September 12

Shingles under the arms, face broken out, insomnia, stomach tightness, irritability, the desire to run away from farm, wife, child, Canada.  Moments of tenderness and intense communication.  Tears close.

Jonah’s crying interrupts my 10 p.m. reverie.  He is shaking in fright, counting “4,5,6,7, 8,10 Mummy, mummy.” Janet is in bed with the flu.  He wants her.  Her involvement with “A Taste of Honey” has been consuming.  For days he’s been shuffled around.  Neither of us have time for him. And he’s just starting kindergarten, a world of rules and crimes and older kids and bullies and beautiful powerful girls and a friendly but harassed authority, and another not so friendly authority. He’s just back from Denver, where his grandparents provided the life he wants.  Today in the car he said he prefers Vancouver to Lund and Denver to Vancouver.  He wanted to hear Lise’s letter and Henry’s story written for him last spring.

The child has such a tie with his grandparents.  If I could be more like them he and they would like me better.  They give lots of support”as long as there is enough money and some professional status.  I fear their loss.  Henry is 70, Lise 66.  I fear them dying.

Autumn blues; the fear is descending. Perhaps with my first week of classes, the first film, it will pass. Or perhaps not, until the play is over.  The potential is here for the order we seek.  The time for each other and our creative pursuits.  Will it come?

September 13

Indian summer has deserted us.  It’s grey and blowing hard this morning.  I sigh with anxiety¦and yet exaggerate.  Jan is under greater pressure and she sleeps.  I fear the chill. I wish to placate and propitiate. When is the day of atonement?

A coffee break between loads of dishes
Evening sun through a gash in the clouds
Goats moving in the rain
Grass green grows lush like June.
Cat Stevens scratchy record.
Jan and Joe iron initials on his new school bag.
Tomorrow the first day.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.