I write this from my desk at the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South. My room is ugly as all dorm rooms are; the bed is uncomfortable, the springs have a way of jabbing my back like a sharp elbow late at night when I’m trying to calm down and settle in from the day’s stimulations. Truly, despite the heat that weighs down like a heavy blanket and the torpor that comes from 95 % percent humidity, it’s one of the liveliest places I’ve ever been. I’m blissfully happy to have this ugly room with no roommate and my own bathroom because my suite mate never showed up! I keep waiting for her to descend—like the sword of Damocles she’s hovering over my life here: she could happen at any moment!
In the meantime, the fourth floor of St. Luke’s on my side is the cool side. On the other side, the men and women are sending away to Amazon for fans. Myself, I’m sleeping under a blanket with several sets of sheets on top; they’ve run out of extra blankets.
It’s Sunday, the quiet day, though there was a lecture in the morning by the great Tim O’Brien and one last night by him too. Everyday some great poet writer or playwright gets up on stage and it’s so inspiring. Everyone here is a writer, everyone here profoundly cares about the written word, the spoken word, and the imagined word, the process of writing, the approach to writing. Every single minute it’s writing this, writing that. I realized today though, I haven’t done any sort of writing since I arrived here. At writers conferences one doesn’t shut oneself up in one’s room to write.
I’ve been hanging out a lot with the poets, one of the young really impressive ones is a dude named Jericho Brown from my hometown, Shreveport, Louisiana. Like me, he knows you can’t go home again. (Jericho pictured above.)
Talking to strangers is the name of the game. I flunked geometry, and don’t read maps very well, but I’m an expert at talking to strangers. A lot of writers are like that. Which is how I happened to leave campus today for the first time since I arrived here last Tuesday. Someone at my table was going to go to the local flea market and wanted some company.
“I’d love to go,” I said.
This is rural Tennessee. The minute you drive out of the immaculate campus with the stone buildings and the perfectly manicured lawns and the famous writers and the students of the famous writers, you are in a different world. The county that includes the University of the South where the writer’s conference is located happens to be the poorest one in Tennessee.
We parked the car and headed toward the flea market, a hot and dusty looking compound of booths packed with real junk and covered with corrugated metal roofs. This was nothing like the flea markets I once in a while attend in LA and New York. Here there were grimy Barbies for 10 cents. Romance novels with broken spines, and yes confederate flags waving proudly. Here the people were poor, and probably every last one of the stall-keepers were supporters of Trump. These people, so many of them morbidly obese and unhealthy looking, were the people who were really going to suffer most under the present administration. The very ones who had voted 45 into office.
I happened on a homemade knife stand. I sifted through and looked for something my husband—who loves knives—would find acceptable. The proprietor of the stand, like me, was a writer. He handed me a pamphlet he had penned The Claims of Jesus of Nazareth. And when I looked at it, he began to tell me about how Jesus wanted to save me.
I was transported back to my childhood, when my best friend Peggy Mayfield was assigned to save my soul in vacation bible school. She’d been told in Sunday school because I’m Jewish I was going to hell. Probably the writer of the pamphlet would think I was going to hell too.
Hell couldn’t be much hotter than that miserable flea market somewhere in the sticks outside Sewanee, Tennessee.
I left the stand, and found my friend from the conference bargaining for a pair of cowboy boots, totally elated. She was crowing about them all the way home. I was sort of depressed actually. Encounters in the real world often have that effect on me. Presently as we drove through the stone portals of the University of the South, my spirit lifted. Yes, I’ll take Sewanee and the imaginary world over the real world any day.
I’m heading off to the Sewanee Literary Conference in a week or so. In honor of that, I went through my shirts and decided to opt for Browns iron and fold and card boarding. Browns is the most expensive, but also the most impeccable dry cleaner and shirt place you can imagine.
A few noteworthy facts about Browns. I once took a little schmatte in there and the dry cleaning bill cost more than the dress itself! A favorite cashmere sweater with paint spilled all over it was also offered up to the proprietress, someone who could be a social secretary to a socialite, or the socialite herself. Her hair is super neat, her diamonds are real (as well they should be with those prices) and her chin is always lifted just a little bit higher than yours or mine. She reminds me of a female Jeeves. And like Jeeves, you can tell she’s highly intelligent, world-wise, cannier than most of her clients and up on the protocol of whatever the occasion calls for. People go there and get their wedding dresses embalmed. Movie stars send their personal assistants to drop off their crap. When you are inside, it’s like a library or the bank used to be, there’s a hushed quality, one would not raise one’s voice in Browns. The time I went in with the paint stained cashmere, I was a little ashamed. I took it out of my shopping bag and put it down on the counter.
“Do you think you can do anything with this?” I asked softly.
She took it up in her perfectly manicured hands ran it this way and declared, “Why not?”
The bill was huge, but there wasn’t a stain left on the striped cashmere. And afterwards the sweater seemed like new.
Today, when Henry and I stood at the counter, the proprietress was wearing an Art Deco diamond lavaliere. And a beautiful starched cotton blouse. The kind with darts and a stand up color. She reminded me of the ladies I used to know back in Shreveport, mothers of my friends, customers of my mother when she had her store. My mother would have liked it, if I had been one of those local ladies, married to some prosperous someone or other, writing an occasional book but mostly socializing, playing bridge, reading best sellers…
I took out my shirts: my striped be-spoke that used to belong to Esteban Vicente. When the painter died, his wife who called me one of her daughters didn’t give me a picture as I had half-way hoped, but a few of his shirts. I love them all and save them for special occasions. The one I’m taking to Sewanee I call “my famous artist shirt.”
I took out a few more and handed them over, and finally the last one: some cheapo lavender linen thing, no doubt made by slave labor, but I love the color. The proprietress fingered the shirt; her lips sort of curled.
“Linen,” she declared resentfully. “The minute you put it on, it wrinkles.”
I nodded. Looking down, I saw Henry had settled onto the mat in front of the counter in his dog version of the Sphinx Pose, front and back paws out, belly down.
“You don’t wear linen, I take it?”
I was very aware, just then, of my wrinkled shirt, jean shorts, held up by a raggedy ass belt; my thin white legs, bright sneakers, stained socks. Henry was still in Sphinx Pose. How I envied my dog’s perpetual good looks and invincible style!
“Of course, not!” she replied.
I met her eyes: “As to be expected of the proprietress of the best dry cleaning establishment on earth!”
That made her smile.
I decided not to leave the linen, or another one that had a little stain on the collar she couldn’t promise to remove, though she suggested perhaps dry cleaning it first then laundering.
How much does it cost to do that? I once posed such a question to the person who takes the New York Times obit by phone. “Madam,” he declared. “If you have to ask, you shouldn’t be calling the New York Times!”
“A week from today, next Thursday for your shirts?”
“That’d be great! Thanks!”
Henry got to his feet in his effortless way, shook himself off and we headed out into the sunlight.
She was the only African American at the convent, and I the only Jew, don’t ask me how many years ago. We were not friends. Or enemies either. I have a distinct memory of Roz, tiny, with very carefully groomed hair in a flip, in her uniform which was just like my uniform: a white shirt, a plaid skirt, and when it was required a delphinium blue blazer with a prominent white crucifix on the pocket. I think of that blazer and I sort of cringe; I, great-granddaughter of a Jewish scholar in a Jesus blazer? Roz, the daughter of a Methodist minister had no problem with the Jesus blazer, and to tell the truth here, I only have the problem in retrospect. Back then it felt perfectly natural, even good. Being a Jew in a small town in Louisiana a thousand years ago was to know you do not fit in. The jacket made me look like I had a chance to.
Roslyn was a very well brought up girl. A girl with great composure. I was aware from a distance of her obvious sang-froid. A sang-froid that was required—as the only person of color there at the convent—except, of course, for the janitor, the maids, and the ladies who spooned out the lunch in the cafeteria where I never ate.
I ate at home with my mother, who didn’t have much to do at the time and needed a lunch companion. She picked me up, drove me home and we had the same thing every day: a hamburger patty with a side of frozen mixed vegetables. I slathered mine with hot sauce, a habit I have to this day with food I don’t like. Mama was always on a diet and because I lived with her so was I.
At the convent, there was no nun of color, or priest of color. Certainly no Jew nun or priest. It was a weird world for both of us. No wonder we looked askance at each other. No wonder we did not reach out our hands and declare ourselves comrades.
Roz was here in LA teaching a workshop on her specialty, Alzheimer’s Care. When she walked in my door last Sunday, we hugged as though we were long lost friends, and in fact she felt exactly like a long lost friend from far away. Of course we had talked on the phone, we had exchanged a few emails when Lavina came out and she read it and talked me up back in Shreveport. Still, this was something different. This was a true bond. She has told me since then she felt the same way I did last Sunday: friends at first sight!
But not back then.
I think we were afraid, both of us, of contamination.
I wonder too, what my mother, the proud liberal would have done if I had brought Roslyn home to eat dinner and spend the night? I always saw through Atticus Fitch / Gregory Peck, because my mother was that kind of liberal. One stood up to the racists, one was good to one’s help, in fact my mother sent our housekeeper Aline back to school so she could pass the literacy test to vote. But bringing a person of color home as a girlfriend, God forbid a boyfriend?
All that was behind us, last Sunday, when Roz and I sat on my couch and drank some wine and just schmoosed, about growing up in Shreveport.
My husband was there and they liked each other. And Henry liked Roz too. Henry sat when Roz said, “sit!” He never does that for me except when food is involved. Roz has her own love affair with a poodle named Maxx. She told me she wants me to meet Maxx!
Everything seemed so easy, stuff that used to be so hard. To this day, I cannot abide how hard it was growing up for all of us. The bad old days are over, but are the bad old days really over? Roz and I talked about that too.
My husband, Henry and I drove Roz back to where she was staying with relatives, a ways away from where we live. Roz said, “I should have Uber-ed but I wanted you to see where I lived. I never saw where any of my friends lived growing up.”
I felt like crying when she said that. I feel like crying as I type this.
I bought a new computer today; the day 45 announced he wasn’t going to sign the Paris accord. I don’t think I would have purchased it today, had I known beforehand about this stunningly vicious announcement—though why should I or anybody else be surprised? My husband wrote the White House in upper case: a la 45: BIG MISTAKE. YOU WERE WRONG. And signed his name. Used to be when you wrote the White House, the WH wrote back.
So far, no note from them. Again am I surprised? No.
My old Mac was eleven years old. It, my dog and I weighed 135.5 pounds. My new Mac, that I hope to keep just as long, weighs quite a bit less. The three of us weigh in at 129.5. I’m often crossing the country with Henry, the computer and his food, the later two in a backpack, so the new sleek seemingly weightless Mac will be a big improvement. My shoulders are already heaving a sigh of relief.
I wrote several books on my old computer, thousands of emails, participated in many Skype sessions, shopped for all sorts of things on line, did yoga, learned how to cut and paste, in short all the vitals of my little life happened on it. In fact, I started this very blog on my old computer.
Why is so much of my life contained within this sleek silvery box? Similarly why is so much of my life contained within the less sleek oblong that is my phone? I got along very well in life, I think before either one of them were in my life taking up time, giving me this false sense of self importance.
I was thinking of the world the way it looks now when my husband and I went to yoga together at a new hi tech studio that isn’t like any studio I usually go to. We went because we like the teacher and it’s close and even at LA rush hour you can get there in a flash.
Before we went, we checked on line to see if the teacher we liked had a sub. He didn’t. We could do this on our phones or on our computers. But so what? I’ve been doing yoga long enough to remember the days when you could call the studio and ask, “is so and so teaching today” and actually hear a human voice. That human voice, in fact, had a job.
While we were waiting with our mats for class, I noticed an electronic sign above the door, “SHHH! SAVASANA IN SESSION!!!
Sometimes teachers used to come out and shush noisy people who were waiting at the door. It was far more effective. You actually felt shame for disturbing the class that was in session.
Did this electronic world, the one that arose in the eleven years I had my old computer create the world we find ourselves in today? The one where an illiterate nincompoop with a horrible dye job currently reigns?
Yes. And Yes again.
How is it that Huxley saw it?
That Orwell knew about it?
That Bernie Saunders, the polar opposite of this wretched bully had a chance. And that all of us seemed powerless to stop what happened.
Will 2016 be the new 1939?
I don’t want to admit how old I will be in the eleven years I plan to have my new Mac. I’m scared to think how I’ll look. But even more scared to think how the world will look.
May All Beings Everywhere Be Happy and Free from Suffering.
Henry got away from me today at a local nursery. One minute I was holding his leash, the next, he had slipped out of my hand and was zipping gleefully through the trees in the back lot, a little speck of white among the evergreens. I knew from past experience the last thing you want to do when something like that happens is start chasing. Henry knows the protocol at the beach. He runs off, he chases birds, but at the beach he comes back. At the beach there aren’t trucks and cars going in and out. At the beach there’s usually a pack of dogs he’s running with. Here at this strange nursery where none of us had ever been, he was in all new territory.
Even though my husband is the only one who can make Henry come when called, I knew it was fruitless when he started shouting, “Hen-ry! Get over here, right now!”
“Henry! Hen-ree….”
It was a dank cold day, and a drizzle was coming down. The huge evergreens were rich and fragrant, and Henry was getting lost among them, peeing on one, sniffing another.
I stood on the edge of this seeming primordial forest. Each tree must be worth tens of thousands. I saw white, I saw his little brown head. Then I didn’t see him at all.
“Here Henry!” I called out as nonchalantly– as sweetly– as possible. I squatted down to ground level. Pretty soon, my little dog appeared in front of the trees and inched closer. I continued to squat, blessing my yoga practice, holding out my arms.
From behind me, my husband hissed, “sit Henry!”
And of course, being Henry, the little anarchist ran away back among the giant trees and bushes for sale. Henry sits very nicely for his morning and evening meals. Or when he doesn’t want to be left behind at home. But there was no bowl of food anywhere in sight. I could see him leaping among the trees, a quick moving spot of white bigger than a rabbit, reminding me of theRoad Runner.
Lord, I didn’t want him to run for the road.
I looked behind me. My husband looked panic stricken, pale and his mouth was trembling. He swore softly. It occurred to me why the almighty had chosen women to run the small being show. We have more faith. We have more patience. And let’s face it: we’re totally used to this sort of shit. Toddlers toddle off down the street unaware of danger; dogs go chasing anything that moves or smells. When we’re young and taking care of our babies and little ones, we’re in the presence of death on a quotidian level. Even an hourly level. Minute by minute women have to sit there guarding their offspring: from the street, from the bullies in the playground, from the ocean or swimming pool. Men have to join gangs, ride motorcycles or traditionally go to war to create that kind of awareness. Stay at home Dads of course are the exception to the rule.
By now, the rain was really coming down; my feet were numb with cold. It’s been the frostiest May I can remember. I wondered how I was going to find my little dog among the tall evergreens at the Whitmore nursery. I wondered how long it was going to take. I didn’t really panic, because I felt confident Henry wouldn’t forsake me. Henry didn’t want to die. Henry was smart.
But he wasn’t coming out. From the front of the nursery, I could hear my husband calling, “Henry! Henry!”
I looked among the trees. It was getting harder and harder to see with the grey mist and rain. I prayed to the gods who rule the canines. Don’t take Henry! Send him to me.
In the end total submission was required. Often that is the case when you love another being: a child, a husband, a friend,—you have to just let it all go and say, I submit. I’ll lay down and let it all go, if only you’ll come back.
This is my love and I’m proving it!
So, I squatted down, put my head on my knees. And, thanked my yoga practice. I was in traditional Child’s Pose. Quads folded, arms out, head down. I was wearing my raincoat, but still I felt the drops on my back. Under my face, was wet earth, the earth smelled rich and sweet. I waited. I breathed. I have seldom felt so utterly in the present moment as I did in the mud in the back of the nursery, waiting for my dog. Certainly not in most child’s poses in the controlled calm of the yoga studio.
Presently, as I suspected, (or had been instructed by the gods who control canines) Henry was upon me, licking my hand. I could picture his little face, with its grin of hilarity. Nothing Henry likes better than a prank. I grabbed him. He was covered in mud as I was. His leash was solid brown, just as the front of my coat was.
I hugged him to me, kissed his head, then set him on the ground and grabbed hold of his muddy leash, and we went and found my husband who was in front, still shouting, watching the road…
An olfactory hallucination (phantosmia) makes you detect smells that aren’t really present in your environment. The odors detected in phantosmia vary from person to person and may be foul or pleasant. They can occur in one or both nostrils. The phantom smell may seem to always be present or it may come and go. Phantosmia may occur after a head injury or upper respiratory infection. It can also be caused by temporal lobe seizures, inflamed sinuses, brain tumors and Parkinson’s disease.
My mother in law whom my son named Nia is haunting our house in Springs, the shabby arty part of East Hampton. I can smell her.
A good many of the Abstract Expressionists came to Springs: Pollock, deKooning, , to name two. They all hung out, my husband remembers being taken to de Kooning’s studio when he was little. The paintings didn’t really interest him—he had enough of that boring shit at home—he liked the painter’s restaurant stove where the he cooked himself lunch every day.
We wouldn’t of course have this house but for her and the fact that she bought land in Springs when it was cheap and gave my husband land to build a house. And the handy, crafts manly person that he is, built himself a house.
They had their house. He had his house. The thick oak tree woods make the places invisible to each other in the summer. The first time I came here, and he and I were eating lunch outside, I saw this pixie person walking across the woods with a basket.
“Whose that?” I asked.
My husband looked down.
Nia had a very breathy birdy voice, a voice as distinctive as her smell.
“I’ve brought berries!” she said that day. And that was the beginning of her intrusions.
I never really minded because she was a trip. And I didn’t have any elders; all my elders were dead. I liked her, she liked me. She read books, she knew interesting people. And she was very nice to me and to my friends. Her relationship with my husband was a wee bit more complex.
Nia died unexpectedly, the day the levee burst in New Orleans just after her eighty -fifth birthday. My father in law, who was way older, died years before. Now, since Sunday (today is Thursday) I’ll be walking through the house and I’ll catch her scent: part old lady, which means (moth-bally), mixed with Christian Dior’s Miss Dior perfume, her signature scent. One minute I’ll catch a distinct whiff, and then in the next instant it’s gone. This is not my imagination. I do not have temporal lobe disease. This is a solid olfactory fact.
She’s here. My husband doesn’t smell her. But I do. So far, she’s only in the kitchen/dining room. She hasn’t wafted into the bedroom, which surprises me, she was hardly discreet.
If I start writing about her at length, I’m worried instead of these rather startling whiffs, the whole spirit will materialize. What will I do then?
Is it because finally her little house across the way is going up for sale? How come when I was there last summer, all by myself, she didn’t come then? Why here? Why now?
When the task of cleaning out her apartment in New York fell to me, the huge run down eight rooms with a view, where she and my father in law lived, held court, and stayed for fifty years, she showed up a lot. And so did he. The feelings were so strong and intense; sometimes I had to sit down to recover from them. I felt then they didn’t want to leave the apartment. (Neither did I—finding a stable place to stay in New York is to say the least: arduous.)
This is something else. This is not a feeling. This is a precise smell, when she walked in the room, there she was Nia and her smell. I could be cooking with her and her Nia smell even transcended the food smells, it was sui generis, completely her.
Odd too, that one of my early novels has a ghost that returns first as a scent. Then completely materializes in the apartment of my main character. First there was the Joy perfume (does anyone wear Joy anymore?) and then the ghost of Annie’s mother Theo is sitting on one of the chairs in her living room in New York.
I never could get anyone to publish that book. But I steal things from it from time to time and put it in other stories and books.
Has Nia stolen that bit from the novel I wrote?
I can smell Nia now. I smelled her just a few minutes ago when Henry and I came in from our last walk of the day.
Do I consult a physician?
A metaphysician?
This afternoon, my husband caught me sniffing. I was sniffing, and looking around and he said, “What are you doing? You’re like Divine in Polyester.”
“Sorry!” I said…
Sniff sniff. Stay tuned…but in the meantime, enjoy Mother In Law by Ernie K Doe, a fabulous blues singer who I actually saw perform in New Orleans when I was a kid. I used to sing it in anticipation of her yearly visit to the coast.
by 
