Sisters, Memorial Day

This is a weird way to memorialize Memorial Day. But honest, if that counts. I woke up thinking about my sister, Judy. 

Who died in the past ten years.  Of cancer. She'd braved chemo for four years.  Of the four girls--me and my three sisters--she was the only one who had kids, a comment on my family of course.  There's a whole lot I'm not going to say here.

We didn't have a great relationship and I knew I'd need help mourning her when she passed so I tried Gilda's Place, you know, Gilda Radner.  It's a great gift for grieving relatives but for me, flawed.  Gene Wilder unabashedly loved his wife.  Him, I believe. I needed another way to talk about my sister and ended up elsewhere (no specifics, sorry). 

What I have never chipped away at in trying to grieve or mourn her is what could have been.  What was--was my niece and nephew, two amazing, intelligent, joyous, complicated (but not too complicated), beautiful kids who are now beautiful adults.  Other than them and the fact of family (a big fact, granted) we, Judy and I, wouldn't have been friends (unless, in the big hypothetical, my not being family would made me more worthy in her eyes). Probably because our interests were so different but more because her response to mine was too often disinterest and contempt I had to hide so much of who I was around her. She made fun of my friends.

Who she met, granted, only because I lived in her house for two years in the early seventies.  It was my only fallback, my mother having moved on divorce before my first year in college was over. There was no other family. So when I was in my early twenties Judy left me there with her husband while she went on long business trips. No, it wasn't worse case scenario, but it was funky.

I can't even begin to explain how race figures into this. Mainly as a gift. Really and truly. But I was a chubby white hippie-influenced intellectual with a black inlaws, living in the Crenshaw District.  And my white sister was anti-intellectual and anti-art--or any art I liked.

She talked to me long and hard about her life.  I could never say much about mine.  Not to her. I don't think she wanted to know me, but I think she liked me. A lot of people liked me for a lot of years, but they didn't want to know me.  These days I want to know me and honestly care about only a few people.  My triple-Aquarianness accounts for my great caring for anyone used by others, the wretched on our earth, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon.  Otherwise, today at l east, I'm just trying to figure out how to connect better with the few.

No More Promises, Pal

I promised I was going to blog every day in June and missed yesterday, choosing to go to bed because I was tired. It was only 10 p.m. and I could have pushed myself but my overall goal is in fact in life to begin slumber earlier than I have been and thus rise earlier, knowing productivity and a general and overall feeling of accomplishment as well as sensual pleasures of early light and even dew if I go to a park are more available to the early riser.

Having broken as if it were a potato chip and my intention a solid onion dip one promise I don't make another about a second blog this day but adopt a wait 'n see attitude.

My clothes are in the dryer. The want ads call. The kitties I cat sit cry out.

Ray Carver: short stories follow the heart

I loved Ray Carver's work but I had to be won over.

In L.A., in the eighties, I heard an editor from Black Sparrow Books praise his spare, lean prose and remember—quite distinctly—thinking: Yeah, right—spare, lean—load-a-crap. Not long after, I bought Where I'm Calling From—the cover art was so cool—at Chatterton's on Los Feliz, was home by 11 p.m. and didn't go to bed until I finished reading, which, given its slim volume-ness didn't take all that long, I suppose.

But still. I sat in bed turning page after page, marveling at the stories as works of art. I had begun writing short stories and aimed for each to be the equivalent of an Indian miniature or emerald or string quartet. Given that it is now 2009 and I've not had a collection published (though about a dozen have been in review), I don't know if anyone cares about my efforts. If they don't they don't. I have some faith in the market (no faith in the crooks who manipulate it).

A fairly recent New Yorker article set right or claimed to set right Gordon Lish's intrusive editing of Carver, thus making Lish the kingpin of the spare, lean rep. Maybe, maybe not. But Lish wasn't the kingpin of Carver's uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist and he was not the one to make palpable American hope and American despair.

Carver did that. His characters are not memorable as individuals. They are a series of husbands and wives who drink and smoke and cheat. Sometimes they encounter the miraculous as in "Cathedral" where a blind man reveals his understanding of gestures of visual art. Or opposite of the miraculous, the chilling, as in“So Much Water So Close to Home,” in which the the body of a young woman is left like a case of beer in a cold river while a group of men have their weekend in the wilderness.

Between the two stories, God is present or God is present in Her absence.

A slew and then another slew of Carver fans have published affective appreciations. So why me, now? Because of Beethoven's late quartets. I heard mention of his late sonatas and remembered something I read in an interview with Carver. He said the late quartets were for the young and the early quartets to be savored in old (relative, of course) age.

And I recalled I was a little embarrassed when I mentioned my trendy affection for Carver to a brilliant journal editor I happened to meet when I was at a summer seminar for secondary educators. This editors discovered new voices and he made great choices. He seemed surprised I was of the masses, with Carver and also with my then affection for The Color Purple, which he perceived not as bad but as mass market and not sophisticated.

Sad truth: Back then more than now but I still struggle to like who and what I like and not think of anyone else, not try to please.

I will have more to say about Raymond Carver. After all, I ruined a great pair of truly sophisticated dark glasses because of him. But that will come on another day. Today I am remembering what is is like to be a fan. I am in the stands and cheering out my heart.

My heart is strong and my cheers are loud.