Joe

 By great good fortune, Joe was standing at the railing watching Clemente ride his horses in the morning that third season I  spent on the backside.  Most folks won't talk to an unknown, older woman who  apparently doesn't have the slightest knowledge of horses and isn't a new owner with pots of money.  But Joe was a talker and I'm a listener. I couldn't be more grateful.

One story Joe told me early on was about the morning his owner (meaning she owned the Thorougbreds he was training) was standing there when Celemente rode by on a white horse, called out, "Look at me, a black man on a white horse," and Joe shouted, "Yeah, jus like a fly in a glass a milk" and the owner almost fell on the ground laughing. 

He and Clemente had known each other for years, since Clemente came here from Puerto as a jockey, into his long years as an exercise rider and then, this last year, into his hot walking stage. 

This year, they had a fight because Joe would often sit in the Legend's Room at the track, but was too weak to walk over to the window to place his bets, so Clemente took the money, came back with the slips, which often didn't have the numbers Joe had given him, or thought he'd given him, or wanted to give him, or they were numbers that Clemente decided were better, or different because he'd forgotten or misunderstood the penciled scribbles. But Joe didn't have enough money to fool around like this, especially when he could a won 5, 6 hundred dollars, if, if only, Clemente had gotten the numbers right. That was it. 

And besides, Clemente really didn't want to notice how ill Joe was when he, himself, was suffering aches and pains from a terrible riding injury some years back that never fully healed since he wouldn't say in the hospital long enough. Or he had an ingrown toenail, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. Hurts.

Joe often said, "Another wonderful day in Paradise," when we met at the rail. Sometimes he'd talk about his son, a wonderful kid, not many wonderful kids, really good, "never had ta 'it 'im, such a good kid, 'as good friends, don' do drugs, good kid, wants ta be in law enforcement." When Joe got colon cancer several years earlier, he prayed to be allowed to see Anthony graduate from high school, that's all he wanted, a few more years, jus' let me live ta see 'im graduate, God.

 When he struggled with chemotherapy, 38 sessions if I remember correctly, he carried a heavy backpack and walked everyday to build up his strength, played ball with his son, totally motivated by his desire to give this boy a childhood he never had, the guidance of a father he wasn't given because his father left the family and Cuba early on, went back when Joe was fourteen to get him from the school run by nuns where he'd been left when he was six or seven, took him Tampa, lied about his age to get him a Social Security card, put him to work at the track right away. Immediately.  

I've written down endless stories that Joe told me. They are far more interesting than I'm capable of writing in this blog. (I'm hideously critical of everything, most especially my own work, so if I say they're interesting I really believe it, that is if you are into vernacular.)

I was lucky enough to know him for the last year he was a trainer, to video tape him talking about his experiences on the backside, and then, when he was too sick to work anymore,  to be able to drive him to doctor appointments where I was allowed to accompanying him into the examining room and take notes. I was fortunate.

Before Christmas, Joe took us to breakfast at Santorini's in Revere, and showed me where he wanted his ashes scattered, telling me to make sure that his son knew this. Then he wanted to make just a little stop at Walmart to buy a truck for his friend's nephew because that little boy, so beautiful you couldn't believe, needed a present, what a beautiful little boy, it's Christmas. I pretended I didn't know why he stood in front of baskets of toiletries, asking which I'd chose for someone or other, maybe the orchid, maybe the rose? And I pretended to be surprised when he gave it to me, along with one of the shiny red bags he'd bought for gifts, just as we got to my car. "You won't take nothin', but I fooled you, didn' I?"

 

I liked all of that. A lot. But I just hated the wake and the funeral, as nicely planned as it had been by Joe's ex and his son, now a Marine, who gave an eloquent short speech, a send off to the father who had played baseball with him, who had been so proud of his abilities, who loved him and encouraged him to join the military, if that's what he wanted, when everyone else said, "Don't do that," and who he loved. "Thanks, Dad."

Sunday

It's seven. I want to crawl in bed with the dogs. For no particular reason. Tomorrow I start teaching one class in the afternoon, once a week. Soon, I have to make a decision about truly retiring. I've been limping along for five years, one class one semester, two classes the next semester and it's starting for the spring.

This weekend I got as far as I could with one project -- this long poemish thing about the racetrack, pages and pages and pages. Now it needs some images, but my old computer (without pentium intell or whatever it's called) will only accept Quark and it's very tedious to upload photographs into that program. My next problem. 

I looked at the video again, worked on the notes about the first rough cut (having made a vague cut myself, looked at the second rough cut many times, all of which has taken days, made notes on both), sent this latest level of decision off to the editor, a very smart young woman who lives in California and has a new baby. That was this afternoon after Orfeo, from LaScala, shown in a cold movie theatre this morning at 10. Staged by Robert Wilson, this most static, formal, elegant performance depended on the slightest gestures of gloved hands, as if the singers were initiating the slowest of mime performances, except an opera was laid on top of these subtly choreographed patterns. (I came dangerously close to falling asleep and the only sound I remember was the white face of Orfeo, his straight, black mouth, the heavily drawn brows right above his eyes, and the neat half moons drawn lightly in black above the brows. I also remember the beautiful black shading on the sides of most noses.)

For whatever reason, I don't 'hear' music. (My daughter's learning disabilities include a lack of auditory discrimination that not only effects her ability to sing, but also to distinguish sounds so she hears Dick Dan Dyke.) I see opera which is why I prefer the films in which there are many close-up shots, tight images of the singers, the heavy makeup, the shapes their mouths make. 

(I vaguely remember arias that I've heard twenty or thirty times, the beginning of Barber of Seville, for instance. I listen to Mozart and Bach because they are mathematical in form, though I don't remember one piece from another. Loud, fierce music is gets my attention, Afro-pop or Reggae, though I won't recognize the same piece in two seconds.)

"Police, Adjective," a Romanian film, was almost as slow as "Orfeo," with very little dialogue, a remarkable work about the slow corruption of official life, clever. And then there's Russell Banks, "My Book y Wook," which I thought was a fast-paced, dense, revealing autobiography by a fame-obsessed, former heroin-cocaine-alcohol-and-sex-addict-vegetarian, who is clear, but not particular accusatory, about the childhood that led him to this level of self-abuse and self-destructiveness and the luck he had in finding a manager who forced him into two forms of rehab. Since I don't know his work (as he said to an American audience, "I am famous in England, but I suppose it doesn't count if I have to tell you that."), I only appreciate the manic dialogue that he races across the page, tossing off quips.  

None of any of this, though I worked hard and tried to stay observant, ironed clothes, washed dishes, vacuumed, baked bread, none of it distracted from the fact that my friend, Joe, died. His ex called to tell me on Friday. It's not as if this is a surprise. He was unimaginably sick, as can happen with a diabetic who never really knew how to manage this disease and also ran into cancer along the way. But, I liked him. I'll miss him, this talkative Cuban Thoroughbred trainer who told stories starting with arriving in Tampa when he was fourteen, his father sending him to work right away at the track.

I've probably repeated the word remarkable fifteen times in this blog...remarkable "Skin,"(a film from South Africa about an Afrikaner couple whose second child appeared to be black, from a true story. It only received one and a half stars, but it was an impressive film,) remarkable "Orfeo," remarkable "Police, Adjective," but Joe really was pretty remarkable.

  

The Gym and Aging

A friend of mine has gone to the gym for thirty years and is now playing tennis. Her husband, who is nearly ninety, has never been much for exercise, especially the sort one does because 'it's more than good for you, it's essential for your long-term welfare.' It's probable that it would have been better if he'd heeded her example, but they'd only been married for fifteen years and have had a marvelous, respectful, gentle time together. And I'm convinced he's lived longer for that happiness.

But I am going to join something or other. 

Though I belonged to the Melrose Y for years, I let my membership lapse after I sprained my ankle walking down the icy front steps after an April Fool's snowstorm. 

Today I stopped at a place that's within walking distance, $99 a year, three floors up, perfectly ghastly to look at, with many treadmills which is what I want.

Now I'm weighing whether it would be better to go back to the Y, which involves a (rather tedious, slightly too long) drive and costs about $400. It does have a pool, assuming that I would swim again. Right now I'm just fixated on the treadmill since the ice, snow, my lack of walking (the dogs that often) because of my fear of falling, is undoing all that I accomplished this summer working on the backside.

So, I took my first step.....Perhaps I'm acting on this impulse to force myself into exercise because my friend is such a good advertisement. Or maybe because it's my daughter's birthday today. She's gone to New York because she teaches acting in New Jersey on the weekends, and would never let me write down how old she is, but it was a fair number of years ago that she was born....  

And I feel a little sad because that baby was so absolutely marvelous, and the little girl was such a delight. It's not that the grown woman isn't full of life, energy, promise and hope. And that having her around isn't as distracting as having fourteen dogs. 

But so much time has gone by. Where does it go? 

My cousin, Patsy

The other night, I found a message from my cousin Patsy on the phone. And I called her back. Unfortunately, we talk only about once a year, close to the holidays. 

My cousin Jacqueline and I were the youngest of the family. Pat and my brother were thirteen and sixteen years older. She would have been my role model, had my mother lived, since she'd so successfully moved into an important and interesting professional life in New York. Whenever I could, I looked at the fashion section that she edited in the New York Times Magazine Section, even though I rarely read the Times, never having enough money to buy the Sunday edition.

Often I'm sure that I've aged  into looking just like her mother, Marion, since I don't remember my mother, and my aunt is my model for family resemblance. I look at my blue eyes and see hers, my wrinkles and see hers.

After I'd done a lot of self-portraits, 1972-73, I went on to take more out in Port Washington where we grew up. I love this image of Marion, my daughter, me and the vacuum. I hear Marion, "Lissie, don't show my hands. Please, don't show my hands." She worried that they weren't the hands of her youth, but I find them comforting since they so much resemble the way my hands have become. I remember Krissy asking, "What happened to your beautiful hands? Where are your thin fingers?" That was twenty years ago, when we were eating dinner with Nance in Tucson.

Recently I had a dream in which I was nude, wearing only high heels, standing on Mackey Avenue outside of Marion and Roi's house. Workmen were sanding the floors and one told me that I could stand on the bed in the guest room and vacuum away all the dust I could reach from there. In the hallway, a tattoo artist was creating the most gorgeous shawl, robins egg blue and silver lettering, perhaps in Japanese, across the shoulders and down the back of a man who did martial arts. After he got up to shake out the pain, and sat down again, I felt his foot against mine.

a ride through the car wash, a long Sunday

I knew Sunday was going to be a long day, so I decided to take the dogs to the car wash on Saturday as an outing. Bogie isn't entirely pleased that Tulip appeared from nowhere in June. He was used to going everywhere with me and doesn't realize that, in spite of this annoying small dog sticking her nose into everything and barking too much, he still goes whenever and where ever I can take him. But he likes the car wash and I could take him there, at least, since he wasn't going to the opera movie, the poetry reading or to sit in Dunkin' Donuts with my poetry mentor on Sunday.

And I decided to take Happy along, Krissy's dog. She's a slut of a dog and will eat anything and go anywhere except for walks at night. Car was the first word she ever spoke. Three dogs and me, riding through the car wash.

I felt compelled to wash the car because I was picking up a fastidious friend. She has an  elegant sense of design and notices curious details which  makes it interesting to go on outings with her. I always learn something, see something new. Unfortunately, I have the terrible habit of keeping a good bit of clutter in my car and, recently, the outside has been decorated with bird droppings. In the past, she has driven us wherever we went, but now they are down to one car and I've been obliged to drive. (She is a far better driver and knows the best ways to get anywhere, which are never the ways I'm used to going.) 

The first time this task fell to me I was so intimidated that I had the car detailed, inside and out. It looked so surprisingly clean that she asked if I'd gotten a new car. But when I picked her up recently, I hadn't done a thing to improve the appearance of my old-lady-tedious-brown-gray-Toyota and she noticed.

I'm not sure that this excursion to the car wash, which involved a long wait in an angry line of drivers all of whom were anxious to get ahead of me, was worth the trouble. Tulip was so frightened by the noises -- water streams, all those suds, the slapping apparatus and the large buffers -- that she crouched near the brakes, missing the whole spectacle. (I took photos so I could show her later.) And the car was so dirty that there was still debris spotting the front hood after the washing, not that this mattered all that much because splats of bird poop appeared by Sunday morning when I dumped Bogie and Tulip downstairs and went off to see Orfeo, a filmed version from LaScala.

Only the 'feed' to the 'server' wasn't working. "What," another friend said, "there are no reels, no film?" The friend that I'd driven mentioned that in Italy or France, there would have been a general uproar over such a long delay, but this audience sat with patience for the hour it took for those young folks managing the technical details to give up on the whole thing and announce that there was no hope, that this opera would be rescheduled, save our ticket stubs, and we'd be given a free ticket for a different opera in the new series. Our small contingent made hissing noises when a woman stood up, announced herself as a lawyer, and offered to sue this struggling non-profit theatre if our money wasn't refunded instantly. $17!

Since I had a couple of hours, I went to Feet of Clay where I continued on with my small job, photographing the goings-on for the website. I used to clean the glaze room, a thankless job that involved a lot of bending and swearing about why people never bothered to clean up around the glaze bucket they'd used, didn't wipe the wall that they'd splashed. Recently I was supposed to mix slip, but whoever did this last took off with the directions. So someone decided that, since I'm a photographer, I might provide images for the website. On Tuesday night, I took over 100 photos and got 15 decent images. That's not a bad ratio in poor light.

One of the feature poets reading at the monthly Brookline Poetry Reading spoke about the pools of blackness outside of his back door, one of those poetic references that always drives me wild because when I open the door, it's to let the dogs out (I usually walk them) and I see Maria in the kitchen next door, doing the dishes, and Carlos just leaving the room. Their daughters must be in other rooms that I can't see into. 

The Dunkin' Donuts, where I was meeting George, my poetry mentor, is on the other side of the earth, so I left the reading early. This meeting was very important to me. He has very little left-over time, especially now that he's teaching full time. And has been generous enough to read this long poemish thing that I wrote about working for a couple of hours every morning on the racetrack this summer. Last time we met, we reviewed 70 pages. When I got back home, Krissy said, "You just met with George. Aren't you happy?" But I just wanted to go to bed, filled with a strange disappointment that he'd been so encouraging. (Oh, that circle-eyed-monster-dog-0f-my-unconscious that wants to defeat me was furious!)

George knows that I don't like compliments. (Actually, I don't think that he does either because when I tell him how grateful I am for his support, he says the Greek equivalent of 'oh, pshaw.' 

We sat there looking at his suggestions for the last half and talking a bit about this upcoming election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Congress that may, just may, horrors, go to a Republican. 

And instead of working on editing that project, here I am, laboring over this long blog....  distracting myself from practical work...  flying these words out into space.... 

 

 Aren't we humans curious?

   thanks!!!!!

Kemper and Me

A couple of nights ago, Kemper and I talked about the direction this video might take. Or rather I asked for his opinion. Though I was very pleased with the first rough cut that Elizabeth Hesik did, I was balking at the second. It covered the territory of my long relationship with Kemper up to the time he found me again when he came to Boston to do some filming at MIT and realized that I was teaching photography there. Why does it matter that I hadn't become the failure that it appeared that I was intent on becoming, I thought/think? Isn't this going too far? Isn't it more curious that we remember that formative year, when I was a sophomore and he was a senior at Bard, when I got pregnant, had an abortion, we got married, I left him.

No, he said, that's not the story. It's the fifty year friendship that has skittered along in varied ways. That's what's interesting. (I'm not entirely certain that he thinks anything is all that interesting about my project, but am very grateful for his willing participation.) 

But, I said, we remember things quite differently. He speaks eloquently in the video about the role of my father and step-mother, who were willing to help us in any way they could, but insisted that he tell his parents, quite rightly (a grim experience) he says. I, on the other hand, hardly remember anything about their intervention except that I'm certain we got married because my step-mother, Mari, believed that anyone who had sex was in love (hardly the case at Bard in 1060-61.) No, he says, we made a pact with the devil, talked it over, decided that we would do this. I don't remember anything about that, but I do remember that a young woman had died from an illegal abortion about that time and that's why I couldn't be driven in the dead of night to the wonderful doctor in Pennsylvania who safely and kindly helped so many out of that situation. He thinks that we talked to illegal abortionists and decided not to take that path under any circumstances.

After we hung up, I decided that he's probably right about the direction the video should take. It is interesting that we lost contact several times (in fairly dramatic circumstances) and he found me again. And that text-over-lays could indicate our different memories of that one year because I think they're important/curious. 

Since I'm positive about the death of that young woman, I looked it up in Google and found that on January 21, 1961, Vivian Grand, a 23-year-old New Yorker, died. Dr. Mandel M. Friedman had taken her body to an undertaker in Queens who became suspicious. That's how the fact that he had performed an abortion was discovered. The sad irony is that it was also discovered that she had never been pregnant. 

Oh, Haiti

40,000 - 50,000 people dead.......................