Navigation

Archive | Past Matters

It’s Always Something

September 11, 2018 in Astro Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Church Matters, City Matters, Essays, Past Matters, Spirit Matters, TV Matters

Sunday, on the precipice of a new moon and the Jewish New Year, I woke at 4 am, early even for me. Cool air drifted through the window and rain pitter-pattered against the glass as I lounged in bed, draped in an autumn mumu and reading my second Gilda Radner book in two days. I’ve been pretty open about how hard I’ve been finding life, so the peace of that moment was sweet.

I’m not entirely sure why Gilda’s been giving me so much comfort right now. I’ve been reading and watching everything about her and I think partly it’s her guilelessness coupled with that intense mischief. Her intelligence and sense of the absurd were palpable, but so were her huge vulnerability and empathy–it was all wrapped in an enormous, childlike glow. Not a childish one, mind you for by all reports she was eminently kind, and children rarely are. (People who think children are born kind are fooling themselves; kindness is always a learned trait.) But Gilda was surely childlike: playful, present, boundlessly, bountifully enthusiastic. So much so that her voice was extra-raspy and her limbs extra rubbery, as if excitement was constantly stretching her limits. Continue Reading →

Oshun’s Sadly Swoon

June 6, 2018 in Age Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Past Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

By the time the delivery guy brought me the wrong order yesterday, I was once again done with the human race and the complicated triggers and traumas we bring to every interaction, all of us butting up against each other like bullies in a sandbox, crying big tears when no one’s looking but fists balled just the same.

The irony of the delivery guy kerfuffle was that on Sunday I’d given an impassioned lecture about Jim McKay’s excellent En El Séptimo Dia, a neo-realist look at the challenges of being an undocumented immigrant working as a delivery person in Brooklyn, where white hipsters with leftist politics treat them like shit. And here I was grappling with the dilemma of how to get my food without causing this delivery person trouble. Especially since, judging from the slip he was wielding, the wrong order was not his fault but his boss’s.

I sorted it out with no permanent harm inflicted on anyone, I think, though not quickly enough to avoid the low blood sugar blues. By the time I finished eating I felt sorry I’d ever relied on other people for anything, even supper.

For the last six weeks I’d been trying to smooth my edges so someone could come close and by yesterday just felt gobsmacked–run over, if you must know. Continue Reading →

peonies and pennies and twice is not a curse

May 19, 2018 in City Matters, Essays, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

Once when I had been making love for hours with a man I loved who loved me, he went to kiss my arm and kissed his own instead.

This was a man I’d seen on a subway and then on a sidewalk and then on a subway, a man who had finally strode up to me with a grin and worried, kind eyes and said, “I fear I’d be terribly remiss if I did not say hello” and it was ok, the way he phrased it, because he was British and it didn’t feel like we were in the present so much as a noir of a neverexistent 1930s–

–a present that seemed like a future of a past infinitely purer and prettier than anything dreamed by this present–

and so we began circling each other, going for walks in the parks, meeting for chaste diner breakfasts, falling in step with birds, early spring air, the stoops of 90s brownstone brooklyn jamaican patties kids biking barbeque smoke smog pollen, until one day he bent down and his mouth met mine

and we fell into each other like it was where we were supposed to be all along. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy