Song for Karen B. Hunter, by her brother Chaim Bezalel-Levy

Karen Hunter's brother and his folkband, Chaim and the Essentials play a song he wrote for her, here: http://www.folkalley.com/openmic/song.php?id=15963 There is also a link on the right side of this page. It is incredibly moving. I thank him for sharing it with me. Coincidentally, he posted it, after four years of working on it, on my 43rd birthday. I can understand how it would take him so long to produce something so beautiful and also so painful.

And not coincidentally, I post notice about the song on Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day, KBH.

This song is dedicated to Karen B. Hunter, Nov. 23, 1951 - Sept. 2, 2005

Rogers and Hart, "I could write a book."


If they asked me, I could write a book
about the way you walk and whisper and look.
I could write a preface on how we met
so the world would never forget.
And the simple secret of the plot
is just to tell them that I love you a lot.
Then the world discovers as my book ends
how to make two lovers a friends.

The Innocent Bystanders

This year, I lost more students and colleagues to violence and illness than I have in all the years I have been teaching. I've lost close family, too, particularly my godmother Mary Pearce, and I've written about her elsewhere on this blog. This is the first time I've been so inundated by unexpected and accidental deaths of people younger than I am. The most recent student, Michael Gonzales of Tilden HS, was a sweet kid -- a true teenager in the best of senses. He liked to skateboard, dance and he mostly had his head on his shoulders. He was not an academically aggressive student, but when pushed, he tried. He was navigating the academic world better than his skills might've allowed.

Tomorrow there is a candlelight service for Michael. I don't know if I will go because I sometimes feel as if I join in grief almost to prove my own life was important. I was at Tilden for one year. In that time, I must've talked to Michael almost every day. But, I never had him for a class -- I subbed for his advisory teacher a few times. I spent a lot of time convincing him to GO to class, and he mostly did. Like a lot of kids, he rode the limits of how far he could stay out of class without pushing it to the point of not graduating. He graduated last week. He died July 4, 2010. A bullet meant for somebody else hit him in the chest.

So many of the students' postings on Facebook ask the familiar question -- Why Mike? And some speak of wisdom far beyond their years and experience. Some students talked about how this taught them not to hold onto anger -- whatever fights they might've had with Mike paled now in perspective. Some wrote the equivalent of W.H. Auden's haunting warning, "We must all love one another or die."

If I were to try to explain to those students (and to myself) why so many "good die young" it might be an extension of Auden's warning adapted to 2010. We must all remember, whenever we bring violence into the environment, whether it be gun violence, whether it be the violence that propels us not to get people appropriate health insurance or just anger, we ENDANGER everyone in our environment. (I lost a student to Ketoacidosis. I have a friend who has survived that many times: the difference is education about Diabetes and insurance.) Our "beefs" are minimal -- the world, and life are not just about us. Whether we foolishly build a post office near a runway because it seems convenient, or, as I did a few years ago, we let off steam out of hubris, we inevitably endanger someone who will come into contact with our work who does not see our mistake coming. As a colleague once said to me when I faced punishment for my mistake, "You weren't thinking about the students who would need you the next day." Whoever brought that gun on July 4th, wasn't counting on missing. That's hubris, too. Not to be callous, but if you think you're going to be perfect at taking revenge, and then you hurt someone completely innocent, not only did you not get your desired goal, but you are now going to be punished for something you didn't want to do. So, even if you "made peace with the consequences" of hurting your intended victim, you royally miscalculated and now two people will have their lives cut short -- you and the innocent bystander. Even if you got your revenge, you weren't thinking about the people around you who need you -- maybe people you haven't even met yet but whom you could have/were intended to meet. If you say to yourself that you don't care, that G-D lets the violence happen in other places and doesn't stop it, you are just fulfilling a cycle of violence which inevitably hurts people whom you or someone you had no intention of hurting loved and helps no one. Do something positive and watch -- people you care about and people you didn't even know will benefit. And the energy will come back to you.

So, why does G-D let this happen to innocent bystanders: to remind us that we are responsible for everyone we come into contact with. That every decision we make, especially one involving violence, includes everyone in our immediate world. As people often say these days, "It's not about YOU." It's about everyone around you.

If I could give Michael's friends advice tomorrow, I would say to remember a time in which they had pure fun, whether it was with Michael or someone else. Hold that moment. The next time you feel angry in any way, reach for that moment. And remember that you don't want to deprive more people like Michael, like Terrance Wright, like Nakemia Riley...like Karen Hunter, of that moment. Give more when the instinct is to pull away. Be extra careful when you feel like you can "let something go." Have no hubris. And recognize that the people you care about do need you. The world needs more of the good people I have lost.

Hold tight to those memories of fun. Be generous -- let the world have the care it needs. No one should die because of something which can be prevented. We should never let our prejudices get in the way of medical research as we have with so many diseases. When in doubt, give. If you're a doctor, take on the extra patient. My uncle is very lucky. His friends gathered around him when he was diagnosed with cancer and his network got him to the best of care quickly. People put him at top priority. A veteran, a father and a good man, he deserved that treatment. But so does everyone.

This country could feed the world if everyone donated 15 dollars a day. There are limits to how much profit anyone needs to make. Anyone who has been in an emergency room knows that good, smart doctors know how to find a way to get people the priority of care they need. It can be done. It is done. And I can list tons of airports with grass alongside their runways -- room for error. Because none of us are perfect, and its hubris to think we can be.

I am lucky for the good memories I have of those I have lost. I will try to hold onto them when I feel angry, stingy, lazy or "above it all." I will try.

Mike's friends have put together a really thoughtful site on Facebook.: RIP White Mike http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=137750112917814

The Summer Knows

I'm not sure of the season or the year because I've mostly blocked out everything that happened before graduate school. Out of an obsession with the movie, Summer of '42 which I still probably don't completely understand, but which haunts me, I'll choose it's eponymous season. The block in my memory is an almost conscious division of "Before my mother" and "After my mother." No, she didn't die, but the person who came back from graduate school wasn't as easily influenced by her. The person who came home from graduate school was remarkably self-confident and shrewd and took a friend's mention of a theater company that she had put in the back of her mind and worked it into a really interesting theatrical piece.

Summer of 1991 was before graduate school. Like I feel this morning, I traveled continually with an ashy, clammy fullness in my stomach. Worse than fear, it's a kind of death of spirit. I'd been addicted to a lot of bad habits and drawn a lot of people into them with me. The way some kids grew up playing "Cops and Robbers" I grew up playing "It's you and me against the world," with my mother and when she wasn't there, friends filled her place. It was a bad game, and some of my friends hated it so much they turned it simply into them vs. me -- which is also what my mother disintegrated to. When you can't pull off miracles, the singular army against the fates begins to curse its one footsoldier and soothsayer. There is no hope, not even pyrrhic victories in this kind of war. It's just about despair that luck continues to elude you and, again, as the messenger/diviner, I usually got a physical or emotional beating in the process. In other words: I desperately needed to get away. And I did.

Later on some of the people whom I got away from also got away. And that was good.

But, we're none of us are any different when we combine even now. And I am, at this period of my life, less confident than ever. It's silly, really. There's the shock of loss and being alone and not having a secure position for the first time since I was 22. And then there's the inability to wrap my mind around any of what happened on Sept 2, 2005. When all the facts have been re-assessed, it still makes no sense. It made no sense at that moment in Karen's or my life. And for once, I felt like not only she didn't, but I didn't deserve it. I finally had been and was doing what I was supposed to do. Always. And I got screwed anyway. (I know, me and a million other people, but like all of them, I say to my mirror, "I was supposed to be different. I was THE RESPONSIBLE one.") It would be hard for people who knew me back in 1991 to know just how RESPONSIBLE I had become. I was for a long, long time, not late, not without my research, not without the protoccols, not without the concerns, the questions, the answers and even the manners and I was able to leap small puddles with single bounds. I was no hero, but I had applied to the "Mensch" club and was awaiting membership. I had all the sponsors. Then a plane crashed with Karen B. Hunter in it and I kind of lost track of time. When I ran out of tasks -- closing up the office, etc., is when it got worse and when I really started to spin. There was something about having things to do for Karen that kept me okay. I still have photographs to print. I'm afraid to let that go.

In the three years which have past, I've lost all the drive that made me a "Mensch" and I never got my membership, as a result.

Back in 1991, there were no drugs involved and no alcohol and there aren't any now. Just that dangerous human frailty called judgement. Shortly after she died, someone once told me I was the perfect friend for Karen because I didn't judge her. I didn't like to judge people then and I still don't. It's not heroism and it's not cowardice. It's an awareness that everything that people do IS the best that they could do in those moments, and if you want to help them, the best thing to do is help them change the moments or how they see them. The only things I can't abide are acts of malice. But those are few and far between.

I used to be one of those young teachers -- back in the Summer of 1991, certainly, who thought that some people cared, some didn't, some people tried and some didn't. I've since learned that everybody cares and everybody tries. I've seen teachers beg kids to stay with them an extra minute to get it right -- teachers who kids say all sorts of mean-spirited things about. The truth is we are all so angry with each other because we all care very much. Colleagues who might retire in ten days are absolutely livid. I've been taught more about concern and diligence from people who are fiercely tough than those who seem more amiable.

The scary thing about being an ATR is you are rootless and you feel just like you did -- or I did-- when you started teaching. There's no sense of where you will go, although you've spent the better part of a lifetime working with at-risk youth, etc. It's like, for a moment, my past was washed away, and with it, the part of me that knows how to be cautious -- the part of me that left that summer never to call some people again, and to be hours away from others. The part of me that was quite sure of who I was and wanted to be. It wasn't to have an acronym that, on funny moments, reminds me of the Russian Tea Room (RTR). That was never a great restaurant, by the way. All atmosphere and some great waiters. Nick, you out there? My mother was the blonde with the attitude who was either too stingy or too generous. If that doesn't jar your memory, this will: she sent back drinks. Who does that? I am so sorry.

Nick I hope is somewhere in Florida. But, I'm in limbo. Karen is dead. And, no, I'm STILL not taking it well.

To find my boundaries again, is the goal of summer 2009.

Running to you

I became part of the wind and seized you, weightless and all heartbeat.

Song of a broken heart with explanation

I couldn't remember a day or a minute without her and I didn't have to because there weren't too many while we knew each other and then ...

We actually DID used to just look at each other and be amazed we'd found each other...So it does make me feel accursed that my days are without her being here yet I never stop thinking about her. I would never want to stop thinking about her. I just hate the abyss I feel when I realize she's gone over and over.

Not a Day Goes By Lyrics:(stephen sondheim)
Not a day goes by
Not a single day
But you’re somewhere a part of my life
And it looks like you’ll stay
As the days go by
I keep thinking when does it end
Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting
But I just go on thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no, not a day goes by
Not a blessed day
But you’re still somehow part of my life
And you won’t go away
So there’s hell to pay
And until I die
I’ll die day after day after day
After day
After day after day after day
Til the days go by
Til the days go by
Til the days go by

What I felt when I saw her

So beautiful you feel wet flower petals against your skin
as she walks by. The water flashes at you gracefully.

When Magical Thinking is Difficult

Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, describes very accurately what mourning has been for me. I live in the world where objects hold not only memories, but possibilities. Clothing still waits to be worn. Emails wait to be sent. Like in the movie, Tell No One, I expect to get an email which shows a cryptic video of Karen shopping in Taiwan.

It is unfathomable to me that all of a miracle can be reduced to pulp -- I think this is what Shakespeare meant by "instant putrefaction" in Troilus and Cressida. When someone dies instantly by being crushed, if you must look, and I only have the coroner's report, the body is all bruise. So, plaintive and so mundane. She'd just been hit too hard. In these days of miracle medicine, it's so hard to reckon with the idea that death can't, at least, be forestalled. People talk about the blessing of things being quick and painless, which, of course, we have no idea is really true. The person has entered a world which is byzantine, and like some monestary run by an ancient order, untresspassable.

The stoic insanity of it has been my excuse for partially not believing in it. People disappear in my life, but they don't usually REALLY evaporate, flatten...go. I've found people on Facebook I haven't seen in twenty years. There are a million Karen Hunters, and one of them is even a gay priest who has written a book about being married. God loves to tease me.

I can less and less call out her name and expect an answer that doesn't come from inside me, however that may be. It's time to get all of the photographs developed to the sizes she wanted and to finish what I know needs to be done. All of this will take a while and each one will push me further behind the firmament--these are part of my gallery, like every work of literature or art worth reading, they depict the strongest yearnings of a beautiful soul.

There is something evil-feeling in being the one left with the artist's estate. The danger is to become too much a curator. I'm not sure what I mean, but I don't want to become one of those people who sees the weaknesses of works....stop. I've spent my life being that kind of person. To indulge in an artistic act I believe to be beautiful and to commit to it without reservation is beyond me or has been except for when I was with Karen. Flying is that kind of an act. Listening and selecting music is another. Being with someone in the music, another. Fact is, I've never done anything beautiful alone, and usually I am the "voice of reason," who wonders if the metaphors are enough.

Perhaps I can think explain it best by saying I start to feel further away from the sky.

Irreplaceable

The simplicity of my days and the way I wait for minutes until I have to leave for work, lose things time and time again, can't remember where I put things, all just point to who is missing, underscore the irreplaceable.

I've tried for months now to use the immersion of a new place and new resonances to reinvent myself and not shed the grief but embed it, be strengthened by it, and what has resulted is a preeminent weirdness. No one at Tilden quite knows my name.

My Funny Valentine

Sorry this song is a day late...



This, like many Rogers and Hart songs, is one of the best songs ever written and it is the best Valentine's song ever. Because, ironically, the greatest beauty, like the strangest, is almost impossible to photograph and capture.



For Karen

and Denise and Jonathan and Sharon and Henry Wozniak, Jr.

and all of my cats...

who have all loved me so much despite myself and whom I have loved so much back.

And, after all, Karen you were right -- you got top billing, way above my cats. You must be smiling in your heart up there and, like you said you loved to be, "in the wind." I was crazy about you pretty much the moment I saw you looking for my phone number on that receipt for Chinese Take-Out (or was it for the Chinese Laundry where you sent your shirts?) on our first (blind) date. Somehow, I think you did know that was me as soon as you looked over, before I answered the phone. You couldn't believe I was so funny looking, but you couldn't walk away either. And you smiled. You were befuddled, but you smiled.



When you left that day, as you left the subway car, I will never forget how you closed your eyes just after you said I could call you -- or whatever the words were that indicated we had connected and yes, this was definitely continuing. You closed your eyes and smiled and again to show me that I had reached in and found you and that you cherished me. Whatever it was I looked like...I felt...beautiful to you and it was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.



And when you said, in the car, on that crazy date when we were driving in a rainstorm to Staples which was already closing...Staples in New Jersey... that you loved to be "in the wind," you imprinted your smile in my heart forever. That's how I remember the lyric -- not "Smile With My Heart," as it seemst to be. I'll look for a book tomorrow which can give me the definitive answer. I have your play in my cabinet, but this apt is so disasterous, Jonathan, that I need to get out of it even earlier than my appointment today to meet with the genius Ira Siff, who also should be on this list, but isn't because I haven't embarassed him as I have embarassed all of the people on this list, by being goofy "in love" only because I am now, sadly, too self-conscious to let myself do that with someone so gorgeous and unavailable to me. To everyone, but Karen who is on this list, I have had to apologize in some way for that. Except for my cats, of course, which is why, Karen, it was hard not to say that I love them equally. But, they wouldn't drive their car as a snowstorm hit to get me and them so that we wouldn't be apart for a day on my vacation...because they can't. Which is why you get top billing...and also why they keep creeping back up - because they would, if they could. But, you were right. You remain top billing.



Of course, it's Rogers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine" which I will now credit, as I owe most of the good lyrics I know and the beat underneath my own, to Jonathan Levy for showing to me, in introducing me to Rogers and Hart and through his play, Ruth.



And, of course, Karen, like everyone on the list, but probably most, you were brilliant. But, genius, too, is too unfathomable to really call, "smart" and often, capable of some of the silliest moments in the world -- which were also the best. To steal from Jonathan again -- see The Marx Brothers, and anytime Karen and I went to go get something chocolate.


My funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable. Unphotographable.
Yet youre my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than greek
Is your mouth a little weak
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?

But dont change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay little valentine stay
Each day is valentines day.

The Alternate Universe of Borough Park

Just as Larry arches into a half' G-cleff, tail up, head curved down a bit to get an angular view of the B-I-R-D-S, Benie instinctively wolfs down water in an enormous slurp, turning Larry quickly around. "It isn't as much fun without me," is the message and Larry, acknowledging the intense wings the two of them share, follows Bernie with his eyes. Right now, though, he'd rather look on the window, so "fast game of tag up and down the bookcases" begone! There's time for that in the puffier part of the day, when the birds plump quietly and unseen.

Just watched Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the Universe." Began a week ago, finished this morning, and it brought with it a great peace. The South Pole is sparsely peopled by types Karen wanted to be, though I don't know if in the forever-sense. A woman travels across a border hiding inside a clean sewage pipe being carried on the back of a truck for five days. The small round shape -- the imposed lens would've been fascinating, infuriating and inspiring...but also nauseating. This same woman (whose name was "Karen," of course) traveled across Africa in a garbage truck crossing arteries of territorial hatred, and finally escaping captivity with the help of drunk Russian Scientists. I think Karen Hunter's instinct to fly was a good one, especially if crossing violent, gorgeous earth.

Almost slept, but couldn't quite -- Friday I collapsed after taking a long stroll, completely in vain, across 18th Avenue, in the Center-North of the Alternate Universe of Borough Park. Though I don't have a bag ready to go to Ethiopia, Nigeria or Alaska (and I want one), one thing I have is a map of streets which are other-wordly, or, at least, discordant. Walking past manicured tiny lawns makes me feel just a bit more interested in what placing a knife to the back of my knee and lopping it off would do to me. The confinement of my body is whale-like and with the up and down changes of air quality -- half-radiator/half cold wind, all cold-wind, all moistish cool, my asthma is running for president of the United Federation of Thrashed Lungs. It sends mailings out while I sleep and has built a coalition among the residents of bronchial tubes inside teachers experiencing this punishing, quixotic air. My asthma promises no nasal drip tapping, or hanging chads of handkerchiefs. Paper ballots, with some healthy lungs doing the monitoring from Eustachians for Justice.

Almost made it to the stores I had wanted to see but it was too close to sundown -- the 30 or 40 shoestores which fill the Universe of Borough Park, home to a dozen or more Hasidic Jewish Communities were all closed, every last one. Running from about 40th street and 13th Avenue to 60th Street and 18th Avenue, are bakeries, stores which sell fine silver, pocket-sized booth selling specialty skullcaps (like a knitted on with the Yankees symbol on it), slightly bigger bagelry's, kosher pizza and falafel warehouses, and intermixed among these, clothing for the well-dressed European woman and man of 1941. Setting aside the special fur-laced hats and high socks which some Hasidic Jews wear, the vast majority of the Hasidic community is simply walking around high quality Film-Noir wear. Well-tailored suits with broad shoulders for both genders. Shapely and sensibly sexy black dresses or jumpers--everything with a soft curve to it, as if it were an upward breath that could lift a bit in a Swing dance. There's plenty of silk, lace and wigs designed to look like real hair worn over what are undoubtedly well-done hair styles, by women honoring the rule that no one but her husband should see her mane. This is a particular shame and a source of irony as ALL of these women choose wigs which must be close to what their actual hair looks like and which are damned good. It's like the rule that says we can't have a full figure statue of a person which is completely anatomically correct -- it must have a blemish to show that it is not real, it is not an idol. The seam which you can sometimes see in the wigs these women wear is that same flag "You are not getting the real beauty."

Almost an odd 40's movie, but not one because you cannot escape the long beards and curly locks on the men who also carry cell phones, work on laptops and drive Land Rovers. It's another planet, as Karen would say, and it's one I like to walk through sometimes, when the alien in me needs company.

People come to these specific blocks like those immigrants to Antartica. They are wrestless and looking for others like them -- who need to experience a rigor, a set of strange rules which put them at odds with nature and allow them to play chess with mortality. On Saturdays, when according to Orthodox Judaism, you cannot make anything or engage a force of power (like electricity) to cause a machine to make something, the Jews of Borough park storm up the avenues leading out of their continent and into Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. These are rarely spirals of contemplation, but usually power-walks. Why so fast? To see what you never have time to see on other days? Or, to move with the speed of a plane above interesting, but potentially dangerous territory.

I stop on my walks and go into a few caterers and sweet shops. By now, I am a regular at one of the local supermarkets, as well, and the owner doesn't know what to make of me. I can usually identify the music being played -- prayer music sung by famous cantors like Yossel Rosenbaum. I buy products which only have Hebrew written on them. Of course, I am that word which Chaim Potok made famous in The Chosen: Apikoros -- Hebrew for hypocrite.

Herzog wonders about the motivations of current explorers of the South Pole, noting that Shakleton's attempt 100 years ago, was on behalf of the British Empire. Wishing it could have been left unseen, unnoticed, or, at least, "unconquered," he seems to relish the stories of those who find themselves there to find community. The saddest story of the film involves a young man who came to preserve a local language -- I won't tell you what happened because you should rent or buy the film. But, the inevitability of Ph.D's taking to the highways for study and because they are not natural parts of whatever is left of the market economy, hit me in the stomach. You know when you study something that has several possible applications, but is not a single skill, that you will have to adapt and find your way to use it. That we may as well still be waring wigs and carrying our work in scrolls as far as the rest of the world is concerned, hadn't quite reached me until that moment. Karen had been told that because of her artistic and intellectual interests she would be better off in Europe as Americans tend to marginalize people not enlivened by consumerism. I told her that was bullshit and still believe it.

The Alternate Universes of Borough Park, the East Village and Inwood stood for me as proof that you can sustain your ideas and your art if you insist upon doing so. But, I was never as aware as I am now of how the market could pack an idea in mothballs and package it, buying real estate around it for people to consume and re-consume it. Much worse, how a bad economy could make the individual feel that anything not of immediate use is frivolous. Very few of my friends go to hear live music downtown, even if they live there. Yes, the bands have changed. But, that used to be the point.

What a comic, thin, man in a traditional dark suit and ice floe beneath his chin called, "The Great City of Borough Park," is a truly profound entity. It's a loosely planned community in the religious sense -- there are multiple kinds of Hasidim, and within them different groupings. As if someone had run around the blocks gluing down pieces of Shtetl, there are tiny shuls (synagogues) that fill tiny houses with hand-painted signs identifying them. Then there are the virtual classical parodies which serve glorious school buildings, community centers, houses and synagogues and, alongside them enormous chandeliers nearly breaking through the bay windows of garden apartments. The unwritten economic agreement to keep the neighborhood affordable for the community who lives there is unparalleled in NY. ( Hasidism do occasionally rent to non-Jews when the few apartments which become vacant aren't immediately gobbled up by the "cousin-of my youngest niece and her husband who are expecting quintuplets," etc.) That you can still find not just outfits right out of The Third Man, but Challah made with honey and eggs with no concern for cholesterol, is itself worth the walk.
For me, though, it's an opportunity to be an alien among my own aliens -- I can balance two worlds at once. Neither is home, and I envy both the people in Antartica and the Jews of Borough Park that willingness to make allegiance with a lifestyle.

Someday, I'll pack Larry and Bernie up in a Volvo (once I learn to drive) and we'll go to whatever that place is which will feel right. For now, I am a very slow traveler. I was and am willing to go faster and could have made that plainer when Karen was here. In the stillness is same desire which the bird's offending Larry have to "plump" and be "home" for a while. I found that home was created by the love of the bird I was flying with which is probably what they feel too.

When I think of Tom.I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England Was sleeping on a hill.
I remember this, And I always will...
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all -- And they're all a part of Tom and me.
--Intro to "Hello Young Lovers" Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I

The formal restraint of a prepared memory -- the story you tell everyone, the face you wear, the closing and unclosing of the hand and then the resolve to leave off there has become habit. There aren't any friends who knew me when...not where I work, so I am this new character. A ragged, but nevertheless, a type -- the mistress of bedeviled children, religious in her belief that somewhere in eternity, her joy remains intact.

Shuffling off to Buffalo

They were joking that soon the place would be a Dunkin' Donuts. "That's a pretty big Dunkin' Donuts," said the cashier, a young woman maybe 22 years old, trying to project confidence that her store was not closing -- yet, anyway. As I walked through the glass doors of Virgin Records on Fourteenth and Fourth avenue, a junkie, his wool hat taped to his skin by sweat, balanced on one foot, haggling with the security guard. I couldn't hear what he was saying. No one could -- he was just mouthing words with no sound. People shifted, weaving a bit. "Where to go?" "Another store full of sales? To the movies?"

On line at Thirteenth street and Third avenue, the face on the man directly in front of me was raging. "Come on, already," he mumbled, but he knew not to scoff too loudly at the customer currently at the window because the crowd on line was with the guy. You could feel the sympathy in the quiet way we all listened. "I'm sorry, but those passes are only good on Mondays." "You mean they're not for weekends?" "No. They are only for Mondays." "Where does it say that?" "It does not say that, but that is the rule. We only honor those passes on Mondays." "So, I can't use this?" "It is only good on Mondays." Three couples ahead of me, the negotiator pressed his head against the air and gave the cashier one last look. "Okay, so let me have two regular tickets." He pushed his eyes downward into his wallet. The frustrated gentleman ahead of me sighed. Meanwhile, in back of me, a couple discretely put their passes away and left the line. I decided I didn't want to sit for two hours and continued ambling along, feeling for the lift that used to come from walking through Manhattan at night.

I had decided not to just take a walk in my sluggish Brooklyn neighborhood because it makes me claustrophobic. There are only a few people out after dark, stores are mostly closed, and walking by rows and rows of houses just makes me feel alone. So, I got on the subway and got off at Union Square hoping to join in the energy of people hustling, drinking coffee, shopping, looking for movies, plays, music and chatting. People on their way to have fun are very easy about letting others brush in and out of their conversations. If they're confused about which way to go, I often just jump in with directions. The other night a group of teenage boys wanted to go to Chinatown, but also seemed to want to stay put in Greenwich Village. "What do you want to go for?" It turned out they were looking for some cheap jewelry. Since they weren't looking for brand name knockoffs, I directed them to the many sidewalk shops on eighth street and to K-Mart. "If you just want anything, you don't have to go to Chinatown." Frankly, they could've gone to their local store, but the purchase had given them an excuse for to get away from their suburb and themselves. They were extremely gracious and they smiled from the bottom of their hoodies until their noses. The boys had told me that they liked being on the street in which we stood because there were so many young people. "NYU," I said, but no flash of recognition shone through their pupils. They went off speedily after thanking me, bouncing in their sneakers toward a troop of people in their teens and twenties hovering around Astor Place. As they left, I realized they had heard about bargains in Chinatown, but not one of the city's major universities. A party school, no less. Was my city better known as a discount warehouse than a place to get drunk and have sex?

Though I'd never gone to Chinatown to shop in my 40 years in New York, my friend Karen had gone with one of her friends and her pre-teen and teenage daughters to look for high fashion look-a-likes. I remember especially Karen telling the story of being whispered to by this ethereal Chinese woman while walking with her friends on Canal Street. "You looking for Prada?" After she nodded, the woman led the group down a staircase into a basement full of handbags. Karen enjoyed the fact that the woman had approached her and not the others because she seemed to delight in making her the offer -- like it was a special gift. However rehearsed her manner may have been, the moment of connection between the two had been giggly and sweet. This was the kind of experience that made Karen feel happily like she was visiting from another planet and she should be alert to silly and striking possibilities.

My trip into Manhattan on Friday was torridly grey, in stark contrast to that memory, and to my encounter a few days before with those kids. I'd met those boys in the afternoon and there were students and people on their lunch milling in a quick pulse. The scant crew walking around as the sky became a thick, drab navy, were mostly just watching each other, not out of fear, but restlessness. Like me, no one seemed to have a particular destination in mind and the stores stood helplessly--every window was full of signs announcing huge sales and muzak bounced like a wave of tennis balls into the crowd slowing it down. For some reason, the soundtrack to Mamma Mia was being played and replayed without a break -- as if a back up sound system kicked in as soon as the other stopped so that there would be no silence.

When stores in New York go out of business or have huge sales to raise cash, usually, they get very loud. They blast their sound systems so that their announcements can be heard for miles and husky men with red faces are hired to call to passersby whatever phrases they think will get people into the store. "Cheap lingerie, Mama. Make your boyfriend happy tonight....Or your girlfriend. Whatever makes you happy. God loves everybody." The preacherly tone often builds. "Just trying to help my brothers and sisters out, now. Stop cursing and do something positive. Buy your mother and father something." And if you happen to lock eyes with the speaker in a pause, he will wish you a good night, a safe trip, or tell you that god blesses you. For some reason, it feels honest and warm even though he's said it to thousands of people and their dogs and he's shouted it a few times at passing cars. It's like listening to a false prophet -- the intensity with which he believes in the power and possibilities which could result from his ideas can shake you, even when you and he know the premises themselves are false.

But those men were nowhere this early evening. Paper signs hung like loose coats leaning over the ocean of glass while the relentless, cartoon-disco continued its manic bounce. There was no one trying to catch your eye and people were mostly talking about the fact that the Village was not very crowded for a Friday night. Only the teenagers felt comfortable just getting a drink somewhere. One or two restaurants were packed -- not the cafes -- but the macrobiotic places, the juice joints and The Dumpling Man. If you were going to spend your money, it was going to be on small, healthy-feeling items.

People were silently measuring the worth of the items at the stores, sale or no sale. "Will I really use this? Why? Sure, I've always wanted it, but I've spent a long time without it." I needed to buy something for my class and I picked up a cheap, literary-ish, former bestseller for the ride home. "I've got to get a new library card," I thought as I let myself soak in the bed of icy wind, soothing my joints. I could've walked for hours, but there was no life to look at and I was unwilling to carelessly stop somewhere for a coffee or to fake drinking a beer. (I can't drink, it makes my stomach dry and raw.) No one was interested in hanging out, and that, besides the funereal quality of the passion-free music, was what made the streets unsavory. We were all tourists and we were going home as soon as we hit our marks on the map. Only the journey was not novel, but completely without awe. I felt faceless, and I was because I had no sense of my own identity. My job is in limbo and everything is consciously day-to-day.

There was an empty row of seats on the "N" train, but I vaulted toward them anyway as there was no way I could've managed standing for even part of the way home. Walking down the stairs, I became dizzy from the unfulfilled need to get out of my own head for a few hours. When I leaned forward and lifted my book from my backpack, I saw the word "Pray," etched on the door. A few years ago, before they made it illegal to take pictures on the subway, I'd taken quite a few shots of similar carvings saying things like "Worship God" and "Go to Church." In Manhattan, they are etched on public phones, bathroom stalls, kiosks, ATM machines and traffic poles as well as train cars. Does this happen everywhere else?

But, I hadn't seen these messages for a long while. The aggressive attack on graffiti in New York had erased them along with the bubbled lettering of people's names which used to proliferate on the granite. So, I was suprised to be faced with this word, scratched into the metal, chastising me. I had a picture of the same message in ink in my collection at home, but the letters were longer and thinner in the one facing me.

Who does this? Who has the time to take a key (the usual implement) and dig into steel with enough power to create curves, not just lines up and down? The person who engraved the one I was looking at, unlike the one pictured, chose a spot about six feet from the floor. Someone tall whose hands had a wide and muscular wingspan.

Perhaps it was an out-of-work barker so disgruntled by the fact that business was so bad that it hadn't even created part-time work for extra gravediggers, he defaced the door with god-like rage.

Dar Williams - When I Was A Boy FRFF 2008

This song reminds me of Karen

From "Perdidos"

Karen and I used to listen to Monchy and Alexander -- she loved the song, "Perdidos." Much, much too late, I know what most of the song means. We knew it was a love song, of course. Here's one of the lyrics, which of course, I would have love to have quoted to her and I do now....much, much too late:

Llevame a donde tu quieras amor
que junto a ti yo soy feliz, contigo
soy feliz (contigo soy feliz

Take me wherever you want to, my love, because with you I am happy.
With you, I am happy.

Encounters with Shrub Mid-Air: A Karen Story

Karen loved to tell this story to everyone she met. I post it in honor of her upcoming birthday, November 23. She would have been 57. (See my post below this one for my thoughts). She told the story better than I do here and, she understood better what all the technical things were, of course. All I can do is my best, which is necessary, but not sufficient.

It was the summer of 2004, the night of the Republican convention in which W was to speak. Karen and I were returning from Provincetown and had designed things so that we would NOT be on the ground in NYC for the event. So, there we were in the night sky, Karen attending to the pilot things and me, thinking, "I'm in the night sky. This is so cool. This is beautiful. I'm like a star..." and other non-profound thoughts. Suddenly, I got a punch in the leg.

In order for Karen and I to hear each other, we both had to wear headphones. That technically meant that, were I not contemplating singing "Twinkle, twinkle" to myself, I should have heard the transmission from the tower in NY. So, when a flustered Karen followed the punch with "Did you hear that?" I was forced to tell the truth and say, "No, I was night-dreaming." She didn't find it cute.

"Ma'am, get out of BRAVO space now." BRAVO space refers to the central, most important air space -- in this case we were in NY's BRAVO space which we needed to be in order to get home. And suddenly we were being told to scram somewhere in the night sky. Karen was about to ask where in this vast expanse we were expected/allowed to go in order to get to our destination of Caldwell airport when a nicer voice came on the radio and said, "Just point toward ----" I forget where it was he said, but it made instant sense to Karen and she proceeded to re-program whatever the device is called that you do that to in order to change course. About a minute later, we both heard another transmission. "Air Force One Requesting Clearance for take off." Karen says my eyes went raccoon wide. About a half minute later, we heard, "Air Force One you have clearance to take off."

So, apparently, we'd been bopped out of BRAVO space because the Shrub didn't want to spend any more time on the ground than he had to, either. His ship and ours literally passed in the night, both avoiding each other.

Shortly after, I believe, we were able to ask if we could return to our original course, which we did, feeling just a little bit cooler than we already thought we were.

Karen Beth Hunter, November 23, 1951 - Sept 2, 2005.

Proof of Heaven, while you're living. For Karen, always.

The line comes from Steven Sondheim's song, "Pretty Women" from the musical, "Sweeney Todd". "Proof of Heaven, while you're living. Pretty women." Appropriately, Sweeney coins it, singing, as we in the audience know, about the love of his life who is lost to him forever.

Karen Beth Hunter was far more than a pretty woman -- she was beautiful and brilliant, exciting and honest, and boldly loving, even if this meant being vulnerable to people who might, and often did, hurt her. She WAS very much "proof of heaven." In fact, she believed in god and the eternity of the soul so I am sure she would be/is glad to know that she affirmed their possibility in her very existence. Shortly after she passed away, a friend of mine, who is not given to paltry sentiment, wondered if she were my guardian angel and said, "She looked like one." My friend meant it.

This isn't to say she was conventionally "angelic". Like my cat Larry, whom she loved, she got as close to you as possible by asserting the truth. The truth wasn't always gentle or bucolic. It was beautiful because it was as essential as breathing. When something is wrong or he is very angry, Larry will kick things up and howl. Karen would get all red and do much the same. She couldn't stomach unfairness and I was to put things right or cause her tremendous pain and sadness. I'm afraid I did that a lot. Like Larry, she held that sadness in and it turned into anxiety. She told me once that she felt like Gumby because she had to twist into so many shapes to fit so many people's viewpoints/needs -- especially, I think, in her office. I used to joke that she was becoming, "America's Favorite Lesbian" because she counseled so many people who viewed her as a mother-figure, but were extremely homophobic (and had no idea about her sexuality).

I have never seen anyone be made so happy, however, by honest feeling and pure warmth. A good meal. Odetta. Irish music. Bachata music. Bicycling on a beautiful day. Clear, pure water. Feelings full, rich and pulsating. Love at its most elemental and finest. Brushing the hair from my face and caressing the stray silver in the strands of brown. Seeing beauty in details of me when it is not yet in the whole of me.

The paradox for me these past three years has been that nothing destroyed my faith in everything more than Karen's death and nothing affirmed my willingness to believe more than her life. She wasn't just "proof of heaven," but proof of earth -- and selfishly my ability to be a whole functioning person on it. She remains my "proof of heaven" and it's wondrous complexity. Like Sondheim's Sweeney, I feel cheated and the bitterness has transformed me, but I try, for her sake, not to let it do so as much as it could.

November 23rd is Karen's birthday and she would have been 57. In my mind, she was eternally 7 years old and I told her so. She was that child on the swing, going too high and too fast in pure exhiliration. In flight. She is still flying. And I am eternally 10 years old. My bicycle and my favorite coat no longer quite fit. My mother's loneliness has overpowered me and I no longer play outside. I guarded my 7 year old friend in the hopes that I can save her from this fate, but alas I could not save her at all. She reminded me of every pure joy I'd ever had and she was all of them at once. "Proof of Heaven" in a world where laughter without irony, without fear, that rises like unbridled passion from the belly upward is so, so rare. In a world in which the concept of goodness is often used to propulgate the very opposite, she was proof that true "heaven" is maddeningly, enchantingly and honestly beautiful.

It was a beautiful afternoon on the waterfront

For Karen B. Hunter

The 69th Street Pier, to be precise, but the water crossed it's fingers and twined itself into what felt like WATERFRONT. The lifting of blues and greens like pie under the crust of the city. An explosion of apples turned blue, green and lilting and dissolving into rain. Touchable.

Tree rings gripped downward into green algae along the wall of the Pier. The brown and white, black, and grey birds paraded toward crusts of bread. And I felt comfortable talking about spiritual places and feelings.

My friend went off on her bicycle and I left immediately, feeling I'd been close to you and wanting to take you home.

Photo by Karen Beth Hunter

Ocean up close

Photo by Karen Beth Hunter