My mother-in-law, whom my son called Nia, was buried eleven years ago today, on Labor Day, in the family plot in Queens, one I used in the novel I just finished. It’s an older Jewish graveyard, impossible now to get into, one with a fancy wrought iron gate. The best plots are at the top of the hill with the views—why should the real estate of the dead be any different than the real estate of the living? As you ascend the hill, the burial plots have the names of the big department stores in New York: Macy’s, Gimbels, Saks, and indeed the neoclassical grave markers, look like little department stores. Something I noticed when the limo was going up the hill. I used this too in the novel I just finished.
Nia died the day the levee burst in New Orleans. While we were making funeral arrangements in Santa Monica before flying to New York, then Secretary Rice was seen buying shoes at Saks in New York, and New Orleans was sinking into the water.
It happened very quickly and unexpectedly. Both the drowning of New Orleans and the drowning of my mother-in-law in East Hampton. Nia had houseguests for the long weekend. She had spoken to my husband on a Thursday morning about some business matter, and mentioned she was going to the beach with her guests. Thirty minutes later she swam out, and the coroner guesses had a heart attack, and minutes later, her body was seen floating in the grey green waters of Louse Point: her favorite place to swim. Someone fished her out, someone else called my son who had just graduated from University of Chicago and was bartending at a local restaurant. He called my husband, my husband called me. And then he said, “I guess I’m coming home from work.”
I said, “That might be a good idea.” Then he said, “Would you get me something to eat, I haven’t had lunch.” I said, “Of course!” hung up and walked over to the nearby Whole Foods and bought all sorts of things to eat.
An hour or so later, my very pale husband came in the door, sat down, at the little table by the kitchen window.
“Have you cried?” I asked.
“I can’t tell.” He replied. “I pulled over and sort of did something. But nothing much came out.”
I had experienced much the same reaction. I had stopped in my walk to the Whole Foods. Leaned against a telephone pole, but nothing much came out.
My husband didn’t eat his lunch. In fact, my husband didn’t eat anything for the next month. Not the lunch I packed for the plane, not any of the funeral food we had at his parent’s apartment on West 77th Street. My husband is a big eater. All of us are, but he’s the one who thinks it’s a sin to think about scrimping on a meal.
Someone called us and said, we had to send a paid obit to the New York Times.
Someone else called and said, she was trying to get a real obit in the New York Times.
I sat down and wrote out a few paragraphs. I found the obit number and began reciting, and somewhere in there, my husband roused himself from his stupor at the end of the little table by the windows with the full plate of food in front of him and gave me the hand signal he gives to a waiter when he wants the check.
I paused. Then asked the man I was talking to on the obit line, “By the way, how much is this costing me?”
He replied, “If you want an obit in the New York Times, you don’t ask price.”
“So how much per word?” I insisted. I was a copywriter for years, and have a pretty good nose for word count. I knew I had just written several hundred words. Several hundred words that translated into between five and ten grand. God knows what it is now. Years later I was talking to a woman whose husband writes obits for the New York Times and she told me, the paid obits are the most profitable division at the paper. I’m not surprised.
I said, “Excuse me,” to the obit man, put the phone down, and held up five fingers, then ten. And whispered thousands.
My husband roused himself and yelled, “Cut! Cut!”
I hung up, cut the obit down to four sentences and we found a friend to stay with the cat and the next day flew to New York.
By now, New Orleans was under water, we weren’t watching TV, but the paper was delivered, the one with the four sentence obit and we saw the pictures of the residents of the ninth ward sitting on the rooftops of their houses, awaiting rescue.
My mother-in-law was literate, idiosyncratic, whimsical and always said she refused to do what her own mother had done: which was to languish for years in bed with paid attendants. She was true to her word.
I’m staying in her little house now fixing it up for rental. I finished my novel here this summer. And I’ve come to love this house very much.
One of my fondest memories of Nia is on the day she saw me after I’d dyed my hair bright red. I’d just gone back to work at an advertising agency, a year or so after my son was born. She took one look at my bright dyed tresses, disappeared into the back of her apartment, and brought back a lock of her own real red hair, one she had presumably been saving for just such an occasion. I’ve forgotten to mention, when she was young, Nia was a raving beauty.
“This is what real red hair looks like, Mary! Mine was Titian colored!” My hair was quite long then and as always very curly. She pulled out one of my curls, and laid her authentic one against my fake one.
I smiled. She smiled. Then she, the baby (my son) and my father-in-law had dinner. As usual, my husband was on the coast working on a project.
Indeed, he’s on the coast working on a project as I write this. I missed him then. And I miss him now.
My dear furry friend Masha recently died. I loved her dearly and used to babysit her. Farewell Masha, may there be lots of green, shady areas to enjoy where you are.
I have finally, I hope, convinced my husband to make a will. We’ve gotten as far as lawyers conferences and the list. Men, I’ve learned, are far more resistant than women to making wills. Our own lawyer didn’t make one he confessed, until he had a heart attack. I can think of all sorts of reasons why this is true. Women used to die in droves in childbirth not all that long ago. We are usually the caretakers of the ill and the dying. Not to mention the young and the helpless. We are used to the idea of death, vulnerability, and life on the brink– ours and everyone else’s. At least that’s what I’m guessing.
I left what money I have and what money I might make in the future should some brilliant person decide to make a movie out of one of my books, to my son. That’s a no brainer. I left my wooden statue of Jesus to my shrink who likes folk art, an angel to another friend who has always wanted it; some jewelry and other things to my niece and her daughter. Henry if he’s still alive and there’s no one to take care of him goes to Lupe, my great friend and his dog nanny who lives around the corner from us in LA. I also left a hunk of cash to take care of him. And EEEK if all of us die, I left my hunk to yet another friend whose name I won’t mention because she’ll be embarrassed.
Pull the plug. That’s the main message of my last wishes. Give my son my money and pull the plug. This is also, on inquiring, something women almost always say they want, to “pull the plug.” Men are either unclear about this or adamant “keep me alive whatever it takes!” I won’t go into particulars.
I want to be cremated. Very un-Jewish, but I have never been very Jewish in life, so why should I be in death? And I would like my ashes scattered around a Japanese maple tree I caused to be planted in front of our house in East Hampton some years ago. The tree was very expensive. In fact, other than my car, it’s the most expensive object I’ve ever dared to desire. That’s a terribly, entirely true, very revealing admission, now that I think of it. Making one’s last will and testament, with instructions to pull the plug is very intense. Intense and highly satisfying. I hope my husband will continue to cooperate so I don’t have to deal with this any more.
I also requested after the requisite spreading of ashes, that the poem, The Well Dressed Man With A Beard, by Wallace Stevens be recited. My son, who knows the poem by heart, or used to, will I imagine, do the reciting. When I thought of this, when I made my list some hours ago, it wasn’t my tall, handsome well dressed son with a five o clock shadow who recites the poem after the ashes are spread, around the red maple tree. It’s my son when he was ten. When we didn’t have the tree. And I recited the poem to him for the first time. And he got it. He got it right away. And thinking about that—not being dead and missing out on the all the fun—made me cry. I hope I live a good while more in great good health, before I encounter what James referred to as “the distinguished thing.” And I hope before I go up in smoke, I visit several more foreign places, cause to be planted two maybe three more mature Japanese maple trees, write five more books, one decent poem and buy a trampoline.
And perhaps a ping pong table.
The bucket list goes on and on. It can never be satisfied. Which is why perhaps I taught myself to be very choosey about wanting a long time ago. Or perhaps I was just cooperating with other people’s desires for me and I’m as rapacious and everyone else.
I’m thinking of Kafka now, the hunger artist who starves to death in his cage, but not before whispering, “if I found something I wanted to eat, believe me, I’d stuff myself like the rest of you!” Then he died. And I bet, being a man, unmarried surely (you never hear a word about his wife) he didn’t leave a will.
The Well Dressed Man With a Beard
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
I’ve been doing something like a meditation practice for a long time. I say something like because, although I’ve read plenty of books on the subject from different disciplines, and have a yoga practice of long standing where the meditation aspect often enters in, I’ve never formally studied with a teacher the way one is supposed to do if one is to learn something as esoteric as meditation.
This prejudice against taking instruction on meditation is completely capricious, as I practically live at the nearby yoga studio here and even more so home in LA where the drive is far less picturesque. (It’s hard to imagine somewhere with worse traffic than LA: but that’s East Hampton, Amagansett–never mind the other hamlets in this region known as the Hamptons–in July and August.) I guess this is my karmic debt alas.
For a while, I was going to do TM because everyone who does it, swears by it, and I liked the idea of twice a day for twenty minutes but I didn’t like the way I was hounded online after just one little cyber inquiry. I could mention a few other meditation cults I’ve contacted throughout the years, and I can genuinely say the same thing: not only did the usual fear of turning my mind over to the authorities enter in, I felt I was being marketed to. I was pitched morning noon and night if I inquired just once. And If I inquired twice, I was asked for my phone number, a credit card and a firm commitment.
Consequently for at least ten years, I’ve settled into my comfortable thirteen and sometimes twenty minutes of sitting as straight as I can on the floor on a cushion with my eyes closed and noticing my breath. And when some other thought enters in, returning to noticing my breath. It sounds moronically simple, but it’s not.
I’ve learned a few little tricks at some of the yoga workshops and cleanses I’ve participated in over the years. One is alternate nostril breathing, which really does focus the breath. The other is exhaling rhythmically for eleven minutes (the later is a breath practice to relieve past anger and actually it really does! At least whilst the meditation is going on.)
For years and years now, it’s what I do every morning before work. One of the above, and on especially bad mornings after troubled sleep, all of the above with the Loving Kindness meditation as a sort of secret weapon if things are really untoward in my world.
Unfortunately, just lately, my practice has fallen off. And I can feel its lack in my life. I have less patience. I am more tempestuous. Less accepting of others and myself. And I notice I am more prey to self-pity, self-aggrandizement, the list goes on and on.
I was encouraged when I heard a Zen Buddhist monk the other night speak of the fact that when he’s in New York, he still gives the finger to anyone who cuts him off in traffic.
After he confessed this, the monk gave the people sitting on cushions in front of him, one of his beatific monkish smiles. A man, I’ve noticed is able to get away with this sort of thing; where a woman, even a charming female Buddhist monk wouldn’t. I think that’s because the world is always more forgiving of a man who loses his temper than of a woman who does. I noticed this particularly when I used to be in a writing group. If a woman was getting pissed off in somebody’s piece—especially if it was written by a woman—everyone in the room, both male and female would point out the off-putting anger aspect and dress the writer right down. This is, of course, a very big gender inequality issue. One worth investigating at length elsewhere.
I went to hear the monk because I was hoping he would inspire me to get back to my meditation practice, and he did! I’ve meditated each morning since then. And when I do, instead of paying attention to my breath, I’m distracted by the thought of the smiling monk, flipping someone off in midtown Manhattan. And also, since I’m having a hard time processing as everyone is, of Allen Ginsberg.
This week has been a doozie, hasn’t it? Death, more death. Donald, more Donald and a coup d’etat in Turkey. I’m sure I’m missing many other horrific events. What the world needs now is love sweet love. And more poets like Allen Ginsberg. The link below is for his distracted meditation. (My thanks to Aimee Levy, for originally sending me this link.)
On Tuesday of this week, my son and I drove to Jericho, New York and finally emptied out and closed down the storage unit that had been acquired don’t ask me how long ago, because no one in my husband’s family was willing to part with the fifty years of paintings, letters, notebooks, and the rest of the detritus of my father and mother-in-law’s apartment on West 77th street following her death.
What is it about old crap that reaches out its dusty moldy fingers and puts the vice grip on the sense of reason? I must have that ugly old photograph. I cannot live without that business letter from 1957. The trips people could have taken for what we spent! The fabulous clothes, the wonderful dinners!
The massages, the Italian leather shoes, the cashmere! What might have been and what have been point to one end: what idiots we were. My son and I, however now have the moral high ground: we did it! We closed down the money pit.
As recently as last summer, my husband and I had set forth with a rented truck and a firm resolve and left Uncle Bob’s Storage Unit facility with an empty truck and mutual anxiety attacks. These old possessions and the memories they elicit are so debilitating.
My son had warned me on the morning we set out: “We might not get it done today, and you can’t just throw away something without vetting it with me! Otherwise, I’m not driving you there!”
“Okay,” I said. And I wondered if this was going to be A Visit to Uncle Bob’s Redux, but at least we had not rented a truck. We were driving in my son’s great big Toyota four-wheel drive. And I hope, since he had at least some of my genetic code, he might be a little more sensible than his father but of course they weren’t my parents. Or Grandparents.
Ghosts and spirits linger around the possessions of the dead. I had found that out when I was elected to clean out my mother and father-in-law’s apartment all those years ago—years I measure, not in coffee spoons like Eliot, but in monthly fees to the storage unit.
My husband’s family and I are not alone in this madness.
Consider the following:
1 in 10 US households have a unit.
Of the 58,00 storage facilities world wide, 46,000 of them dwell in the U.S. (The U.S., birthplace of the Big Mac and the Mac mansion, the California Closet Industry and indeed the California King itself, apparently is fonder of its clutter than anyplace else on the globe.)
Experts in the field of self- storage would tell you that the 4 D’s dominate the industry. Death, Divorce, Downsizing, Dislocation.
Yes, we in the U.S. use more gasoline than anyplace else in the world by far. And we also use our cars to drive us to our storage units, where we hoard our clutter that we cannot bear to part with.
Myself, though I have no problem parting with clutter, my email inbox contains close to four thousand unread or undeleted emails. I alas, know I am not alone in this accumulation of cyber garbage.
Is there a correlation between how much is in our hard drive? And how much is in our closets and storage units?
Now that space to hold “memories” in the form of images is getting smaller and smaller, is our desire to hold things, growing? Hence our explosion of containers for personal crap?
The interiors of our houses are expressions of who we are. Our storage units by extension tell even more about us. That is to say: What we hide, what we cannot bear to part with. Indeed our true neuroses dwell inside the long aisles of the storage units that dot the US. map, delivering, a 5.1 return on investment to the owner of the unit. Not the possessor of the drek.
In a way, our hidden clutter is more about our subconscious wishes and desires, our primal selves. Our desire to contain our raging IDs.
Out of sight, out of mind? Not so fast.
Yes, here in the good old USA, we have more Donald Trumps, (millions of them) more guns, more cars, more storage units, than anyplace else on the globe. Here we glorify and make a fetish of our clutter—and create a multi billion dollar industry to support it.
My good news is that, Uncle Bob’s in Jericho is gone. Hallelujah.
The bad news is that I have two more storage units to contend with….one three blocks from where we live in LA. And the other one, well, I refuse to even go there…..
I was in a conversation Sunday morning with a very hip forty something entrepreneur. He used the word curated seven times. I’ve been hearing the c word bandied about for a few years now. Everything is curated! Once upon a time there was the curator and the collection. As in art with a capital A. Now Whole Foods is curated. And one curates one’s clothing. I told my friend Laraine the echt dog walker, she should say her pack is carefully curated. It is!
Urban English, while wily, entertaining and certainly hip, is a language remarkably imprecise. Also, I never get it. I don’t know if this is because I don’t spend enough time online (it seems to me, I spend my entire life online). Or because I’m just plain dense.
Also, I’ve never understood no matter how many times someone explains to me or I look up, the word inchoate. I know what it means. I just don’t understand it. I could never, for instance, use it in a sentence. If you use a word, you have to understand it.
How about that schadenfreude? The inimitable German one-word marvel that says it so much better than envy, jealousy, or hostility. Shadenfreude, the joy we feel in another’s misfortune, is in itself a little work of art.
My cousin Melissa Marcus, a French scholar and translator of Isabelle Ebherhardt, sent me a poem the other day—Boketto—in the Japanese language, to stare out of windows without purpose. Now that’s a beauty.
Uxorious is not an especially pretty word or one heard all that often out there in our carefully curated world. I once told a childhood friend of mine he was the most uxorious man I know and I meant it as a compliment. It was. He looked it up when we were talking on the phone and he roundly disagreed. He felt insulted. He wasn’t uxorious.
On the same subject… how come there is no female equivalent of uxorious? Is there no such thing as being excessively fond of one’s husband? Or is it just assumed one always is? It’s hard to say.
On that same afternoon I was driving down Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton. The sun was shining in the deep green trees. The road curved. Henry was beside me with his little head looking out the window, ears up.
A flock of wild turkeys crowded the road. I slowed down. Sometimes you can go for months without seeing them. Then you start seeing them every time you leave the house. Or even in your own yard. Wild turkeys: Amazing looking creatures. The first time I saw them, I knew exactly what they were because I once worked on the Wild Turkey account. Wild turkeys are odd, majestic birds. And you never saw them until you did.
This group of wild turkeys hit the sun at exactly the right angle. On one side were the little shingle houses on Three Mile Harbor. No mcmansions. Not yet, anyway. On the other side, the sweet little harbor with the boats and the docks, the water was the new very late spring blue. The trees still had the green of newness. And the wild turkeys with their tiny tiny heads and their great big bodies were in the middle of all this, their feathers shining.
In the best of all possible lexicons, there ought to be one word to describe the joy of encountering that flock of wild birds in the afternoon sun.
There probably is in some lovely language I don’t speak.
That evening, when I was talking to my husband, I told him this. He paused on the other end of the line. Perhaps I should mention, my husband was at work at Sony in Culver City. Sunday afternoon in June, and still at work. There is a pretty precise word for that: workaholic.
My husband declared: “I wish there was a word for the ongoing strain of having one’s wife and dog on another coast.” I laughed. He laughed. Then we both starting talking about words we wished existed.
Here’s the Boketto poem my cousin sent me. How comes this wonderful poet has not had her place in my carefully curated poetry collection?
She will now…
Boketto, by Susan Rich
Outside my window it’s never the same—
some mornings jasmine slaps the house, some mornings sorrow.
There is a word I overheard today, meaning lost
not on a career path or across a floating bridge:
Boketto—to stare out windows without purpose.
Don’t laugh; it’s been too long since we leaned
into the morning: bird friendly coffee and blueberry toast. Awhile
since I declared myself a prophet of lost cats—blind lover
of animal fur and feral appetites. Someone should tag
a word for the calm of a long marriage. Knowledge
the heat will hold, and our lights remain on—a second
sight that drives the particulars of a life: sea glass and salt,
cherry blossoms and persistent weeds. What assembles in the middle
distance beyond the mail truck; have I overlooked oceans,
ignored crows? I try to exist in the somehow, the might still be—
gaze upward to constellations of in-between.
by 
