J Shows Up Again . . .
. . . in a dream of another one of his guy friends.
Bo (a major character in our semiautobiographical thriller Brains & Brawn, if you’d like to meet him) dreamt that he went to J’s old apartment in New York and there was J, eating a slice of pizza. (You’ll remember that my old friend Margie, who’s here helping me pack right now, wrote to me that J would no longer be hungry because “the soul doesn’t have a stomach.” My two-word response was, “His does.”) Bo says, “I thought you were dead!” and J puts his finger to his lips and says, “Sshhhhh! I’m just pretending to be dead. I don’t want anyone to know I’m alive except you.” Then I came in (apparently the other exception to the rule), and the three of us started shooting the breeze just like old times.
A Preview of Coming Attractions
This, sent by Peter Hoh, makes me ridiculously happy. I’ve been thinking of my apartment like this anyway:
Singing
The advertising-free magazine of writing The Sun, published in Chapel Hill, has an invitational section called “Readers Write” that throws open a different resonant topic each month — upcoming ones include “Paying Attention,” “Rumors,” “Cheap Thrills,” and (still open) “Authority,” “Saying Too Much,” and “Boxes.” Last fall I sent the following as a submission to “Singing,” but probably too late to meet the deadline. I’ve been encouraged by my brother and my mother to post it here.
* * *
Do we ever really know our parents? I was so stuck to my mother as the central axis and problem of my life that it took me decades to back off far enough to get a good look at her. A raven-haired natural beauty, capricious, temperamental, given to impatience and depression, she held me spellbound, first by “rejecting” me as a small child (suffering from prolonged postpartum blues, she turned me over to her mother during a two-year, three-times-a-week psychoanalysis), then by “dominating” me as an adolescent (she was so beautiful and vivacious that I thought even my own friends liked her better than me). She was not the sort of warm, nurturing mother who makes you feel cherished and secure; on the other hand, she gave me—and the five siblings who followed that successful, for her, psychoanalysis—some great things. She let us play in the gushing gutters in our oldest underwear after thunderstorms, and she sang to us at bedtime. She had a frail but ringing soprano (she said a high school teacher had called her “the ghost tenor”) and a large repertory of tragic Child ballads. I can still hear her voice singing, “There was a ship/ sailing on the Lowland Sea /And the name of that ship/ was the Golden Vanity …” When I came home from college for holidays we’d sometimes sing together, me shyly carrying the melody while she supplied the harmony: “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming …”
I vividly remember the first time I got a hit of the mystery of who she really was: my hand closed around her wrist in a swimming pool in Mexico and I felt how much smaller her bones were than mine, and was struck by the paradox of fragility and fervor that was her essence. I was 25. The next year I did what Jean Shinoda Bolen describes in Goddesses in Everywoman: “the archetypal ‘nice girl from a good family’” got involved with a “tough, streetwise man” as “the means through which a Persephone woman separates from a dominating mother.” Romantic love and babies had been my mother’s turf and, as much as I idealized and longed for them, I scrupulously chose a life course that would deny me them. Instead, I let myself be ravished into the underworld of a Gulag survivor’s wise, traumatized psyche and eventually became its queen.
Last spring I stole a few days from taking care of my now disabled husband and visited my parents in Florida: 92 and 86, still in love. My mom is still beautiful, wrinkles and all. She’s fraying around the edges a little cognitively, but more hummingbird-brilliant than ever at the core. I think she’s burning so much fuel on the thoughts that really matter that she can’t be bothered with peripherals like where the keys are. It’s already happening to me. My brain, though not my temperament, is so much like hers that I consider it a preview of what I have to look forward to. She had gone on the Internet, found the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s sinuous, sneering “Hong Kong Blues” from To Have and Have Not, and memorized them all. Right then and there she sang the whole song for me—“He got twenty years privilege taken awa-ay from hi-im/ when he kicked old Buddha’s gong”—and then cast me a look of such intimate, conspiratorial merriment that I thought, God, she’s irresistible. I don’t remember what it was we then started belting out together that caused my sister, trying to sleep in the back bedroom with her husband, to come out and ask us to please shut up.
‘Appigenetics
I owe the title of this post to The Anchoress, whose first son, when he was little, would peer into his parents’ faces and ask, “Are you ‘appy?”
The Anchoress writes a provocative post about that question, which two nuns with microphones asked random people on the streets of Chicago in 1968 (clips from the resultant documentary are in Elizabeth’s post, along with the schedule for the documentary itself on Chicago’s PBS station). It turned out not to be such an easy question to answer. The Anchoress provides one answer, though, that I strongly relate to: she links happiness to gratitude.
I e-mailed her (forgive me for being lazy and pasting instead of posting; it’s actually because I have so much else to do):
It’s a marvelous question, and suggested answer. Definitely, focusing on how much has been given, rather than how much has been (and will be) taken away, is a reliable formula for happiness. I wonder whether it is a matter of will and choice, or temperament. Some people just chronically think the other way. Is it just a habit? How does that originate? Maybe there’s a neurochemical predisposition, but at some point the habit gets established — possibly because it works as a twisted strategy for getting one’s needs fulfilled as best one can in situations where the direct approach is verboten. “Poor me” can be a perversely gratifying identity. And then the habit changes the neurochemistry.
Epigenetics is now demonstrating that our experiences and choices can change us right down to the genes: that is, the interplay between our experiences and habits actually alters gene expression. And it seems likely that changing our habits can actually change gene expression. (I suspect that practicing karate has changed me that deeply.) Could chronically unhappy people — who may be resigned to “This is just the way I am,” either because of inborn temperament, indelible trauma, or ingrained adaptive strategies — change themselves through a practice of gratitude? (This is what is implied by the Japanese form of psychotherapy called Naikan.)
The current mainstream assumption is that people are at the mercy of their given neurochemistry — whether given by nature, nurture, or both — and often the intervention of first resort is pharmaceutical.
I’m sure Pfizer et al. are grateful.
“A common frustration expressed by caregivers…”
. . . is the inability to find physicians who are knowledgeable about LBD,” or Lewy body disease. It is the second most common dementia, yet it is misdiagnosed 80 percent of the time (J’s was), leading to suboptimal treatment at best and disaster at worst, since people with Lewy react very badly to antipsychotic medications that are often given to agitated Alzheimer’s patients.
Finally, finally, a major medical center, NYU Langone, is doing something about it. (And in New York! If only.) In J’s honor, take a moment to learn a bit about the disease that killed him. It may help you help someone in the future, or belatedly recognize what it was that really ailed someone you loved. And pass it on.
The Gift of the Dying
My brother visited us the weekend before, and wrote this 3 days before J died.
The gift of the dying
Is their knowing.
The dying know it all
But only their eyes say so.
And what they say is this:
Go. Live. Sing.
Pray for me,
But don’t spend all day on it.
Outside, the world
Is growing accustomed
To my absence,
And being ceaselessly amazed
At the arrivals,
Raw from their journey and,
Like you, shocked
At being torn away.
Turn your attention to me,
Ever so briefly,
Say the dying,
So that the fierce forward-leaning
Nowness
Of life
Can shock you anew,
And build your resolve
To call out to the cosmos
With all the devoted desperation
Of your borrowed soul.
Go,
Say the dying with their fluttering eyes.
Go, but don’t leave me.
Come back,
So i can see what coming back is like,
Once more,
And so that you may remember
That in coming back,
You are practiced
In the art that i learn even now:
The art
Of going
Home.
What Friends are For
A frazzled spaniel attracts the attention of a film crew shooting footage of the devastation left behind by the tsunami, leading them back to what at first appears to be its dead companion. It turns out the other dog was only injured. Both animals were later transported to safety and are receiving medical attention.
Inexorable Power of the Sea
What begins as a trickle effectively destroys a town in less than seven minutes:
A Google street view of the area before the tsunami can be seen here.
Ambiance 