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Solstice Visitation: Space Crone Transcends

June 21, 2021 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Essays, Past Matters, Ruby Intuition

Last night was summer solstice and I stood in the darkness by the river, weeping without entirely knowing why. It had been a beautiful day but lonely. After sessions I had mourned my solitude even as I’d appreciated its authenticity.

Its charge.

I woke thinking of my grandmother’s funeral and knew she had come through again. She doesn’t return often–only when I really need her. She rarely shows up in a big glorious visitation because that’s not how my intuition works and that’s not how she works. She arrives in an essay, a wrinkle in time, a shining, shared solitude.

She died a few days before my 18th birthday; the funeral happened a few days after it. I was so conscious that no one could ever again legally lay claim upon either of our bodies.

We were free, and it was terrible.

I had loved my grandmother and not felt sure of her. That’s the best way to phrase it. It’s not that she didn’t talk. She spoke when she had something to say. She just wasn’t the type to hold forth. More, she was was the type who listened and to whom others paid court.

By default and by virtue of her quiet self-possession, she was the matriarch of our large, wild family. There was no patriarch. My grandfather had died when he was not much older than I am now, and I’m not sure he ever reigned easily. I never met him –he died months before my parents married–but heard tell of fights, fugues. Futwahs.

My grandmother reigned easily. Everyone confided in her—speedily, anxiously—and she listened with the lids of her large blue eyes lowered at half-mast. You could never tell if she was rapt or bored. That question lived at the center of every exchange she ever had, I think. Continue Reading →

An Unaffectionate Memoriam

May 17, 2021 in Age Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

Walking out of my building yesterday, I ran into the older woman who lives downstairs. Without warning she grabbed my hand. Even fully vaccinated, I’m still shocked when someone touches me these days and her grasp carried an extra frisson. So did her words: My husband died last night.

She said it in English, though she usually speaks in Sicilian. For two decades I lived above those two, and their constant battles–screams, tears, explosions—always took place in their mother tongue.

In the early years he would assault me in the corridor–boobs, ass, whatever he could grab as I scooted by their door. Growing up how I did, I was accustomed to dirty old men, but he was over the top. The landlord didn’t do much about it, just “talked to him man to man.”

These old Italians, he said, waving his hand like an old Italian. Whatever he said worked for a while, then my neighbor began to knock on my door whenever his wife was at work. In all the years I knew him, he never worked and she always did. Vaffanculo, I’d hiss until he’d creep back downstairs again, footsteps soft but sure.

For a while there also was a brothel on the second floor. Not tech-savvy sex workers with master degrees in gender studies, but dead-eyed girls who sucked off johns in the vestibule and pulled knives when you complained. You could ask why I didn’t move.  I’d answer the apartment was rent-stabilized, and if you don’t get that, you don’t get living in NYC when you weren’t wealthy.

Eventually the crack whores were replaced by hipsters with jobs I didn’t entirely understand, and the vials and small baggies littering the hallway were replaced by a small gym and laundry room. People complain about gentrification, but it has its advantages. So does aging out of being prey. My downstairs neighbor began to bother the blond millennial on the first floor instead, and that generation doesn’t mess.

When the girl called the cops, they put him in lockup where he had a mild stroke. After that he was a tamed man, though the fights never let up. I’d hear them through the floorboards—her anguished squawks rising and falling; his deep vibrato. I didn’t mind their soap operettas, which validated my decision not to marry, but I did mind the baleful glances he shot at me. Head down, he’d flatten his body dramatically against walls whenever he saw me or any other female in the building. Predators play victim better than anybody.

I wasn’t surprised to learn of his death. A few weeks before I’d been awakened at 4 am by red lights pouring into my front room, and through the window I saw his body–frail, shrunken, intubated–being shoved unceremoniously into an ambulance. I may never see him again, I’d thought. Maybe it’s just the sustained devastation of the last year, but I’d felt a profound lack of sentiment. Something was shifting that lived below emotions–the Earth itself, hurtling forward on its axis.

Their apartment was quiet after that, but I didn’t check on them. The only time I’d gone down there was when he’d begun swiping my deliveries a few years before. He old, she’d said as she handed over the unopened packages.

Then shut the door in my face.

It’s so strange when someone you’ve known a long time but didn’t like passes over. He must have had good qualities, but I saw him every day and never cared for him nor his wife, defined by her marital boulder. That man, she said once after yelling at me for calling the LL. Like he was both of our burden.

Devout even by the standards of our neighborhood elders, she was known as a “black stocking”–someone who attended Catholic mass every day. “It don’t make her happier,” said Mikey, my seventysomething pal from the coffee shop. “It don’t make him faithful,” said Paulie, my other seventysomething pal from the coffee shop. I sighed. “It makes her faithful.”

She did feed him beautifully. I always envied the aromas drifting from their apartment at mealtimes: garlic, tomato, basil. She grew it on the fire escape.

Now he’s gone and when I looked into her eyes she seemed to be registering this loss as if tonguing the gap left by a pulled infected tooth. Anxious and angry no matter what. I felt compassion for her if not affection. I feel this way so often. O humans.

Painting at Audre’s: Part I

April 14, 2021 in Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Ruby Intuition, Style Matters

Once when I was 9, a mother and her two kids disappeared from our neighborhood. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was just that for years they lived down the street from our house, then one day they were gone.

The husband was still there, but when my mom took my sister and I around to visit his wife and kids, he said they were out. His normally polished appearance was unruly—clothes rumpled, face unshaven—but he offered no further explanations and shut the door before my mother could ask any more questions. When we went back the next day, he didn’t answer the door, though his orange Volvo was parked in the driveway. Nor did he answer it the day after that.

For a full week my mom kept finding reasons to drop by. A cutting from her favorite fern, an invitation to take all the kids to the park, cookies she’d just baked, a mug that seemed up the wife’s alley. My mother liked to collect things for people, like a mother bird dragging treasures back to her chicks safe in their nest.

But no matter what time of day we stopped over, no one ever answered the door. The orange Volvo was always there, each day covered with more leaves, but the mother’s car never reappeared.

The real reason my mother kept looking for this woman is she was one of the few people in our neighborhood whom my mother liked. Having spent her young adulthood in downtown Boston, she’d never cottoned to the suburban town to which my parents moved after I was born. She never said it directly—my mother said almost nothing directly—but even as a kid I could tell she found the other mothers in our neighborhood grating or phony or both. She relaxed around this woman–told jokes, pulled faces, lingered over coffee.

I liked this woman too. Let’s call her Audre, because it’s close to her real name and she possessed the practical, large-hearted lyricism of Audre Lorde, whom she liked a lot.

Back home we spent a lot of time wondering where Audre might have gone. Was she sick, I wondered. Does she not like me anymore, wondered my mother. It was my father, surprisingly, who came up with the right answer.

Maybe she left her husband, he said. Continue Reading →

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