The summer after the second grade (1950), we moved from Inwood to Riverdale, and my grandmother moved into our old apartment on Arden Street. The neighborhood was getting rougher: Irish and Italian blue collar families were moving up the street from Nagel Avenue, and the German-Jewish rising middle class were heading for the suburbs. My father was getting a raise, and my parents felt that I needed my own room and wide-open space to roam in. But I missed the old block terribly: the solid row of four story houses and stoops, the street that belonged more to children and dogs than to cars, the people screaming out the window, marble season in the gutter, open hydrants in the summer, mountains of snow and garbage in the winter, Abe’s candy store on the corner.

And I missed the old building: 28 Arden, a walkup with three apartments on a landing, their front doors adjoining each other. My closest friends lived right upstairs–Frankie Pershep and Ralphie Rieda. My more distant playmates lived on the top floor and in the basement. But most of all I missed the cramped three room apartment on the second floor, old 2H. Behind its sheet metal coated front door, painted to look like wood grain, was a dark, narrow entry containing a painted linen chest, a full length mirror, an umbrella stand, with a bear carved on it, a small closet and a huge door to a dumbwaiter which took the trash out every morning. The kitchen had two features which nothing in the new apartment could match: a clothes drier over the stove that could be raised or lowered with a rope and pully, and a door under the window that opened into a little cave for storing potatoes and onions. (more…)

Hey, let’s go down to Chinatown
And get a bit of Lichee
You say that you’re allergic
And it makes your elbows itchy?
Well, that’s no serious problem
I know just what you should do:
Mash ginger root with ginseng root
And get a sticky goo
Mix it up with some rice vermicelli
That you’ve dipped in a little grass Jelly
Then rub it gently around on your belly
And wipe it off when it starts to go smelly.
Do this and your elbows will never get itchy
Though you’ve eaten your fill of delitchious lichee.

(Written for the Lund Theatre Troupe’s Production of Free to Be You and Me)

Raymond asked: “What do you really want now.  What do you really wish would happen to you?”  I took a long time to answer: “I’d like to live more productively in my head–intellectually, imaginatively, emotionally; to read, study, think,write and digest my experiences, and come up with something, maybe.  Be cerebral according to my leanings and headings.

The five years we gave ourselves in 1970 have finished.  We stand on a solid plateau.  It has been good.  What is next?  The next chunk is ten years. Why?  I think I can tell now what I want for the next ten years.  What are the needs, the priorities?

1.    Peace, space, inner order; not being crowded by excessive fear, anxiety, more to do than is possible. This has been more effectively provided by TM than anything else.
2.    Predictability, so that options can be chosen and followed up.
3.    A sense of usefulness and value to others of my work
4.    Material beauty and comfort, order in routines of daily life.
5.    Options, not feeling locked in–the possibility of change within a steady framework.

Voice of the sea
Whisper to me
Over and over and over.

Wave upon wave
Washing my cave
Clean and pure and free.

Prospering, prospering: joy, peace, snug warmth.  Reading, drinking tea, sleeping, meditating on the saggy sofa by the stove.  The Ashley works better all the time.  Last night it burned 8 hours and still had three logs going this morning. The ceiling over the kitchen insulated with blankets of pink fiberglass, the holes in the floor chinked, curtains over the windows in the living room.  The house is getting tighter, cleaner.  And yesterday, unpacking woolies and a forgotten old tenor recorder and boxes of books from behind the eaves.  And Jan and Jonah making a chocolate cake.  And Janet and Martin coming to interview us about the adoption and Chantelle LeDuc playing with Jonah in the bath and upstairs.

I prepared salmon dinner and invited Janet and Martin to stay–they did–then went off to rehearsal.  It’s coming together [Free to Be You and Me] and I begin to really enjoy the play.

The moon and stars are brilliant.  Tonight is potluck dinner with our coop collective.  This morning I ran the drain from sink and bathtub to the barnyard so Jan and Jeanne will have running water during the freeze.

The wind gusts, the stove taps lightly, the mixed-in sticks of green alder hiss, the drdaft whistles low and cheerful.  The snow falls, sometimes in rare flakes, sometimes in thick clouds.  Out the window, black and white and red and green.

TM–for the last few weeks it has helped, I think–and last night missed my meditation, wantonly and for the first time.  Is this why I suffer now? Does it really mean a good thing for my life? Something added?  A direction?

I am cut off. I hate to seal the break with my former life. I hate the idea of becoming a Canadian citizen.  I am still an exile.

Stan told me a story last night.  Several years ago, when he had dropped from sight altogether and his parents and family back in New York had no idea of his whereabouts, his sister was staying with her best friend Joy and discussing her lost brother.  Joy’s father said, “Oh, he’s out in British Columbia with Steven Marx, living with him.” This man said he had been Steven’s Hebrew School teacher: Leo Wolff.

Again to California.  A semester unemployed.  Babysitting, cooking, cutting wood, waxing floors in a perpetually disordered and drafty house.  Going into debt, living off patrimony, forgetting the past, and doing nothing in the present even to forget.

What frustration I feel about expressing myself in writing or any other form for the gratification of others and for the satisfaction of self.

What beauty here can I see? In the rain dripping from the eaves, the stream pouring, channeling under the bridge, the smoke, blue, passing the window, billowing up the hill, mixing with the fog, trapped in the cedar boughs.

The Ashley drying the house.  I sit by it with a purring kitten and a cup of lemon grass tea.  Grey and green.  Rain for the last two weeks.  The sunshine that made us long for cover now a nostalgic memory.  Days when I felt like Adam before the fall:  cultivating my garden, prospering. My response was fear and guilt.

The horses race around the pasture, the beat of their hooves shakes the ground.  The two billy goat kids moan quietly because of the rubber castrating rings I’ve just put on them.  I’m minding the store: the goats, the garden, the chickens, the fire, the laundry, the boy.  My mind spills venom.  Where are my plans and aspirations?

Psalm 131

Lord my heart is not haughty
Nor mine eyes lofty; neither
Do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me.
Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother.
My soul is even as a weaned child.

1.

Midpoint of our years
Summer Solstice nears
Mothers giving birth
Sanctifying earth.

2.

Dawn and Dusk converge
In the sun’s ovoidal path.
Opium days
Like poppy buds engorged,
Violet velvet vulvae
Swell, slit, split, splash out
Orange-red radiance
Petals, pistils, stamens
Fingers, toes.

A lesson I want to teach myself as if a child: that which you want most–maple sugar, gum, great lovemaking, a baby, the ability to write–you cant get it by desiring.  Fate, the tide which brings and takes, is a sexual person, beautiful and proud.  She gives only of her own volition.  Insistent craving doesn’t attract gifts.  So turn your longing elsewhere and learn to do without, only then may it come, a surprise, a mystery, grace.  Its enemies are lust and satiation.

Last night at the dinner table drinking white wine in the wet sunswept yard and watching Jonah.  He’s in the field wrestling with his training-wheeled bike, kicking it, crying, spitting, calling it fucken asshole, finally abandoning it, going up the hill where Ezra rides the toy tractor.  He grabs it from Ezra, who struggles to hang on to it.  Jonah lifts it over his head and threatens to smash him with it.  Ezra goes back to the cabin where Jenny is riding the smallest car, rips it from her and starts hitting her.