I am in the midst of a full-blown love affair with Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones’ ragged masterpiece from 1972. What began as a flirtation last summer, when I put “Torn and Frayed” and “Loving Cup” onto a playlist that was in frequent rotation, has become something much deeper and truer. I cannot stop listening.
At the same time, I’ve had an epiphany about music generally. If you’re like me, you’ve had the experience of listening to a particular song over and over and over. From time to time, something gets in there, and it can be weeks before the need to stop hearing it on a constant basis fades. This happened to me with Stew’s “Come Down Now” a few months back and then a few weeks ago with “This is the Sea” by the Waterboys. It’s happened hundreds of times in the course of my life.
Just a few days ago, it finally occurred to me what’s going on: in these instances, the songs are my soul’s attempt to communicate directly with me, bypassing the brain and delivering the message to a much more core place. And the beautiful, circular magic of it is that the songs are also the voice of the songwriter’s soul, giving expression to something true in a language another soul can understand. It’s mystical, and real.
Now I’m paying close attention to such songs and the way they make me feel and what they have to tell me. I should point out that it’s not necessarily the lyrics that I’m talking about, although they can certainly contribute, but it’s the whole of the song: music, tone, layers, words.
Exile on Main St. is essentially shaping my own personal and creative manifesto. This album is loose, unselfconscious, and soulful to a thrilling degree, and I am declaring those as the three qualities I most wish to cultivate in my writing and artwork, and in my life as whole.
Below I share my soul’s current, urgent communiqué: “Let it Loose,” a song from Exile that will take you somewhere sublime.
It was 1974. High summer in Bedford Hills, New York, a small hamlet an hour north of the city. A little boy was playing in his driveway, bouncing a superball as high as he could. On the 22nd bounce, that superball went so high that it disappeared into the sky.
As the boy peered up into the blue, shading his eyes, everything around him was still. No bird song. No dog bark. No car horn. A moment later, an enormous shower of dandelions fell all around him. He was engulfed in a cascade of buttery blossoms, the scent of deep taproot in the air. The boy stood there, considering what had just happened and grieving the loss of his superball. Then he skipped off to find his dog.
I believe there is magic in this world. Huge swathes of things that operate beyond our cognition and escape our awareness. But, as far as I can tell, that magic doesn’t come with strange rules or arcane trappings. It’s an everyday kind of thing. Music, for instance, and its power to influence our emotions. Stories and other feats of imagination that take us out of ourselves. Fleeting natural phenomenon that crack us open. (Double Rainbow guy is a particularly vivid example of this one.) It’s all around us, if we can only get ourselves into the state of mind that permits us to see it. Like the little boy in the dandelion shower.
That boy was Russell Langsam. Mystical ballplayer and musical badass, Russell was the first person to correctly name the Waterboys as the inspiration for my recent post “This is the Sea.” His special powers are wit, conversation, parenting, and a drive to do work in this world that has value in human terms. He is magic, and so are you.
Russell doesn’t particularly care for the Waterboys, but I am still sharing the song “This is the Sea” below, in his honor, so that some of its magic may guide him to extraordinary, double-rainbow-across-the-sky opportunities.
I went to high school with a girl named Amy MacKinnon. I have a memory of a shared moment that I’ve thought about from time to time over the years. Amy and I had a Latin class together. I was in the miserable midst of growing out a short, layered hair cut — a style I’d impulsively adopted after years of belonging to a local dance company that required the pulled-back bun of the ballerina.
I was generally a mass of insecurity, self-consciousness, and low self-esteem, and I must have been bemoaning my hair. I remember Amy taking an appraising look, considering a moment, and then assuring me that I could, in fact, catch most of it up in a ponytail. In a kind and matter-of-fact way, she gave me an entirely new piece of information about myself, one that would push me over the threshold from short- to long-hair again.
It was a tiny conversation, about something trivial, but I never forgot it. How come?
I’ve written on this blog repeatedly about seeing and being seen, and my issues around those ideas. In that instant, Amy looked, and saw, and reported back with some good news. The fact that I remember our brief exchange so clearly suggests how rare it was for me to experience being seen without also perceiving that I was being judged harshly. When I looked at, and saw myself, the only thing I had to give was a long list of criticisms. Amy held up a different image, one that neither flattered nor mocked. An honest assessment. And within it was not just the possibility of ponytail but a suggestion that maybe the truth, the reality of myself, was not as awful as I feared. It cracked open my self-image in a way that permitted hope to enter, ever so slightly. And it makes me wonder, today, why Amy and I weren’t fast friends.
Given her capacity to see clearly and assess without judgement, it’s no wonder that Amy MacKinnon became a writer. I just finished reading Tethered, her debut novel. It is the tale of Clara Marsh, an undertaker, and the damaged people, living and dead, who threaten the walls she’s carefully built around herself. Set in towns south of Boston, not far from where we grew up, it’s not only a page turner but it allows you to engage questions like how much faith do you have in the people closest to you and how far would you go to save someone outside that circle of familiarity.
The book also allows you to consider if you might have an aptitude for the art of undertaking. While I must answer with a resounding ‘no,’ I can imagine something compelling about working so near the mechanics and mystery of the human form. So long as it is alive, that form holds within it the potential for kindness, courage, love, and change.
It would be possible to interpret the handful of posts I’ve written since the move to Northampton as a series on loss. And that is indeed part of the story. Those emotions have been fairly easy to feel and to think about. But something else is happening too. Something that I’m only just getting my head around because it seems to be a reversal of the usual way.
I am the first to acknowledge and celebrate the bad-assness of New York City. Its audacity. Its ability to hold everything. Its capacity to surprise you after years and years. But I’m starting to think that, for me, larger-than-life was something preliminary. The big stage and bright lights were, in my experience, a dress rehearsal. A training ground. A practice run. A place of becoming.
Here — now — it is time to be.
I am not clear about what comes next. But I walk through tall grass and wildflowers and I feel all that New York has given me: a spine of iron, an eye for layers, an urge to connect. There is a part of myself that I am finally ready to step into — a place deep and wide, cool and tidal, opaque and clear by turns.
New York was brilliant, brutal, dumbfounding, defining. But that was the river. This is the sea.
* * *
P.S. Anyone who can name the Celtic-infused, folk-rock band from the 80s that inspired this post’s central metaphor will receive a lavish tribute on this blog.
“Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or as an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.
New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder.”
–From Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
This is not the post I planned to write, and may still write yet, about how a whole mess of what I needed has been dumped on my head recently. Instead I’m feeling wistful about Brooklyn. I’ve already started to forget the pain-in-the-ass stuff — the alt side parking, the schlepping of groceries, the smell of summer garbage. But I miss something, mourn something, that is almost too close to the bone to articulate.
I can see now that the underlying beat of New York City is ambition. Whether people admit it or not, they are there because they’re after something — some form of accomplishment. It may not be Trump Tower, but they’re trying to build or make something in their world — an artwork, a career, an identity, a philosophy — some kind of offering that others can see and appreciate.
Here, in Northampton, it’s about something else. Freedom isn’t quite right, but it’s close. It’s more about individual contentment, I think, than individual accomplishment. And that is very likely a better fit for me. But it also means that a dream has died. Something vague that carried me to and kept me in New York City for nearly 20 years. A romantic notion of life lived in that particular place, fueled by movies like Swing Time, Moonstruck, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crossing Delancey. A vision of my life with the same cinematic sheen. But without the right scaffolding — the brownstones and bridges and water towers and crosswalks — that dream ceases to be.
And there are things that I can no longer hold in my hands. Certain ideas about myself. Some assumptions about the future. There is a tenuousness about everything, and I feel tender like a bruise.
Mostly I’m too busy to feel fragile. Mostly I’m being productive and appreciating my new comforts. I’m noticing all sorts of natural beauty and watching my children thrive in an environment of blazing sun, fresh-cut grass and unprecedented independence. But I’ve got some interior unpacking to do. Probably some rearranging. NYC and I are no longer together, and I’ve got to discover what it means to live without it.
When we moved to Northampton, Jack started full-time daycare. In Brooklyn, he attended our beloved Little Mushrooms four mornings a week. But now he’s gone Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 5:00. When he comes home at the day’s end, he’s out on the playground, with a short break for dinner, playing it up with a motley gang of kids until bath. Then he falls, exhausted, into his own bed.
Those last three words count. A lot. Up until July 1, when we left Brooklyn, Jack was sleeping in our bed. When I say ‘our,’ I mean mine and Josh’s. But when Jack said ‘our,’ he meant mine and his. The three of us had become embroiled in a somewhat complicated sleeping dynamic. Toward the end, Jack would awake cheerfully in the morning, then catch sight of Josh and growl, “Go away.” He wanted me all to himself.
I never meant for it to happen. We Ferber-ized Jane when she was about six months old, and though it was a textbook case of three nights of decreasing crying then — poof! — done, it was unpleasant enough that I didn’t want to go through it again with Jack. So when he was just days old, I procured a trio of books by professional nannies (who I figured knew a lot more about getting kids to sleep than pediatricians) and set about making schedules and charts that I posted around the house. Then I began the dogged and clearly insane work of waking him up at pre-determined times and letting him cry it out for great lengths at other times. The moving and profound movie “Away From Her” — all 110 minutes of it — will forever be tainted for me by the plaintive cries of our infant down the hall.
Despite months — and I mean several months — of persistence, I could not get Jack to adhere to any nanny’s schedule. So we upped the ante to Ferber. Over the course of the three nights it’s supposed to take to at least get a toe-hold on regular sleeping habits, Jack’s crying got longer and harder, and it began to mess up his naps. Baby Jack was never much of a crier nor was he high-strung, but he was beginning to slip into a hysterical panic at the mere sight of his crib.
I remember one night when he cried for the better part of every hour from 8:00 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. until Josh, who is no softie, insisted we bring him into our bed. At which point, Jack — and we — promptly fell asleep.
Anyway, I’m able to confirm for you that some kids are just not sleep-trainable. And so we finally limped onto the path of least resistance and began full-on co-sleeping with Jack.
It was wonderful. It was horrible. But, mostly, wonderful. I got two-and-a-half years of that cuddly little body curving into the crook of my arm, pressing into my side. On countless mornings, I witnessed a tiny, cheerful person open his eyes to a new day and grin. Sometimes, I would kiss him and he would smile in his sleep. It was blissed-out contentment for both of us.
Of course, there was a dark side. The restless, wiggly sleep phases where Josh or I would be wakened by a sharp kick to the kidney or a foot in the face. Or the long hours of lying with him until he fell asleep, excruciating when I knew I had to get up and put in a couple more hours of grant-writing. And then there was the eventual jealousy and the increasingly vivid enactment of a classic Oedipal complex. And the constant groping. Uh, I’ve said too much.
Anyway, it had to end. And we knew that the best, and perhaps only, opportunity for significant change was our move to Northampton. Josh and I decided that once we left Brooklyn, Jack would never again 
sleep between us. And he has not. With all our old patterns and routines out the window, it’s been shockingly easy to accomplish. I simply told him that if he wants to play with the big boys on the playground, then he would have to sleep in his big-boy bed at night. And he made his choice.
But I miss it. I miss him. I feel like we hardly see each other at all. And that’s because he’s not my baby anymore. He’s a separate, sovereign person. He has a life of his own. And a bed of his own, too.
Just as surely as my outer geography has changed, so too has what’s inside. I’m in need of new inner maps; the old ones don’t seem to be of much use here. They no longer match the terrain.
Tonight I’m in Bennington, away from the half-eaten hotdogs and quarrels over bath toys that keep me rooted in our new life in Northampton. But now — away from that, away from them — I have the distinct sensation of floating. I feel untethered. Drifting away from everything familiar and being pulled in slow motion toward not merely the unknown but the unknowable. Things that don’t yet exist. Ideas not even seeded in my consciousness.
But I am not floating. I am on the couch in the campus farmhouse, where I’m renting a room for the night. When Mary Oliver taught at Bennington, she lived right over there, out the window and across the tall grass. If I were in this state of mind and solitude at home, I might take one of her books off the shelf, open it at random, and read a few words in the hopes that they would provide guidance or at least comfort.
I can’t do that. But I love Mary well enough to know what she’d advise. She’d tell me to plant my feet in that grass between our houses, to lay my cheek against the rough skin of the oak, and to let my body persuade me that I am indeed grounded on this fertile and mysterious earth.
We made it. The path was a bit bumpy, with the movers arriving seven hours after we did — at nearly 10:00 p.m. — on account of their truck breaking down repeatedly on I-95, but in the end, people and possessions were safely deposited in Northampton, Massachusetts.
I’ve got to hand it to the kids. Their resilience is amazing. They were on the playground outside of our backdoor making friends within minutes. And upon waking the next day to a sea of boxes, Jane delivered a line that may be the most positive spin on moving ever: “It looks like there are presents everywhere!”
I too suspect that new and surprising gifts are all around us. It was easy to spot them during our final days in Brooklyn as we were surrounded by and sent off with an abundance of love and support from our friends and family. When I relax a little and get some rest, I hope to start discovering them.
1. Movie Parties: What started years ago as “Bad Movie Night,” during which Josh and his friends snarked at comically lame films, evolved into a weekly family fest, with honorary uncles Bill and Andrew, of movies we truly love. Best recent screening: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
2. Creative Graffiti: It makes traffic a bit easier to take.
3. Prospect Park: It was our backyard for a decade. I love it in every season.
4. Impromptu Dinners with Neighbors: Many a roast chicken and bottle of wine were enjoyed with Gisela, Jonas, and Linus. A toast to some terrific dinners with Cem, Isil, and Maya, too!
5. The Vespa: Not as prevalent as in, say, Italy, but they’re here in the Slope, representing cool Euro style.
6. Authentic Diversity: And for the most part, in this city of 14 million, we all just get along.
7. Belleville: We had Thanksgiving here one year, and I enjoyed the steak-frites throughout my pregnancy with Jack. When Bill and Andrew offered to treat us to dinner anywhere in the city before we move, this neighborhood French bistro was my choice.
8. Stoop Life: It all happens here — socializing, business, playtime.
9: Manhattan from the rooftop: I wept here on 9/11, but mostly the view from the roof stops my heart in a good way.
10: New Old Friends: Just because it hasn’t been that long on the calendar doesn’t mean someone’s not an old friend. Jen has given me a profound sense of belonging and home that I will take with me. Thank you.
