New York Experience

New York Experience September 17 2009



Ellen: City Spring

Searing lilac skies.

Glass panes blue, gold, soft silver.

Razor sharp shadows.



Reflections:

Ellen was a native New Yorker, and I learned to love New York in loving her. New York City has a unique pace, energy, flavor. I haven’t been here in five years or so, and the traffic has worsened, reaching total gridlock most of the day. There appear to be many more private cars in the traffic mix. Restaurants have gone and come. “Cheap eats” are suddenly “Chic eats.” I’ve seen endless ads for gourmet hot dogs and premium pizzas. Neighborhoods still function as multiple small towns, each with its own constellation of delis, diners, cleaners, gyms, people greeting on the street, and ethnic groceries. Apartment buildings tower over pedestrians, who all – no matter their age or ability – seem to stride with long, quick steps. I walked 20 or so blocks today, beside a stooped woman with white hair using a cane – and had to really march along to keep up., even though other walkers going in the same direction flowed by us on either side. Taxi drivers and buses vie for every inch on the street, apparently without so much as a skipped heartbeat. Even simple storefront restaurants offer food more savory than I’ve tasted since I was last in a large city.



Rosemary: The Kindness of Strangers September 17 2009

Penn Station. I get off the train with suitcases,

And stand on the platform, midst the swirling crowd,

Looking for a redcap. There are none in sight.

We’re deep underground.

I trudge along the platform weighted down,

Don’t see any elevator, don’t know where the exit is..

I guess I look the way I feel – bewildered.



Suddenly, a tall, genial man walks up and smiles, and asks if he can help.

I ask him where to find a redcap.

He laughs and grabs the bags out of my hand,

Motions with his head and strides off,

Saying “Follow me”!

I do.

We go up three lengthy escalators,

Crossing swarms of people hustling to and fro

At every station level,

Like ants around their colony.

He keeps making sure I’m with him,

As he leads me out an exit, to a taxi stand,

And says “You’re on your own.”

I can barely stammer “thank you” before he

Turns back and disappears again inside.

I can’t believe my good fortune.

Was he an angel, sent to help me?

It sure felt that way!

Making Memories September 15 2009

Making Memories September 15 2009


On the beach in Padanaram, MA, where Ellen and I married in 2008, I got a chance to walk with my grandson, finding various kinds of shells (clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, snails); examining the mother-of-pearl inlays inside different ones; talking about gulls dropping shells so they break and the gulls can eat the clams; finding a delightful plenty of hermit crabs scurrying around the shallow bottom in the water inhabiting a riotous variety of little snail shells;  touching and smelling different kinds of seaweed; watching the tide go out, then – rapidly – come back in; feeling how the wind changed with the changing tide; reassembling the scattered skeleton of some kind of large fish -- skull, backbone, tail, fins; watching the rotating bridge opening every hour on the hour to let sailing boats pass in both directions, into and out of the harbor. What a marvelous shared adventure!

I also got some “alone time” to just be, enjoying the beautiful sunshine, at our wedding spot.
I’m really glad we had a chance to create new memories for ourselves at this spot that seems to have such momentous resonance in my life – from childhood, from our wedding, and -- now – from a delicious day spent with my beloved family.

We left Padanaram around 4, and, not wanting to be caught in traffic going back to Providence, went down the coast, past New Bedford, toward Cape Cod. We found a lovely town beach at Mattapoisett. The beach was deserted, though the bright sun created a seductive warmth on the sand. The kids flew a kite and built sand castles, a single gull tenaciously wading near them, unwilling to give up its peaceful afternoon to noisy kids.

It was a memorable and thoroughly enjoyable day that will provide beautiful memories for many years in the future. A day like this is a treasure, a feast of love and deep peace, to be savored over and over.

Day at the Beach September 15 2009

A day at the beach – perfect as a dream:

Warm and sunny -- with a light, cool breeze

And fluffy clouds against an azure sky --

Clear expanse of sandy September warmth all to ourselves.

Wavelets lap wetly at the shore, as the tide goes out,

Then -- quickly turning -- rushes back, with shifting winds.

Hermit crabs, each wearing a unique and borrowed shell,

Scurry underneath the warm, clear water – exploring.

The kids fly their kite, then build a castle in the sand.

A lone gull sits, his shadow growing longer as the sun descends.



We’re in a seaside painting –

A joyful time to harbor in our hearts, forever.

Familhy Gathering

Basics September 14 2009


Family gathering. Several generations.

Little kids run, scream, cry,

Playing hard, Interacting.

Everything’s immediate – right now.

It reminds us of the basic rhythms

Of sustaining life –

Eating, running, learning, eating, napping,

Changing, running, laughing, crying…

In a way, it’s soothing – always in the present.

Actions come and go at warp speed,

Followed always by another, and another.

Yet I miss the grown up chance to

Meditate, reflect, converse, consider -- get outside myself.

Each time of life has its own needs and its rewards.

That’s another necessary basic rhythm.



Reflections:

Yesterday, we attempted a family reunion – trying to get all five of us and our families together in one place at one time, since both I and my daughter’s family would be in New England together – something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Those who came had a wonderful time. We did manage to recreate the exuberant sense of extended family that had marked several annual multi-generational gatherings during our childhood – winter and summer. Those get-togethers from long ago have provided me with a wonderful lifelong sense of family, of belonging. We wanted to relive that excitement, and also to share it with our children and grandchildren. Although we succeeded, still we felt sad that not all of us had made the effort to attend. We missed those who didn’t come, as we missed those who are no longer with us in this life.



The passage of time that creates holes and new stitches in the family fabric is bittersweet. Now, instead of being the exuberant children racing around, being asked to perform new skills to show them off to older relatives, getting acquainted and enjoying seldom seen cousins, we were the old ladies, the grandmas, grandpas, great-aunts and great-uncles. There is also the joy of watching the next generation just beginning their lives – the sense of belonging continues, even as it falters. A family gathering is a major achievement – one to be savored intensely as we get to experience it.





Sisters September 14 2009

As children, we were proud to be five sisters –

The “Hyde Girls.” We seemed a well knit set.

We felt special.

But as we’ve gotten older, differences outrank our sense of kinship.



We held a gathering this week with some not there --

The close knit rows and stitches showing holes,

Like an ancient cardigan, unraveling.

Life Cycles

Life Cycle September 12 2009

Today, a stunning sight –

Outside a deserted house --large seedy yard --

Forests all around --

A sick red fox, at height of day,

Lies there, watching us watching him.

Above, a dozen vultures circle hungrily.

The fox stands briefly, but he cannot walk.

He stays, atop a rock, fully visible.

He has lived – he’s beautiful.

Now his time has come to die.

He patiently awaits his fate –

He who’s eaten many other creatures

Will soon, in turn, be eaten.

Life proceeds in cycles.

Like the fox, we, too, live, and then we die.

Inevitably.



Reflections:

Today, I visited places I haven’t seen for more than 50 years. Two were particularly striking:  the giant building where I had spent three years training to become a nun, and the island city of Newport.



Right after high school, I entered the convent. On this trip, I was staying near the place where the novitiate had been, and we drove there this morning to see it. This was the first time I’d seen it since leaving in 1959. In the 1950s, it had been a prosperous place, bustling with people. Twenty five or thirty young women became postulants every year, so there were close to a hundred in the three year cycle of preparing to become nuns. The convent and novitiate occupied an imposing, brick, three story building the length of two city blocks, on a massive forested rural property big enough to hold several farms.

The novitiate program was supported by a whole staff of nuns. The novitiate was also the location for the order’s regional administrative officers and staff. The Mother House was a very large, white, 1920s bungalow just across the way from the novitiate, and it, too, bustled with activity.

I knew that today the novitiate and convent building were being used as a nursing home. I was not prepared, though,  for the aura of abandonment that I found. As I drove up to that formerly imposing building and saw its present state of disrepair, I realized that nothing much has been touched in the last 50 years. The cement columns are crazed with cracks, and the paint around windows is cracked and peeling. Some hang slightly askew. Grassy weeds grow between slabs in the walkways leading up to the side entrances. The former chapel has been demolished, and nothing was built in its place. A ramshackle fiberglass tunnel leads across the place where the chapel’s basement had been, providing access to the basement of the remaining building. Now crumbling steps behind the building leading up a steep slope gave us access to the fields and hills above, places to play and socialize.

The former motherhouse across the way is also abandoned – sitting amid splendid woods and fields, but empty and achingly uninhabited – except by the dying red fox sitting outside. I realized that the time I remember being there had marked the pinnacle of the place’s prosperity and usefulness. It was as if it was aging with me and my long-ago classmates. Shortly after I had left the novitiate without taking vows, Vatican II and the abandonment of traditional convent dress and rules had decimated the number of young women who felt called to become sisters. The novitiate as we had known it had not survived for very long after that time.



Newport provided a striking contrast. When I had been there, while in college, in 1960 and 1961, most of its old building stock was suffering late stages of decay. Wooden Georgian houses from the 1700s were missing window sash and trim pieces. Many historic waterfront buildings had fallen down or were in the process of doing so. Exploring the old streets had felt like visiting an archeological site. Today, it has all been refurbished or rebuilt, and is lively with tourists and shoppers. A building here and there caught my eye, remembered from decades earlier. Much of it, however, was a modern recreation of what might have been there before – now created whole from the imaginations of architects and developers.

The whole day provided a sobering example of the transitory, cyclical nature of experience – life and death, prosperity and decay, memory and imagination.

Commemoration

September 11 2009



One Year Later…


Ellen:


“Betrothed” March 20 2001

I cleave unto you as I cleave unto my soul,

A pure shining light

Which never has failed me.

Reflections:

One year ago today may have been the most joyful day of my life. My bubbele and I were married, on a small beach on the South Coast of Massachusetts, before a Justice of the Peace. It was a consummation – after intense years together, loving each other, growing in spirit, and dancing the cancer vigil. We never knew when death would come, though it was hovering; we enfdeavored to live what each moment brought without always being mindful of the threat of separation looming over us.

Today, alone, drenched to the skin, with rain dripping down my neck despite the thin protection of a nylon hood, I stood in our marriage spot, alone. It was a moment of mourning, of acknowledging deep loss.

I performed two small ceremonial acts, in honor of the love Ellen and I shared. As we had 10 years ago when we first knew that we were meant to be together, I threw two stones into the water with a pledge of undying love. When the tide turned so it was going out, I laid a bouquet of two beautiful, fragrant, coral colored roses tied together with baby’s breath and ferns – a lovely bridal bouquet – on the water, and watched as it, like our life together, receded into the distance, floating out to sea. I had thought of this day as a commemoration of our love. It was that. It was likewise – like the bouquet given to the sea -- a moment to let go, to start looking forward to the end of this sad transition – to whatever my next life stage will bring. This is the challenge of widowhood.

Rosemary:


Remembering - September 11 2009

2008:

This day dawned fair and mild –

Perfect weather to reflect our deep and loving joy,

As we came to this spot, to marry.

Our hearts overflowed with love.

We radiated with delight.



2009:

I come back to “our” beach with you in spirit.

Gray skies hang low.

Gulls, instead of soaring, huddle silently against the cutting storm.

Wind-driven rain beats, sharp, against my face,

The drops cascading down with my own tears.

I stand right where we stood a year ago,

To pledge undying love.

In memory, I throw two stones into the water,

Then slowly, weeping quietly,

I turn and walk away – alone.

Home Ground

Reflections:


I had a fascinating day. I had an errand in the North End of New Bedford, where obviously I’d been as a kid (I recognized the church by name from several blocks away – must have seen it before) – but it wasn’t a hangout. What an intense, vibrant neighborhood that physically hasn’t changed in at least 100 years! The streets were lined with old triple and quadruple decker houses, with no front or side yards. It’s now a Portuguese neighborhood (everything was written in Portuguese), --very lively, with lots of people on the streets and sidewalks. I think it was an Italian neighborhood way back when – similar energy.

Then I figured I’d drive back to Dartmouth via the place where my sisters and I went to school at Holy Family, in midtown New Bedford . There, too, the preservation is virtually perfect – these houses were probably around 150 years old. Narrow streets, granite curbs, huge sea captains’ homes three or four stories high, crowned with Widows’ walks. One of my friends from grammar school lived in one of the captains’ houses on that main street, and it was odd to drive by it now, so many years later. Being inside that vast house was a memorable childhood adventure for me.

The schools are still there. The elementary school where two of my sisters went is still in use as a Catholic grade school, and as I passed by, I could see where the kids used to line up in front, grade by grade, to go into school.

The high school is there as well, but boarded up. It obviously hasn’t been touched, maintenance-wise, in decades, but seemed in decent shape nonetheless – a two-story, solid, square, brick building with “Holy Family High School” engraved in granite over the peeling, double front doors. I studied it from across the narrow street and knew, with assurance, which teacher occupied each “home room.” The little store and lunch counter where we went for lunch every day is also still there – a square, one- story brick store 90 or 100 years old. It hasn’t changed a bit outside, and the part of the store occupied by the candy case, lunch counter, and soda fountain is still intact, with all the same furnishings. It’s still a breakfast-lunch diner, but obviously Mr. Goggin, who was the proprietor in the 1950s, is long gone.

So much was unchanged – as if preserved in amber. One late 19th century house that was on the corner of the high school block has been torn down and is now a parking lot, but everything else has obviously been there for a very very very long time – It never occurred to me as a high school student to wonder how long things had been there – they just were. It’s strange to walk in the same places over 55 years later in yet another century – the same person in a very different emotional place and body. Back then, I couldn’t possibly have imagined this happening. I feel as if I’m revisiting a very distant former life. The streetscape is the stage set; the live play, as if it happened yesterday, dwells in my memory.

I don’t know why New Bedford isn’t on every tourist itinerary as an incredibly well-preserved example of New England industrial history.

I also spent a little while at Apponagansett Beach. The weather was gray and chilly, with an extraordinarily cold, strong wind, so it wasn’t comfortable staying there very long. I’ll go back tomorrow, hoping for nicer weather. I plan to float two roses in the water, and throw in two pebbles, to recognize and commemorate Ellen’s and my wedding last year. I’ve got to find out when the tide is going out!


Sea Shore Haiku (Ellen, September 20, 1995)


Lacy sea spirals
Blown aloft by Fall blusters,
Wind-pressed, turgid sails.


Gulls (Rosemary, September 10, 2009)


Gray and white, they crouch against the wind,
Feathers skewed like tousled hair, riffling with each gust.
They walk stiffly, like gnarled old men --
Mincing steps, no neck -- nothing moves above their hips.
They gather, gossip, gang together, argue.

The walks are strewn with shells they’ve dropped from soaring flight,
So they could eat the quivering mollusks that had lived within.

The gulls are here since long before we humans came.
Eternally, they’re one with tide and rocky shore.
They carry on, supreme, as if they’re here alone,
Using what we’ve made – entitled.

What's Real?

PARADIGM SHIFTING January 9, 2009


In your first e-mail to me,
You stated you had
“No fixed ideas how things should be”—
Creative spirit, you spoke truth.
Together, we thought easily, solved problems quickly.
We shifted paradigms with glee.
It was exhilarating, sometimes frightening.
Arm in arm, matching strides,
We changed our lives, moved, married, bought, sold, remodeled,
Learned, shared, taught, traveled, healed –
Forward steps with few skipped beats.
Decisive. Sure. Eager.
Like children still, despite our years.
You even died decisively, with grace.
As I live my grief, I can change focus,
Move on with energy,
Rejoicing deeply --
Or remain cheerless.
Or both.
Joy can survive with sadness.
We can proceed together,
Still celebrating love.

Reflections:


I really wanted to come back to Dartmouth, to where I had grown up and we had married. It seemed important to be here on our anniversary, to spend the day mindful of the great blessing we experienced a year ago, finally, to marry each other.

Today, I drove up the Rhode Island coast, from Connecticut, toward Dartmouth, arriving here tonight. Route 1 was slow, with a lot of traffic. I passed towns with wonderful, tongue-rolling names, each of which resonated from childhood memory as I read it and knew how to pronounce it with certainty and a sense of pride: Meshanticut, Wampanoag, Apponagansett, Padanaram…

The couple of times I stopped at a store, or paused to ask directions, my ears reveled in the rapid pulse and tight, flat vowels of Rhode Island speech. It hasn’t changed, amazingly, in 70 years – who knows how much longer before that? Once upon a time, I also spoke exactly that way. I’d wondered, for years, before coming back home last year, how I had sounded as a young woman. Now, I’ve heard that speech enough, recently, to know the answer.

Strangely, these childhood resonances have seemed more real this time than my memory of our four days here last year, to apply for a marriage license, wait the required 3 days, and then be married, before a justice of the peace and two witnesses, on Apponagansett Beach in Padanaram.

We had come, oxygen machines and cancer medications in tow. But you didn’t feel well after the trip, so we spent our waiting days resting at the hotel. I was concerned how you would be for the wedding. That day dawned bright, warm, and sunny, and, fueled by adrenalin, we both felt marvelous. It was a transcendent experience.

Being here again now is pressing home to my consciousness, however, how transitory is the glory of past moments.


Tricks of Memory September 9 2009


Just last year, we came here, you and I,
For our joyful wedding day.
I’m here again, commemorating.
Driving past the now familiar landmarks,
And, now, in the hotel we shared 12 months ago,
It feels strangely as if last year happened in a dream.

I have the pictures with
Our beaming faces, radiant smiles.
Who were those happy women?
As I now see how quickly time
Erases even deepest heartfelt moments,
I once again become aware
How what is present now is all there is –
All else is make-believe.