SOL Tuesday: Grief Insight

Last weekend I had several insights, but this is the most interesting so far.

            I’ve noticed how I’ve wanted to have the radio and often the TV as well on whenever I am in the apartment. I was not always like this. At first I thought it was just to replace Jack’s voice, which wasn’t constant, of course, but was available.

            The other day, with both the radio and a fan on, the fan almost drowning out the radio, I remembered as though connected by an umbilical cord to the fall of 1961. I  was 19, on a job with my college in Los Angeles, as far as I’d been away from anything or anyone I knew in my life. I had just moved into a rooming house, brought groceries home after my job, and I had no radio. I had never been so alone. The silence of the room terrified me, and I cried for maybe half an hour. I ended up going home,  a decision I always regretted.

            After that, I never lived alone again, except for a couple of weeks between a roommate and moving into a commune. And then I got married.

            My 74-year-old self is still connected to that 19-year-old self afraid of the silence. I’m trying to get used to silence now. Listen to music or talk, or baseball, if there’s something to listen to, but not just to fill up the silence.

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There are more Slices of Life over at Two Writing Teachers. Check them out, and join in!

SOLTuesday: Why I Love Copyediting

I’m still free-lance copyediting on occasion. The magazine I was working for today gave me a collection of fiction reviews to copyedit. And sure enough, there was a historical novel whose reviewer was a bit hazy on historical fact.

            The reviewer says the novel is set in “Nazi and Fascist-occupied Venice, Italy, in 1945, just weeks before Italy’s surrender to the Allies.” Well, Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, so is this novel set in 1943 or 1945? After the Fascist Italian government surrendered, Nazi Germany invaded, and there might well have also been Italian Fascists in Nazi-occupied Venice, but I don't think one could say the Fascists were "occupying" an Italian city. And if it’s set in I945, then it’s just weeks before Germany’s surrender.

            A little fact-checking shows the book is set in 1945, so I know how to correct the review. And I feel like I have earned my pay for the day.

SOL Tuesday: Donating (a delicate subject)

I came to the Bronx today to donate the unused catheters left over from two years ago, after Jack came home from rehab. (If you don’t care for potty talk, you can skip this one.)

            The rehab place had left his Foley catheter in place; apparently, they didn’t know how to teach an old person to catheterize himself. Jack hated needing me to help him in dealing with the Foley, which was also not a very easy process. So Jack went to a urologist, who showed him how to do it himself; we bought a box of catheters, Jack had the Foley removed, and after a couple of weeks, he was back to normal with his “toileting.”

            Jack would have thrown away the half a box remaining, but I can’t do that. Why not call the urologist and see whether I could give him the leftovers, which he could give to a patient, since these things are expensive. But after Jack died, I learned that the urologist was no longer at Roosevelt (now Mt. Sinai West) Hospital. (Like Jack’s cardiologists and hand doctor, there’s been an exodus of doctors from Roosevelt.)

            Finally I found the urologist online at his new hospital, in the Bronx. Yes, I could bring the catheters to his office. But by public transportation it took about an hour and a half to get there. The  Google map was not that helpful, either; this hospital is much more accessible by car than walking (from the bus), few sidewalks, obstacles Google doesn’t know about.

            However, mission accomplished in five minutes. And I love coming to neighborhoods in this city I have never been to. This one (Morris Park) has two- and three-story buildings with ground-floor storefronts and apartments above. Shops with Spanish and a few Arabic signs; a West Indian restaurant; phone stores; discount stores. And the elevated “subway” follows for a short distance the Boston Road, aka the Boston Post Road, aka the King’s Highway, aka Route 1 (which has run from Boston to New York since the 17th century).

SOLTuesday: Blackout! 1977

            This is a slice of life from 39 years ago tomorrow. The night of July 13, 1977, the lights went out all over most of New York City and nearby areas. It was also the summer during which a deranged man was killing young people at random in the city and referring to himself as Son of Sam.

            I was at a meeting of feminists in downtown New York City to discuss how we could overcome the Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress the previous year, that prevented Medicaid funds from being used for abortion. We thought of starting a coalition of women’s groups to organize women, particularly poor women and women of color, and to fight for reproductive rights; this group become CARASA, the Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse.* We also talked about a zap action group, doing skits to make our political points, which evolved into No More Nice Girls.**

            As the meeting was winding down, the lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and went out altogether. Our hostess found a flashlight and candles. The few of us who were mothers took turns on the phone in the kitchen to call our kids or babysitters. When I reached Frannie, the Barnard student babysitter with our five-year-old, she reported that my husband, a reporter at the New York Post, had called to say the lights were going out in northern Manhattan, and she should get the flashlight out of the cabinet in case they went out in our apartment – which they did as soon as she put her hand on the flashlight.

            Out on the balcony of the 11th floor apartment, we could see some leftover fireworks from July 4 popping here and there, and a journalist said it reminded her of Vietnam.

            Eventually we decided to adjourn to someone’s low-floor apartment elsewhere in the Village. But first we had to navigate 10 flights of stairs in darkness. Fortunately, many of us still smoked, so by the light of lighters and matches, we made our way, feeling adventurous.

            On the street, however, it did not feel adventurous. Four of us who lived uptown were walking toward Sixth Avenue when a couple of young men walked by, and one muttered, “I’d like to fuck you into the ground.” Luckily, we were able to get a taxi pretty quickly, but lurching uptown with no traffic lights was unnerving. And only 10 blocks from my home, a car had been rammed into a Woolworth’s, breaking the gates guarding the windows and the windows, and people were looting.

            I felt lucky to be home, and my daughter did, too. She grabbed my hand after I came in the door and said, “From now on, we are going everywhere together.”

*CARASA no longer exists, but you can find out more about its goals here.

**No More Nice Girls can still be resurrected for imaginative protests and demonstrations. And Ellen Willis, feminist par excellence, who coined the name, also used it for one of her essay collections. You can view its contents here, and buy the book from BN.com.

SOL: Today's adventures in Telephoneland

Act I: I call Time Warner first. From Will the phone techie, I learn that while Time Warner still has my phone number, it is no longer active. He said that the original request from Credo to port over, i.e., transfer, my number had been canceled when it wasn't completed in time. So Credo will have to request the transfer again. BUT a transfer can only be made of an active number. So I have to reactivate my phone account with Time Warner, and that itself takes about 20 minutes because the customer service person sort of insisted on finding me the best-priced bundle, and then she has to send me through a "third-party" recording to verify that I'm who I say I am, am authorized to change my plan with Time Warner, and lots more questions.

Act II: I call Credo, where I get yet another techie, named Kenny. I tell him that Credo has to resubmit its request to port over the number. He tells me that Time Warner had called Credo earlier in the day (before my call to Time Warner chronicled above) to ask, "Why are you billing this number when the number belongs to Time Warner?" When told that Credo had been asked to port over the number, Time Warner says, "Expire the request, the customer wants to stay with Time Warner." This is BEFORE I had called Time Warner today. Just want to make that clear. And I do not want to stay with Time Warner

Intermission: I have lunch with Susan and Dozie at Sookk, a nice Thai place on Broadway.

Act III: In my e-mail after lunch is one from Time Warner "confirming" a service visit on Thursday about a digital phone. I have no idea what this is about, but it's a good thing I call to ask, because then I learn that while the woman I talked to at Time Warner earlier in the day had reactivated my phone number, the reactivation won't be final until Thursday. So Credo cannot submit a request to port over my number until at least Thursday. The service call was to connect my phone, but since all I need is to see the phone light on the modem light up, I won't need a service call for that. (So this guy says.)

Act IV: I call Credo again to report that they can't submit a request for porting over the number until it is really a live number on my end. Justin, the techie on this call, tells me my problem is rare; he has only seen it once before. He also has an ingenious theory about what happened: when the porting over looked done, Time Warner immediately released my number, but in fact the porting over wasn't done. So when Time Warner saw that it wasn't complete, it took back the number, but then the number existed in both places, which isn't supposed to happen. So Justin thinks the number got stuck in a recurring loop in which the porting over starts, Time Warner cuts out, then takes back the number when it sees the porting over hasn't completed. AND when I first asked to have my number transferred, I was supposed to have been assigned a temp number, so that when my number was ported in to Credo, it would replace the temp number. Now I have been assigned a temp number, which I don't want to use because I don't want anyone to think that this is my number.

Epilogue: I am waiting for the phone icon to light up on Time Warner's modem -- hopefully this will happen on Thursday -- and then I will call Credo and start this porting process all over again. Will it work this time? your favorite cliche.

SOL Tuesday: Seeing Art

Today I went to an exhibit at the new Met Breuer, the Met’s modern art annex in the old Whitney Museum building a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit is called “Unfinished: Thought Left Visible,” and includes works from the 16th century up through the 21th of paintings, and works in a few other mediums, which appear uncompleted either deliberately, because of a non finito aesthetic, or because the artist never finished the work.

            What was most interesting to me was that very few of the art works looked “unfinished” to me. Perhaps this is because my eye is so used to paintings that don’t look like photographs, but this must have been a shock for 16th and 17th and 18th century viewers. As for 20th century work, who’s to say they’re unfinished even if the pencil or charcoal marks of the underlying sketch are clearly visible, like a Mondrian. It looks fine to me. A few paintings from the 20th century with large areas of beige blotch are clearly incomplete. For example, a work intended to show the drafting of the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War shows George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and others clearly portrayed, while the two British representatives are missing in the beige blob. What’s revealed is a political moment rather than an artistic one, the refusal of the British to willingly acknowledge the independence of their colony.

            Most of the “incomplete” works, however, looked good as they are, interesting and final in their own way. Even the five Turners, which are mostly vague areas of color. And the Abstract Expressionists? How can four canvases that are all white be unfinished? There’s an artistic intention that has little to do with the visual.

SOL Tuesday: Primary Day

Today is Primary Day in New York State, the first time in 40 years that the primary has been meaningful for both parties.

            My voting place is in a public school a few blocks away from where I live. I went to my election district table, got the ballot on paper inside a manila folder, and sat down to fill in the “bubbles.” On the left were the names of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (I got the Democratic ballot), and on the right were a list of six delegates pledged to Sanders and six delegates pledged to Clinton. I filled in my bubbles, went to the scanner, fed in the ballot, and started to leave.

            On my way out, I noticed a poll worker trying to answer a ballot question for a young woman who wondered why, or even whether, she had to vote both for the candidate and delegates, or if it was okay to vote for just candidate or delegates. He didn’t seem to have a clear-cut answer, repeatedly saying, “That’s your choice.” I thought I knew the answer, but wasn’t sure.

            Outside, beyond the polling boundary, there was a table of Clinton people, so I stopped to ask if they knew how to fill in the ballot properly. I was told that delegates were assigned based on the percentage of votes for each candidates, so if one voted for delegates but not candidate, your vote wouldn’t count, but if you voted for candidate and not delegates, your vote would count. Got that? Best, of course, if you voted for both candidate and delegates – though probably you shouldn’t vote for Hillary as candidate and then for Sanders delegates, or would your vote for Hillary add to her percentage, thus to her delegate count? Very confusing.

            I decided to be helpful, went back to school, and the young woman was still talking to the poll worker. I explained what I’d learned to both of them. But I did think the poll worker should have been better trained – he wasn’t a regular employee of the Board of Elections, just hired for primary and election day. And I do hope the campaign worker I talked to was right.

Slice of Life Tuesday: One More Successful Call to Bureaucracy

As a retiree, my husband set up a Flexible Spending Account a few years ago, but never got it together to use it — and it's one of those accounts that if you don't use the money each year, you lose it. Last fall, when he got a reminder letter that he had until May of this year to use it or forfeit it, he said we should look into this and how to get the money. Well, of course, we never got around to it, and the reminder has been in my pile of to-dos for months.

            Today I finally called the benefits office to find out what exactly I need to do. After 25 minutes on the phone talking to two people, I learned that the FSA only covers premiums for Medicare Part D, and that amount is on Jack's Social Security 1099. (If I'd read the reminder more closely, I'd have known that, but who reads every word on a form letter.) Filing a claim is easy.

            I'm rather glad Jack isn't here because it would have been really hard not to say "see how easy this was? how much money did you give back to McGraw-Hill because you are so bureaucracy-resistant?" At least it's one more thing I can cross off my to-do list and remove from my mind.

PAD 3: Baseball

Baseball

Life begins on opening day.

So say many baseball fans and writers.

Baseball leads into spring,

Round white balls promising

white crocuses.

Green fields brightening

the eyes.

Opening day without my partner

darkens the spring day.

No one to share a cheer

for the strikeout.

No one to share a groan

at the left-fielder’s error.

But I can imagine

his agreement,

his argument,

his “it’s only a game”

reassurance,

as I imagine tulips,

daffodils, lilies

sprouting in tree wells,

in parks, brightening

the city with color.

Poem-a-Day 2: He Said, She Said

He Said, She Said

He said, Can I take you out for a drink?

She said, Sure, I’d like a drink.

He said, I’ll have another.

She said, I’m doing fine.

He said, I’ll have another.

She thought, that’s a lot of glasses

lined up like a wall between them.

He said, I’ll drive you home.

She said, I’ll call a cab.

He said, I drive better when I’m drunk.

She said, I get home safer when

the driver’s not drunk.

He said, See you around.

She said, Not if I see you first.

Poem a Day 1: A Foolish Poem

And since it's April and National Poetry Month, I will attempt to write a poem every day. Robert Lee Brewer is posting prompts, which I will certainly need. Today's is

A Foolish Poem

Who’s the fool

looking for a rule

for making a tool

to escape from school

It’s too cruel

to watch my drool

Am I the fool

who can only pule

Is there a jewel

that drips the fuel

onto the stool

where I’m the fool?

SOLSC Day 31: Office Pro

I had to go into the office where I do free-lance work today, to change my password and consult with the team I’m working with at the moment.

            One of the benefits of working in an office is the opportunity for spontaneous conversations that aren’t available when one lives alone. I heard two editors talking about movies—I heard Embrace of the Serpent mentioned, which had been the topic of my last movie group discussion—and I rushed over to join in. The two editors were talking up Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some! which I had decided I didn’t want to see after watching the trailer. “The trailer doesn’t represent it,” said one editor in her 40s. I praised Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but the editor in his 30s wasn’t going to see it: “I don’t like Tina Fey.”

            It was maybe 10 minutes having nothing to do with work, but everything to do with feeling connected to others, and exchanging opinions. That’s the part of working full-time that I miss, the part that isn’t working.

Because I had free-lance work on Thursday, I had no time to do my Slice. So here it is, a day late.

SOLSC Day 30: An Ordinary Day

I will not report on technology, except to say that I HATE HATE HATE Microsoft Excel.

            A pleasant day. Some paid work, followed by a long lunch with a friend (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, all very delicious), then she drove me and a cartload of YA and middle-grade books to donate to a used bookstore in Washington Heights. A nap, dinner of leftovers, then more paid work. Next I will call an old friend in Hawaii.

            Nothing exciting, no insights, but a nice day. It would have been nicer if it were warmer, but I can’t have everything. (Oh, why not?)

SOLSC Day 29: Focus Group Questions

I just got a phone call from Advance Focus, a market research company looking for people for a Democratic Party focus group next week. First the woman calling had to see if I qualified.

            My age was okay, my employment status (semi-retired) was okay. But then she asked what my occasional work was. When I said, “freelance copyeditor,” that disqualified me. “Publishing” was one of the industries they didn’t want.

            Why? I didn’t ask that question, but could it be that I’m assumed to be too well informed? I’m not average enough? Does it distort any focus group in New York City to exclude media workers, since media industries are a major sector of the city’s economy? So many questions: I'll ask the focus group of this blog.

SOLSC Day 28: “There Is a Field”

I saw a powerful play tonight, There Is a Field, about the death during a protest of 17-year-old Aseel Asleh, a Palestinian living in Israel, in October 2000.  Jen Marlowe,  a human rights activist and writer, wrote the play; she knew Aseel when she was a counselor at the Seeds ofPeace camp, which brings together children from all sides from regions in conflict.

            The play is based on years of interviews Marlowe had with Aseel’s sister and other members of his family, presenting a heartbreaking account mostly from his sister’s point of view. The Asleh family lived in Arrabeh, a village in northern Israel, and the parents brought up their children to be proud of being Palestinian. Aseel wrote, in a 1998 e-mail to his Seeds of Peace campmates about Land Day commemorations (about the 1976 seizure of Palestinian land by the Israeli government): “We should never forget, but we should forgive.... I will go on. I will make this planet a better place t live and I will go on. For all the souls who only saw pain and sorrow in their eyes; for the souls who will never see a pain of another soul, I promise you I will go on.”

            In this presentation, Aseel appears as a very mature, serious yet playful young man, and it is lamentable that his voice and actions were stilled by police in actions that an Israeli commission determined were not justifiable.

            I’m really glad I saw this performance at Columbia University, the middle of what the playwright calls the Land Day Tour. There Is a Field will be seen at other universities, in Florida, Georgia, and Missouri, and there will be two more performances in New York in mid-April. Check here for more information about tour dates.

SOLSC Day 27: Spontaneity

I brought vanilla cream-filled chocolate eggs to my book group in Brooklyn today, and had bought a couple of extra to share with my daughter when she visited last Friday. But I forgot to give the extra to her. So, since she lives in Brooklyn, we agreed that I would come by after book group to hand her over her “cream egg.”

            I arrived at her apartment in early evening, and we had some very emotional conversation about grieving, sadness, loss, what it all means. As I was getting ready for the long subway ride home, she asked what I would do about dinner. We decided to go out to dinner in her neighborhood, to a quite good Indian restaurant. (I had tandoori fish, which I had never seen on a menu before.)

            As we walked her back home on the way to my subway, I realized that this sort of evening would not have happened were Jack still alive. He did not enjoy spontaneous changes in plans, so I might simply have left the cream egg with C. and gone on home, or not even bothered with the detour and given her the chocolate eggs the next time we saw her. It feels almost perverse that while grieving his loss, I now feel more freedom to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.

SOLSC Day 26: Reading About a Lost Manuscript

Another movie today (the French My Golden Days, though the original title Three Memories of Youth is more accurate). I didn’t fall asleep during the film, though I was afraid I might; I slept little last night. But once home, I drowsed for maybe half an hour before assembling my dinner: leftovers of baked fish, mushroom risotto, and kabocha squash. I am still cooking, which means there are often leftovers, which I love.

            While eating dinner, I read an article in The New York Review of Books about the original typescript of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. I read this classic novel by a disillusioned Communist (as a red-diaper baby, I was drawn to these stories) in my early 20s, and the author’s two-volume autobiography — I still remember his horrifying account of having his tonsils removed as a child, without anesthetic! From the NYRB article I learned that Koestler’s original manuscript, in German, had been thought lost. An English translation by Koestler’s then mistress, a young artist who was not a writer, was the first publication, in 1940, and Koestler translated it back into German a few years later. But now that the original has been found, it seems that there are numerous translation errors that soften Koestler’s points, German syntax creating awkward English, and unidiomatic English. What seemed odd to me is that Koestler translated the English version back into German after World War II, apparently without recreating his original — odd, until I remember that when I’ve rewritten something I’ve lost on the computer, I never feel it’s as good as what I wrote the first time.

SOLSC Day 25: What’s Normal?

I saw the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot this evening. It’s based on a memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by the journalist Kim Barker, and after seeing the excellent movie, with Barker played by Tina Fey, I’d really like to read the memoir.

            The movie is set mostly in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006, and shows some of the ways the Americans trying to help the country rebuild deeply misunderstood the culture. Marines repeatedly rebuilt a well that was bombed in a village, thinking they were helping village women so they wouldn’t have to walk a distance to get water. When Barker accompanied the Marines on one of their repair missions, the village women were able to talk to her — they couldn’t speak to the men — and confess that they were destroying the well because collecting water was their one chance to socialize without the village men around. And they wanted Barker to ask the Marines not to rebuild the well.

            Barker confesses to becoming addicted to the excitement of being a war correspondent, but when one of her colleagues, who she’s also having an affair with, is kidnapped (she helps engineers his rescue), she rethinks that attitude. She tells the colleague she’s returning to the States because, she says, she was beginning to think that life in Kabul was “normal.” What was heartbreaking for me, though, was this: Barker, as a Westerner, could leave Kabul and Afghanistan, but for Afghans, life there, no matter how insecure and corrupt, is their continuing normal. Unless they’re rich, they have no escape. I hope Barker’s memoir reaches that insight.

SOLSC Day 24: Colliding Lives

My lives collided this afternoon. Have I mentioned that I seem to be living three lives simultaneously? There’s the life of memory and the past, remembering Jack and  random thoughts, experiences, stories. There’s my life now, moving on, on my own. Then there’s the imaginary life of what Jack would have thought, liked, hated, what we would have talked and argued about.

           Today the life when Jack was still alive and the life when he isn’t crashed together when I ran into an acquaintance in our neighborhood. I was at Mondel’s buying custom chocolate Easter eggs, and the husband of a woman who I first met at the sandbox when our kids were toddlers came in. I’d probably last seen them in November, after Jack had fallen at home.

            “How’s he doing?” the neighbor asked. My heart clutched. He didn’t know, and I had to tell him.

            I hate these moments. Later today I’m getting a refresher with my physical therapist, whose colleague treated Jack over the past two years. I will have to tell him, but I’ve been preparing myself. In Mondel’s, it was unexpected. I told him, he was shocked and sorry, and I left the store. But I had to sit down outside on a street bench to put myself back together. These moments, when the life when Jack was alive and the life when he isn’t collide suddenly, feel like the emotional atoms of my being have scattered like pool balls. I need to gather them back into the frame of my body.

SOLSC DAY 23: Bilingualism

I am bilingual in computers. Except for a brief flirtation with the immediately obsolete PCjr, I’ve been a Mac girl all the way. But at work there have been mostly PCs, so I’ve learned to work in both operating systems.

            Since I’m mostly working at home the past couple of years, my PC knowledge is a little rusty. So when one of the editors I will be working with the next couple of months, who also works at home on her PC, wanted a refresher, I found that trying to imagine the PC screen while talking her through a process over the phone wasn’t that easy.

           This afternoon I decided to stop by my old office to give myself a refresher in Windows 7. I went through the steps the editor was having trouble with, took notes, and will consult with her when she has stories ready to work. And I took advantage of being in the office to hang out for a while, which I have missed while working at home.

            Do you have a favorite computer system? Are you a Mac or a PC person?