Moment Magnitude

The Endless Pool of Tears

The Endless Pool of Tears.

That may not be a direct quote, but it's at least close to a line I read in Mary Edwards (I wanted to write Ellen, that must be a Catholic upbringing hangover, unwelcome) Wertsch's book, Military Brats, a book my father gave me (fraught) that I used in therapy some fifteen years ago. Among other things - but that's a whole big-ass episode in my life about which I may address or not.

But that endless pool. While my violent, controlling, rage-aholic father, who started out as military, somewhere getting scooped up into covert activity under the aegis of National Security (NSA today), wrecking havoc on my childhood - and my Irish twin brother's (although I expect he is still less likely to admit as much) prevailed upon me to become adult before experiencing my own childhood, here I fucking am.

I've been clean for a long while. It used to be that I would break down in these uncontrollable periods of tears, sobbing racks, animal howls, torrents of tears, most often thudding my head again the steering wheel of my car, after a night out with friends, one drink too many, in the back of my mind grateful that no cop car caught me, parked, and free to let loose all the pent-up pain, rage, and fear in a flood of salt water.

It happened tonight. And I let it. I was present in my pain. I allowed all those tentacles of tangled pain wrap right around the firmament of my psyche.

All I could think of was my sister, when she was maybe three or four years old. I was pushing her on a swing. We were living in Germany. I think I remember that she wanted to go higher - something about which my mother warned me - but my little sister was never very fond of me (preferring my brother), and I wanted to please her. I think. I pushed harder.

(What the fuck is that weird feeling I get in my hands when I write that, godammit?)

I pushed her higher.

And she fell. On her face, Her bottom teeth almost perforated the place right below her bottom lip. Panicked, I picked her up, I know she was crying, screaming, and hauled her back to our house. I don't remember much after that. I I'm sure my mother took her to the dispensary, where she was stitched up, injected with penicillin or tetanus or something, and that was that.

To this day, I feel culpable. There's no getting around it.

My sister is dead.

Every so often, these sharp images come at me, so fearsome. That endless pool of tears wells up to the point where I can barely see through the windshield of the car as I drive home.

These days, I am less inchoate. These days, I say "I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry..."

Not that it makes one lick of difference.

I get out of the car, eyes swollen, and I look up at the crystal clear night, the stars so clear out here in the country. I can see all the way back in time, universes ago.

I know that it's just a roll of the dice. This consciousness, this fucking self-awareness, in all its glory, in all its agonizing responsibility, drives home the intrinsic thing: There is no god.

But it's hard.   

Lemonade

I am dead tired of making lemonade.

Not only lemonade, but lemon chiffon and/or meringue pie, lemon curd, lemon custard, lemon squash, lemon anything-else. I'm done with it.

This year, 2007 threw bucket-loads of lemons at me. And I am fearful and hopeful at the same time, because while the year is winding down, more shit could happen.

To wit, a fast recap (not dispassionate, not at all, not an iota):

Early in the year, the IRS audited me. Corporate for all my professional life, the first year out as an independent, and whammo. I pushed back, the claim is in appeals (abeyance, a moratorium), so I am not dwelling on it as much. The sum might amount to $4 or $5K. It's not a lot, and that's not the issue. It's the principle of the thing.

In spring, Jake passed, after more than sixteen years of cat life. Aida, his litter mate-sister passed more than a year earlier, and although I allowed him to slow down in his old age, without veterinarian intervention (I have doubted that decision often, even when I counter it with the knowledge that the vets would have injected him with needles, placing him in an intensive-care, metal cage - and that would have been worse), his little body withered away until he fell into a coma.  He breathed his last, collapsed on my bed, as I whispered the stories of his life. I miss him every day.

My younger sister, 39-years-old, was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage four. And before she had a fighting chance, her husband carbon-monoxide asphyxiated her, their innocent five-year-old daughter, and himself in a double-murder-suicide. This happened on September 7, and made the front page news for a handful of days in Portland, Oregon. All I know is that the dysfunction in my family saved me this time. I hadn't seen or really communicated with my sister in, I guess, ten years. I never met my niece. If I had, I would be writing this through a medicated haze. As it was, I self-anesthetized the first week after it happened. Did the tragedy mend other rifts in my riven family? I have no hard evidence yet. I have exchanged some conversation with my brother, who acted heroically, traveling to Portland with my father, making identifications at the coroner, collecting some of my sister's belongings from the scene.

I do know that my mother's and stepfather's hearts are broken, and the best I can do is to spend time with them, no mean feat in these cash-strapped days.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, my car was stolen. My beloved 2001 Audi S4 Avant (the bi-turbo engine, limited production, no longer available), was taken from right in front of my building in Chelsea. The police weren't positive, but I was. I checked my EZPass account. For those who do not have these indispensable windshield devices, they allow drivers to pass through toll booths without stopping. The toll is electronically recorded from the windshield device. Women have caught cheating husbands from reviewing their EZPass accounts online. I think a reference was made to such an activity on an episode of The Sopranos. The moment I checked my EZPass account, I saw that my car had been taken between four and five in the morning, to Newark, also known as "cop shop central." The car was targeted. Just last night, a Maserati, several BMW's, Volvos, Range Rovers, and an Escalade were parked on my block. I am shit-out-of-luck, and playing the GEICO paperwork-waiting game. The interim courtesy rental has been a 2008 Pontiac Grand Prix (not worth the hyperlink, trust). The very first car I owned (in high school) was a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. The irony is not lost.

A week after the grand theft auto, my bank called to tell me someone was using my debit card to make peculiar online purchases. The identity thief spent about $100 before we closed the account. The bank will restore the money, it's just more paperwork. The thief ordered a Tupac CD, an XBox game, VistaPrint business cards with my name and some gobbledygook data - an incomplete address, a science fiction book, some other services. Some of the goods and notifications were mailed to my NYC address (even though the address was incomplete). Bizarre. I attempted to return the merchandise, without much success, but I did notify my bank.

One company, who sent skin care products called Hydroderm, accepted the cancellation, but allowed me to keep the products. I have to say, this stuff feels much better than the Hymed line I've been sampling recently. (I doubt that any cream reduces wrinkles, but I like when a skin product feels and smells nice.)

I think I can sense an improvement coming with the new year. I will be renting my loft out for a while, it can pay for itself until I can refinance and drop the payments to a manageable level. I took an apartment in the East End. I plan on coming back into the city once a week, stay with many of my dearest and wide-ranging group of friends. Soon, I'll be driving some kind of other car - I allowed myself to muse a bit. Which make or model?

Tomorrow I travel to New Mexico, to spend the holidays with Mom, let her be Mom. We'll pass into 2008 in each other's company.

Third Hand

I have an update on my brother, from my mother, by way of my brother's wife.

It was in writing, either by old-fashioned mail, or by email. Third hand.

Here is the gist.

Mon frere (feeling the French birthright this eve), allegedly has been having an affair for at least the last eighteen months. Probably longer.

The other woman is (by now) a former friend of my soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law. Dah!

According to said-future-ex, she is no longer friendly with her friend (astonishing), and that she filed for divorce from my brother in January of this year (the latter is actually somewhat astonishing, in that it happened fully six months ago).

My pending ex-sister-in-law alleged that the kids are are better off, now that she has moved them back to her condominium by the beach. Good thing she didn't sell the place.

She added that she knew about my brother's affair. And she said something to the effect that he said  she "couldn't handle the truth."

I thought to myself, what? Was he quoting from that awful Tom Cruise - Demi Moore - Jack Nicholson (playing Jack Nicholson, of course) film? How pathetic (even if fellow alum Aaron Sorkin did pen it). And I wouldn't be the least surprised.

In fact, I wish I could admit that I am surprised at this turn of events. But I am not.

My brother is continuing those patterns he created for himself from the earliest years of his adulthood: Serial monogamous relationships, one woman dovetailing the other, never of his own doing or machinations (he would insist stridently - since it seems to me that he is incapable or unwilling to accept responsibility for his duplicitous actions). He would attempt to control the women (shades of our father), berating her physical appearance, demanding strict diets and health regimens (how screwed up is that?). I know it worked on weaker-minded women. The stronger ones - and they were few in comparison - walked away. One walked away to another woman. I hoped, for a moment, that that might have taught him something about the fragility of masculinity.

Oops. My bad. That would have required some self-reflection.

And so it repeats.

My hope is that my niece, whom I hardly know - in fact I do not know either of my nieces, not being prone to close relations within or among my immediate family - will fare well. She struck me, for all her sleep disorders, as a cool little kid, with her own sense of self, and a real willingness to be happy.

For all my shyte, I have been described recently as a happy person. There is value in that. Even when sad moments offer a counterpoint.

This world and this life are a gift. They are all our swollen neurology can know. I've written it before, in terms of this capricious, unknowable world: The best we can do is pay attention, be mindful, and be grateful.

Someday, maybe, my niece and I will walk along a beach - and have a conversation.

H-O-7-7-Y

When I was three or four years old, just learning my letters, starting to hold a pencil (a new, more grown-up instrument than crayons, though I loved crayons for decades), I wrote my name: H-O-7-7-Y.

"Aitch, oh, el, el, wye," I would say. I printed the letters, all-caps, box-like, and admired the symmetry. They looked so right.

We lived in Okinawa. In fact, we lived there for five years, from 1963 to 1968, during the Viet Nam war.

My young mother suggested to me that my "L's" weren't quite correct. I am pretty sure I either protested, or ignored her. In my mind, I knew that they way I wrote my name was the right way, there was no brooking the argument.

It was only when I started kindergarten that I had doubts about my "L's." The teacher told me my letters were not letters at all, that they were sevens ("Count with me, one two, three..."). I had to admit, in my child's mind, that my letters were indeed, sevens.

Over a few days, I noticed how the other children wrote their letters, and I noticed too that I was the only one writing sevens instead of L's. And then, I doubted myself.

I tried writing my name a new way: H-O-L-L-Y.

I didn't love it right away. The bottom line of the new letter sat on the lined paper, making it stand out less. It didn't look as perfect, but I chose to stick with it.

I think I was embarrassed, for a four-year-old. I didn't want to appear to be too weird. My thick-lenses, magnifying eye-glasses (cat-eye style, of course) made me look strange from the rest of the children. I has been stuck behind Coke-bottle eye-glasses since the age of two.

So I talked myself into accepting H-O-L-L-Y, into preferring it, convincing myself it was okay.

But for a while, I dug in my heels. I was a stubborn little kid. I had to make the change, internally metamorphose, before I allowed anyone to tell me what to do.

Funny, I still behave that way today. Sometimes. 

Brother, Brother

I returned to NYC - full-time - late in the summer of 2004.

I drove from Boulder, across two-thirds of the country, and planned to arrive at my loft the same time as the moving van - to off-load.

Since the movers would take five or so days, I planned to stop and visit friends and family along the way, before I turned up outside my hometown apartment door.

It turned into a pleasant mini-odyssey. I stopped to see a fabulous (and I do mean fabulous) long-time friend in Chicago, a former-favorite assistant in Pittsburgh (married, with a baby, a lovely husband and home, all of which she deserves), and I hoped to stop in to see my brother and his family on the Jersey Shore, before I swung north and home.

All went swimmingly, until I got to my brother's.

A bit of backstory. My brother and I are less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he in December of the same year. Eleven months apart, true "Irish twins."

After I completed kindergarten - the school system determined I was of the correct age to attend but my brother was not - my mother prepared me for the first grade. Apparently, the school system's age designations shifted, and my brother was put into the first grade with me. In essence, he "skipped" kindergarten. Nevertheless, we entered and remained in the same grade for the entirety of our elementary and high school education(s).

Although we are not twins, I suppose we developed some degree of non-verbal communication. Our childhood was not an easy one. I make light of it now, and say that we were raised like wolves. We fought a lot, but I know I always had a deep care and concern for my brother, even if I rarely articulated it.

When he was very young, he had repeated bouts of strep throat, and as a consequence, as many bouts with big, penicillin-filled needles. He was just a little boy, with a tiny, bony butt, and shoulder blades that stuck out like a newborn bird's.

Bacterially, I possessed the hardier constitution.

But he grew stronger and bigger than I - and he pummeled the blazes out of me, often for the slightest insult - in my opinion anyway.

It wasn't easy. Our father was of a capricious, rage-filled nature. He was gone often, but when he was home, I know that a knot of tension and worry kept me on guard, on watch. Although we misbehaved as any kids did, sometimes - and without warning or apparent reason - our father would explode, and knock the crap out of us. My brother got worse than I did. And I hated it - I was the wide-eyed tearful witness, helpless to defend him, or myself. And terrified. There are episodes that I remember, that I will not forget.

Still, as an adult, my brother and I grew close, I think as adult siblings do.

Over the years, I have found it easy and enjoyabe to sing his praises. We were both voracious readers, but I made a career out of it. He was more musically talented than I, and a natural athlete. I was more obviously competitive than he - in my pursuits (academics, socially, high school musicals up to my senior year, college admissions, a college scholarship), and I know I probably irritated him when I cheered him at his high school track meets, questioning the results, wanting to understand the nature of his races.

Still, we were both hell-bent on escaping our "crazy family," as he called our parents. I went off to university, but not before he one-upped me, and took off without notice. He was only seventeen years old, but had packed his room clean - and was gone.

I recall he told me, some weeks later, that I couldn't leave him there "with those crazy people." That's a line he was able to use on me again, decades later, when my mother called us together for a Christmas celebration. I didn't want to go, but my brother persuaded me. Mom had moved to New Mexico by then, and my brother and I spent a couple of days hammering up the steep hiking trails of Sandia Mountain.

By then, my brother was well on his own road to success. After a years-long stint in the Arizona (call it his college-equivalent), he returned to New Jersey, and pursued two life tracks. One was his own residential carpentry-building company. The other was bicycle racing. He succeeded at both, on the local level.

He also went through a series of long-term monogamous girlfriend relationships. Some of these were fraught with "sturm und drang." One early debacle resulted in resentment between us, and I resolved thereafter to never get involved. The serial romances continued, through a first, disastrous marriage and divorce, through a few more women - before his present marriage. He fathered a daughter at the age of forty. I doubt that the marriage has been easy (given his behavior pattern), but I do not doubt that he adores, is crazy about, and loves his daughter.

For some wacky reason, he ceased communication with my mother. He gave me flimsy, unsubstantiated reasons, once - but hey, that's his issue, not mine. And yet I know that the limited interaction with her granddaughter causes my mother anguish - which seems so unnecessary.

Despite these challenges, I still always thought and spoke so highly of my brother. His business has grown exponentially - in accordance, in part, to the absurd growth in real estate value anywhere within one hundred miles of New York City, and especially anywhere close to the Atlantic ocean and adjoining waterways.

At the age of forty-seven, he is a paragon of athletic fitness, and looks some fifteen years younger. In many ways, he resembles a certain uber-famous movie star, who has starred in a series of wildly successful films about casino and art thefts (no, it ain't Clooney, guess again).

Somewhere along the way, his values seem to have grown more conservative. Money can do that. September 11 did that to some.

I have remain steadfastly skeptical. I lean left of center, but I understand and value the worth of a dollar. Perhaps NYC Democrats are like that - in any event, we seem to care about our city first, and we understand that we are different from the rest of the country, liberal or reactionary-right. I prefer to question authority, to use my own mind, to query, to take little at face-value. I am not a fan of the present U.S. government leadership - and the truth will out, as it does. I suppose I am more Aristotelian in my thinking - I want my nation's leader to be super-smart, someone whose mind and character I can respect. Like so many others I have had to wait - and it will be a full eight years gone.

Because we were raised overseas - in Okinawa during the Viet Nam war, and in Germany, close to the Czechoslovakian border during the Cold War - I have an innate respect for the U.S. Armed Forces - the people on the ground, doing the hard, terrible work. If I have developed an intolerance for anything, it is that, in war time, the people who suffer most are women, the elderly, and children. I am no fan of war. I don't care if academics can argue about it's historical necessity. Bah.

Why this tangent?

Because, when I returned from the West, when I visited my brother and his family, he instigated a conversation over dinner that turned ugly. The presidential election was looming. He asked me what I thought of John Kerry, and I responded that I was concerned the American public would not embrace his wife - she seemed too European-aristocratic for mainstream voters.

I do not know why or how this angered him, but he went berserk in an angry, neck-vein-throbbing tirade about how we had to support this president, how he loathed liberals, how we had to support our troops, etc. I admit, after I attempted to counter the assault with reasoned questions, that I tried to mollify him - to calm him down. A knot of tension had sprung forth in my stomach.

To this day, I do not believe his rage and anger had the slightest thing to do with politics.

And I know it had nothing to do with me.

I suspect that my brother resents that I am unencumbered by my personal family responsibilities (there is, ahem, a downside, but on balance, I do prefer my choices and my freedom). I suspect that he has, unwittingly or not, taken on aspects of the dreadful nature of...our father.

I stayed that night in my brother's house, after he mumbled downward into relative quiet (just like our father would do after a rage-attack). I shared a bedroom with my then four-year-old niece. I awoke in the middle of the night, to see the little girl thrashing and babbling in her sleep. Sleep disorders, hmmm, surprising?

My brother's wife remarked to me after he lost his cookies, "I have never seen him go off on anybody like that - except on me."

Holy shit. That could not be good.

I know from my own personal work, that if I place myself in a situation that is not safe for me (emotionally or otherwise), then I will remove myself from it.

And that's exactly what I did. For all my brother's smiles and niceties the following day, I had placed a call to my one-and-only high school girlfriend, who lived in Princeton with her two boys, a girl, and her adoring husband. She bade me come stay with them directly - and we had a glorious time, catching up, hanging with her (first and foremost) and her kids.

I made it to the city and my apartment on time, my heart slightly heavy, but ready to press forward into my future.

I have had minimal to no contact with my brother, my sister-in-law, or my niece.

My mother told me just last week that she learned that my sister-in-law is moving out, with my niece. My brother and she are separating.

I am not surprised.   

Jake

Jake passed yesterday. He was almost seventeen years old, I think. Maybe eighteen, my records and memory are not one hundred percent.

He lived fifteen months longer than Aida, his litter-mate sister, who died in January 2006.

He had been deteriorating, given his age, and he was such a comfort to me after his sister died. I loved this critter. He was the best cat, a classic orange tabby. The Jaksester, Jakerama, Jake-o-matic, Ba-zeep, Ba-zoop. He was more dog than cat, as I've written.

At then end, I suspect he had some form of dementia, his biological systems had almost shut down completely. He hadn't been able to jump very high since we lived in Boulder. Not up onto the kitchen counter the way he used to (Aida's heft eliminated that option a couple of years earlier). His hindquarters shrunk over the year, but he got around pretty well.

In the last weeks, he took a general turn for the worse. He slowed his eating, and became incontinent. I suspect that his kidneys and other internal organs started to conk out, as is normal. Still, he would wake me up in the morning, talk to me - or meow often as was his vocal habit, keep me company, want to eat my food (which now that he was old, I allowed), greet me whenever I returned home, come trotting form wherever he was resting and yell at me (it sounded like "Where have you been already?").

I realized that when he stopped eating - even as I attempted to force some mild yogurt or liquid cat supplements into him - that his body was at its natural conclusion. The last day, he could not walk, and started to hide, as cats do when sick, or when they are at then end of their lifespans.

His last several hours, he had tremors. I am sure his brain was depleting itself. His last night, I made him as comfortable as possible on my bed with me. Every twitch or sound and I started, gently touching his cheek, telling and retelling him the stories of his life.

What precious kittens he and his sister were, some eight weeks old, straggly, brought to me from a barn in Orange County, upstate New York. Their hair stuck out at odd ends, and they needed to be de-flea'd. They were little terrors as they grew, ripping around the house, destroying drapes, rolls of toilet paper. I took days off from work when I had them fixed, so concerned that they were in any kind of pain. They didn't seem to notice, and bounded around the house.

They lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey for the first three years, then six here in NYC, another three and a half in Boulder, and finally home again to this same Manhattan dwelling.

Together, they would perch their front paws on the edge of my bed and wake me up every morning. Two little faces. In the last year, Jake slept with me most nights - it was easier for us both.

Whenever I put on my running shoes, Jake raced over. He was guaranteed a round of petting as I tied my laces. He would stretch out to his full length, and let me run my hands up and down his belly.

He was a talker. Sometimes, he meowed for several minutes in one run, changing tones, changing from shorter chirps to drawn-out notes. He loved to yell right after he produced something significant in the box. I liked to think the elimination made him feel good.

In his last months, he would sit close and stare at me. For long periods of time. It might have been eerily disconcerting if I didn't love him so much.

That last night faded into the light gray tones of the morning. Almost half past six, he twitched again, but did not left his head. His breathing was so shallow that his abdomen barely moved. His breathing went through a series if small, raspy exhales. When I took his paws, I felt his pink pads go cold, and a moment or two later, I knew he was gone.

He was at peace, my baby boy.

And I am not.

I cleaned up the litter box, gathered all cat-care paraphernalia, and took it to the garbage. I wrapped his limp, little body in a light blue towel, and placed him in his carrier. A couple of hours later, I took him to the vet, and made final arrangements for his cremation. His ashes will go into a tin next to his sister's.

I am experiencing phantom sensations, as if he is still here. It happened last night when I was sitting on the sofa. I thought he had dropped down from the cabinet behind me and was pressing against my back. I thought I felt him, and instinctively put my hand behind my back expecting him to be there.

I have not lived alone for seventeen years. The loft feels empty. There is no cat litter grit under my bare feet. Already, I am brushing off less cat hair from my clothes. I am not sneezing as much. But my eyes won't stop watering.

What I have done is broken my heart, and although my big brain knows that each day will be easier, right now is just not good. 

I'm off to the gym soon - I need to release some of this free-floating anxiety. I know when I lean down to tie my shoes, I think he'll come running over to be scratched, and rubbed.

I never had children, And if this hurts so much, I wonder, how do parents survive the untimely death of a child?

Science-thinking isn't working for me right now. It will. I know it. Just not yet.

Time To Go

Back in the mid 1980s, when I had my first gig as an acquiring editor (the big "get" at the time), I was part of a close-knit group of similar-aged editors and marketers, all promoted from the sales staff at the same time. Prentice Hall grew its professionals from within its self-trained sales staff. In those days, we all thought we would stay and grow together in that behemoth college textbook publishing company. We worked and played together - hard.

One of my closest friends then, another junior editor like me, had issues with drinking. Because I admired her smarts and her pluck, I remained loyal to her, especially as we were both in our twenties, making mistakes, flailing about in our attempts to learn from them. For me, it would take another decade and a half to understand what we experienced as a group, groping our ways as we strove to grow up.

Nevertheless, there were times when, after three or four tumblers of scotch, her personality would change. Her eyes would lose focus, and this monster would erupt. She would engage in arguments for no reason at all, grow vicious and strident, hurling insults and the cruelest of barbs. Those of us closest to her would back off, take cover. She usually fell asleep not long after the tirade. And the next day, she behaved as though nothing had happened at all.

Now, of course, I know the signs of addiction. Whether it's alcohol, or over-spending and shopping sprees, or eating disorders. They're all addictions. The thing feeds on itself, the mind that gets stuck in an endless loop. It grows so fast, before it collapses in on itself, leaving a wasteland around it. It cannot be stopped from outside, although the practice of intervention works for some, they say.

My father had an addiction to rage: The unpredictable bouts or anger and violence, the results of which left their marks on our young bodies, but more so on our psyches. I cannot remember a single instance where the size of the rage was commensurate with the sin that we, as children, committed. All these years later, I know it was not. It never was.

Living a life on tenterhooks is no way to live. Today, I am mindful of these characteristics in others, even those I have called friend.

The friendship with the former colleague from the halcyon Prentice Hall days ended years ago, the result of a drunken tirade.

I have thought about her from time to time. I think she may have married, gotten divorced. I believe her beloved mother passed after a long bout with illness. I thought I heard once that she was trying to address her drinking problem. But I don't know. I attempted to make contact a couple of times over the years, but I reached into a void.

More important, I learned, through hours of therapy (I have joked that as a woman, you are not given license to live on this island unless your wardrobe is mostly black, you have a cat, and a therapist), and awkward, uncomfortable cognitive behavior methods to recognize the addicts, especially the "rage-aholics."

My therapist, a very smart woman, taught me how to not only adopt the words, "I do not give anyone permission to treat me that way," but to believe them. Believe in taking care of myself.

A newly famous writer-blogger described this break-up with a friend.

It's not an easy thing to do. But sometimes it's the only thing.

Linden Boulevard

This is one of three tree(s) that grows in the front of my building.

I am pretty good at rocks. I can usually make a first-pass guess as to whether a rock is of igneous, metamorphic, or sandstone origin. But even the best petrologist knows that it is, at best, a guess. Sometimes they need to examine a slice of rock (yes, a slice - they call it "thin section") under a high-powered microscope to analyze the grain structure. And even that does not provide an absolute answer all the time. Sometimes they have to go deeper and determine the chemical make-up, the structure of the molecules that make up a sample to determine what kind of rock it is. Maybe they use centrifuges or something, I'm not sure (but I could find out).

I think that's cool. Meanwhile, I am comfortable with a first-pass guess.

I know far less about flora. Plant life? Forget it. I know the differences among roses, tulips, and carnations. Honeysuckle - because you can smell it. I know obvious characteristics. Conifers versus deciduous, but little else. Strictly 101-level.

Like those trees outside my building, the ones we planted some ten years ago. I picked a leaf off a low-hanging branch, and did a few minutes of research. It appears to be more linden-like than pear-like.

And I kind of like that. The linden part. One reason is that I remember my mother telling me she grew up somewhere near a Linden Boulevard. And a Pitkin Avenue.

I did a search on those two street names, came up with an on-line map, and sure enough, those two streets run from East New York, Brooklyn into Queens, and dead-end somewhere near Ozone Park. As my mom tells it, she grew up in East New York. And I know the family, at a later point, populated itself among a collection of blocks in Richmond Hill and Ozone Park. Close to Kennedy Airport, or as my grandfather called it, "Idlewild."

The Opera Crush

Like a fourteen-year-old girl, I have a crush.

Unlike a fourteen-year-old girl, I am not papering the walls of my bedroom with posters of the object of my crush.

Instead, I am listening to the opera. Over and over. The movie soundtrack of that decades-long running, much-hyped, overblown production, The Phantom of the Opera.

I never saw Andrew Lloyd Webber's inflated show on Broadway. I had no interest.

My mother listened to opera. Long before she and I would tune in to WQXR's Texaco-sponsored radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera's live performances, she explained that her grandfather - Grandpa Masa, who had immigrated to New York from Italy - would take the subway from his house in Brooklyn - where the family made red wine in the basement, and blood pudding too - to go to the Metropolitan.

She told me The Opera house was in Midtown, on West 39th Street (this was well before the Center named after Lincoln Kirstein was constructed). He would go to see and hear his favorites, the Italian operas. Puccini, Verdi. He had ten children, and named each of them after characters in the Italian operas. My grandmother was named Carmella. Her sister was named Aida. My grandmother changed her name to Mildred. My great aunt changed hers to Edith. My mother said that they changed their names to sound less ethnic. Incredible. I prefer their originals.

Before the Saturday afternoon WQXR broadcasts became ritual, my first experience with the opera was as a student on St. Patrick's school field trips to The Met's dress rehearsals. In our plaid uniforms, the nuns steered us down into the Bay Ridge subway station and we rumbled into the great city. The first operas I saw live were Carmen and La Boheme. We brought our lunches in brown bags, but I couldn't eat. I was awestruck by the stage, the music, the performances - and astonished when the unseen director in the orchestra pit would stop the music to fine-tune something beyond my site-line or comprehension. The rehearsals were not stopped often, once, if at all.

I was twelve thirteen years old. I had a crush on a classmate, but everything vanished when the music started. I was transfixed.

Puccini's Turandot was the first opera I realized I could hum to, the first opera whose arias and overture remained stuck in my head, replaying themselves. Like so many others, "Nessun dorma!" thrilled me, and I could listen to it over and over. I cannot bear it anymore, it is overplayed and overused everywhere. I prefer "Perche tarda la luna?" So lush, so dramatic, so schmaltzy. At the end, the simple, repeated tune sung by a boy's choir, I learned, came from a Chinese music box that Giacomo Puccini bought or had in his possession and that served as one of his inspirations when he wrote the music.

The film version of The Phantom of the Opera started its rotation on HBO this winter. When I clicked on it, my expectations were all but nonexistent. While I refused to see the Broadway production - by then I was a member of The Metropolitan Opera Guild, and I preferred to see Lincoln Center productions over any insipid musical - I did see one of the Phantom's touring companies perform it - in Toronto. That was over ten years ago, and I was attending an astronomers' meeting. It was January, and the temperature never rose above zero degrees Fahrenheit. An elegant gentleman had invited me - I suppose it was a date. I hated the show, the production. I thought it was a kitschy rip-off of Puccini.

The music box, the dueling soprano voices, it made me itch. The date fizzled.

But this time, this winter, when I watched the film, even though the actors mouth movements didn't always line up with the music, something changed. I watched the film more than once, many times since, in fact. And the songs blend and reverberate in my head the way "In questa reggia" still can.

Then there's the crush. Gerard Butler. I cannot stop watching him. An utter crap-piece-of-shit movie, Timeline, based on Michael Crichton's novel, featured Gerard Butler - and so I watched it. Awful. Dregs. But I cannot stop watching this man.

That slight Scots burr. The electric, light eyes, the intense demeanor, feline-like movement and strength. Damn. He should have been the next James Bond.

We were (I was) robbed.

I almost had a sweet dream about Gerard Butler. I dreamed that he bent to let his lips graze the back of my neck. But this time, Jake pawed his way up onto my shoulder and sneezed in my face, and I woke up.

Which is just as well. I need to get over this crush. Or not.

Mr Butler is reported to be starring in a film, Butterfly on a Wheel, with...Pierce Brosnan.

However, if someone wants to invite me to see an opera at The Met the remainder of this season, let me know. And thanks in advance.

John Kochansky

It was bound to happen.

Sure, I had read about the deaths of high school classmates over the years. They were people I didn't know well, or with whom I had little or no contact. I didn't connect to any of those death announcements. Until now.

I got the call from my mother last October. John Kochansky was in the hospital, in intensive care, in a coma, in Monmouth Medical Center. She received word, an email message I assume, from my sister-in-law.

He never emerged from the coma. He died on October 14, 2005. He was forty-seven years old.

John Kochansky was one of my brother's few, close, high school friends - as far as I knew. My brother could be secretive.

My brother Scott and I were in the same grade, all the way from first grade. I joke that Scott skipped kindergarten. When we were children in Okinawa, my mother told me that it had something to do with the cut-off dates of our birth years. Scott and I are "Irish twins," less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he was born eleven months later that same year. They put Scott in the first grade with me.

In high school, John was a year ahead of us. He was enigmatic to most of his fellow classmates. His talent was enormous. He drew, all the time. Inasmuch as we would sit and stare at the creatures and landscapes that poured - as if in a dream - from his pencils, in contrast, his words were terse. He said little, and whether it was a pose, a protection, or just John, it created and maintained a distance between him and the rest of the school.

Which was smart. And John was smart.

I have two pieces of John's artwork. One is a cast iron cat sculpture (see above). The other is, as he told me, his "doodle pad." He said it covered his desk, and he would draw on it when he was talking on the phone. It hangs, framed, in my loft.

      

      

In time, I grew to realize how open he was. But back then, in the mid and late-seventies, John looked to me like another of the long-haired, pot-smoking, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, but most of all, Frank Zappa-listening, cool guys. On the fringe. They were not ostracized the way they might be in today's high school culture. They existed, as I remember them, outside of sports-playing, cheerleader-dating fray.

When he spoke, and he spoke to me often in the years after high school, and after college (he did a year at Syracuse University - I came the year after and made it through the necessary four years, that full scholarship obligated me), his voice and speech patterns still echoed Frank Zappa's. He could describe in detail, in a deep, lilting, low-registered timbre, interspersed with pauses and rhetorical questions, one subject after another. So many subjects fascinated him.

I liked inviting him to my parties. He would talk - at length - to a guest, who would later find me and tell me, eyes wide, about John's conversation, or to be more precise, John's soliloquy.

I remember he cornered one friend - at a party in the late eighties - a micropaleontologist (yes, earth sciences again), not to discuss ancient bacteria deep down under the ocean floor (which is pretty esoteric on its own), but about the use of a musical instrument called a gamelan. From there, he described African musical traditions, one in particular, of dream-sounding female incantations used in the former Upper Volta, now Ouagadougou, during ritual female clitorectomies. The micropaleontologist made a good audience. I expect that his hard-science brain was less horrified than perhaps any of the other party guests would have been on that, or any other night.

John was a hemophiliac. I wondered often if that made him fragile. He worked light construction when he wasn't doing his art. He married. He fathered a daughter.

On October 18, 2005, I drove to his funeral, held at The First Baptist Church of Long Branch. Was John a First Baptist? The church was packed to almost overflowing. I stood at the back, listened, and watched. It was hard.

I spied my brother and his wife among the congregation. After the services, I stood there, rock still, hiding behind my sunglasses. Scott approached me, we exchanged three civil sentences, after which he stated, "I have to get out of here. I need air."

Scott left through a side door. I didn't follow. We're not close, not right now.

For more on John and his work, see Gregg G. Brown's blog, News Transcript, Farmingdale, New Jersey, and Gallery 31.

The afternoon was sunny. I drove east to the ocean, the place where, in my teens, I would skip school, smoke pot, and ride the waves. It's built up with condo high-rise apartment buildings. The shoreline is artificially hard-armored. One huge hurricane, and all of it will be washed and blown away.