"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.