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July 26, 2001
On the map Ireland looks like a little, hairy, old-man-foetus in profile stretching its toes and fingers into the Atlantic. It’s coastline, particularly that of the Western coast, is a place consumed with getting from A to B by the most circuitous route. My self-donated annual lottery prize is a visit to this part of the world. It is required to rescue soul and sanity, shore up the body for the coming year and refurbish the imagination. It hasn’t failed yet.
There the birds sing with a persistent generosity all morning, like those jazz greats simultaneously accepting and defying their basic pessimism. There is a machine buzz of flies and their kamakaze ticking against windows; huge moths; large black slugs; cows; endless bewildered sheep roaming the hills and the roads; less humans. Nature here is benign, no mosquitoes, no snakes, no Lyme ridden ticks, no man-eating sharks; the most threatening animal I encountered was a sheep dog with mythological ambitions, whenever one walked onto a beach with him he turned into a hormone driven minotaur monopolizing a leg of the nearest female, usually me.
The first days of the holiday are often the most difficult. Going away is like placing the shopping bag of your life on the floor; the contents escape and become fiercely animate objects and the bag loses all its form. It passes. You can spend a whole day reading, cooking, eating and walking. I became convinced while sitting in the wild garden of our rented cottage one morning, a warm sunny morning, that this is where time is manufactured. It emerges from this navel of the world in a wide ribbon, more plentiful at the point where it issues forth than when it reaches other parts. It is immensely comforting to experience this expanse of time. It stays light until 10.30 pm during the summer, which may have something to do with this illusion.
Wild salmon; smoked salmon; local lamb, pork and beef; floury potatoes; giant cooking apples; regal vegetables; milk, cream and cheese: all striving to taste of their very essence. A famine would seem impossible.
Beware the fellow tourist encountered at the start of the trip, he is the ineluctable character destined to haunt your stay. Ours took the form of a Dutch painter living in the vicinity. We’ll call him Ludwig. The previous tenants of the cottage, friends who we overlapped with for a night, had purchased two paintings of the area from him. The exchange of the paintings for the agreed upon price was the last thing to be done before our friends' departure. As I am sleeping in the sun filled loft bed on our first morning, and one sleeps long and hard in these parts, Ludwig’s verbal diarrhea crashes into the cottage. Can I outsleep his incessant ramblings, will my bladder outlast his tale? No. I have to rise, descend the stairs and join him for a breakfast of pig parts and psychobabble. He has met an American woman from Santa Barbara in the nearest town, in its gourmet shop. He is buying his daily cappucino (yes cappucino has come to Connemara) and betrays some hint of irritation that this blow in, the American, is monopolizing the attention of the shopkeepers. She turns to him and says, “you have been rolling a big boulder uphill all your life.” This comment completely disarms the ornery Dutch man and to make an incredibly long story, as he tells it, short it is decided that Ludwig should leave his Dutch wife of 25 years, move to Santa Barbara with the clairvoyant blow in and start painting redwood trees instead of rocky shorelines. We met Ludwig in every pub, on every turn of the road, and in every shop we frequented until he left for California a week after our initial encounter. He lasted six days in Santa Barbara. The gourmet shopkeeper kept us in cheese and gossip, cappucino and local lore.
What I kept reminding myself as I wanted to tear out Ludwig’s tongue, as my mind became saturated by his New Age tide of trivia, and by his egomaniacal stories of conquest and colonization, was that one shouldn’t run off with strangers you meet in the Connemara Hamper and that the devil you are holidaying with is wildly superior to the man ahead of you in the cappucino queue. Perhaps, as Ludwig kept telling me, there are no coincidences.
July 25, 2001
Books do furnish a room. I needed less furniture. You go away to realize the value of your home, among other things. Always on return I treat it with added reverence. This time I came home wanting to make a better working space. This involved the removal of five boxes of books which I donated to Housing Works on Crosby street, which is a great place to donate your excess volumes (or buy more).
So in pruning your library what do you keep? What do you remove? Obviously reference books remain. Do you throw out those really fat novels written by men that you haven’t read since you bought them eight years ago? Yes. Do you throw out one of the brilliant books that you have two of? Yes; keep the prettier edition, or the one that a friend gave you and wrote in. Do you keep the books that may prove useful if you get stuck writing that piece that you’ve been so stuck that you haven’t even started? Yes. Do you keep all of the books by your favorite authors. Yes and No. Some favorite authors have written books you don’t like, divest yourself of these. Some authors helped you more than any religion so you keep all of those books regardless of quality. Regardless of the fact that they may have been appealing only at a certain time of one’s life. Do you keep the slim poetry volumes? Yes, they can be very soothing when you can’t read the fat novels by men. Do you keep the books that you couldn’t finish written by dear friends? No, but not without guilt. Do you keep the misguided gifts from mother and father with inscriptions? Mother is older, so you keep the one’s from her and donate most of father’s.
It’s not an entirely rational procedure. But the space resulting is sheer joy.
June 1, 2001
In Chinatown today on Mott and Mosco streets, buying bau for lunch, I looked up at a window and there was one of those classically Chinese pugs, long haired and painterly, resting his elbows on the window sill and looking out into the street. He wasn't merely gazing; he was looking with an animated and anthropomorphic curiousity. I went inside the shop under his window and purchased a disposable camera. I stood back to take a photo and just as the flash went off he disappeared inside. I waited a long time for him to reappear but he didn't. I left feeling as if I had been rude.
May 31, 2001
Endings are difficult. Even when they are longed for. Today is my last day of "temping" with the robber barons. The work has dried up and I sit at my desk feeling both guilty and relieved. And bored. The end presumes another start.
It appears that to perform an activity well, usually for monetary reward in our society, is a fundamental part of most people's lives. There seems to be a reward other than the mere getting of money. As I may have mentioned before, this aspect of life seems to have evaded me. I have managed to get some money for a variety of activities, but the other rewards have not been so forthcoming. The fault lies with me of course, and lately I have been taken with the intensity with which people perform their daily work. That glad distraction and pleasure you sometimes see, not always, but sometimes.
When I was working in London as the "assistant" to the movie star I would get up at 5 am in order to extract him from bed and prepare him for the days shoot. I walked for 20 minutes to get from where I lived to his house, from Chelsea to the Cromwell Road. En route I would occasionally encounter a fox. This is not an uncommon sight owing to the patchwork of parkland stitched into the body of Greater London and the availability of edible garbage. The fox would sometimes stop and look at me and I would return the gesture and then we would part. There was something in his purpose and intent, a streamlined tenacity that I envied.
The other living creatures that I would encounter at this hour were men and women perched on slow moving Honda 50 motor cycles. Each bike rider had a clipboard with a map attached vertically to the handlebars. Their heads would swivel from side to side as they progressed, reading street names and making note of landmarks. They were following prescribed routes as part of their study for the notoriously difficult "Knowledge," the exam all London taxi drivers must pass that tests them on various routes, landmarks and the geography of London. Here too were the runes of industry and purpose.
I would always tell the movie star if I had seen a fox on the way to his house. He is a country boy and a fox sighting and my recounting of it would always initiate our day together well. "Did he look at you funny?" "Yes he did, he stopped right in the middle of the road and he said, 'What the hell are you doing on the Old Brompton Road at this hour?' And I said to him, 'I'm going to get a movie star out of bed.'" And the movie star would just leap out of bed without the usual battles that ensued.
May 30, 2001
Into the house comes the annual New York magazine Best Doctors issue, just as the issue proclaiming the best restaurants, the best dry cleaner, or the best pedicure does. While I am loathe to admit that I will slavishly follow their suggestions regarding restaurants, stain removal outlets, or who best to commit the aesthetics of my extremities to, I find their doctor list lacking. None of my favourites are on it. I was curious as to their methodology when choosing these great providers and came across the phrase "a cross-checked compendium of referrals, in which doctors rate their peers." It has a dubious tone. Never ask a doctor about a doctor, ask a patient; or ask a doctor who asks their patients about other doctors. I wanted to share my list because something in me has grown weary of the appropriation and dissemination of "the best of " everything through the normal channels. I wanted to sing the praises of the people who make the vagaries of health tolerable to me and to many others. The people who are too busy seeing human beings and gathering anecdotal wisdom to be writing papers involving clinical studies; the men and women who know how to hold out the sponge along the marathon route but don't stuff it down your oesophagus; the doctors who still know what diagnosis means; the ones who know that the quality of your life is not the same as the length of it; the practitioners who know when to stop and when to go.
Dr. Michelle Alpert: Family (family being whatever you choose to make it) Medicine, Infectious Diseases and the woman with the most infectious laugh in Manhattan. Knows how to be a doctor and a friend.
Dr. Deborah Coady: Gynecologist. A woman who readily acknowledges that being a woman has its bizarre aspects but somehow makes it seem fine as evidenced by the tilt of her head.
Dr. Busell: Hematologist. A brilliant doctor if your blood is funky and a man recently educated in bed side manners by a patient's father wielding a scalpel. You no longer encounter endless waits in his rooms and the scars on his face have healed nicely.
Nurse Practitioner Weisz: Family Practice and Infectious Diseases. A woman possessing a fabulous brain, great legs and good ears.
Dr. Liz Greenberg: Chiropractor. Can resolve anything related to the spine and is your single best defense against computer shoulder.