takes us way back, like Enigm/Enya and PM Dawn doing Memory Bliss (is that right?). Or Moby’s First Cool Hive, or Firesuite by The Doves or even Nina Simone “My Baby Just Cares for Me…” which is a great song and one I wish more people would play or know because I never hear it anymore.

The point here? I’m not sure there is one other than it’s impossible to pick out good music to some extent – to pick the good from the good – provided your list is “all good” how can you determine which are the best songs and which are the ones to leave off when you have a limited amount of space? How to determine which songs are too provocative and which ones are appropriate is another question. It may not bother me in the least, but it may bother other people. It may not even bother the recipient of the disc, but should he listen to it within earshot of anyone who does care, then we’re both in for a world of crap.

One does not wish to be inappropriate anyway. The trick then to find the right songs that are meaningful to you, but that won’t have a double-entendre so to speak; that can pack a punch with perhaps a message hidden in the background or in the subtext – this is how you know you have made a truly great CD.

Go to it, and tread lightly.

the list of the moment

I admit, I have been mooning about lately and so my present list of the moment, the current top songs on MY own list, which I do periodically, is perhaps not to be completely trusted.

That said, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't at least find it to try some of these songs, unless they are way out of your genre (so far that you couldn't crawl home), then I think why not give it a shot.

Without any more stalling then, here is the list of the moment:

Je Reviens - Autour de Lucie - This song just flows through the lips. It has an ever-present French pout about it, and a slight whispering quality that makes this glide out of the speakers soft as baby power hitting your face, a very gentle breath blown by a lover on the ear. This song seems perfect for anyone having an, or wishing to have, an affair or for the newly involved or those lucky few who remain in love despite the many years that go by. Suffice to say, I think this an incredibly romantic, but also sexual/sensual song. See if you can find it and give it a quick listen.

Ne Me Quitte Pas by Sting - because it's a great cover of a truly romantic song, and one not need understand the words to understand that this is a truly pleading song (the title, Ne Me Quitte Pas - Don't Leave Me, in French, for those who perhaps didn't know. Many versions of this available for download, but this is the best and who can beat Sir Sting.

Desert Rose by Sting, Arabic Remix - I admit to liking the original and yes, I know this isn't a new song, in fact, not many on the list here. But the List of the Moment is simply what I am listening to most. The Arabic Remix features more of Cheb Khalid, who is doing the Arabic singing, and it's just beautiful. Like the original, but better. I can practically hear camel bells in the distance.

Heroin by Lou Reed - What can I say? Old it may be, this song still has incredible guts and amazing lines (it's my life and it's my wife...) and so many other great lines, too many to list and more, it's honest. Probably the most honest song i've ever heard about addiction and is completely unapologetic, which in this case is good. More, why apologize to the public. Reminds of Kurt Cobain's Lithium in some ways. Same basic idea.

She's in Fashion by Suede - This is like the new version of West End Girls (Pet Shop Boys, which I also love). This song, though, has such great style. It sounds like what they are singing about, which is quite a cool trick. Highly recommend finding a copy of this song.

Thirteen by Big Star - Why did I ever put that CD aside? I just the late Elliott Smith do a cover of this and so wanted to hear the original again (Big Star are just a generally amazing band) and so listened to the whole album, but this song always sticks. Sweet, a backward glance. And I'll throw in here, Alex Chilton by The Replacements, which makes reference to Big Star and is also an amazing song.

Why'd Ya Do It by Marianne Faithful - I have never heard an angrier song about infidelity, and for this reason, it makes the list. If you don't know it, find it. It's vicious and so worthwhile and everything I would say in that situation were I in it. That's saying a lot - it's pretty serious. Try a sample if you can't find it to download, or just trust me and go buy the album Modern English.

All My Live by Evan Dando - Ah, one of my favorite artists who also did the song "Hard Drive" which made another of my lists. All My Life is as good as Hard Drive if not better. It's a sad song, no question, because all the things he thought he wanted he didn't want at all. You can probably listen to a clip of this at Amazon. It's from the album, "Baby, I'm Bored."

Hallellujah by Jeff Buckley - I've heard various rendetions of this song, even one by Bob Dylan which I absolutely loved, and then there's the orginal which nobody can really beat by Leonard Cohen, but Jeff Buckley's rendition has a poignance about it. It's ethereal, dreamy as if sung under water and if memory serves this was the album he recorded before he did drown. Regardless of that, this version could have angels weeping - it's that beautiful and that mournful. I know that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to rush out and buy a depressing piece of music, but trust me, this is a beautiful, beautiful song, as is "Everybody Here Wants You" on the same album. Check out both. They are both on my list of the moment.

Harley David Son of a Bitch by Serge Gainsbourg - A Frenchman singing "Eh, que'est que tu fais avec mon Harley..." is pretty hard to beat. It's funny, especially given that it's coming from S.G. who is usually so self-serious. Maybe he intended this as serious too. The joke is on someone, though i'm not sure who.

Cigarettes Will Kill You by Ben Lee - Great lyrics and a great piano key. The main refrain, "And I want a TV embrace..." Me too. A perfect song. It's that simple.

See a Little Light by Bob Mould - Reminiscent in some ways of Husker Du, but still all his own. Uplifting and harder, but still right on the money. This is a good one. If you haven't heard it yet - do.

Heaven by the Rolling Stones - Flowing and perfect. I would even say it's one of my favorites, but then there are so many.

and of course, we can't have a list without Bob Dylan - so the song of the moment for the Bob count is:

Can't Leave Her Behind - which is only available as a bootleg, I believe, and is hard to find. Not sure exactly how I came to have it, but if you can find it, it's beautiful and the fact that it's recorded in a hotel room, takes nothing away from the song. Dylan never released this song. It just somehow got out, though I can't imagine why he didn't release it.

Answering Bell by Ryan Adams - I love this song. It has a great ringing quality to it and is so different from the album that followed (Heartbreaker, though there is much to love on there, especially "To Be Young."). Great lyrics and memorable and when a song stays in your head that long, or comes back, then I think it must have something (that or it's really annoying). I don't find this one annoying. I find it pretty great.

So that's the list of the moment. What I've been listening to. It may not be contemporary, but it's where my head is at.

Be well all, and as ever, thanks for reading,

s.r.p.

be forgiving

It is January again, and soon January 26th, that awful day when my brother chose to end his life and committed suicide.

People tell me You recover in time, but you don't. Yes, you recover from other, more normal deaths. From illness or old age, or more expected deaths, difficult as they are, but a suicide is almost impossible to get over. It is as if my brother were a hungry ghost, walking the house, uneasy and unable to rest, or unable for me to let him rest because there is still so much that I have to say. I want to slap him with one hand and stroke his face with the other. I want to be a comfort and a fury, because part of me has been still angry. How to forgive the same person who, once upon a time, told me that this was not an option. That no matter how depressed I was, suicide was "never a way out" and that we learn to live with our pain because it almost always invariaby passes.

He was right, of course. I have suffered great pain in my life - cancer, deaths, my own other serious illness, Richard's suicide, and yet I got through it and I lived. I remember going through a divorce and thinking for certain that I would never be happy again. That the world would go on spinning but that I would stay still and that was fine with me. The wind on my face? Hah. Who cared about it. A friend told me I would feel better. I thought of her as Pollyanna at the time; I thought she was being ridiculous and did not understand the magnitude of the pain I felt, yet she did. She did and she was right. I somehow miraculously overcame that major depression and though others would follow over the years, I always knew that they would end.

As for my brother, he ought to have known the same, and lord knows, he did. But this time, he told us in his note, the pain had built up too much. He was tired of getting over it, of having things to get over. He was just plain worn out, and it didn't help that the woman he loved had recently left him and yet was still having an affair with him but would not leave her new and rich husband. I can't blame her though for his death. She did what she did and while as a sister, as a protectant, I want to tell her how wrong she was to do what she did, I cannot blame her for my brother's death.

Sure, I've blamed myself at times - sometimes I even blame myself now, but at the end of the day, it is to him that I return for he alone pulled that trigger. Small comfort that he did it in the bathroom and had a photograph of he and i and our dog at his side. That he took all of his "security blankets" - photos, trinkets, etc - and looked them over, turning them in his palm one by one, for who knows how long before he decided enough was enough and pulled the trigger.

We do know that the last thing he did in that bathroom, before shooting himself, was to call his girlfriend one last time and beg her to leave this man whom really, she did not love. She had left Richard because he would not marry her - because he did not believe in marriage (and if you came from our family, you might not either). But even this seems a flimsy reason to break up. After all, is't marriage in the heart? Isn't it a commitment that you make to each other, regardless of a piece of paper, it is truly what you feel and while legitimizing it is often a good thing, I can understand his reservations.

He'd seen it end very badly and he'd seen it, as did I, played out like Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, drunk and fighting and bleary eyed all the time. So no, Richard would not marry and the girl married someone she didn't love, mostly for monetary reasons I think, continued to see Richard, because she did love him, and in doing so, screwed him up more than he was already screwed up. I should note too, that it didn't help that he was manic depressive and not taking his Lithium, rather like Kurt Cobain who was also on Lithium, stopped taking it and then shot himself (for reasons I can't speak to). All I can say with certainty is that obviously the Lithium factor is a big one, for when he was on it, he was a different person - optimistic, energetic, hopeful and more. When off it, surly, depressive, downward spiraling and impulsive.

Impulsive enough to get a gun (for he didn't own one) that, oh boy, an idiot "friend" had loaned him, not accounting for the considerations. Never once asking Why, for it was hardly a hunting rifle and Richard was not the type to hold up a bank etc. He could only want to "borrow a gun" for one reason that I can think of, and don't bother defending this person because I have made up my mind. Again, I don't blame him per se, but I do blame the confluence of events that lead to this point - the lack of Lithium (the biggest factor), the girlfriend who still loved but who left regardless, the gun loaned by a friend, and his overall state of mind and rememberance of our childhood which was so clearly on his mind when he wrote on the mirror in large letters "FUCK YOU DADDY."

What more is there to say than this? I wanted to share this story because I think everyone has been at the edge of that place where we consider it, toss it around in our heads perhaps, but then know we would never do it. Or there are those who flirt with it more, cutting and playing roullette with pills or pills and alcohol; there are a thousand ways to be self-destructive and to ultimately kill yourself on-purpose/not on purpose if you're looking.

But I have to tell you: grow the fuck up. Enough of this sophmoric Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton crap. It's hightime now you left that behind, and it's high time that I forgave my brother because no matter what he did, I can understand the reasons why and though I often say "he stole my act" and I mean it, I see how many reasons there are to live. I've had to explain all of this to my other siblings who were younger at the time, afraid that because they shared the same blood as he, that they too might try and kill themselves as if this "bad blood" coursed through their veins as well. I had to tell them No. I had to tell them as I'll tell you, Suicide is never an option. If you want to do it, then go and do it and stop talking about it because I cannot be responsible for you anymore. I can't babysit you while you hold us all hostage with some emotional crises when we all have crises of our own.

I want to tell you so many things, but the words do not come easy, and so for this reason, I am including the words of someone who knows far better than we and whose speech gets me through almost every day.

"Our deepest fear
is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve this world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God
that is within us;

It is not just in some of us - it's in everyone!

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others!

Nelson Mandela - Inaugural Speech 1994

fields of gold

I am certain that if i could just get some rest I'd be fine. I am also certain of many other things these days that don't really make much sense. Mostly, I've been thinking of my childhood and my cousins, an odd bunch agreed, but of one in particular that I adored for a time, my cousin David, who struck me (at age 12 or so) as the perfect boy.

He was 19 at the time and far too old to be playing with little kids the likes of me, but I confess, I was in those days a little Lolita. I flirted, I led him on, and just as we hold Humbert Humbert responsible, a deeper understanding tells us that Lolita played her role. Yes, Humbert ought have known better, but children can be seductive, as our Lolita was. This much is a fact. It doesn't mean they want anything or mean anything by it, only that they're not wearing fairy wings and halos. This doesn't mean that children are asking for sexual situations, only that it is normal to be aware of, in some early stage, their own burgeoning sexuality. It does us no good to neuter children's natural sexuality as the Victorian's often did, but I digress and am off on the wrong tangent.

David used to visit with relative frequency, and we would flirt with each other, toss things at each other, anything to start a chase game, which he would inevitably win, and land smack on top of me saying "give". But he was gentle, and would hold my hand and take me around. He would see to it that my water glass at the table was full. He would hand me the potatoes and our hands would touch and linger a bit, and when he arrived and left and we kissed and huged like normal people, David and I kissed lower on the cheek, closer to the mouth, and he held my hands rigid and stretched as he did so; it was almost as tango of goodbye.

David was exotic because he came from the other side of my family and I could never ask questions about that side for some reason, but I could with David, who had one brother and two sisters. Like my father's side, David's side was Jewish and he was raised thus. My own family would not have me raised Jewish, no matter how much Jewish blood I had in me. So David and I shared the same WASP/Jewish blood, a rich blend that spoke of the middle-east and of kindredness. I remember seeing television programs about the middle-east and wanting to go there with David. I wasn't quite sure why - i just knew that we were more kindred than i was to others in the family. That David had always looked out for me and I felt a shiver down my back when we held hands, especially when he spread apart my fingers and put his inbetween them, meshing our hands together, filling up the spaces.

I remember his sister Wendy, who was thirteen or fourteen, taking me down to the beach one day, appropriately near the opening of one of the caves and telling me how to give a blowjob. I don't think I even know the meaning of the word, but I knew what she meant with her gestures and got the basic gist of it, which certainly at the age I was, did not yet appeal. She was precocious, but it didn't help her any. Wendy wound up pregnant at 16 and after that seemed to have a constant stream of babies and all with different fathers.

David seemed separate, gentle, but just bad enough. - bad because he was older and could do all sorts of grown-up things that I could not do. One day David asked if he and I could go to the park nearby the house. Permission came easy since he was older they let me go because he was my cousin. They trusted us.

We walked hand-in-hand to the park, perfectly naturally and were speaking some nonsense when David interupted with a simple question that was clearly on his mind because it came out all in a hurry.

Have you kissed anyone yet?
What do you mean? I said.
A kiss, he said.
Well, Paul Gardner run up and kissed me in the playground, I countered, trying to sound grown-up or more grown-up than I was.
No, not like that. I can tell you've never been kissed - not properly, he said.
I blushed. He was right, but then, I wasn't sure what a kiss was. What sort of kiss did he mean? I mean, even he kissed me on the cheek so what else?

David looked about and then took my hand and led me into a field of tall-grass. The sun shone golden, and our hair lit up and caught fire in the light. I was waist deep in tall grass and David led the way, cutting a swath with his arm for me to get by. Then we reached a spot far enough in and he motioned for me to sit down. I did. I didn't ask questions. Niether of us were speaking at this point. It was as if we were playing out a time-old ritual. I shook a little bit, and David warmed my arms as if to take the shiver away.. I wasn't stupid.I knew what was going to happen and I wanted it too, but my heart was thumping.

David put his hand over mine and said, "It's okay" which was nice but did little to calm me. I felt myself growing hot in the face, blushing, burning, then David took his hands and turned my face to his. He was so close. Never had I been so close to any boy before. I kept my eyes downward, embarassed, shy, and looked at the patch of grass. "Look up" David said, "Sarah, look up please." And then he tipped my chin toward his face and said, "God you're beautiful" and then leaned forward and put his mouth to mine, parting my lips only ever-so-slightly with the tip of his tongue which I accepted as one accepts a communion wafer. I figured if what we were doing was a mortal sin, this communion would protect us.

He lingered there, in my mouth, for a moment, then drew back, palm still to my cheek. He searched my face for signs of distress. My heart was beating a thousand beats a minute but no distress. Instead, it had felt nice and I didn't feel sorry at all. David let me think a bit then said, Want to do it again? (he asked every time, which I thought was gentlemanly and endearing). I quietly said yes and looked down and again he took me in his hand only this time, he had us lying side by side, completely camoflaged by the tall grass, and then he put his arm around me and drew closer and I could see all of his freckles. Then he leaned in and kissed me again, only this time, he slowly put his tongue in deeper, turning it over and over again in my mouth, but ever-so gently. It's okay, he said, stopping for a minute.... just do what comes naturally, and then his mouth eclipsed mine again. I shocked myself, allowing myself to meet his tongue with my own. At first i recoiled from the shock of it, then I felt how much I liked it, and our tongues spoke a foreign language all their own and I forgot everything. I forgot the time, I forgot where I was, but I never forgot that it was David and he never forgot that it was me.

I felt his hand on my leg, moving under the tartan fabric of my skirt, but he didn't try to move it higher, just kept moving in circles in the same place. We lay there like that, kissing in the tallgrass, arms and legs wrapped, David's hand on my thigh where my floral dress fell all around his arm.

Of course, we kissed for as long as we possibly could and then headed back to the house and I felt a changed somehow. I knew we had a secret and that it was nobody's business but our own. When he left that day, with family present, he took my hands as always, but he kissed me goodbye right on the mouth, almost defying anyone to say anything. Nobody did.

David visited often, and when he did we often snuck off to the coat-room where we would hide among the racks with the cashmeres and 1940s fox-fur and the smell of Youth Dew and we would lie down and kiss. We were "kissing cousins" and it didn't bother us one bit.

I remember the coatroom one time and laying on a coat he had put down for us (the floor will be cold, he said) and I stopped him mid-kiss because he had gotten a girlfriend and I was pouty and jealous and knew I had no right to be and more, it had changed nothing between us. I told him how I felt. I told him You'll not want me anymore. You'll stop kissing me. I'll die, I said.

He tilted my chin as he so often did and said, "blood is thicker than water, Sadi..." and he kissed me again and never again did I doubt his utter and true commitment to our secret and our tacit promise to always be there for eachother.

We kept that promise. It's been years since I've seen David and I prefer to remember him as he was during those brief years. I like to remember him at the boy who taught me how to kiss (and what a teacher he was,) and although I know I will or may be judged for this, but that is as irrelevant now as it was then. We still have each other, and if noone else wants us, then God, do we want eachother.

How easily we could and would fall back into those easy ways and the memory of the rain slapping the round window of the coat-room. Of David's warm kiss and his hand inching up my thigh, how he raised my dress over my head and I raised my arms. How we did this to be closer, with less between us, and how overtime, the less became less. What I remember most is David never doing anything I did not want to do, and while I was afraid, he could be bold and when someone shouted for us, or shouted at me for being "absent" (read, with David), he always stood up and said it was because i was with him, helping him do something and it was true, afterall. I was with David and I was helping him somehow. I think we healed eachother with those kisses; I think we remixed our blood and made everything okay.


I remember David playing Young Americans for me, how halfway through the song, we began kissing. How impossible it was for us to stay away from each other and how we hated it when somone else would come into the room.

I heard Young Americans the other day and thought of David and the physical memory of him came back as well and spurred a whole slew of thoughts and poems as well as thoughts of guilt, not guilt and I decided 'not guilt" that I can't regret what I have already done. I can learn from any mistakes, but I cannot regret this. More, I do not see those times as a mistake, regardless of what anyone else would and will say. I see them for what they were: two kids, growing up, learning the language of love in the only way they knew how and with someone they knew they could trust and beneath the surface, a deep and passionate love that transcends any moral boundary or social boundary. A love that cannot be judged by social standards and that may defy some people's understanding. As for me, I will never forget the way David spun the coat-room key on his finger. How it became our mutual sign for "go, now" and how he spun it before me, eyes twinkling, and in that moment, we were off, each of us anticipating the moment that was just around the corner.

tango

Ask me what I miss most in life, and I will have to say that it's dance. I miss dancing more than I could perhaps even miss a person, because it was always just that much a part of my life.

It began, of course, with ballet at school, which, to my great credit, I used and followed through on until I was in my late twenties and then, for good reason, though that's for me to know, not you. My school was closing down and the relocation would be simply too far for me to travel, and the other ballet school cost twice as much money which at the time I didn't have and frankly don't know whether or not I would have it now.

I also took tap, and drove my family nuts with my tap shoes, kicking up a storm on the kitchen tile or out in the back "garden" cement (there was no grass in our garden in Tottenham; I'm not even sure it even qualifies as a garden as much as an "out-back
where you have a shed and a few old bikes and set of fire works on Guy Fawkes night. That was about right - it was more some cement staging ground than garden, which suited me fine, for I could practice dance out there as long as I wanted, or until the grown-ups got really tired of me. I also used to dance on top of my granfather's feet, gently placing each tap shoe on his big work boots while he carried me atop his feet, waltzing and whirling about the room.

I danced in nightclubs as soon as I could sneak in, which was at about age fifteen, that I managed to swindle my way into of-age clubs. It's all make-up and attitude and besides, I never went to drink, I went only to dance, and though the dance had no name or real form, there were certain rules that applied and certain moves that were common and I mastered them all until I became so good that one evening, I was lifted high to the top of a speaker at Palladium and danced before thousands of people.

I was fifteen, a regular Lolita with my Bonne Bell lipsmacker and clothes that were far too adult for me, and yet here I was dancing in front of all of these people. I didn't have stage fright and nor did I swing the other way think I was so great or so much better. All it did was confirm what I already knew - that I could dance and that I always would.

More recently, I took Tango lessons with my husband who swore he could never dance and yet he did and he did so elegantly. He may have been a couple of beats ahead at times, but who isn't when they're learning. In so many ways he was the perfect partner and who better to tango with than your lover, for although he is my husband, he will always be my lover first.

The tango is such a dance of passion - the clinging woman, the refusals and refuffal she must take. How she must be practically or literally dragged across the floor. How her leg is held high by his hand, such that she is almost doing the splits. How the man spins her around so firmly. How their eyes never meet until that one critical moment, and then they look away again. The dance is all tension and then sway. Tension, sway. Tension, sway. It is almost as if the passion is just too much to bear. That the dance is one of tension because the relationship is tense - either because it is early and there is still the buzz of infatuation or because it is later and those rivers run so deeply.

The tango was originally a dance of the lower-classes, of immigrants who had set port (though now it has come to symbolize high culture, this was not originally the case.) The dance has its roots in Buenos Aries of the 1880s, I'm told, where immigrants from all of over the world landed and docked headed for the "portenos" where they could drink and find company and maybe even someone from their own country. Out of all of this grew a culturally mixed dance called the tango, a dance of love and passion, ,but also of frustration and deep-rooted sorrows. The tango remains one of the most complex dances, emotionally, anyway, that there is. There are also variations on the tango, although most people follow a common step and between variations the step remains the same, certain personal or cultural flourishes are often added.

These days, work calls too often and I find I have less and less time for dance as the demands of daily life and work take over. I still get in a quick ballet step here and there, and lord knows I am content to dance in my kitchen and dance with my husband, who is always willing, an in whose arms I can rest safely and who doesn't even mind if I stand barefooted on his shoes while he whirls me about the room in the perfect tango, always so personalized, always so passionate and every last bit of it he and I and while I know many women who would or who have told me that they find this dance a degrading one (and I do see their point, though for me, I disagree), I see an entirely different dynamic, and perhaps a less politically correct one.

I see a dance in which yes, I am subordinate to my lover, but he too is subordinate to me. We are then, communicating vessels, he dependent on me and me dependent on him. They may not mean it this way, but it really does "take two to tango." He must rely on my moves as I must rely on his, our weights literally pushing against each other, each of us holding the other up in some way or at some point. But what can I say - I'm a sucker for romance because when he takes his hand and firmly puts it around my waist, spinning me around on my t-strap shows such that I am facing him and then he turns that beautiful roman profile to the side, and I look over his shoulder, I fall in love all over again. Every time.

the last days of summer...

I remember being fifteen and in what I thought was “in love.” I remember Thomas and his denim-blue eyes and floppy sandy blonde hair, and even his buckle belt with a ship on the front and the grosgrain ribbon. I remember Thomas’s long summer legs entwined with my own coltish and tanned legs; I remember us young and finding the ways of the world and though perhaps, or definitely, Thomas knew a great deal more than I, he was a patient boy, and all a girl could hope for in a first summer romance while she is young.

I met Thomas by chance. He was hired to watch the parking lot at the private beach where I used to swim. Make sure no non-tenants invaded the water, he guarded the perimeter for the wealthy of the town and I laughed at him when he told me I could not swim there because I had been swimming there for over a year and windsurfing too, so who was this prep who was so smug, I wondered, to tell me what I could and could not do.

And so our relationship or friendship began. We sat down under the shade of the parking lot’s nearby tree where Thomas offered some of his blend of ice-tea and lemonade and I drank greedily, hungrily from the bottle, slaking my thirst. Then we spent the afternoon reading and he read Tennyson to me as we sat on the grass, shoulders touching imperceptibly and I felt the thrill of the new. He seemed to me a soulmate, for who else at our age, or his age even, was reading Tennyson besides me, besides him.

Later, after his shift was almost over, Thomas asked if I would go with him for a walk to the Sanctuary. I said Yes, Why not and we crossed the street and climbed the wrought iron fence and began our way up the hill through the graveyard. Problem was the sanctuary was part of the graveyard but you couldn’t get to the sanctuary at this hour. The gates were locked and unscalable.

We settled for the graveyard – an old one with stones from 1700 and 1800 and lots of shady, scented linden trees and the smell of fresh cut grass. There was one grave with a giant monument and chain around the grave itself. Perfect, Thomas said, and pulled me down with him to the fresh snipped grass.

Could I really lay down with this boy, I wondered and could I do it here? I didn’t have to wonder much because I did. I lay down with him and I knew what would happen next, more or less. I knew he would kiss me lightly at first, then he would kiss me on the mouth, full on; it all depended on how well the first kiss was received. The first kiss was well-received and soon I felt the weight of him on top of me and then offering gentle, the wafer of his tongue – a communion tablet, and I was absolved of all sin. I felt pure and light as a statue at Notre Dame. I felt “lovelier than air” as a friend would say, and I felt other things too that I had not expected.

For the remainder of that long, hot summer, Thomas and I would meet every day at the same time, toward the end of his shift at 3 p.m. Always hand-in-hand up the walk way and always to the same grassy area behind the monument. The kissing was fine with me, by fine I should say great because I didn’t want or expect more than this, but Thomas did. He was a young man and vital and in his sexual prime (or so I’ve heard, but I can’t confirm this… only a man could and I haven’t polled). He certainly seemed “primed” one afternoon when we had been kissing for over an hour and he ran his hand over the breast over the Lacoste then motioned to lift it and take it off, which I let him. I let him because I was wearing a bra, which surprised him and yet, he took in good stride.

Our relationship was, as I put it to him, Strictly over the bra. We could kiss and he could touch me over the bra, but that was it. And as for me touching him, all I recall is straddling him (this was how he liked to kiss) and feeling a hardness between my legs and wondering what it was (this was truly how naïve I was). I remember Thomas asking me if I wanted to see, and being young and curious I both did and I didn’t. I remember how he unzipped his tennis whites, how in one simple gesture he had it in his hand and it was like nothing I had every seen. How his blonde hair trailed down his belly button like an arrow pointing to what surely would have been Nirvana. Damn that 20/20 hindsight.


Perhaps I was still too young and I was afraid our summer would be ruined if we did more. If I lost my virginity. So, we still met every day and Thomas ever the good sport made no mention of it and even came to like my lacy bras, which I think had by then become fetishistic to he and I both. No matter. We are allowed our peeves and perversions in life.

As it turned out, I would lose my virginity but not until later and definitely to the wrong guy. An older man who lacked the sweetness of Thomas and who befriended me, it seems now, simply because I was a virgin and that would make him feel like “the man.” After, after the awful ordeal with this man, I wished for Thomas and those sweet summer days and I hated myself for not doing what would have come and did come so naturally to both of us. How we had weathered multiple bug bites on the backs of our legs, how we both got a rash from something sprayed on the lawn, or the time we got poison sumac all over our chests and how the doctor told my mother, ‘You can only get it where it touched you’ and I wanted to kill him. I had it, as did Thomas, in my mouth, my hands, my back, legs (front and back), my fingers, my chest, my face, my shoulders. It took a month or so of cortisone shots to make it go away. Yet all of it seemed worth it to me. It was all worth it because Thomas and I had the summer that would define our youth.

Now, I watch as those younger go about arm in arm, awkward in their newfound adulthood, finding their way along the corridor of being sexually comfortable with each other as they reach to each other with complete inexperience and ignorance. The land of what is not known.

We've all been there, and somehow, most of us find our way through it and to the other side. I even know people who are now married to that first girl they met in junior high school and had their first experience of love, of sex, and remained in that place forever, and happily so. It's always somewhat bewildered me. How is it possible, I thought, to just know in that way that you need to know, to never want to experience another person, to just be so solid in that love that this is the One, the Only, the person who will always be there. Perhaps it's not so simple. Perhaps you just hook up and the years tick by one by one and the next thing you know you are fifty and still with that girl or boy from junior high that you took to the prom and who found you in the backseat of his or her dad's sedan and you knew then that nothing would ever be this pure, this good, this visceral. After all, let's face it; there is little in life that we allow ourselves that is as absolutely visceral as those first, early experiences of sex and love. But every day I read stories about couples who met in high school and are still madly in love and kudos! Surely if I had gone to school with Thomas, maybe things would have worked out differently.

After we get older, we enter the world of should and ought (sadly) and desire becomes a mixed bag. We shouldn't want another because we are pre-engaged or because our faith tells us so, or because we are taught that promiscuity is wrong, or because social roles tell is a girl should have X number of partners and a boy Y number and that number will vary from generation to generation, town to town, country to country, and so on... it's always shifting, moving, like youth itself, so changeable. But no matter where you are or who you are, there is that meter that clicks over at just around thirteen or fourteen, or for some, a bit earlier, that says that the moment is Now. That it is now that we must go out and seek that person and that our classmates or third cousin who the boy at the beach etc is the person with whom we will venture into this unknown land. In short, a person who is at the same age and stage and who is willing and ready to go on the voyage with us. I remember those early experiences, and I remember that for me, they were perhaps a bit too innocent. That my girlfriends were doing things that for me, didn't yet feel right and I waited a few years longer, but I remember vividly the desire and the yearning that I felt for one boy in particular, and feeling in that summer that no one, anywhere, would ever measure up in the way that Thomas did. That Thomas with his tennis racket and his sandy blonde hair and his lavender-blue eyes was the only boy I would ever "love." and I do mean love.


I felt certain that I was deeply in love with Thomas and so when he left to go to college to Yale, and away from the more reachable Philips Andover, I felt that a piece of me had been taken away. It didn't help that the popular radio song at the time was "Every Time You Go Away" and "Missing You" and the like. I listened to them with great pain. Went out of my way to avoid them, and yet I would be sitting in the backseat of the car and suddenly, there it was, all the old pain (and it was pain) and that fucking huge blackness that I felt was left behind when Thomas left.

All I could think about was the way he kissed me and I knew in my heart, I thought, that nobody, anywhere, would ever kiss me that way again and I would never want to be kissed like that again because a desire like that was impossible.

I watch as those younger go about arm in arm, awkward in their newfound adulthood, finding their way along the corridor of being sexually comfortable with each other as they reach to each other with complete inexperience and ignorance. The land of what is not known. We've all been there, and somehow, most of us find our way through it and to the other side. I even know people who are now married to that first girl they met in junior high school and had their first experience of love, of sex, and remained in that place forever, and happily so. It's always somewhat bewildered me. How is it possible, I thought, to just know in that way that you need to know, to never want to experience another person, to just be so solid in that love that this is the One, the Only, the person who will always be there. Perhaps it's not so simple. Perhaps you just hook up and the years tick by one by one and the next thing you know you are fifty and still with that girl or boy from junior high that you took to the prom and who found you in the backseat of his or her dad's sedan and you knew then that nothing would ever be this pure, this good, this visceral. After all, let's face it; there is little in life that we allow ourselves that is as absolutely visceral as those first, early experiences of sex and love. After as we get older, we enter the world of should and ought (sadly) and desire becomes a mixed bag. We shouldn't want another because we are pre-engaged or because our faith tells us so, or because we are taught that promiscuity is wrong, or because social roles tell is a girl should have X number of partners and a boy Y number and that number will vary from generation to generation, town to town, country to country, and so on... it's always shifting, moving, like youth itself, so changeable. But no matter where you are or who you are, there is that meter that clicks over at just around thirteen or fourteen, or for some, a bit earlier, that says that the moment is Now. That it is now that we must go out and seek that person and that our classmates or third cousin who the boy at the beach etc is the person with whom we will venture into this unknown land. In short, a person who is at the same age and stage and who is willing and ready to go on the voyage with us. I remember those early experiences, and I remember that for me, they were perhaps a bit too innocent. That my girlfriends were doing things that for me, didn't yet feel right and I waited a few years longer, but I remember vividly the desire and the yearning that I felt for one boy in particular, and feeling in that summer that no one, anywhere, would ever measure up in the way that Thomas did. That Thomas with his tennis racket and his sandy blonde hair and his lavender-blue eyes was the only boy I would ever "love." and I do mean love. I felt that I was deeply in love with Thomas and when he left to go off to college to Yale, and away from the more reachable Philips Andover, I felt that a piece of me had been taken away. It didn't help that the popular radio song at the time was "Every Time You Go Away" and "Missing You" and the like. I listened to them with great pain. Went out of my way to avoid them, and yet I would be sitting in the backseat of the car and suddenly, there it was, all the old pain (and it was pain) and that fucking huge blackness that I felt was left behind when Thomas left. All I could think about was the way he kissed me and I knew in my heart, I thought, that nobody, anywhere, would ever kiss me that way again and I would never want to be kissed like that again because a desire like that was impossible.

To be clear: I didn't want to get fucked, not at that age. Not literally, not metaphorically. I wanted to be made love to, or my idea of what making love was anyway, and although I had fantasies in which we did it, I had been reading Plato and his ideas that sex drained the mind of its creative energy and Aurealius who was a real Stoic (as we know) and so I stuck by my "only over the bra" rule (much to Thomas's frustration and my own, for that matter.)

Yes, I wanted to know what that hardness in his tennis shorts was all about; often when we kissed, I straddled him and felt him beneath me, moving gently in the summer grass, the mosquitoes nipping the bare backs of my leg and my ass under my tennis skirt. The truth is, I was afraid. Whatever it was that he had there felt strong and firm and good but at the same time, it felt grown up and foreign and slightly terrifying to a young girl my age, my size, a little petite at the time, and he was a bit tall. The confluence of such factors made this a no go, and we left it at more or less relatively heavy petting, and I'm deeply sorry about it. Sorry that I waited.

I watch my own step-son navigate these waters now, and like any good step-mother, am highly suspect of girls who come sniffing around or those he takes on dates. I trust him but I don’t trust their feminine ways. At the same time thought, I want to tell him, to just live. To not wait and let it all pass you by because it will be gone in a blink and you or she will be off somewhere like Thomas as Yale etc. and the time will have passed. I want to tell him to, like me, remember everything. Remember where you are or were the same way I can still smell the grass-clippings and the scent of Thomas’s neck after we had played a good game of tennis (of sweat and laundry detergent), how when we kissed he always tasted of lemons because he was always drinking lemonade from a large bottle he carried around.

All I’m really saying is don’t be the sap who sits in the car listening to sad songs and applying each lyric to yourself. Do what feels right in the moment – but don’t hesitate or the moment will be gone. I toss my step-son a nod and wink. Pray he always gets my meaning.

finding yourself through art

I have never thought much of myself physically, and so for this reason I do not think much of myself physically. I don’t spend the day in search of mirrored serves in which o check the way I look because I already know what I look like and have somewhat made my peace with the fact that this cannot be changed. That I will never look like Angela Jolie and that is that.

This past holiday, we were with relatives and some friends who were looking over my wallet photos in which there is one of me in Paris. My God, exclaimed on of the guests, you look just like what’s-her-name (I dreaded the next part; would she says Selma from Scooby Doo, who I always identified with my glasses and knees socks when all I ever wanted to be was the svelte blonde one who got all the attention. I was certain she would say Selma or someone equally disturbing to me.

But she didn’t. She said, in fact, You look like a young Ingrid Bergman or Isabella Rossellini. Now this was new to me. I had been told I look like Juliette Binoche before, and could see that in the shape of the face, the mouth, and was many times honored, but that didn’t mean that for a second I bought it, much as I would have liked, and no matter how sincere her comment, I just couldn't see it.

I am also convinced that I am a size or two bigger than I actually am – an eight or so (which is still small or good for my height), but it does not hold true to realit; in reality I’m a size four or a six, not through dieting but because this is simply my natural weight and equilibrium. They call this inability to see yourself as you are Dysnorphia and lots of young girls with eating disorders have it and thus cannot see themselves as they really are and hence begins the cycle of binging and purging, dieting all the time and in some case, anorexia,

Admittedly, I am none of those things. I am just a sloth of a dysmorphic, one who would lie about thinking what difference did it matter were I dressed or did not dress, whther I did make up or no make up, shaved my legs every other day or not. Who would notice or care. I could become a human vegetable, sorry for herself, box of tissues within reach (in case of self-pity and endless bouts of crying), I could try on new clothes that would swim on me because they were too big and then convince myself that I must have lost a few (like 20) pounds, That I should keep said clothes for when I return to “my real size.”

Oddly, while I overestimated my body size, I underestimated my breast size pinning myself at 34B and certain this was correct even if I had lines that cut into me at the end of the day. You see, if you are dysmorphic, the world need not make sense. It is all about perception and if you perceive that your breasts are too small, then you will make them such in your head, whether they are or are not. Likewise if large, you may do the exact opposite. Dysmorphia is a contrary state of being. It was my husband who sussed out the bra thing and returned home one day with a box of lingerie all in a size 36C and lo! each bra fit. He also buys me dresses, skirts etc, for presents and they always seem to fit. Though I may be dysmorphic, my husband clearly sees better than I do.

A few years ago, some graduate students approached me as I was reading a book in the park. They asked if I would ever consider modeling and gave me the phone number for the museum school. This was legit. I thought about this a great deal and decided that I would sit in on a class first and then decide,

The model arrived and put on a kimono-like gown. Then she waked up to a platform and let the robe drop, so simply it fluttered to the wood floor. She struck various poses, holding each for about a half hour, and the students, all very serious and studious, drew what they saw. And they saw what I saw: a beautiful young woman, nude and unabashedly so,

Despite a few hesitations, I spoke with my husband and we decided it was a go. I still remember that first glass. How nervous I was. How afraid I would get that giveaway nervous red mottling I sometimes got on my chest. But I didn’t. I simply undressed, put on my robe, and stepped up to the platform. The room was silent save for the scratch of pencils and conte crayon on paper. The class was three hours long and holding each pose was incredibly hard work and coming up with a pose even harder. Yet still there was a confidence born of being the only nude person in the room. These students had to look at me, Had to draw me, and I reassured myself with this fact over and over again. I alone held the cards: if I was tired, we would break, and so on. Anyone who tells you modeling is "easy", don't you believe it. It remains some of the hardest physical work I have ever done in my life.

When we took a break, I asked a few students if I could view their work so far. I was truly amazed at what I saw. I didn’t see a fat girl or Selma. I saw a young woman with her long hair in a bun and a long, sensuous curve in her spine. She was fine-boned, petite, but all in proportion. She was an illustration in a magazine, yet she was me. It was hard to see me but not me. Intellectually I knew this was me, but really believing it was another thing entirely. One student was so kind as to give me one of his drawings.

I still have that drawing; it rests in a frame in my study. These days, the model self and the dysmorphic self have made their peace. I modeled off and on for fine art schools for two years and over the course of those two years, I learned more about who I was and what I looked like than I ever would have in any psychiatrists’ office. I realized, for the first time perhaps, my own real physical worth and I saw myself through the eyes of others and I was not disappointed. I was, to be honest, flattered, knowing that the students had to draw what they saw, not some fantasy but that which is actual. This is not arrogance, it is a simple matter of being honest with yourself, of taking stock and seeing youself as you are.

I have modeled here and there occasionally for fine art professors and painters, the occasional photographer who is gifted (read: no pornography) and I like the results now… for the most part. I’m still making peace with some other bits here and there – stupid things really like the fact that I wear glasses, and so on, but that is just vanity.

If this would work for someone else I’d say try it. Find a reputable school near you and volunteer (you will also be paid for your efforts and can make quite a bit of money; I was and remain very picky about who I model for and would advise you do the same. There are too many creeps which is why I suggest either a same sex artist or a fine arts school which is where I began.

I now buy my clothes in the correct size (okay, well mostly I do), I even buy bras that fit (hallelujah no more lines and painful digging) and when I look in the mirror, still not often but more than before, I am able to see, at times, what those others saw in those classes and while no doubt not everyone will see me that way, when do more than twelve people agree on anything and besides, self confidence must come from within, not from some other’s projection of impression of you. Sure, that all helps, but ultimately, you have to make your peace with yourself so that you can be comfortable in the moment, never wasting a minute questioning what to everyone else likely seems blatantly obvious.

Thanks for listening

sadi ranson-polizzotti

passion sustained

I was making my husband’s holiday gifts while my friend sat with me at the kitchen table, having her cigarette and tea, and wondering about how it is that after twelve years there could still be such romance and passion between my husband and me. She said, to paraphrase, you’re both so romantic. We’re affectionate but that’s different. How do you do it? You’re luck you know.

My first thought, was a. he’s bloody lucky too and b. how could we not? God, today may be today but that fist kiss could have been yesterday. I remember how he chased me through the public garden and how he whipped acorns at me like a schoolboy and how I ran and ran whipping linden berries and acorns when I could. I remember I was wearing a short lavender skirt and a while tank top and that on that day, I had forgotten to wear a bra. I remember that it was July 25th, a Monday.

It had been his birthday on Friday and that we worked at the same small publisher and that he took me out to tea that afternoon. How he held up his palm and pressed it against mine and just held it there. How he said, Later will you come with me to the public garden? I remember how this girl, a real atavist, I really hated and who had been fired, showed up just as we were to leave and how she had a crush on him. How she overstayed her welcome. How she kissed him goodbye and he didn’t resist, but why should he? He was no more mine than I his – not yet. How everything was so tentative.

We rode the train, bumping into each other, even though we had never been so close, and how we kept meeting eyes and I kept telling myself “this is nothing” because I feared hurt, I feared abandonment, I feared he might be a guy who thought of this as a game – how many women can I make fall in love with me and then say “go screw.”

I remember the smell of his cologne, more present because of the heat and humidity of the day. I remember how we got off of the train and practically ran to the green and fresh grass of the garden. How we didn’t wait but as moment to throw these things at each other – the contact of each berry or acorn, a way of getting close: I touch you.

I ran. I tried to out run him to no avail, yet I never quit. I slipped on the humid damp grass and fell beneath the shade of an oak tree and lay there, stunned for a minute before he came over to see if I was okay. I was. He said, “your head is bleeding” and wiped it with his finger, and then he kissed me on the forehead, and since I put up no resistance to this test kiss, he kissed me full on the mouth and how it was like no kiss I had ever experienced. It was a grown-up kiss: experienced and how I felt things I didn’t know possible and how he said, God, you’re so responsive and thought for sure I must have been putting it on.

I wasn’t. I’d had few boyfriends before and had my last since I was eighteen through 27. That doesn’t leave much room for dating, if any. So this kiss, so different and foreign, and he so foreign with his olive skin and tangle of hair that waved from his oxford and his southern Italian aqua blue eyes and hair that waved in the heat. He was Other. Different.

How to explain to my girlfriend that this never changed. That all of those feelings from that first kiss and onward have only brought us closer together. That the thrill, far from being gone, is even stronger. That all we need to is pass each other a look and we both know what it means. How we mirror each other in looks and in expression and how we did not know this until we saw the wedding photos in which we are twin-like, like any couple or any couple connected, who converses with the other a lot and who have a dynamic relationship.

The gift I was making by the way was a brief film made of separate photographs that I had morphed together with a fade effect and added as a sound track “The Air That I Breathe” by Bread. (Laugh all you want: it was and is the perfect song to this film). I was also making a beautiful leather green double photo album that tied with green silk ribbon. In each compartment was a photograph representing a period of the past year along with some photos I took (with a friend’s borrowed tripod) of me. God, he said, you’ve still got the body of a twenty year old. So ask me how we stay romantic and these are some of the ways.

I also leave notes in his briefcase, photographs, little gifts unexpected, kisses unexpected, and so much more. Never do I let a week go by, nor does he, without some small token (and it can be really small) of affection. And mostly, a day does not go by in which we do not have a “real” kiss, not the dry parched peck but a smack on kiss.

No doubt, we are not unique in this for surely there are other couples who are equally romantic and moved. It’s not always easy – or has it always been a bed of roses, more like a cat walk of thorns on which I had to walk every day and feel the pain. Those times are best forgotten because holding onto them only harms me. Holding onto that anger helps nobody and should I ever find myself on that walk of thorns again, then I know what I would do, love or no love, I would file immediately for divorce as already discussed with my lawyer; my just-in-case clause.

Do I expect this? No. Absolutely not, but then I would never have expected it the first time around. Can I live with the knowledge that people fuck up. You bet, because I’m not angel and although we are so close, I alone hold the trump: He doesn’t know what I did during that time either.

I don’t mean to sound mean, it’s just a fact – yes he knows me about as well as anyone can, but that’s as different thing from knowing what someone under duress is capable of. I can tell you that Goethe said, Napoleon went forth to seek virtue; when she could not be found, he sought Power. Let’s leave it at that.

We may be, we are, one of the most romantic couples I know and I’ so grateful for that, and yet, as I tend to the garden, as I tend to the house (our nest) as I polish silver bowls in which I store my bird’s nests, as I clean in my sheer slip that I use for cleaning because it’s loose and easy to clean, as I lean over and feel the weight and way of my body move forward, I am all too well aware of what can go wrong, yet I’m wise enough to know that you can’t live in the “maybe” or the “possibly.”

All things are possible and I could even be wrong about “the now’ as I write these black and white words, but for now, I choose to believe in the more romantic reality unless I see cause not to (and I do not).

I don’t know if romantic couples stay together longer. Perhaps shorter. Perhaps practical couples stay together longer – I don’t know. But what I do know is that whatever it is you have, you must enjoy it now and drink from its cup the way I took in that first kiss and will never forget the taste of him, the scent, the smells of the grass and the dirt and how I spent the rest of the afternoon as if in a daze. In some ways, I am still in that daze now and for now, I’ll stay there but with my eyes wide open.

on style

I never could understand what the big giveaway was that I am not American. I don't mean after I open my mouth, because that much is easy enough - the Midatlantic accent is a dead giveaway and while people may not be able to place it specifically, they know it's somewhere in Europe. But this is not important or what I want to talk about.

What confuses me more is how so many people can tell that I am not Ameerican based purely on the way I dress, which to me, is much like everyone else. I have made a concerted effort to "fit in", especially when I am called to work in corporate America. I dress in black suits, white oxfords, and my black buckle shoes (this could be part of it, since I don't see many American woment wearing ankle strap buckle shoes) but again, they're hardly a give away sign, and the rest of me is quite normal. Simple haircut - bobbed but growing out so often in in a brief ponytail, make up minimal as is the perfume, which if I wear at all, is Penhaligon and is subtle so much so that I can hardly smell it myself.

No, there must be something. I finally asked my friend Carrie who works for a large corporate American firm, where I used to work (and not surprisingly, was never really accepted as one of the team because I seemed to foreign, which to me is discrimination - I wasn't even given a chance.) But regardless, Carrie tells me: you wear these great shoes with silk socks - no American woman would do that, not that I've seen she tells me. More, my suits have a French or European cut; they are not boxy or shoulder padded, but tend to fall easily around each curve and the skirts have a slight flounce at the knee, unusual for an American cut. I tell her, I bought the suits in Paris, she says, Then what do you expect and she's right.

The problem though is that I want to fit in, but I also have been for years and will be, loyal to my own sense of style that I've had since I was a child. I was forever putting together odd outfits. My grandmother could have predicted that I'd wind up working at Vogue magazine for three years. That I would inevitably find myself in the world of fashion, for as much as I resisted and as much as I expected to be in Features and writing, I was marked "fashion" and in fashion I stayed as Anna Wintour's sometimes assistant and another editor as well. It was gruelling work but I have to say, it was hardly as if American women lacked style for they do not, so I can't say that this is the difference between them and I. What I can say, or all I can say is that the style is different.

American style, the style I was exposed to at Vogue was more casual. Women wore more loose trousers with silk blouses and sling-back mules with bangles and slightly unkept hair (contrived in this case) to give the illustion of a "woman on the go." By contrast, though I did not work at British Vogue, I can tell you the style difference as I perceive it is that European women care less about practicality and more about what looks good.

Yes, I generalize for the sake of the article here (because there will be differences on both sides; those who fit to type and those who do not) but overall, European women cared less for practicality and more for sensuality or sexuality or how they would be perceived as they walked their little dogs all over the winding streets of Paris. Paris in which a scarf can be tied a hundred different ways - a scarf! - and each style is for a different occasion or season or reason. Spend enough time in France and you'll soon learn the code and find yourself buying scarves and doing the same (I now have a glass cabinet full of my finest scarves and folded neatly alongside them, all of the cashmere pashminas I bought from various street vendors in each Arondissment.

Imagine a city where you can buy a scarf from a street vendor. Whose sole purpose is to be there to make women look fashionable in case they forgot a scard that day or are a tourist and feel that they don't fit in without one, though mostly the stands are for the natives.

And as for the socks with shoes, every time I have been interviewed for a magazine, the author noted that I tended to wear "long silk dresses that dropped all the way to my ankle socks and shoes" to quote one article directly. And so there it is - I do wear scarves almost every day, I wear silk ankle socks with my shoes, even heels or mostly heels, that all have the requisite buckle ((I will not buy shoes without said buckle). I also carry a handbag with a powder compact and a tortoise shell comb and a small size bottle of my perfume.

I can be a true lady to the last, and a tomboy at heart: an utter contradiction, like most women who are interesting. We are all multi-faceted, never only one thing. Never so easy to peg and pin down. The outside presentation of self may say one thing, but the inside presentation wouldn't hesitate to smack down someone if the situation called for this.

I was brought up to believe that there is real power in being a woman, and not enough women seem to realize that. I've even heard that it's "degrading" to dress up and be ladylike, which seems absurd to me. Elegance is never out of style and I will continue wearing my giveaway socks and shoes, my white shirts with the French lace detailing, my ankle strap shoes, my scarves so full of memories, and nor would I hesitate to pull on a pair of my husband's jeans (which harks back to an earlier piece I wrote about wearing a lover's clothes), pop on a white oxford or teashirt and a pair of shoes. The key difference perhaps, I am never without a good handbag (it sounds stupid, but it's true and something I, anyway, who raised my sister, taught her when she was sixteeen. Always have one good handbag - for interviews, for lunches with friends, for yourself.). There are times when we were dirt poor but my grandmother always had that Delveaux handbag - blue and square with the snap clasp up top that I used to covet even then. In it she kept golden colored tubes of lipstick and power that smelled like violets.

She remains, my grandmother, one of the toughest people I know and yet you will still never see her without these things if she is going out. She will always have her lipstick, her good back, her hair combed just so. But she is and was also a tought Scottish woman who would take no shit from anywhere and our house in the projects backed another lot. The kids would sit on the wall and she would go out with her broom, knocking them off as if they were pigeons. She would smack the asses of punk rockers who slid down the long escalator rails in the Tube.

You can always dress down, you can always be casual, but why not try to bring a little of that Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn glamour? It's not about defining you, it's about discovering how much power there is inherent in such things. It's about change, and changing the self just as I change myself sometimes, but the ankle socks and shoes - they stay. They have become a signature or sorts and will never go away.

growing up shy

My whole life I've been shy, but try to tell that to anyone who deals with me in superficial way, and they'll tell you that I am an extrovert to the fullest. This, however, is my own fault. For putting up that front, because people can only see or perceive what you show them unless of course, they misperceive, but in this case, I doubt so many could misperceive

No, this has to do with me and the outward social face that I have long felt the need to put on and that travels way back to my childhood. Don't get me wrong here; this isn't a "my mother made me do it" story, but what did happen then does have some bearing on the person I am today (you can say this of anybody; we are who we are, both good and bad, from our parents, among other people, but largely from our parents or whomever raised us and how they raised us.

My mother was not often present. She was, to me, some mythical and beautiful figure who turned up at my grandparent's house (where I lived) and who always smelled of Caleche by Hermes and who had her hair done in a sleek and chic Anna Wintour type bob by Vidal Sassoon himself who was just starting to become a success. I remember my mother showing up with a beautiful bob in the most becoming shade of lavender because that is the person she was and still is.

She is glamorous, all sparkle and shine. I remember being in the hospital with Meningitis with my mother turning up in a fur coat a flurry of shiny objects and the Demerol drip in my vein made her all the more interesting. She had brought with her not the requisite flowers. Never anything so conventional. Instead, she showed up at her daughter’s room with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, which I could not drink because of the drugs and which struck me as odd, but then, that's who she is. She is sparkly, charming, sexual (note, not sexy, and there is a difference).

As a child, I would see my mother occasionally and we could not have been less alike. She found me boring and dull and plain (and said as much, telling me to "settle" in life because it was the best I'd ever do. She also told me other "truisms" - how I dress like a nun (this because I don't dress all flash and sparkle like I bought my clothes out of the dollar-bin somewhere in the West Village in a bin full of sequins and other shiny clothes. She told me lots of things, and at that time, few of them were flattering, if any. I remember all of them well, perhaps too well for to this day, I still those pieces of me that she seemed to latch onto. True or not, I now see them. If the person perceiving you is your own mother and says such things, then you have no reason to doubt. Why would your own mother tell you something untrue? It's only logical then that what she says must be the truth.

What I remember most thought is how painfully shy I was as a child. How I could not speak to another adult or play with new children (her friend's children if I was with her) because I couldn't relate to them. I had my friends yes and was even popular in school (as witnessed by the time I broke my ankle and we received so many cards that we needed a trash-bag to lug them all into the living room where I had my leg up. But despite this, I was still shy -popular yes, but in some odd way that carried through even til college, though I could and still can't put my finger on why it was. It doesn't matter I suppose. What does puzzle me though is how shy I could be and yet be popular at the same time.

I recall once my mother and I were driving and got lost. She pulled to the curb and said "Sadi, ask this man walking by for directions." and I froze. I tried, but my stutter came back and I felt my face burning crimson. I couldn't even look him the face yet I did try. Try though I might, he couldn't understand a word that I said.

My mother, by now so irritated with being lost and with me, pulled away from the curb and with one hand on the wheel and one free hand slapped me hard across the face, leaving a bright hot and crimson imprint of where her hand had been. It was the first time I remember being older and being hit and it was the beginning of a trend.

There was the time we went to the fabric shop because she wanted to teach me how to sew and I wanted to please her so I tried but couldn't ask the assistant for the fabric or tell her how much yardage because of my unbearable shyness. My mother started hitting right then and there, in a shop full of people who all feel silent but did nothing. You don't interfere with a mother and her child, I suppose, though every bone in my body told me that this was not my mother because she didn't raise me. She was just someone I knew and someone I didn't particularly want to know at that.

There was the time the school had to call because I was sick and needed to go home and for whatever reason, she was convinced I had been with "boys"; that her "own daughter was a slut" (I was a virgin) and this too warranted the requisite slaps but we had progressed from just the face to beating about the whole head.

I was a freak. I could never be born of her and she told me as much; that my cousin (money-hungry, drug-taking, mercenary,) should have been born to her and I to my aunt. I quite agreed. My cousin may have seemed superficially like my mother, but the, my mother herself was superficial and the two seemed to me and to others in the family, two peas in a pod. After that conversation, which occurred many times but for the last time when I was twenty-eight and finally had the courage to say "I do too... so why don't you call her." and I hung up the phone leaving no room for answer or reply.

Yes, she called a few times between the time we spoke again and then, but I hardly noticed and would just erase her messages. It was a full year and half before we would speak again and even then our conversations were pinched and uneasy and never once did we talk about my cousin again or any of these things. It was as if they had never happened. It was as if the hitting, the slaps, etc. had never even occurred and by now, by then, I had essentially learned a social facade and as a good friend in publishing put it, "Fake it...." because he told me, "Everyone else is faking it too..."

That I could do. I could certainly fake being an extrovert and while it may have and may still sometimes give my leg that bouncing, kicking tremor, or shaking hands for the most part I have fooled everyone. Meyers Briggs, I think that was the book we used, had me pegged as an introvert, my own husband knew from the minute he met me (which seems to me unfair since few others could or can guess.) My ex always knew that I was the introvert and yet I have, and I am reluctant to spill the beans on this one, I have consistently scored high on the Mach Test.

For those who don't know, the Mach Test is a test used to determine who Machiavellian you are and to what lengths you would go to get what you need or what you want. I have consistently scored high on this test, but there is no conflict there between shyness and being a Type A to such a degree (which is really what the Mach Test) is all about. Note that a night score on the Mach Test does not mean you are a horrible person anymore than it means you are a good person. It simply means you are someone who knows what they want and how to go about getting it. You will create the right alliances (I really ought to go on Survivor or some such program. I'm shy enough to not be perceived as a threat and Mach enough to forge and easily break alliances to get to the final goal - winning.)

My shyness is still there, though socially I have learned for the most part to keep it in check, which is tiring in and of itself. As the years go by, I find that shy girl coming back more and more, some return I suppose to the (and I hate this term but it is applicable) the "authentic" self. I have never taken drugs for my shyness because I don't feel that in my case it is a disease or condition, although I do believe that for others it can be or is. I can imagine how bad it gets when worse than mine. The only thing I have trouble with is my own mother's "remedy" to my shyness, literally beating it out of me until I was so afraid that I became the opposite of shy - or appear(ed) to be - the popular girl at Vogue, at Palladium, at Limelight, in University, going out with the best-looking guys and everyone wondering, no doubt, Why her?

I can't answer that question because I honestly don't know. I do know that my husband was incredibly supportive when I modeled for fine art school drawing and painting classes because he wanted me to see "what (you) really look like.' and Lo! It worked. I still have some of the drawings the students gave and am so grateful because it is a gift to know and to keep what you looked like at 27. What your body was like and how young and lithe you once were, and though to me, I feel little has changed, no doubt it has (and I'm in denial) or it has not changed as my husband says, but only "improved" because before I was too thin and now have some flesh on me, which certainly has benefits (note, we're talking about going from a size 2 to a size 6, hardly earth-shattering and for my height, a 2 is not healthy).

I don't want to say all of these things or relive them and I don't. But writing about them helps me understand who I am today. That I am yes, still shy but yes can hold my own. That even though I scored high on the Mach test, that this is not a bad thing - in fact, many heads of corporations score high on the Mach Test (naturally) as are many great artists. All of these things we take as ”bad" - shyness, social anxiety, manic depression, epilepsy and so on, are all qualities that have been noted in some of the world's greatest movers and shakers. Great writers, artists, prophets, leaders and more. Think Aristotle, Plato, Poe, Sexton, Alfred Nobel, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf and the list goes on and on and on.

I can't apologize anymore for who I am and I won't. I think I've learned how to be less shy just through experience and age, and I've also learned that the next time someone slaps me, they better run and duck because I fully intend to slap them right back and twice as hard.

Thanks for reading,

his oxford shirt

I remember playing dress-up as a young girl. We didn't have much but there were certainly plenty of old grown-ups dresses, gold-flecked high heels, floppy hats, and long strands of beaded necklaces that we could wear. The photographs that I have, and they are few, show us as children, our stick-like legs wobbling on gold shoes as we stood looking or trying to look like our IDEA of grown-up as we all posed for the camera.

Not much has changed for me in this regard. I'm still playing dress-up, only this time the characters have changed. I am drawn to my husband's clothes just as much as I was when we were simply lovers and who knew what was to happen. Even then, I wanted what was his, a piece of him (in those days, his blue-ink fountain pen. I would steal it and wear it hooked on a chain beneath my silk blouse, dangling close to my breast where at first it was cold, then warm). He always knew that it was I who had taken it but proving so was another task entirely.

How to prove that I was the culprit and yet keep that distance at the same time? You have to know, we were co-workers who yes, perhaps or yes, there was an attraction there and a strong one but there was also a great deal of denial. The attraction was inconvenient at best (both of us otherwise involved), complicated (the age difference just barely on the line of what would work and what might not). More, there was the fact that truly, I told myself nightly, I hated him. Yes it was true I stole his pen to be close to him, but deep down, I assured myself, I couldn't stand his arrogance, the way he had to strut his brain, the way he knew so well his own worth and the way he could likely tell that I never measured up my own worth to very much - not at that time. Not when I was that young and coltish. I was, instead, skittish, shaky, as if not yet ready for any kind of grown-up relationship. Boys were one thing, but this was a man and that was something else entirely and truth to tell, it frightened me.

But what has changed now? I am less skittish. We are together now - as in properly together, married, signed, sealed and delivered (though even if we had remained lovers, it would be equally valid). The blush has never worn off the rose. I am still fetishistic about objects, particularly those that are close to him daily - a watch, a pen, an oxford shirt.

I awaken in that in-between time between daylight and night, and the first thing I reach for is one of his faded old broadcloth oxford shirts. I love cover my nakedness with its thin fabric, to inhale and take in the scent of him. I may wear the shirt all day and walk about like this, or perhaps I'll change. It depends on the day. It is the same as with his fountain pen that swayed and bumped against my chest as I walked and my hips switched in my long-black skirt, except now I can cover the all of me with a piece of him.

Until recently, he did not know I did such things - but I outed myself. It seemed time to come clean. I borrowed a good friend's tripod and took a series of photographs, taken on a grey day in the mid-afternoon, all of them rife with atmosphere, but rife with the weather and the overcast of those late-summer days when we first began and when he first kissed me. I put the photographs together in a film-maker and made for him a film. Nothing that couldn't be seen by my mother, but something so intimate that to anyone else may seem stupid or sophomoric yet to me, to him, seemed the most romantic thing of all. I also took the photo outtakes and bound them in a beautiful green-leather album that tied with green silk ribbon. The images are black and white, still, quiet, and contemplative.

As for the shirt itself: It falls way past my bottom, each sleeve long past the bone of each fine wrist. I love the oversize-ness of it; how it dwarves me and how, on it, I can still smell him - his Blenheim cologne, the scent of his deodorant, and then the smell that is uniquely his, which is a combination of spices and sage and paper smells and heat or humidity or cold all trapped within the fiber of the weave. It is smell, one of the most primal instincts, that strikes me most because it is smell, and I believe this, that drew me to him in the first place. Smell as the basis for a relationship, which seems and is primal, visceral.

This is hardly a fair game though, this cross-dressing. If he, by contrast, dressed in my clothes, we would imagine this some perversion - a man putting on a woman's dress simply because he misses her is a pervert. A woman who puts on a man's shirt is nostalgic and romantic. These are not roles or names that I have assigned; don't misunderstand; these are roles that were assigned long before I came along. Is the difference that some men dress-up as a turn-on whereas I wear my husband's shirt not as a turn-on, but as a way of being close? I cannot define perversion here; I only know that it does not apply to my wearing his broadcloth shirt because there is something so right about it.

Not too long ago, I posted one of these photographs on my Website and called it "his blue shirt." More women wrote to me to tell me that they too do exactly the same thing. Sweet relief! I am not alone in wearing my boyfriend's or in my case, my husband's, jeans or t-shirts or oxfords. There are women who have gone so far as to steal a pair of good jeans from a guy for sentimental reasons and more, just because they wanted them. There are women who have stolen oxfords, sweaters and who didn't feel that the Victoria's Secret "boyfriend sweater" was quite the same thing (and I quite agree.) Really, all that the Victoria's Secret "Boyfriend" line is a woman's sweater or shirt made two sizes too large and more, it has no history, which is key to the concept. There must be a history behind the shirt, and there must be signs of the man who wore it: his scent, the scuffed collar, the thinness of the fabric, the fact that you know the shirt's history.

None of this can be manufactured. You "make" a boyfriend shirt. It either is or is not.
I know my husband has a shirt that he has had since the early eighties when he lived in Paris and after then when he worked at Random House. It is soft white with very fine pale blue lines that run the length of it. The shirt has worn thin in places such that if you touch it the wrong way, you could easily gouge it like a delicate piece of rice paper. The collar and cuffs are frayed. Some buttons are missing or hanging on by a thread, yet I love it and refuse to let him throw it out.

I love the thinness of the cotton. I love that he wore this when he crossed Pont Neuf or that he kicked a trail down rue Mazarine where he lived and was excited to be young and abroad and to have the whole world open before him; his oyster. I love that he wore it work and made decisions about books that we still read today and that we know of and I love most of all that although I was not there (damn that age difference thing), that I could have a piece of it, albeit a literal piece, not an experiential one, to hang onto, a sort of security blanket that whispers secrets of times gone by, because that is what these things do. I can see him then. I've see photographs (and so have you if you've read lately) and I see a beautiful man in his early twenties, but I also see someone not yet ready to settle down. Someone that had I met and been involved with, I wonder if we would be together today. I could never have handled the betrayals, the ego-searching.

I could have, would have, been a friend. We could have sat at Montparnasse and laughed over Pastis, but not more than this, no matter how drawn we may have been, each to the other, because timing is everything and the timing would not have been right. For the shirt, the clothes, for any of it, for a relationship to have any meaning, for me anyway, it must be one, singular - there must be no sidelines, so to speak. I can't blame him for having a youth and a good one at that. I don't begrudge any of that, and it can even bring me joy to know that he was happy then, but I am smart enough to know that I, had I been his steady girlfriend, would not have been happy.

These items speak to us about who we were at the time (the design), how we lived (how well-taken care the shirt is), the cologne or lack thereof that we wore, even our underarm deodorant can be faintly detectable and take it from me, even the distinct scent of someone's office - a publishing house let's say - he will return home smelling of books and of paper and the next day I will wear his shirt and think of heavy leather bound volumes and typefaces like Perpetua and the old inky letterpress in David's barn that he let me run several times, entrusting me to the job and I did it and did it well.

More than dress up, all of these things - smells especially are temporal lobe triggers that guide us down a path of memory or a memory we create predicated on what it is exactly we are smelling. Either way, we breathe a history, secret or not, to this fabric.

Men say, or some men say, there's something sexy about a woman wearing a man's clothes and they're right. There is something inherently sexy about a woman who is so strong when need be, to see her so dwarfed by a simple oxford. It is endearing. I, anyway, never found this insulting. It is the kind of thing couples who are secure can laugh about because it is sweet and funny and has no real bearing on the woman's true power.

One has to take life a bit lightly at times, and wearing your boyfriend's or lover's clothes is one of those times. Some people will never do this. They will never wake up in the morning and pull on their boyfriend's shirt without even thinking about it. They will not walk about the house sniffing his cologne and smelling paper and ink and all the other scents of his day and the sage smell of his skin. They miss this one small pleasure. Perhaps I am still stuck in my youth playing dress up and so are all those other women who said they too could connect. I can't say because I don't have enough of a distance on the subject to see myself one way or the other in this regard. But what I can say is that the fact that I still want to do this so many years later tells me all I need to know about love and about yearning.

Thanks for listening

s.r.p.

life in sepia

I'm living in the quick-quick slow tempo of early mid-winter. Of the too dark days that have begun slightly to lighten and that will guide us into summer where I'll don a straw hat and my hair will turn golden and my skin remain pale and we will walk along the beach, solving all of life's problems as we do so, having talks philosphical because that is what we do.

There will be no more bullshit: no flirtation, distraction, inability to deal or immaturity because those days, thank god, seem beyond us now, or is it just beyond the pale. So far away yet I can feel them still in the tick-tock of my heart and still it aches with the sting of betrayal. But we don't speak of such things. In this great land we "move on" which is a good philosophy in theory, but in my country we are petulant and sulky. We, or my family and friend's anyway, are forgiving yes, but the sting of the past still stings even years later it is remembered and can still jerk the tear from those big grey-green eyes.

When a close relative recently died, one who had helped bring me up and was as a father to me, we went out to clean out his car and in the boot, we found bundles of letters - love letters - written to his ex-wife and evidence that he had cashed out his pension and sent it to her. They had been carrying on an epistolary affair for over thirty years and none of us were any the wiser. This left his wife, who also brought me up, devastated and furious. Where do you put your anger toward the dead? It only gets turned sadly inward and we wind up beating ourselves up and thinking none of it would have happened if only we had been enough, which i have to tell you, is such SHIT it makes me furious.

I can't help but still love him, but were he alive even I would give him a good smack because that is what the situation merits. Why we think of such things in the winter I don't know. Maybe it's the weather that gets us down. Maybe it's other things - my brother's suicide that when the date comes around every year I feel myself curling inward and wanting nothing to do with the world because I am at once angry and feeling love and sorrow. I don't know how to express these complex emotions. I feel autistic at such times; as Bendricks says in Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, "How oddly we behave at such times" and he's right.

We behave oddly because we don't quite know what we are doing or who we are or worse in some way, who the other person was that they could betray us so much by being the absolute opposite of what we thought, or keeping a secret that we just couldn't imagine them capable of. It's hard to discover that the dead are, after all, no better than the living, that they are the same as the living; that they sin with the best of us and the only difference is that they are not alive to protect their cache of sins the way we do every day.

I don't mean sin in any Catholic sense. I mean sin in the catholic sense, if you get my meaning. Ordindary sin. Perhaps the living, not those who die quickly, but those of us with a longer time line we know how to cover our tracks and so we all die looking like various Mother Theresa's, pure and nunlike as if we practically deserved a wimple.

But death bores me really; I'm no Plath or Anne Sexton, much as I can appreciate and see the talent, I find that I have long since left that sophmoric part of me behind. That there is no great reunion as they say in the film Sylvia, that in death, Sylvia, it seems doubtful anyway, will be reunited with Papi and all will be well. I suppose it is possible, for who of us know the truth of the matter - none of us; we're all here. But I wonder.

For my part, I'd rather consider that this right here is it and put all of my energy into that. That seems more productive to me, to live in the now as I've often said because this is what really counts. I love that I'll be in New York again in a few weeks and that I'll feel beautiful, the way one can only feel in New York because of the way you walk and your hips switch and your breasts way and you feel the weight of each hip as it presses down on your black-buckle shoe and you know you are that One. That you know you can be whatever you want to be - that in the moment you are at Lexington and 63rd and the sun is setting on the building, warm and slippery as a canned peach, you in that moment are it, and nobody can take this from you.

I try to retain that same spirit when I return, yet somehow it is lost on the highway - that girl that was so confident is gone, perhaps because New York was where I first was It, or where I first made it in publishing and so the feeling is natural. I need to parlay all of this to the present here, though here is a remarkably dull and provincial town, alas, and gosh, even the idea of a well-dressed (as opposed to practically dressed) woman is not a sight you would ever see. I don't mean that one should go out half naked.

By all means be warm, but for God's sake, look good doing it. It's not that hard. I doubtless sound very sexist in all this though I tell you, I expect nothing less of the men, so there is no double standard here.

Instead of the pale and wan girl I see in the mirror I want to be the golden sepia girl in the photograph because I like her much more. She seems to have a certain quality or grace that I do not possess, regardless that the photo is of me. She seems not to care what anyone else thinks and godbless her for that because that is a tough one even for the most secure of us. She seems sure in herself and that she should be because she is that one stepping off the curb on Lexington and 63rd with the hip-switch and breast-sway and her skin glowing and glowing and glowing and just someone I would want to know.

Is this someone we all have? Some other self that we reserve for certain occasions? A friend says no, but I say Yes. We are different selves depending on the moment and that doesn't make us phoney, just who we are. You cannot be the same way with a male friend as you can with your husband. That's just the truth. But gosh, I wish that sepia girl would come out more often - if nothing else, I'd like to see her smile.

Wear This Stigma

photograph: "epilepsia" - autoportrait.

I have to keep moving forward, regardless of what any doctor may say or any health official or anyone in the field. It seems I get yet more and more bad news and yet I am the furthest thing from a hypochondriac (in fact, I'm not even clear on how to spell the bloody word,) and yet, I seem to bring with me a plague of illness ever since I was a young child.

For the most part, I have made my peace with epilepsy: I won't bother it if it won't bother me, though it certainly made its presence known in April when it caused seven or so hours of back-to-back Grand Mals, which I may have written about here (or perhaps not, I can't recall). All I recall of that day is the morning when I approached my husband to tell him that a "big tidal wave was coming."

He of course reassured me that this was not so, yet part of me must have been prescient, knowing that some impending disaster was about to happen, because not a half an hour later, I made my way about half-way across the living room's wooden floor before thinking "gravity is soooo heavy" and then falling.

I remember the hard slap of it. How I could not even put out my hands, and then everything went black. The rest of the day is in snapshots only, when I would regain consciousness for a moment or two, then fall back into the restless and blue slumber of the brain as it hisses and crackles. For example, I recall a fireman's red suspender and recall thinking "safe" because I knew that help had arrived. I remember being wheeled into the E.R. screaming No No No, like a little kid who had lost her way and was terrified, which essentially I was. As to the rest of that day, I recall nothing except waking up for a while in a room where they were gluing electrodes to my head (for the second time apparently) and were in the process of admitting me to the hospital for a proper say. You don't have Status Epilepticus (seizures followed by seizures) and then walk out and go home and say, What a bitch of a day. It's never so simple.

What I remember is that I did not remember. I did not remember my own name. I did not recognize my husband. I did not know anything about the modern age (president, my address, where I was - the usual stuff they ask). In fact, the only thing I remembered was the year of my birth, and so because of this, whenever the doctor asked me a question I told them the year of my birth. The first time I said it got such a hurrah reaction that I must have determined that this was the "right" answer for each question (obviously I was wrong). To be fair, I did say of my husband that he "looked like a nice guy" and since I couldn't go into the bathroom alone and wouldn't let a nurse come, I chose him to which the nurse responded, "But you don't know him." "Yes," I told her, "But he seems nice" and then the door closed and I made him turn around while I peed. Somewhere in the coiled labyrinths of my brain I must have remembered some intimacy with this complete stranger, otherwise, why let him in.

It took a while for my memory to come back and it came back slowly. I remember seeing Johnny Cash on television in the hospital and knowing that I knew him but not knowing his name.

But that's epilepsy. That's just something I live with and you manage because you don't have a choice. Cancer was a different thing entirely and I don't feel like going down that long and boring and painful road because if a freckle can turn into something that could kill me (melanoma) then I can't think about this because I have literally thousands of freckles that could, at any time, turn "bad" and since I cannot control this, I cannot think about this anymore. It has come and come back and gone and then come back again and for as much as I want to kick and shout about it, it is true that it could be worse and IS worse for so many people - so who the hell am I to complain. Pain is a relative consideration, and my pain, which was really painful, could always get worse. Just when you think things can't get worse, they do.

Now, I find that one of the medications I have to take has caused my thyroid function to fly off the charts and that yet a new doctor is added to the mix. It's not that I mind or that I feel sorry for myself: it's that it is another detail of my life to manage, and frankly, there are enough details to manage as it is without this. I barely keep control of all of the medications now (they live in a large Tupperware box, absurdly large) and want more than anything to just stop taking them, if I could but I can't and that is my reality.

I'm not sure where I am going with this other than to say that if you do have your health then value that. Then get outdoors in the sun (because I can't) and soak it up and yes, be careful if you are fair as I am but otherwise, just live your life. These days, I feel like the youngest shut-in ever. I remember having to learn how to change my own IV and administer the medication through the IV and snap and tap the oxygen out of the line because one oxygen bubble could kill you. Thank god those days are over and I am free to walk - to walk - no wheelchair, no IV, nothing; rien.

So it is then that I am about to reluctantly ring another doctor and introduce him or her into my life. That I must do this because it is what is required for me to stay on the other medication that prevents me from having those brain storms all blue-flash lightning and cool-electric gas; that prevent me from lighting up like an electric shaman dressed in a coat of mirrors as I travel down the Witness Tree. This is what we must prevent, even though in some cultures it is nurtured and valued. That the village shaman, often or most often epileptic, is revered and not distained or misunderstood or, as used to be, confined to a mental institution because some idiot muddled up epilepsy with a mental disorder when really, it's a neurological disorder but no matter - anyone different just shove 'em all in the same hole because it's there and it's deep enough.

Still, despite social stigma, despite the risk of status, despite my absurdly high thyroid function, I must move forward and keep reminding myself that this is not as bad as it gets. That I've seen worse in friends who have died from far-worse conditions, and that for the most part, I am functioning and fortunate. I can do so much that they could not. More, i've been through so much worse in my lifetime in my own fight with cancer, which truly, has made me a stronger and more tolerant person - tolerant of other's foibles and idiosyncracies, even my own.

Not too long ago, and I'll end here because it only bears out my point, I was having an IM with a so-called friend in Paris when I began to have absence or Petit Mal seizures. I did not collapse or convulse, but these are seizures nonetheless. I tried to respond to the IM but everything was blurry and it didn't make sense, so I tried as hard as I could to type EPILEPSY, but when I did, it came out like gobbledy gook. Not at all what I expected. He typed one word with a row of question marks: "Drugs??????????"

This is how ignorant some people are and this from someone who said he was a friend (obviously not and not someone I have any interaction with anymore - I see no point because I see no future with someone that presumptuous. That anyone who would assume that of me simple doesn't know me. It's not the first time I've heard it, but I admit it hurt more because I had overvalued this person. I remember being in Provincetown years ago, and while there, I had a grand mal seizure in a restaurant. All I remember is saying, "We have to go..." and then trying to stand and again, fighting gravity that would win out any day.

The ambulance kindly drove us back to our little shack on the beach and wished us good night (I had refused hospital treatment since I then felt fine now that the convulsions had stopped). The next day, as we were leaving, the old woman who ran the place told my friends that "she shouldn't do so many drugs and alcohol - that's what happens!" practically wagging her finger at me as we drove away. I'll never forget that. It was the first time I realized I had a stigma attached. I was wearing my boyfriend's striped oxford and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. I turned away and looked out the window of the Lincoln Town Car and knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

photographs | souveniers

Were it not for me, there would be no photographs or albums or souveniers in this house. I am a documentarian. I document everything; record every event. Make certain that we never have the usual posed photographs where everyone has a frozen fish-stick smile on their face but instead, that they look natural as they are speaking, moving, gesturing.

I do all of this through the use of a telefoto lens that I have by Nikon as well as the zoom function on my HP Photosmart Digital that is okay but will never get the same effect or quality or fineness of film.

I hate to say that because digital is supposed to be better. That you can get more detail I'm told and that you can get better shots and truer colors and yet I still find my Nikon and regular old film get the best shots we have going. The one thing that I do have to do, because otherwise I am, for periods, wholly absent from the photoalbums and scrapbooks, is to take photographs of myself and develop those. It would not occur to my husband to pick up the camera to take a shot: not because he does not love the way I look - he does - but because he has "the real thing" he says, so why bother? It's an interesting way of looking at it, I suppose, but yet when I am old I want to remember and I want him to remember us as we are now - vital and young and in the prime of our lives. I want him to remember that, just the other day, he said "Jesus, you still have the body of a twenty year old." I want for that to never be lost.

And so it was that for Christmas and the holidays I made for him a video out of a series of photographs (this one above being one of them and then set the whole video to music - "All the Air That I Breathe by Bread" - it was fitting, so there). I also made him a beautiful album with photographs of the two of us, an album that is just for us and for our eyes only. It has photographs of us through the last year and even more from the whole twelve years we have now been together.

To be a good documentarian you have to have a good eye for things and you have to be able to know what to capture and what not. I am regretful that nobody documented my fight with cancer because hell, it would have reminded me how very far I have come, yet no matter whom I asked to do this, nobody had the heart to pick up the camera and take photographs of me in my wheelchair, leg up and wrapped, my IV trailing behind me, and so on. It was just too horrible, yet it felt necessary to me that we record this event because it is or was a part of my life that was key. That helped define me for a while and that is important. One cannot just document weddings and birthday parties and get togethers, or one can, but it won't tell you the truth of your life.

I recently put together a book for those who care when I die. The book is entitled, Un Jour De Ma Vie. A Day in My Life, and it is literally a little black book with black pages and on each page, a photograph that represents a different section of the day - for instance, waking and what I see. What I look like upon waking; the dresser top where I put on my perfume and find my clothes and the like. Then my car, a shot of the sideview mirror as I drive fast toward wherever I am headed on that particular day - work, a museum opening, a friend's house, etc. You get the idea. But for each part of the day there is a shot and each shot captures the mood of the hour or the hours, for mood is important.

It wasn't vanity to make the book. It was a way for me to share my life with our son, who can in turn share it with his children, and more, it helped me realize what a great and blessed life I truly have. How beautiful my life is when I see it lain out before me in photographs, it doesn't look bad at all. No, it's not all roses - there are thorns and sickness is the largest thorn of all, but we deal with that and even the EEG read out of my epilepsy is included in the book as a reminder of seven to nine hours of seizures back-to-back. I don't want to forget that this happened to me because even though I do not remember the day, I know that I woke up at 7 p.m. and was afraid. That I did not know my own name or my husband's name. That I had amnesia for a while and that it was feasible that my memory may never have come back. Thank god it did, and so I can do this now, and write my name and know to whom I am married and be glad for all of it.

Perhaps that's it. Perhaps in documenting I am looking for those things to be so glad for - and finding them too. Leafing through one of the big albums I see so many things; friends, dinners, my husband's Roman profile that I have always loved, the self-portraits that I took because nobody else could or would do as good a job and so were reticent, the walks on the beach, the photo of my ex with my current as they stand profile to profile on the great expanse of beach. All of this is my life. Held within this simple frame is my life as it was two seconds ago and while I do not beleive in looking backward, and I strongly believe in looking forward, the occasional backward glance can make you appreciate the now even more because you know from whence you came. Or, the backward glance reminds you of what it is exactly that you do have and how very grateful you ought be.

in the now - paris visa

I love this photograph: he doesn't hate it, but then, he isn't as fond of it as am I. I cannot imagine why though, perhaps this is because he is my husband and I his wife and I see things that others don't see. I see a young man, wavy haired and handsome, so vital and full of potential and in a new and strange land (Paris, France) learning his way around.

If I had known him at this time, I would have certainly made my presence known until I got what I wanted, which is him, just as he is in this picture here. But the problem with that is that at the time, I was nine-years-old and lived an ocean away, and even when he was in Paris, I was likely in Northeast London, Tottenham, atteding St. Anne's and he was already a student at Yale and had a steady girlfriend, whom I envy and don't envy at the same time because I know that during this particular time period, he had lots of women wanting him, as an American teacher in France it was practically guaranteed and I've often wondered if that's why he went but nonetheless... He was a commodity there and would give himself over to that. But that is someone else's history, not my own.

He wasn't exactly the type to, how do I put this gently, ah, be a one woman man. In fact, he was more interested in testing out his new found independence and why shouldn't he? There is nothing wrong with being youthful and indiscrete; that's what youth is all about and I can understand that, so why then limit yourself to one girl or young woman. It seems almost a set-up to fail, yet I do know couples who have been together since highschool, which seems to me an act of great will and love. But for so many of us, to commit at such a young age seems dangerous and to split up for three years while one lives abroad and the other remains in Paris seems to me a recipe for disaster and not a deal that I personally would take on, no matter how appealing I may have found him, no matter how charming or winning his lines about fidelity etc. Call me cynical, but time has borne this out.

But I have him now, and it is in the now that I live, yet I am allowed, I think, to wonder What if.... if I had been eighteen or so. I need not dwell on it too long because I think the answer is very simple and not at all complicated and most of you if not all could suss out the details. How odd that we could have been in Paris at the same time; that we could have crossed paths; that my nine year old grey-green eyes would have met his grey-blue eyes. That at the midpoint of the intersection we recognized something in each other. A knowingness or sense of knowing.

I wonder if that did happen what he thought. If he went back to his garret on rue Mazarine and what he thought of as he lay there on his bed. If he found it disturbing to catch the eye of a nine-year-old who was holding her grandmother's hand. And I wonder too what I would have thought. If I went home and knew I had seen the one I would marry and that from that day on it was settled and all those others inbetween for him, for me, were just part of a journey as we tried to find our way back to eachother.

It often feels like that; back to each other, as if we had been together in some past life and that this were but a second or third time around. Heavy Samsara, so to speak. That we haven't reached enlightenment yet (and in some ways I pray we never do because that will be the end of this) or perhaps we'll go to some Taoist island of the afterlife and be made of gold after we get through the underworld of horsehead and cowface. I want this to last forever. I want this feeling to last forever. I want always to feel the way I feel right now and while I don't see that changing , I'm wise enough to know that life is always about flux and that flux is something you just have to go along with; That there is nothing permanent but change itself. Hardly profound and likely you know this, but it bears repeating regardless.

I believe in that change. I believe in that flux and I believe that I have little choice but to follow this change no matter where it takes me. Pray it be somewhere good and for now, my husband shows his worth as I in turn must show my own; pray it is with each other.

Never take any moment for granted. Life in the now.

pleats and perversions

This could be me in junior high school, with my pleated skirt and plimsoles with knee socks or ankle socks more often, on my way to Saint Anne's where the nuns taught us and where i learned that i was an Anglican, not a Jew, despite any Jewish blood i had, i was an Anglican through and through. It was so ingrained, so much a part of my life that i never questioned it and always, from that point on, thought i would be a nun.

In fact, i desperately wanted to be a nun, so much so that i went to the requisite morning chapel, but also went after school as well (my grandmother finding me by my tale-tale brown Raleigh leaning up against the fence outside.

I thought i would great in a wimple. I thought i'd look terrific dressed up as a nun. I had a real thing for costume then, as i suppose i do now in some odd way. I certainly have, ahem, a style that is all my own. I haven't changed a bit since junior and grammar school. I still wear the pleated skirts with ankle socks, only now they are silk and i wear them with heels. I still wear the white oxford with the PeterPan collar, and i'm still the same tough kid who came out of the projects, ready to take on anybody who wants to take on me, and these days it feels like a few.

People are so "brave" as they think when hiding behind a computer screen. We can say and write things we would never dare say in real life because most people in this regard are either normally civilized or too cowardly to express anything and more, most people have a life and a job and don't have time all day to sit around picking on someone they really, let's be honest, don't know.

A friend told me to expect this now: told me 'you're well enough known and established and there will be those who envy that and will pick on it' I suppose part of good press is bad press. Any press is good press, or so they say. I don't let it get to me emotionally. That much is nothing. It's easy to disregard who calls him or herself Lord Ragpot or something equally stupid and has an Austin Powers icon. I mean, talk about several years ago and being ouf of fashion.. Babe, that was old in the nineties...

I was written up as a "silver spoon middle-class biatch." to give the quote. First, i grew up in the projects, and more i wasn't middle class but what the hell is wrong with being middle class? Or even upper class? i'm assuming that anyone who has the luxury of sitting at home all day and slamming me is him or herself middle-class and or unemployed and is still hiding behind the monitor. A coward. That is the word I am looking for. A true coward would sit and do this and say such things, but c'est la vie et tant pis et pas grave. Or the point in English: no harm, no foul.

This may stir the pot, but so be it. One has to say what's on one's mind. I don't really care any more one way or the other, i just find it vaguely amusing that someone could or would spend so much time talking about me. In fact, it's rather flattering in its way, so who am i to complain.

The point is, and this has happened to me many times; i'll pen an article, get tons of praise, and then one person will come along and point by point refute what i say. My response; write your own freakin' article then. Don't just crap all over me, but do something about it. Quit your whiming because, uhp, i think i hear the waaambulance. Waah.

Ah, life online. Thank god i have a real job and don't just pretend to work. Oh, and if you are one of said commentators, know that by writing here you will be only proving my point. How about we step outside and settle this once and for all? I'll come to your state if you'll come to mine ....

pressigny afternoon | a room with a view

I remember this view. I remember being in Pressigny in France on this particular afternoon and telling myself not to forget a moment of it; not to forget the chime of the clock, (how it chimed three times just after...), the smell of the armoire and the scent of the castile soap, the feel of the sheets, the look of the grand old bed with its’ collapsing center due to age and use. How we loved it there and how we loved and loved and loved. And how, we promised and kept this promise that we would always return.

It was the place of my husband’s youth; it was the place he had gone to live as a teenager, waiting the year before he would go to college and spending a year abroad as some teenagers do. I have photographs of him at the time - his curly hair waving in the humidity, his hips thrust forward as he leans against a statue in the Jardin Luxembourg, another of him playing with Evelyne’s (the woman in his French family) dog and how he looks so much the same. How some things change yet remarkably stay the same. I’ve often wondered if he had not had this experience, had he not gone to France and then returned again several years later and several times, living there as a normal French person, whether or not we would be together, for my blood is so thickly European (and his too for that matter, as a first generation Italian), that I wonder would we have connected? I had gone with American boys but there was always some disconnect there – some cultural divide we simply could not bridge and that may have been a failing on our part but regardless, there it was and no boy from the Heartland would ever steal my heart in any lasting way. It had to be this one, this person who had occupied my land, my territory; it was he who stole my heart and rather, to he who I gave it over gladly.

I look at this window in Pressigny and am reminded of that whole afternoon; how we had eaten Emmental cheese and how it was mellow; how we dined on salad and garden radishes and you could taste the earth in the salad. How the wine too tasted of earth and of oak barrels and how, when in France, I allowed myself to smoke and the taste of the cigarette seemed to compliment everything so perfectly (odd, because I normally do not like cigarettes). I remember how we climbed the small town’s one small monument and went all the way to the top of the tower and he whispered things hot to my neck that made even me blush and my pale green dress fluttered at the knee and I felt vulnerable, exposed, young. I was young. I am young. But younger than that… still a girl, but a woman too. I remember thinking all of those things – at once contradictory and at once making perfect sense.

These are memories yes, and I have the photographs and the letters from Evelyne all neatly tucked away and the lavender I picked in the garden, and the poems I wrote in Pressigny (one of which I’ll include here likely) but what I do know is that memories are in the past and lately, if you’ve been reading my work, the theme is to move forward, because no matter how sweet the past, the future may be sweeter and the only way to find out is to take it full-on with the gusto of life, the way I take France every year and take it with a passion, wrapping my mouth and my tongue around the language and my pen curling letters and words that are foreign yet so familiar to me.

Evelyne is older now, and I wonder how long she has to live. She is tough to be sure but we all break down at some point and then I wonder what will become of our Pressigny. If we will still go and if so, where we will stay for the town has about fifteen houses (really) and I saw no hotel.

I already miss the grand old house – the one that in Pressigny probably sold for about 20K (imagine!) and I already miss it now. Truth to tell, the minute I board a plane I miss it. I miss Europe and I miss home, yet I call America home as well which leaves me stuck in the mid-Atlantic somewhere, a girl without roots, without a home, loving two places at once and having to decide where ultimately I wish to live. Both countries have their benefits and drawbacks and I’m not sure yet where the chips will fall. .I just know that I cannot worry about it. That I need to simply dine out on the memories that I have forever, because they are good and strong and rich and the stuff that life is made of. This is my room with a view.

Thanks for listening.

Grand Pressigny

The climb is dizzying
Each step closer to cloud
They whisper promise of rain
As you whisper promises hot
To my neck. I blush to the sound
Of it: what you promise to do.
I weaken at each word
Fall and rise to your touch.
I wonder who stood
Years before us, fought
For this land, as you once
Fought for me. Pushed
Back the boundary,
Take what is yours as I ran
To the bell tower, took
Firm the rope, and set
The clapper in motion
It licked each side ringing
Alto and sweet.
My bell tolled only,
For you, for you.

go away closer

It's all in the details. When I first met my husband, I couldn't stand him and worse, we had to work together in the same publishing house. I remember interviewing with him and feeling at once attracted and repelled by what I perceived as an arrogance; here was someone who liked to "strut his brain" as one friend put it, and that was dead on the money.

He sat there, or we sat there, as the afternoon ended all about us and sun angled lower in the sky, and we argued about Chechnya and the camps there. He argued for the sake of arguing and I, in my youth, argued out of a sense of outrage and righteousness. For two hours we did this, and I thought of the penguins who stare at each other for a period of time before they decide that it’s okay to mate or not. That was us: two penguins each of us wondering who would lose the eye contact first, who would lower or drop their gaze.

I remember I was wearing a longish blue linen skirt and an ivory silk blouse and how in those days, I didn’t wear a bra because it never really occurred to me because I still felt like a kid. After a time at the office, I did begin wearing a bra when I noticed other people noticing. I ran to Sacks at one lunch hour and bought myself a pair of espadrilles a bra, both totally over-priced but the closest shop to the office and the easiest. I still have both to this day: the ankle lace espadrilles with the rope bottom and the peach colored bra with small flowers on it. Both were delicate, beautiful, and I put on both when I returned to the office and oddly, felt more confident.

For the whole of two weeks, I still looked for other jobs, despite the fact that I had already been hired, I worried that he and I would not be able to make it work and since he was a director and so was I, we would have to work together and closely at that, which at the time struck me as pure hell. I even went to New York for a job interview at The Nation and thought seriously about taking it. But by the time they job was offered, I was beginning to make my peace with our Editorial Director, and I had grown to love my job as well and loved the high-ceilinged space we occupied with countless shelves covered in books both new and old, rare and dusty and smelling of paper and binding. I turned down the other job offers, and prayed I had not burnt any bridges.

At this but at the same time, I will never forget that first interview with him. How we spoke about everything but the job. How we spoke about Yugoslavia and how he had an Audubon print about his desk of a great horned owl and how his own eyebrows, arcing skyward, reminded me of that owl. How his blue eyes shone and flashed white and blue and how the iris was surrounded by a glowing amber color and how a tangle of hair came from the top of his oxford and how I was so curious. I remember how different he was from me. How he was darker skinned, how his hair waved, how he had that hot Mediterranean blood that could be traced through Italy, Greece and even a small part of him Arab.

But what I remember most is how he smelled. How I could smell the fading scent of his European cologne, which reminded me of walking through Paris where people smelled of neroli and lemon and sage and slightly of a better version of Eau Sauvage. How he smelled faintly of cigarettes because at that time he smoked but only a little bit. How he wore deck shoes with no socks and how I loved the color of his ankles, so unlike my own, they were golden and olive - not pale and freckled. I noticed how his hair curled in the late spring humidity and how, even then, even hating him, I wanted to kiss him and more, knew he felt the same way. The whole thing was like fencing, or as he would later write, “Dancing on one toe at the edge of a cliff” making reference to Tansy.

It was a game of "go away closer." The game one plays in grammar school in which you toss a spit ball or something at the boy or girl you like. How you pull her pigtails or ponytail (how he pulled mine), how you wrestle and fight and stamp and kick because you cannot make sense of or process these feelings.

How curiously we behave; how juvenile at such times. Yet there I was, a full-grown adult, just as he was, acting much like a child. Soon, we took to lunching (his idea) in some effort to make peace, and so we did. We lunched while waiters danced all about us and the silver ware clinked and clanged and I began not to hate him anymore, but to simply desire, just as I saw his own mixed feelings turn to desire, or was it just lust then?, when he offered me his coat on the way back to the office and it was spitting rain.

I remember him standing beneath the Linden tree, balancing on the curb and me standing under the same tree in the rain. How there was no other reason to stop other than to simply spend more time with each other. I pulled his coat tight around me and inhaled the scent of him that emanated from it. You don't offer your coat to a co-worker, no matter how gallant you may be. Such a gesture says something of the feeling there, an implied intimacy.

I suppose I think of all this now because it is a new year, for one, because I am still absurdly in love, for two, because I hate how time slips away (as I've already written) and because part of me wants those days back but part of me knows that you must live in the now. That the now is what counts and the now is when you create the new memories that will become the treasure of tomorrow. I'm okay with that. I know that there will be many good memories to come, and though it is hard to fathom they can ever be as good as those first early memories, I know deep-down that love only grows and deepens, if you're lucky that is, and thank
God, this time around, I am lucky - what a miracle! Because we all pay our dues, we all have our unlucky, at best, relationships, our mishaps and misadventures and yet we somehow survive (though we never think it possible at the time). Every break-up feels like a little death when it is happening, yet we do survive, and to some, that’s the hardest part. To me that we survive is hopeful. It tells us, we can be independent, that we do not need another to make life more meaningful and while it’s nice, it’s not necessary to our happiness. Know that and your chances of being in a long term relationship increase.

When I met my husband, there was so much in life I had not done. So many things to explore and while I was not eighteen or nineteen - I was twenty-eight or twenty-seven to be clear, and still remarkably naive for a girl or young woman of that age. I had been involved with the same person since I was eighteen, so that left little room for "dating experience" or any other kind of experience for that matter. Suffice to say that once I met my husband, much as I hated him at first, I also felt a clear and hot-cool electricity and more, a cat-like curiosity that I could only pray was not apparent or obvious. I wanted to play it cool, to remain aloof and business-like, yet that’s not in my make-up. I wear everything on my sleeve, and when he spoke to me, I blushed, and when he walked into the office each morning and I tried to play it cool, I would fumble and again, the crimson giveaway.

I had never led a sheltered life: growing up in the projects was by no means easy. I was streetwise, yet naive in the ways of love and of loving. For the most part, I was afraid - afraid of this man, because anyone else I had dated (and there were few) had been a boy and there is a difference between a boy and a man. A man seemed slightly threatening yet he got my blood sluicing rich as claret, pumping hard through my veins.

It was exciting and frightening all at once. I recall the day he asked if I wanted to go to the park after work and how we rode the train together, bumping into each other the whole way, neither of us pulling back. How once there, he took to throwing acorns and linden berries at me. How he literally was chasing me and fast until I slipped on the humid and wet grass and I lay there for a minute, looking up at the sun through the great oak tree.

He ran over quickly, worried, leaned over me and said, “You’re bleeding” and kissed my forehead. Then after that, he leaned over and kissed me in a way that I had never before been kissed and how even now, I can’t say how long we kissed, only that it must have been a long time because soon is was late and we both had to rush. It was Monday July 25th. There was a key difference here and I felt my body respond almost as if this were nectar of which I simply could not get enough. He said, “You’re so responsive,” then put his mouth over mine again before I could answer.

Love is truly in the drape of an arm, a lover's profile, the golden color of their skin, the shape of their head, the way s/he wrinkles his or her nose, a crooked smile or even crooked teeth a la David Bowie. Love rests, in part, in scent - in that primordial instinct that tells us whether a mate is right for us or not. A subtlety yes, and so one on which we pick up subconsciously, not really understanding why it is we are drawn to this or that person.

If you have forgotten all of this in your marriage or relationship, then perhaps it’s time to revisit it because it's worth the trip; or if like me you never forgot, then go into the next room and hold that person for a while. It's so easy to let it slip away from you - to let love slide and the days pass without comment or incident. I always though that that is the beginning of the end. Don't let it happen to you. Real love comes but once, they say. I don't know if that is true, but I do know that I'm not willing to take the chance.

saveur

A friend of mine called this photograph Saveur - which makes perfect sense. To savor all that life has to offer, to taste and drink of it fully and to dip into the deep wells that we so often overlook.

I'm too often busy to really get into the world.. spending my time, as now even, hiding behind a computer screen. I want to shout at myself to get out. To get some fresh air and hey, maybe even get dressed once in while and take a drive "just because" instead of 'because i have to."

The New Year speeds by and i want so much to slow time down. To savor every day and each year i promise myself that i will, yet each year there are too many days wasted on pure nonsense, or in plain english, crap.

A friend writes to tell me that he's been shot at, had his house set on fire and all because of his political beliefs. As a writer of often controversail topics, i've yet, and pray never, had these things happen to me, but ive been stalked, harassed, name-called and more. None of this will ever stop me from writing about the things that i do or how i write, and as i've learned over the years, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks anymore. That (worrying) or guilt for that matter, are what a good friend would call "useless emotions" and i couldn't agree more. As i once heard in a film, There's what you do and what you don't do. And it really is that simple. Make a decision to do something, don't come crying to me after the fact. You made the decision and Amen, doors closed, that's it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm so tired of regrets and living in the past, because that is what regret does - it holds you in place, tethered to the past, and so one must cut the string and move on. I lived with regret, with anger, with guiilt for years before i finally realized how absurd the whole construct is. How feeling guilty changes nothing. How what i need to be doing is what i am doing right now - listening to New Cobweb Summer by Lambchop - the best song and my song of the year (though i think it was written before actually) but that's besides the point.. For me, it was the song that marked and named the year.

Every year has it's mood, it's certain je ne sais quoi that can only be captured in a good song and for me this is it. It's been as rough year with literally near death experiences, amnesias, aphasias, odd relations who come and go and who betray, and who, in the final account, we have to forgive, not so much for them, but or ourselves in order that we move on. This is what i mean by taking life and drinking the juice of it. You cannot be parched and choking on anger. It's a pure waste and high-time to move on and yes, i do know whereof i speak because even i have some serious things to be angry about.

Never judge lest you know - though that didn't stop someone the other day from judging and totally misjudging me for that matter. For the silverspoon that was supposedly in my mouth - Gosh, how i wish. And how i grew up as some "middle class bitch" were all rich for me, but let it go. Why care? Who is this person anyway and what point in stooping to that level. More, even if in my case it is not true, it struck me that anyone who had all day to spend on the Internet, sans traille, was most likely middle-class themselves. And while i never had any silver spoon in my mouth, much to my regret and much as i may have wished for one because life certainly would have been easier, i could clearly see it gleaming between the teeth of said nastiness.

As Kurt Cobain would have said, Oh well whatever nevermind.

It is 2006 and that means a fresh start for all of us, so here i go.... resolutions to get more fresh air, to get out more, to stop listening or rather, caring what other people think (something i recommend for everyone).

Nourish yourself in this life in every single way and let no day go unnoticed.

ciao ciao 2005, hello 2006

I’ve decided to stop celebrating New Year’s. After all – what am I truly celebrating but yet another year closer to my own demise and while I know that sounds rather macabre, it happens to be at least part of the truth and since lately, I’ve been hung up on my own mortality, I don’t see any reason to celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not at all opposed to celebrations of all or any kind and even like to participate in them myself quite often, but as I sat drinking champagne last night and wearing my three-dollar New Year’s tiara (blue and silver, quite lovely), I wondered what the hell I was doing.

I have been with my husband twelve years now and I seems like yesterday that we had that incredible first kiss, I still remember the taste of it, the weight of his body on mine, how I had slipped on the grass (he was chasing me, quite literally) and how he then leaned over and kissed me.

It could have been yesterday. It does not feel at all like twelve years ago and I have to tell you, this frightens me. It seems or is a point of fact that the older you get the faster time moves and I’m not sure what to do about that other than live with it the way we all do, but must I go out and celebrate it? Yes, it’s another year with him and that is something to celebrate in my book because another year with him is a great thing and what I want forever.

What I am afraid of, and not without reason because the year has brought me some rather serious health concerns, is the fact of losing him. I’ve already decided that it’s okay if I go first – that much I can deal with, but if he leaves me here all alone (if he dies first that is, ) I have told him I will never forgive him. I’ve also told him that if there is a heaven and he gets there before me and chooses some ex girlfriend over me or someone entirely new (he was hardly reassuring on this front and offered up, “Well, it is heaven after all…,”) that I could kill him except I can’t because he’d already be dead, wouldn’t he. The most I could do is stamp my foot and have my little fit and walk off to my own area of heaven, populated no doubt, by all the other angry wives who got to heaven only to find their husband living like Hugh Hefner. Why is it that the heaven I hear about – if there be such a place – is always catered to men? Why isn’t it populated with Peter Falk in his prime, ready and waiting for me, or some such thing or any other number of great men who have died and who are thus waiting. Or more, why in my house isn’t my husband, all heavenly, waiting for me? I suspect they tease, and I suspect heaven, if there be such a place, is not one where we sit around on clouds having long, philosophical discussions anyway. The truth is, none of us knows what happens next but I can tell you, I’m not eager to find out because I rather like my life on earth and although I do not like the state of the earth these days, the wars, the threat of terrorism and so on, I still like the live I’ve carved out for myself. But as for heaven…

No, I don’t take any of this literally but maybe you get my point? I can see celebrating the coming year and saying “out with the old and in with the new” but what I cannot see anymore is truly being glad about another year passing as I speed toward my own mortality and watch my husband do the same. Call me crazy but that’s just not what I want. I wonder if all the people I saw last night with their horns and their hats, as I walked through the snow holding M.’s hand in mine, my New Year's tiara firmly in place, whether or not those people too thought about the passing of time and how quickly it goes, because at its’ root, that is what this article is about.

Remember when you were little and it seemed Christmas took forever to arrive. The years seemed to stretch out then – long gaps of time in which you waited for Father Christmas and that bike or soccor ball you desperately wanted, but whatever the case, it seemed to take forever. Same with birthdays as well. Nothing every came quickly; it was always slow and tortuous.

I used to hate that. I used to think a year was forever, even in my twenties a year seemed to me a long time – or relatively long time. Now, it seems to go by in a snap and that to me is a snap or moment lost and lost too fast for my taste.

All of this harks back to a piece I wrote the other day about living in the moment, and what I’d add now is decide too this year what is important to you before you really get into the real core of the year.

Of course, the in-jokes in our family about heaven and who will get there first are simply a way of deflecting some very real fears about what happened in 2005 vis serious illness, and what could have been a potential loss of life had not my husband been home. Would it have been? I can't say. Am I glad he was home? Absolutely, because I do not know what would have happened without him on that day - the day of the seven-hours of seizures.

We have our scares, our mortality comes rushing toward us, and soon we learn that this is just part of the deal. That one day, yes, we will die or get old but that's okay.

I wondered about Dick Clark last night, sounding so frail and fragile and wondered if he had wanted to be out there "rockin in the New Year" or if this was his agent's idea. I'm assuming it was his, but regardless it made me sad, but probably for my own reasons. If Dick Clark is aging, then so am I, I thought and I felt not only for him in that moment, but for myself and my own little family - more reminders of mortality. No amount of Veuve Cliquot can cure you of this unsettled feeling. No doubt, Dick wanted to be there and no doubt, i'll get over myself as well, but that doesn't make the point any less valid; that each New Year is but a reminder of what is to come and then, what may never come again. The bitter and the sweet (and you do need both) because the sweet is never so sweet without the bitter...

I welcome the year; I open all the doors and windows to let the old year out and the new year in (an old European custom that we used to do when I was little) and I take it full on with the succor it demands while still knowing that I need to remember this moment, that I need to remember this day because snap your fingers and it will be gone.

Have a great 2006; relish every moment of it.

reaching out

What is the New Year without reaching out... without trying to connect with someone or something. Tonight i feel remarkably isolated, yet some dear friends just came around and changed that for me by bringing us a new house-guest in the way of a beautiful, as yet, nameless black cat with high-beam yellow-eyes and a beautiful triangular face.

Having lost a cat not too long ago, i thought it would be perhaps too early, but it's never too early to rescue a cat that had been previously abused or dumped rather because she is black and bought or adopted only for a party, as an "object" for one evening of fun and then as a thing to be disregarded.

How sickening we can be at such times, and how wonderful as well that there are those like my friends and even myself on this front that would take in this poor beast without question.

No, i'm not the crazy cat lady of the neighborhood or some other stereotype that perhaps pops to mind; just an ordinary citizen, or resident alien, trying to do my bit both for my family and for anyone else that i can because that's the right thing to do. I just wish more people felt the same way. That they felt the right thing to do is to reach out and to be fair and equitable. I admit, i've had some poor luck with that this year - nasty politics, back-talking, one particular gossipy bitch (pardon me but no other word would do and any other i can think of is far stronger so i'll leave it there.) The year has been a boon in some ways - i've seen more work in less time than imagined, had the 'when it rains...' issue more than once, and also ended a contract earlier than expected. Life changes and we change with it. I want to say something really profound on New Year's Eve and as a writer, i ought to be able, but the problem, as Bendricks put it in The End of The Affair is that "happiness has so little fictional value."

I ask myself why i struggle to write these days and know that herein lies the answer. I am happy, i am not a tortured artist. I am not a suicidal poetess, a la Plath and yet somehow i am still creating perhaps now more than ever and, if i am to believe those around me, work that is more meaningful as well than when i was writing in the upswing of mania - those late night, early morning essays and poems that seemed to come so easily and so brilliantly were perhaps not so brilliant after all.

What i have now is far better: a husband who loves me, a new cat who has taken to me and already has found her place on my bed where i write and has curled up like an apostrophe alongside the computer, and has, sadly, already decided she can easily jump to my high desk, and who can take this hand and wrap it around her to get all the love she could ever want.

This is what i offer beast: a home in which to purr; some safety and reassurance, all the things that i need as well, she will find here.

I lit candles today to scent the house of rose - i've come to associate the smell of rose with the cat, so perhaps her name will be Rose, i'm not quite sure yet and won't be until i get a sense of her personality; she may well be an Astrophe. We'll just have to wait it out.

For now, i extend my hand to anyone who has extended theirs to mine; to old friends and new friends i greet you and say, let the past be in the past. The future holds such promise.

s.r.p.
sat. dec. 31. 2005

to be is to be perceived

To be is to be perceived. Or so they say, and i find myself perceived and misperceived. A few days ago i came across a reference, or list of references to an article that i had penned and found myself much maligned.

Don't misunderstand, as someone who has long written about pornography and other tough and thorny issues, this was no surprise and i'm pretty thick-skinned, yet this latest lob seemed to be coming from the home quarters so to speak. From those i felt would understsand the situation and yet all i had was misperception and accusation.

One, but one person in this place could see that i wasn't some, how did this one (no legal name used, bien sur, put it), Oh, i know, "Middle-classed whining WASP" who had been "born with a silver spoon in her teeth."

How do i write of the ways in which you have it all wrong, cheri. Of the ways in which you do not know me. My own husband, and he's right, says Why do you care. God i wish i could be him; not caring what people think. Not giving one shit and just walking away from the all of it because it hurts when people blow their darts at you and while you know they are just sitting around bored, or jobless, or with a job and blowing it off or whatever the case, obviously have nothing better to do than to talk about you (unlike this, a time usually reserved for articles but on this day, used to respond in some public way because a public response is called for.)

I have a life; i live it. I, for the most part, could give a shit what anyone says about me but talk to me about what it took to get into this country, to keep my status here, talk to me about A-11s and I-90s then we are speaking the same language and no, i never received the little ribbon-tied press-release that you did. Ignorance is no excuse and i don't claim ignorance. The article was clear - my green card expired pure and simple, and it should have been pure and simple as that. That it was not is not only NOT my fault but is something that i truly blame on the inefficiency of big government - yes, the same government that delivered Mohammed Atta's Green Card six months after 9/11.

This is who you defend. I am who you attack. You remind me of the woman i used to see most days at immigration. The woman who, much like you, whoever you are behind your false name, had made up her mind about me and who i was. To her, i was some blonde WASP. I was not the girl who grew up in Tottenham, with cousins in Islington and a second home in the, oh sigh, swank Finsbury Park. Yep. You got it. Ain't life grand. I am the girl of Ambler Road School and of Saint Anne's Elementary. I am the girl whose biggest offense was stealing The Book of Nonsense from the school library. I am the girl who was pushed off a second-story balcony of the projects because i was different from the other kids (I was the one white kid in a black community. The truth is, i never saw a difference between us, not until that day.) This is how i grew up. I don't complain about it or claim that this part of it was so hard. In fact, i withhold a great deal because it does not belong here and is mine and mine alone to deal with.

I've said enough. I can't care about what you say. Frankly, i really don't know what i would say to tell you just what it is that i think of you. Of the ways in which you've judged.

Sorry, but i'm not the girl you thought you knew. Boo-hoo. Go play that shit someplace else. This bitch just ain't buyin.

never let em see you cry

i had to take a photograph and i chose this one because it was a hot July day and the sun was full on and i had just returned for the nth time from immigration where i must go to get a greencard.

Now, don't misunderstand, they ought be tought (even though Mohammed Atta's Green Card arrived six months after 9/11, but we'll ignore that fact for now) i, for whatever reason, had an incredibly difficult time getting my perfectly legal and by rights greencard. I've been here long enough, married an american, have paid my dues, know the words to the national anthem, america the beautiful and the pledge of allegiance - how can i not count as an almost citizen, i wondered. More, there waas one woan who seemed to have it in for me because whenever i turned up, she would find this or that problem and one day, even began to cut up my old greencard, which i need to get my new greencard, forcing me to practically (or actually, rather) beg that she please not do this fo r the obvious reasons - which, btw, she damn well knew.

It has taken two years and thousands of dollars in legal fees for me to get to the point where i could turn in an application with some semi-reasonable hope of getting a green card. One day, i was shaking in line, and who wouldn't be, men with guns on their hips. Department of Homeland Security thugs with rifles and various army men and while i know that logically i should feel more secure, the probem is that i only felt more nervous. I felt, becaues of past immigration experience (it's a nerve-wracking ordeal if you've done it), that i was doing something wrong. More, i have a nervous condition that makes me shake anyway.

To make matters a thousand times worse, i was pulled out of line, told to spread my arms and legs and searched with a wand and a pat-down. All of this only contrived to make me yet more humiliated and worried and yet i persevered.

A few days ago, a rather blank looking envelope arrived in the post and i would have assumed it junk mail. It looks too official, my husband said, and so he opened it, and there shining brightly was my green card.... new with the gold back, with a not half bad photograph of myself and more. I was or am official. I am legal to work, to live and here. What a concept. ONe would assume if you marry an American that you are instantly legal but this is not the case. You must go through many hoops before this happens and we still haven't reached the end of that road yet but we will. For now, i just thank god it's all done.

This picture, i hope, captures the mood of that hot summer day when i returned home and felt defeated. Nothing but pure defeat. The heat of the day, my already snipped and now useless green card with its missing corner. To me, this photographs says "respite" yes, but more than this is says defeat. It says i have taken off my suit, unloosed my long auburn hair, i have given up. it is a picture not of repose but again of defeat and in this way, i have always regarded this as a rather sad photograph - the opposite of what one may think, nobody could ever change my mind as to its meaning. I know all too well because i was there on that hot-hot day.

I wonder.., this summer, what will my husband and i do without our bimonthly visits to immigration. How odd it will seem to simply enjoy the day, but how much we will miss the routine of being searched and humiliated by DHS, by customs officers and the like. By waiting in shabby green faded rooms waiting for our number to pop up on the screen.

What then will be our defeat? Or will we triumph? I choose triumph. Never let 'em see you cry, my grandmother says. Even on that day, i never did.

passion and aging gracefully

Lately, i've been thinking a lot about passion , because i see so many couples - married, unmarried, - seated at restaurants, with an uncomfortable silence between them as though there is nothing left to say anymore; that the resentments have set in and all that could have been said is said and it is over and done for. Yet they remain together - living almost in a kind of hermetic silence.

I am fortunate to have so much passion in my marriage, and after twelve years, we remain even more in love than we were from teh first kiss (though i must admit, that first kiss was delicious and awfully nice and nothing we do now could ever recapture that moment on July 24th, Monday, 1994. Nothing can even come close, and yet our love and desire for each other has only grown. So, we are blessed. At least, i think we are. To share this is risky because it is so personal, and yet i share because i wonder how many people keep that passion alive in their marriage or relationship. Do they know it takes work to do this, or do they simply not care, or is it that they don't have a clue about how to go abuot keeping that passion alive. I can't answer these questions, i can only say that marriage, like anything worthwhile, is work. That some things do not come easy and although we are both naturally passionate people, i can say with certainty that it is never an easy thing.

Most years, we go to Paris and it is there that we find each other again - if ever we lost each other, it is Paris that renews that spirit. We do not go as tourists, but as natives; my own European-ness that feels at home at last or again, and my husband's all Italian blood and though he was born in America, he was raised by first generation Italians and more, had lived himself in Paris for several years. He is then, to me, not really American . Not that here is anything wrong with being American - obviously there is not. I have made this my home for many years now and feel as though i am stuck somewhere in the Midatlantic - between my birthland and the land i live now..

One need not be European to feel passion. Yet as Europeans i wonder if we grow up wiht more passion. I see it in the way he stands, hips thrust forward as if made for making love, my own come-hither pout, bow-lipped and ready for the kissing. Our langauge so full of refernces that remain secret yet overtly and boldy sexual or sensual. The way i always keep myself dressed as a woman, careful to put my perfume on daily, to look as a woman ought look, or my own version of what a woman should look like. I notice in Paris that i never see a woman walking about in sweatpants and sneakers. It is unheard of. Women dress each day, silk and cashmere scarves abound, and the hips sashay as they walk, as i walk, feeling the weight of my own curves as i move, catlike, down the pavement, chin held high, neck thrust forward. In short, confident and proud.

I wish i saw more of this in America. Perhaps we get too caught up in the practicalities - the children, the housework and so on, yet don't these same things exist elsewhere? I tell myelf it is a different aesthetic. That this is not a perjorative issue - that one is no better than the other because it is not, only that there is difference and that difference shouts at me and then i see why these couples fall apart, wordlessly dining together. I tell myself, I never want to be this, and my husband reassures me that we never will and he is right.

I look to Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin as the model of a perfect marriage, still teasing each ohther and playful in their later years. Now there's a couple who never forgot or lost that sense of newness. That remained together without ever falling silent and the two aged gracefully - no botox, no surgery, no makeup, just Jessica with her long grey hair coiled into a neat bun on her head, and Hume looking lovingly on. I pray that i can keep up with this; tha my own life will be as such and while i don't know what the future holds, I light my candles all over Paris - Notredame, St. Sulpice, Montparnasse and pray that it always be the way it is now.

december 28, sadi ranson-polizzotti, Fl.

handle with care

I always feel so fragile around the holidays. I can't blame my family because I'm too old for the blame game and long ago learned to take responsibility for my own actions. What I've learned is that I can be fragile even within my strength, even within a core of strength there can lie a certain fragility - a deer in the headlights doe-eyed stare. We live with it. Sometimes it is even appealing to certain people, not because they wish to hurt or take advantage, though certainly I've encountered those as well, but because they wish to nurture and take care and this is what I find in marriage.
To me, the holidays are not only a time to celebrate all things religious, but they are perhaps even more, a time to celebrate all things familial, matrimonial. I have to tell myself these days I am still young, not old by any standard but my own stupid one. That as my husband said, Christ, you have a great fucking body, and though perhaps not eloquent, coming from a man who is usually very eloquent and well spoken and known for his work as such, I found the comment reassuring and strangely rousing in certain ways; it woke me up, in fact, and I realized that all this worrying about age was or is only forcing my youth further and further back. And so it is then that on this holiday, this Chanukah, this Christmas, this kwanza this whatever, this solstice, yes solstice is the word I am looking for, that I am blessed. That I am blessed in so many ways, including, and this is important, to be the person that I am and not someone else, because all things considered, I rather like me. I'm not being arrogant here - don't misunderstand, but if I have to be someone, then I'm glad that it's me because I'm kind, I'm loving and hey, I'm good enough looking or as the Amish would say, and this is a great compliment among them, I am "plain" which means good-looking. So, You're looking very plain today is a great compliment and one an old friend uses with me all the time.

More, today I am missing home - I am missing Europe more than ever. I am missing France because although it isn't home I desperately want it to be home and while we visit for a good amount of time every year, it is not enough to sustain. It sustains for a brief while and then it is gone, or almost gone. An ember that I wish to fan and keep going so that I never forget. So that I always keep my dream alive because it is the one thing in this life I really want - to return to France and live there as we live here, only better, because I will be among my own people, Celtic and pale and hazel-eyed and freckled, and what could be better than that...

And so, I leave you with that dream. For now, I must take care of family - but never give up hope, never let anyone tell you who you are or what you are and never be afraid to be either strong or fragile. Both have their virtues and I should know. I am often swinging wildly between them but there is always some equilibrium reached, some middle ground that makes me me.

As I write this I think of Nelson Mandela who said, in his inaugural speech, "It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us...."

How right he is. How rich and how blessed we have been.

s.r.p.

leaving home |

photo: window view, Pressingy, France


i'm dreaming of Europe again - of my Europe that is, or as i call it. Of being home and kissing the soil and the chalk in the Jardin Luxembourg that always makes my boots so dusty and the conkers we pick up and throw at each other like school children and even though it is or has been a holiday (once) it has become a place to scope out now. A place to say, Let's go back, because we are both European (he Italian, me Scottish) and France beckons, both of us having spent a great deal of time there.

Don't get me wrong. I love America and it has done much for me and i like to think i've done much for it as well - that it's been a two way street, but the time has long come that i can't stay here for much longer. That i need to return home before i lose all that i am.

Last time or every time that plane lifts off the French soil, i feel as if i am betraying all that i am again and again. That i am leaving behind my country, the place where i feel so much more inspired than anywhere else. One begins to understand why so many writers moved to Paris and became ex-pats and stayed to write or paint. Why Henry Miller wrote Quiet Days in Cliche and you begin to see yourself in that life. Perhaps not Miller's a bit-too-exciting-for-me life, but a life of one's own, just as i have built a good nest here, no doubt i would build a good nest there as well. The question though is how does one find a decent job. There are no papers and flying for a "maybe" interview is incredibly difficult. What you need is an American company with a French bureau and a boss who sees that you are the obvious choice to send. Look, i would gladly support my family single handedly, take the weight off of my husband and although this would be a huge responsibility and stressful, isn't it for him as well? Sure, perhaps he feels that this is his husbandly duty, but what about me as a woman - don't i too have some financial obligation.

Yes, i work and i work a lot, but somehow it's never enough or long enough to count on. By it's very nature, my work is by definition, unstable. As a writer it will always be so, unless i write a big bestseller and the truth is, i'm not the type of writer who wires big bestsellers because, as they tell me, 'You write too European." Perhaps in Paris then, where my book did well, then i would do far better. Perhaps instead of American publishers i should be focusing my writing efforts on European publishers who 'get' my work and the people too - less gens- who seem to understand. Yet still i connect a great deal with so many Americans so i wonder what they mean when they say You write too European. What does that even mean? It means nothing...It is a label without cause, unjust and unfair. Writing is either good or bad and so far, there is enough interest in my newest book that i am optimistic and hopeful about this. Already one publisher has asked to see it and my agent hasn't even begun to try to sell it. How can i complain, or will they too eventually decide this is "too European."

For other venues for which i write, i try to stick to American punctuation, American spelling and yet i find it difficult because no matter how long one has been here, the European remains and i have to make a concerted effort for the punctuation and spelling do not come naturally. Yet when i write for one British company (left unnamed), they tell me i am "too American." One woman was even so nasty about a recent article on the site that i pulled it in the interest of keeping the peace. Oh, i had done my research and there were conflicting stories about this incident, but i got my news from reputable sources and still... still no matter how much i tried to explain and to smooth her ruffled feathers, the angrier and more insulting she became. This is my countryman i thought. She is one of "us". And they say the French are rude.

Never have i been treated rudely in France. Especially if you make an effort or better, have some fluency in the language, it is appreciated and respected. When i was growing up, you had no choice but to learn two languages. When travelers come to America, we do not speak their language, yet when we go abroad, we expect them to speak our language and they do for the most part. It seems unfair to me somehow. A double standard; i've meet Russians who speak perfect American English and had to learn a whole new alphabet. I"m not sure i could do so well myself...

But this is off topic and not what i meant to say. Perhaps it is better said in a poem:


One year. It is too long.
Why when we do not watch do the years slip by,
the pace quickening, yet when we long, when we yearn
a year is a lifetime.
I have waited – a year to the month
to return to our Paris ; anniversary celebrated, love consummated.
I took it all in. Found the strands of our love and wove them in Pressigny.
Recall the village square clock, how it chimed at our conception:
Our first, our would-not-be.
Then, I knew nothing of him. Only felt myself blooming,
unfolding with fertility. I beamed pink with the love of it.
Three months and I would bleed red as the love drained out,
as my body, auto-immune and inhospitable refused to believe.
Â…I believe.

Come September again we will be.
My ballet-slippered feet, my wrap skirt dancing at the knee.
We two returning to the old haunts, the new.
Your own clear memories; that garret where you made love.
the girls of your youth: sweet, so easily sensual.
And iÂ… I will swing a path down Rue Mazarine,
wondering as I do if in those first early summers
you have found or noticed me.

If you would have wooed me with your slow, easy charm.
Whether you would have noticed:

- the curve of my hips
- the perfect shape of my tits
- the plump, bowed lips meant for kissing

Would you have taken me home to your high, scented room
Fucked me with the vigor, the gentleness of youth.
Taken, wanted me for yourself, exclusive and predatory.
A thing to be possessed, never shared.
A woman you could hold.
The one with whom you'd be where we are right now.

Paris.Fr, Septembre, 2005

dishevelled elegence | on being a woman.

I hate to admit to being vain at all because it has so many and only negative qualities that one thinks of that song by Carly Simon, supposedly about Warren Beatty but hey, ancient history and water under the bridge and so on. The song that, whenever it came on over the radio my mother would turn the volume way up and say, "Listen to the words, Sarah. This song is about your father. "

Do I need to say they were, by then, divorced? And so I listened carefully to every word and thought of my father off "cavorting" and Lear jets and hair (or is it hat?) that "strategically dips below one eye" as, by chance, his did. That even I, now, can see that the song could so easily fit my father that it’s amusing. He did always have one eye covered by a thatch of beige/blonde hair. That he did seem to “cavort” with women, not just be, but be in a way that was different. And women too, likewise, would flock to him. He had that “thing” that people say I inherited from him. This thing that defies definition but when I look at my father I see exactly what it is and in his case, it is pure charisma and that slow, easy charm of his.

Was the hair contrived to fall over one eye? I doubt it. I think it was naturally floppy that way. But did he do other things to make himself appealing – in his studied “disheveled elegance’ as I call it, with his clothes on looking ‘as if they didn’t care,’ his ratty old belt buckle scratched and faded but still somehow sexy but on him. On anyone else it would look foolish. I could see why so many women fell for my father, and I felt for them too because I knew that they were, each of them, just one of many. That he would never settle for one. That much as he may have wanted to settle down, it just wasn’t in his make-up. If he had been American he’d have been a Woody Guthrie type figure hopping’ freight trains and breaking’ hearts at every stop. No doubt, my father lead a life that, from my nine year old point of view, seemed charmed and romantic, and really, truth to tell, I didn’t mind that he changed girlfriends so regularly.

For one, it meant that I was the one permanent in his life, which as a child is a good feeling, and secondly, it was interesting to see who he chose. What they looked like, how they were. I remember one in particular whose name, let’s call her Sue, said all the time, “Really, that’s soooo interesting” with this god-awful snotty Kensington accent. She had wavy blonde hair (contrived on both counts; even hen I had an eye for fashion), and dressed in gypsy skirts and semi-sheer gypsy blouses and the like. She also spent a lot of time applying lipstick, which was fine because no doubt father was off somewhere fixing the flop of his hair.

Is it so awful to care about the way we look? I don't mean obsessively - that does strike me as "vain" or too self-preoccupied in the least, but to care about how and who you are can only be good things.
Recently, a friend of mine had an aunt pass away who had left her all of her clothes, jewelry, and more. Since I am the right size, I was kindly invited to have my pick of the clothes that fit me. I found clothes that had never been worn from the forties, fifties, sixties. A black silk and lace slip; several pair of split slips in silk - blue and peach. Several white slips and so many lovely clothes, including beautiful black, crushed velvet dress and as I dry-cleaned and spruced up each one, I felt myself becoming more womanly with each. I felt better than I did or do in jeans. I felt more like myself and wondered when I had become this person who wears pants every day when I used to wear a skirt and stockings no matter what. Was all of this going to lead to some inevitable affair that my husband would have? Some suburban domestic drama that just bores me to tears by now.

It could I suppose. How you look is important to your partner. You can't just say, Well, I'm home so I can just let it all hang out. There is a fine line between relaxing fully and being a complete sloth and not taking care of your looks. I wear perfume every day, even on weekends, regardless of whether I am going to see anybody on that day. I wear perfume to bed, as did Marilyn Monroe (who wore Chanel No 5 to bed every night). I myself wear Penhaligon's Castile but to each her own. Taste and scent are so subjective but I cannot imagine a day in my life without fragrance and god help us, it just so happens that I have expensive tastes (I never tried: it just happens that I am drawn to higher end scents and those have higher natural oil concentrations and so are more expensive. The higher oil concentration means that they will last longer too so that's good, but the money bit we could do without.

Being a woman is about so much more than just wearing a genuine forties slip and Penhaligon perfume. It is about, as with me, intelligence, analytic abilities, ability to maneuver about and succeed to best effect in any given situation no matter what. When we say, Do the best you can do, this is essentially what we are saying. No two people will have exactly the same ability level but you can do certain things to increase your odds. First, and don't go yelling at me for this, recognize that there are just things that men are better at and things we are better at. I wouldn't give up being a woman for all the tea in China, but that's me. Some people want total equality which I agree with but I would hate total sameness which I hope is a different thing.

I don't want to dress like a man and hide my feminine figure. I don't want to open my own doors if a man is gracious enough to open it. I want to know that should I need to I can fix the toilet, open my door, level and hang my artwork, paint or stain heavy bookcases, carry a hundred pound air-conditioner up a flight of stairs, paint the apartment by myself, bathe the cat when she walks in the paint and drive a stick shift if I need to and an automatic with variable because I like it. I want to fix my own car, put air in my own tires, own my own pressure gauge, my own ratchet set and toolbox, and I want to be able to change the ugly showerhead to one of those big silver sunflower ones that spray the shower water everywhere.

The best part is, I can do all of these things because I had no choice but to learn. In actuality, whether you have to learn or not I recommend learning all of these things for some of them were great experiences, even if they didn't feel it at the time. Even if at the time they felt nerve-wracking, they were good things.

Sure, yes, I'll wear Crazy Aunt I's old clothes that are still new. I'll wear all those things she bought on anxious or heartbreaking shopping sprees when she was seeking something she never could find (peace of mind?, I can't say...) What I can say is this: I will wear them like a lady and am ever-grateful for the reminder, the winter wake-up shot in the arm that reminds me that women are all tits and hips and curves and softness and great smells and that none of that detracts from my daily (and highly unsexy) job as a technical writer for a software firm and an editor of a Russian book on children's literature. But if I must do these things, then I can at least do them with grace.


sadi ranson-polizzotti

old friends revisited

Old friends become new again and for as much as we feel they have changed (never us, never we who have changed, we think), the truth is, we have changed just as much. They look at us with fresh eyes as much as we do them.

Misha is one of my best friends and it had been years and here he is, bright and alive in New York, the world laid out before him and his for the taking, and I remember him when he was an intern at our publishing house - how young and rollerskating to work every day, now married with children.

Flux: nothing profound about that. Wabi -sabi, the passing of time, the way things break down that can be both beautiful and /or ugly depending on the thing. But these are perjorative judgments. What counts is the moment and how you feel in it. Not to worry about where it's going or what you'll do next, but just to live in the "now" of things. That is the healthier way to be, or so I am told by those far smarter than I am and more educated in such matters.

So Misha: still the boy I used to play with, the friend I used to drink tea with and now the man I still drink tea with but who cannot touch me because he is orthodox. No goodbye or hello kiss or ciao. No touching of any kind and in that moment, I realized just how much we touched.

I hadn't really thought much of it before, but we do or did a lot. Or more than normal anyway, likely because we were friends and once upon a time etc etc... Life takes strange turns, unpredictable turns. So now we meet and we work together on projects and we sit facing each other, both of us with a quick sparkle in the eye at the joy of seeing the other in this moment, knowing to savor each minute for soon it will be gone. Vite!: catch it in a Polaroid!

documetarian

It's hard to capture the moment of any given moment in a single snapshot, and yet this shot, to me, captures everything about my most recent foray to NYC. It was subtle, full of life, soft, scented, productive, proud, energetic yet mild, and always but always with friends both old and new and discovering new things about myself and about them as well. Once can hardly say that this was by any means a 'wasted' trip; besides which, no trip is wasted unless you make it so.
Life, like anything (and I realize this is trite) is what you make it. It's like that song by the group "Talk Talk" (remember them?) "Baby... life's what you make it..." and so on. I loved that song when I was younger. It gave me the sense that anything was possible and that virtually nothing was beyond my grasp. That I could do anything at all and that life was mine for the taking - like a ripe fruit about to fall from a tree, I would catch it and drink from life's fine juice and feel enriched.
I cannot say this did not happen: life has been rich and remains so. I have been blessed in so many ways and yet like any one, I’ve had more than my fair share of trials and tribulations to say the least. I've been thrown curveballs and no one should ever have to face - too much death, illness, things that affect your very aspect and can even influence your personality to a great extent - if you let them. If you choose to be a victim, then you will be one. That is not to say that there are not victims and perpetrators, there are, or, to really get into thorny issues, that a rape victim is not a victim, she or he most certainly is. But ask such a survivor how they want to be viewed. Do they really want this one act to define who they are for the rest of their lives? I would say not. I would say that it is letting the perp win by allowing this to affect you forever and by not somehow fighting back through different means be it therapy or some kick-ass martial arts like kick-boxing which I do that says, No victim I.
Of course, I've gone off on a tangent again. What I meant to say and what I’ll now say is that every moment has its meaning and is worth capturing. My husband is so clearly not a photographer that it is entirely up to me to keep a record of our lives; some photo albums and scrapbooks. Now, why I feel compelled to this, especially lately, I think has to do with getting older and facing my own mortality (which is absurd because I’m still reasonably young and friend's laugh at me, but no matter, the feeling is real.) I want a record of who we were so that when we die, our son can have these records with their annotations and say Look this is Dad and Sadi in September 2005 in le Jardin Luxemborg. I want him to have what I never had, which is a past, which is roots.
My family albums, or most of them, the ones I could not save, were thrown in the trash when my mother got a divorce. Nobody said a word about it for I would have taken them and to me, it was a selfish act for those photographs represented my childhood or a great part of it.
My husband's family, by contrast, has saved everything and even the lock of hair from his first haircut that his and my Grandma gave to me to keep - such an honor to rust me with this object she has been carrying around for half of her life. Amazing and I put it in a very safe place with all other important things. As for me, I won many a blue ribbon for my horse-riding, lessons my grandfather paid for even though he couldn't really afford to. I have only one report card because nobody bothered to save them even though I was high honors and I may know it - I would like the official documentation. To go back and read the teacher's comments.
This will not happen because nobody in my family was, as I am, a documentarian, save for my father who, shhhhh, we don't talk about him, who liked to take photos of me with his telephoto and zoom lens's, so I never knew he was about. It was odd, always, to find these photos of me on my horse riding about on Rocket, completely oblivious to his hidden lens. But even those few photographs were destroyed once my family got wind of them.
I suppose I get this documentarian aspect from my father then - for he too wanted to save the moment, or try to. To stop time as much as is humanly possible. Maybe this is why programs like Flickr are so common today - a public way of sharing one's life. I'm not sure. My own "real" albums are all here, thick and brimming with photographs, ferry receipts, Eiffel tower tickets and so on and I take great time to annotate and date each one.
I recently made a little book entitled "un jour de ma vie" which has a photograph for each part of my day (a representative picture). So there I am getting up (je me leve), getting dressed (je m'habille"), sitting in my study at midday, at dusk, retreating to the bedroom for the late in the day respite and a cup of tea, and photographs of the things I see each day - dresser, desk, computer, etc etc.. You get the idea. We try to mark each in French as well since everyone here is bilingual and any chance to practice, including for our son, is used.
My husband asked Why are you making this. I thought about it a while: for one, it is a great little object: black with white-bordered photographs to make them look older, the annotations in silver ink, an black spiral bound, each photograph representing various hours or a time period. The other reason, I suppose I wish someone had done this for me. I wish my mother or father had cared enough to create something of their life or even better, taken the time to think about my own life and those small objects that are so highly symbolic. I would do anything to get back my blue ribbons. Now, all I can do is say I won - but I can't prove it.
tant pis - that's over, so move on and I have by becoming the documentarian myself.
Treasure the moment and hold it close. If you can find even a sugar packet (as I often collect even though I don't take sugar) from a restaurant to remind you, then do it. Whatever it takes but live in the now - not the past or future, but this moment as it is.
sadi ranson-polizzotti, December, 2005.

of ankle socks and other matters ....

It's okay to be different. i've finally realized that being different, however one defines that, is more of a strength than it has been any weakness. I come from an entirely different culture, speak differently, have a condition that makes me see the world differently as through the eyes of Van Gogh (same condition - epilepsy) and i feel nothing but blessed anymore. I used to see all of this as a bad thing. That the fact that i still wear ankle socks with my high heels to work is not exactly de rigeur with the American female set and likely never will be. It might be a nice idea in French or Italian or even American Vogue (where i used to work and no doubt was hired for my 'quirkiness' and again , i'm not even sure what that means, only that the word has been used to apply to me numerous times but never once has it hurt me. It has, every time so far, been a great asset.

I remember when i was running Lumen Editions , a small press that i started that published literary fiction and by god we were successful . A tough thing to do in fiction in publising in those days and now. And so as Editorial Director i received a lot of attention and a reporter was dispatched to interview me and so i did. She was gracious, we sat outside, me avoiding the sun at all costs and she taping and taking many notes. She asked for a photograph and i gave her the best one i had, i thought; me in my friend Misha's yellow slicker and yellow rain cap , sitting on his fireescape and looking in the window. It's a great picture and i'd reproduce it here if i could find it. Instead, i offer up my feet.

The point is, i became who i am, for better or for worse, by being exactly who i am. Not a put on of what is not, not something unreal, no longer trying to force myself to fit in, but just allowing myself to be everything that i am, and you know what, it worked. Suddenly i became successful and had more job offers and the like than i could count.

Don't try to fit in. You'll almost undoubtedly fail. Simply keep being who you are, whoever that is, and if you are good, you will shine and that will come through. It's obvious advice, but sometimes it's the obvious we miss. I recently, for example, got two jobs because of my accent because both involve recording to some degree. All that after all those years of trying to lose it, i find, like Frank McCourt, that it is a useful thing after all.

I thought it was brave of McCourt to admit he had once an American accent and then decided to reconnect with his roots and inherited a Dublin accent. Who would ever admit such a thing? I remember my own awful american accent when i tried to fit in, which i never did, and when i discovered that i t was easier to just sound like me and give up. When i did that, everyone wanted to be my friend. You couldn't ask for more.

The same is true now, only now the stakes are higher. I've outed myself a bit here but honesty is always the best - accept me with my brogue and accent or not at all. Accept that i grew up in London and spent a great deal of time in Scotland and was raised by a Scot herself and so of course i have a bit of a brogue. Of course i also have a bit of american - a mid-Atlantic accent they call it. Anything else would be prentious and not what i want. I hate it when people have been here for twenty years and still sound as British as the day they arrived or worse, who go to England for 6 months to study and come back sounding more British than i. How phony, i think, how utterly pretentious; backed, no doubt, by a deep insecurity.

I say enough. Time to move on. Like yourself, maybe, gosh, love yourself.

mince allors!

sadi ranson-polizzotti

greenwich village, nyc - december, 2005

It's the perfect New York moment. Caught just out of the shower, ready to go out on the town, ready to see friends and standing dripping in a loft in Greenwich Village where you have come to stay for several days - see friends, make new friends, and by god, you do and then some. You make friends that will likely last a life time and when they die or you die, you will mourn them as much as you mourned your cat, which is a lot and likely more than any person - if we're being honest here. Okay, not anyone, but most people. It must sound cold to say such a thing but people underestimate the importance of household "pets" how they become a part and parcel of the family proper and cease to be domesticated animals but more than this.

But this is not what i want to talk about today. What i want to talk about is New York and choice and so much more. I remember living in New York when i was working at Vogue at conde Nast publications in the mid-80s and most nights, we spent our time at clubs like Palladium or Area or The Saint and the like, places that are not, probably, so interminably unify, but what do i know. i just know that at the time, one needed a golden card to get through the crowd and get in and god knows for whatever reason i had it. Never once did i wait in a crowd of people to get into any club. Not once did i have to talk my way in - well, once i did when i wanted to, and succeeded in, bringing in the entire Norwegian Fleet who were in New York for the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty. I did succeed and angle deviating, whose name i shall never forget, what very grateful and gave me his hat, which i stupidly, in my youth, gave to a friend who collects hats instead of keeping it as a souvenir and the real gift it is and was for myself. I wish i could find Ansle and let him know that i still think of him and his fleet and his many kindnesses to me. I remember feeling like the only girl on the boat the next day, which essentially i was, and being in his office when another, petty officer came in and gave a look like a scene in a James Bond film in which the woman is taking a shower in the officer's quarters.

I admit, i was wearing something revealing and i admit too that i was doing it all for show because everything then was for show. It was the high and kickin' 80s and everybody was doing everything and even though i wasn't one of those people - i was a club kid and soon everyone knew me and just knew me as Sadi, which made me feel like Cher or Madonna to suddenly lose my last name but so what. I had some small measure of notoriety and was glad for it. I could do people favors, get them in the door, provide introductions between movers and shakers and realized that at the time anyway , shit, i was a little mover and shaker myself.

I was also fifteen. I had no idea what i was doing and Conde Nast and Vogue were intimidating and out of my league i felt. I was the youngest person they had ever hired and i doubt after the experience with me, they will ever make that mistake again. It wasn't that i was a bad employee - i wasn't - it was that i was young, politics were lost on me, which is just as well because i managed to largely stay out of them and not get caught up in such nonsense. I remember vividly one day having an assignment with a Vogue editor whose assistant was out of town or out ill for a period. I took to her desk and did all of the tasks she would do (I was in Fashion - so i picked up clothes, taped the bottoms of shoes so they didn't scuff, picked up jewelry, took polaroids of all of it, etc etc). There was a bulletin board above the assistant's desk that had a jumble of cards and ribbons from all over the world and from so many different companies. Looking back, it really was art or artful anyway.

But I, me in my anal retentive need to help others clean up, set about cleaning it up and so I did. I took each precious thing that she had and repinned then like little soldiers. The end result was a checker board pattern of beautiful objects but even i could see that something had been lost. That it must have taken her years to create the original and it had taken me fifteen minutes to destroy it and a half an hour to put it all back together in my organized way.

She was furious. Now i see why. Now, here with the New York wind on my face as i walk down Madison i understsand why people stay here no matter what and why i stayed there and why i would even go back to live there now. Why i visit as often as i do.

There is nowhere like New York; so on this day as i stroll down Madison, confident in my hip-switch and the movement of my shoe and the high arch of my foot and the wind blowing my hair seductively about my face and my body moving in time to a song in my head, i know i am home but most of all, i know i have grown up.

sadi ranson-polizzotti
december, 2005

le cou

A friend writes, as I too believe, that love is in the details. He tells me that he has fallen in love with a woman simply because h loved the shape of the back of her head. Another friend writes that in Japan, and I don't know whether or not this is true, that the back of a woman's neck and the shape of her head in the back are a measure of her beauty and a great one at that. I believe that. To me, the most, or one of the most beautiful places on a woman's body is the hollow at the center of the neck - what we called "the salt cellar" the little dip, or, as I named it for my husband, "M.'s bosphorous", borrowing Rafe Fiennes line from The English Patient because it seemed or seems so apt.

Really, it's called the supersternal notch - not the saltcellar, but saltcellar and supersternal notch cannot do justice to this place, just as my love or anyone's love of details - the things that made us fall in love in the first place almost defy reason or definition. How to explain why or how I fell in love because I liked the way his ankles looked in shoes without socks? How I loved the gold color of his skin or the tangle of hair from his oxford that was scented and spiced. Or more simply put, his otherness - that he was or is so completely opposite of all that I am, physically and in many other ways and yet so compatible.

Love is in the details and yes, so is life. The expression, Stop and smell the roses always struck me as trite until I became ill at one point and couldn't get out to smell the roses and then it didn't seem so trite and I just sat there in my wheelchair admiring the flowers blowing in the summer wind, perched in my chair by the open backdoor with the hot summer air wafting in but unable to move or experience my world, or the world I should say. It may sound trite, but you don't know what you have until it's taken away and if you haven't yet learned this , you will. Trust me you will and if you think not, then you are a fool. Life is bound to take it's toll on all of us at some point - it is the nature of things and it is only then that we can truly appreciate what we do have.

As winter sets in again and the days become dark, I am reminded of that summer and what Camus wrote and I'll end here, "In the depths of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer."

s.r.p.

le matin

le matin the waking hour, the quiet hour just as dawn breaks into day and the only sound is that of the mourning dove and other early birds, but mostly the mourning dove who coos her melancholy song. I could sit like this forever just listening, and why not? Isn't life about taking in the details anyway. So much of my time i taken up with work and other pursuits and i'm glad of it, happy to be so in demand in this sense and to work on my book but to rest, to be in Paris, to simply let the light wash over me - to point Eastward toward the sun and to know that this day is unlike any other is something we'd do well to never forget.

le mariage

to be married, to commit, to give onesself over utterly to another person and to have no regrets about this. To let go of the past and to look forward. To thrive in the moment and not in the past or the future but to live in the now... to never let anyone come between you. To feel the same youthful desire of years prior that only intensifies with age as the years pass by. To grow old together, to intertwine, to work side-by-side and be comfortable in the quiet. To be comfortable in the noise and to know every idiosyncracy and yet love regardess. To have watergun fights. To never take it all too seriously but to keep on moving and move into the future hand in hand and make that ontological leap that your body says No, Don't do it, it's too dangerous and you do it anyway because you know it is right and true. You believe. You have faith where there is no proof. Everything mathematical that you have trusted is thrown out of the window and instead you learn the odd calculus of love. This is to be in love. This is to feel desire. This is my way of being. His way of being. Ever closer. The time is now.

s.r.p.

One week and I will be there. Just one week and I will board a plane to Paris where I always feel at home because no matter how many times I hear the French are rude or any number of such comments, I’ve never found it to be so. Whether you speak the language or not, you can fit in in France and easily so. Sure, speaking is easier and after all, when in Paris... as in Rome... We certainly expect those to speak our language.

I was always amazed at the people I worked with who were or are from India. Those who grew up speaking Hindi and Telegoo and yet had better language skills than a lot of us English and Americans. Truly. It never ceased to amaze me and I knew that had I been in India, there was no way I could get by, though many explained to me that they had grown up learning English in school as a requirement.
We too have our requirements though language isn't really a big focus and seems to be dropped by many students after minimal requirements are met, if there are any. And as for translations, we rank almost if not the lowest in the world to carry books in translation.

Visit Paris and you'll find in any bookstore a section for books in German, French, and English etc etc. I visit most American shops and I can only find books in English, which troubles me somewhat because there are books I’d love to read in French that aren't available yet but the shipping alone is hardly worth the price of the book. How to get around this? To lug them all home in my suitcase? To have friends rush out and purchase them and send them to me? Certainly, that is looking more and more like a valid option though one hates to be an imposition. Or I do. Most of us don't like to be such.

So off I go to the place I call home, or once called home because I feel divided. It is my London, weary and wonderful after terrorist attacks; my America, of which I am deeply proud and honored to live, and my France, a childhood home of sorts and place of frequency to which I return again and again, telling myself each time how this time I’ll stay. This time will be different and we'll set it up and it won't be a thing said in the moment.

It's not about romanticizing. God knows there are so many foibles to living in Paris, or France. Everything is expensive, even simple things like linens and appliances. Flowers are cheap but you can't eat them. Rents are expensive but nothing compared to what the appliances and beds cost and try getting one delivered to your house as you would here! Hah! I've heard you have to venture far out of town and then get a truck and bring them back yourself.

Yet still... still... I find myself yearning. I’m not even there and already I’m missing it. How awful. One thinks, then just go! If you love it so much then just go, but like anyone, I suppose it is inevitable that we romanticize places where we do not live and holidays are notorious for this. Off you go on some wonderful jaunt and come back believing you could really make a life for yourself in Thira, Greece, where you would serve up cappuccinos to willing tourists who would ask you how you like living in your one room, studio type white stucco house with the small little garden and the zillion Greek quilts and the sound of donkey bells at night and you know, just know it won’t be like this.

It can’t. Like anywhere, it takes on a daily life of its own. A city becomes a place whre you work, live, try to get by and have the usual routines and domestic bliss and not so much bliss as you do anywhere. It’s just a different setting and while I would argue that some settings make it easier to suffer the invetiables than others, I would never argue that the inevitables marvelously vanish once you get there. Nobody could be that naïve, except perhaps Diane Lane and that woman who wrote the book and even then, she didn’t have such a great time ~ it was a great deal of work and if you’ve read Under the Tuscan Sun then you know it. Life ain’t Diane Lane spinning around on her bed in her charming villa and living it up with some cheeky and saucy Italian.

Ah well, c’est la vie, eh? I’ll simply send a postcard. It will read: having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

xo

who we are is where we come from. to the people of new orleans, my heart goes out to you all in this darkest hour. you will prevail and although time has and will takes its toll, you will find a way through the dark night of the soul and with help, practical mostly and some spiritual faith, though god, it is hard no doubt to find any faith in these hours, you know you have it and will again find it.

i cannot compare even my darkest hours to your own and although i may myself have looked death squarely in the eye, i somehow slipped through and he missed, didn't get me this time. for those of you who lost loved ones, again, my thoughts, prayers, everything i have i offer you now.

may you find your way through this, and know that everyone's thoughts are with you.

s.r.p.

photograph: profile, sadi ranson-polizzotti