41. Someone Knows You’re Coming
The Year Of Paying Attention
“Who’s your favorite Beatle?” was a vital question when I was a boy, and there’s a special place in my heart for the fourth grade teacher who said I looked like Paul McCartney (I didn’t and I don’t.) In junior high I fantasized about playing the guitar like Eric Clapton (not Jimi Hendrix, a much more dangerous, far cooler guitar god), but I have never truly wished I was somebody else. With one exception.
I was gasping on an elliptical machine while once again listening to writer Calvin Trillin, this time narrating About Alice, his memoir about his wife, who died from cancer on September 11, 2001, at the age I am today. I worried that, were I to begin bawling in the gym, it would alarm the lady on the treadmill opposite me, but I chanced it. Since the 70’s, Trillin’s humor pieces often described family life with his wife and two daughters in Greenwich Village. I’ll just say it: I want his life, his memories, and his relationships. I want to be plain-spoken and charming, committed to What’s Right without pomposity, and deeply in love with my partner. Trillin is my Midwestern romantic ideal.
His offhand narration can’t mask the depth of his affection for his daughters, and for Alice, and you can’t even resent him for his good fortune. It’s the opposite of bragging. After Alice died, Trillin got a letter from “a young woman in New York who wrote that she looked at her boyfriend sometimes and thought, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?”
As I listened, wheezing, I thought: I need to appreciate Sarah more. I’m not nearly enough like Calvin Trillin towards her. And also — why aren’t my daughters as accomplished and amazing as his? Because they didn’t have Calvin Trillin for their father, that’s why. They didn’t have a chance.
Why did my marriage end? There it is, the question that stands proudly atop my self-doubt and self-criticism. No answer can put it to rest. Many marriages end, or persist without joy. But marriages like Calvin and Alice’s — that’s the gold standard most of us can only read about.
***
“Are you going to say goodbye to Hugh?” Sarah was asking about the yoga teacher I’ve seen most Tuesday mornings for years now, Level 1, 8–9:30am. “No,” I told her. I’d been thinking out loud that since my pre-paid 10-class card would be used up this morning, and with me in New Orleans all next month, maybe it was a good time to stop going to yoga, and save the travel time and money by just doing it at home. Then I rushed out the door for Hugh’s class.
I said good morning to the sweet older lady who unrolls her yoga mat next to mine. Out one evening last year, Sarah and I had bumped into her, with her middle-aged son, all of us on line at a Greenwich Village theater, to see something avant-garde and vaguely incomprehensible. It was just a few weeks ago, a morning she was absent from class, that a fellow classmate quietly told me the lady’s husband recently died, after a long illness.
I imagine she’s in her late 70’s (like a lady ahead of me in line for ice cream last week in Westhampton, who announced her age to justify eating all the ice cream she wanted; I told her I supported her position). When Hugh announces it’s time for the shoulder stand, I retrieve bolsters for the both of us, and after class I take her folding chair to put away with mine. If I decide to stop going to class, will I say goodbye to her? Will I thank Hugh? Or will I execute the Irish Goodbye, the French Exit, and ghost them both? My lifelong impulse had been to disappear, without permission or explanation. I don’t do that anymore, but Sarah’s innocent question hangs in the air.
On his podcast, Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield talked about the theory and practice of encountering death with fellow teacher Frank Ostaseski. In previous podcasts Kornfield described calmly preparing for a hypothetical death, then going through an actual life-threatening crisis, at which time the serenity plan was instantly replaced with terror. “Failing the test,” he called it.
Kornfield talked about the recent death of his brother, and Ostaseski, who co-founded the first Buddhist hospice in America, read the “death poem” of a woman he knew, who “lived on the margins of society.” She wrote:
Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray.
Soon enough the seas will sink your little island.
So while there’s still the illusion of time,
Set out for some other shore.
No sense packing a bag;
You won’t be able to lift it into your boat.
Give away all of your collections.
Take only new seeds and an old stick.
Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail.
Don’t be afraid.
Someone knows you’re coming.
An extra fish has been salted.
Then Frank said “Nobody who I was dying with ever said ‘I wish I got that second Mercedes.’”
***
Before falling asleep the other night, I opened up I Am Flying Into Myself, a collection of poems by Bill Knott. The first line of Thomas Lux’s introduction woke me up, describing Lux’s first meeting with Knott at fellow poet William Corbett’s house in Boston in the late 60’s. Over breakfast this morning I mentioned the book to my friend Peter, since Peter had introduced me to Bill Corbett when we bumped into him at an arthouse movie theater a year ago.
“Ah, Nights of Naomi,” said Peter, referencing one of Knott’s volumes of poetry. He mentioned his book Auto-Necrophilia as well, and Knott’s publisher, Big Table. Peter told me he’d never seen Knott read any of his poetry. Lux’s introduction described Knott’s bleak childhood. His mother died in childbirth when Knott was seven, as did the baby, and Knott’s butcher father drank poison three years later. Lux describes bringing a copy of a book he’d published of Knott’s work to the poet’s apartment. The windows were boarded up and a mattress lay on the kitchen floor. The burners on the stove were turned on for heat, and the phone and electricity had been shut off.
The cover photo for I Am Flying Into Myself shows Knott in a chaotic room piled with books, papers, boxes, what appears to be cast-off furniture. The artist at home. “I’d like to look at that book,” Peter said. Our conversation returned to a topic we’ve been investigating — what should we be doing now? We’re old enough to be discerning in our activities, and lucky enough not to worry about making ends meet. He mentioned a book by John Cage: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).
Just then the poet Anne Waldman walked into the restaurant, and came over to chat. She and Peter talked about a couple of recent memorial services for dead poets, and her upcoming trip to Marfa, Texas. Peter told Anne he’d been reading about her in Chris Krause’s biography of artist Kathy Aker. Then Waldman left to sit with a friend at another table.
“Anne told me that, years ago, she made a commitment to say yes to poetry, to go wherever she was invited to read or talk about it,” Peter said. “She’s constantly on the go, flying to Korea for three days, then somewhere else, then somewhere else. She’s worn out!” he said. I feel like a poetry groupie when I’m with Peter, meeting Ed Sanders of The Fugs, hearing about Peter’s conversations with John Giorno, and book projects with Cage and Kiki Smith and John Ashbery. “I’m sure you saw, John Ashbery died,” Peter said. I said I had.
Next week: On A Rooftop In Brooklyn.
The Year Of Paying Attention begins here.
