Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Wrote This Sitting on Our Hill Two Years Before We Moved Here

This place is nothing but seasonal shifting. We've been here 10 years and it is all about the weather. Today is early April, with birds wildly cheerful, but there is a weirdness about the incipient green tipping the hills within my view.  It should be slightly less apparent and more in keeping with the still-grayish light.  

Looking for closure, whether New York or here, I am kidding myself that I have much future at al. My 69th birthday next week, only a few years of words left. Am I really so unhappy that I never became a writer? When I was a kid upstate, the first book I ever read had vivid colored pictures and a font that still knocks at my memory with joy.  The pride in my first terrible weird poem drove me to add "not copied or traced" to the end of every work of youthful authorship.  I didn't want to be an author, then. I was an author, confident in my baby books, my stick figure words, self-adoring every sentence.  

After I grew up and understood that no one had any interest in copying or tracing my work, this early foray into the importance of copyright still served me in my work in publishing other authors. However, I did not become an author myself.  I only wanted to be one.  My novels were a series of unfinished plots and cloudy characters. I could only write self-indulgent entries in my journal -- pretty much the blogs I'm writing now. 

I should wrestle this writing thing to earth here and now. The fantasy of this elusive authorship has dogged me all my life, including, for the past decade up and down the Taconic Parkway, between working in New York and replaying the kid in Hudson.  The decision to quit my job and finally give writing some effort near the place where it all began rests on this hill looking across at the Catskills. 

If Michael and I leave New York permanently, it will disrupt the lives of our sons Jeremy and Willie and my own life in the center of the noise, clutter, and chaos that have kept me energized and driven for nearly 60 years. I will need to quit a job I have been paid nicely to do, and, with its occasional moments of actual writing, has kept the itch for actual authorship at bay.  I will be returning to a place uncomfortably close to the suffocating conservative town that I gleefully escaped years ago, with never any regrets.  And, if, in the end, if we move here and I can't write because I have no stories, will it mean that my life has finished in defeat   Will this hill with its view of the Catskills and the Berkshires be enough to compensate for the loss of the city that I've loved nearly all my life?  

(As if on cue, Robin has suddenly perched at the very top of the pine tree in front of me and its precise orange is a sudden exultation in space.  A tiny perky surprise out of the almost unendurably slow fuzzy expansion of spring. And I could swear that birds around me are now calling to each other "right, right"  pause  "here ".)

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

CELEBRATE or celebrate

Three events:

1. A couple weeks ago when I was alone upstate, I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Big Night back to back.  The first is a documentary about Tokyo's master sushi chef, who was 85 when the film was made and has spent his life perfecting the layers of small raw pieces of fish and vinegared rice.  The second is about two Italian brothers living in New Jersey in the 1950s, whose restaurant is about to fail.  They are conned by their competitor into believing that Louis Prima is coming to their restaurant and they spend all their money on one celebratory meal, which includes a timpani, a large pastry drum layered with pasta, ragu, vegetables, and eggs.

2.  I was in New York last weekend to see my sister and brother-in-law perform in the chorus of The Occasional Opera, an annual birthday event put on by an old school mate of his.  About a decade ago, the schoolmate, a radiologist in NYC who also plays the bass violin, was asked by his wife what he wanted for his birthday.  He wanted an opera party, so he invited a few colleagues who also sang or played, sent them music in advance and they all came over and performed it in his living room.  Everyone had such a good time that they did another opera the following year, and then the next year -- each time inviting more friends -- both amateur and professional, until the event outgrew the radiologists' living room.  For the past few years, these birthday operas have occurred in a church next to Lincoln Center, and now includes a full chorus and orchestra and a mix of professionals and highly talented amateurs singing the leads.  No one is paid.  Everyone rehearses only on Friday and Saturday morning, the chorus has only an hour with the orchestra.  On Saturday night a hundred or so family and friends come to watch and, at intermission, to eat dozens of deserts downstairs that the performers have brought in. The resulting glorious sound is miraculous, a convergence of friendship, talent, and the deep passion for music.

3.  The next day we went to the Cloisters, where 40 speakers had been set up in a circle in one of the halls and every 15 minutes played Thomas Tallis' motet Spem in Alium.  Each speaker is a single voice and when you stand in the middle you are bathed in angel voices.  We listened to it twice between wanderings around the museum.

I came back upstate deeply depressed for a day.  Here, life's meaning relies on Jiro's sushi making --the pleasure around the making and gradual improvements in small things (heartier vegetable plants, tastier pumpkin soup, balanced colors in the flower garden, stronger skiing).  New York is Big Night, with its instances of  great joy (brilliant amateur art and music accidentally discovered, brilliant professional art and music intentionally created and available, astounding meals, great loves, sudden leaps in my career, children's milestones.)

The basic question then, does one live life for the high experiences created serendipitously or come upon by accident or for the incremental small pleasures brought on by a plodding discipline and attention to detail.  I have, of course, lived generally in the former sphere, with the occasional foray into writing and cooking that resembles the latter, sort of.  Now, I have no choice.  At 70, the peaks in the sine waves are by physical and emotional necessity lower, and maintaining the objective of CELEBRATIONS can only result in chaos and sorrow, while these small textured daily celebrations can be sustaining.  (I actually made the timpani when Big Night came out.  It took two days to make and looked great. Individually each layer was terrific, but when it was put together, the converged flavors became muted and the result bland.)