Same Old Lang Syne

The recent passing of Dan Fogelberg took me back to the summer of 1982. I’d graduated from high school the year before and was trying to put a responsible young adult’s life together, which meant going to work part-time and going to college part-time. My neighbor and childhood friend S— had just graduated from high school, and in the fall she was headed for UC Davis, but we were still hanging out, and that summer we played tennis and piano and guitar and occasionally went to the movies. S— was…how can I say this? She was my benchmark for what “good” in the conscientious sense meant to me, and although I was not a “bad” person, I struggled to be “good.” Though I appreciated music that was "bad" in the Sex Pistols sense, Dan Fogelberg was the sort of “good” music we listened to most, and when he swung through the Bay Area on tour for his double album “The Innocent Age” we bought tickets. S— drove us there and back in her Toyota Corolla. My parents—my mother especially—approved of S- whereas if I had been going to a beach house for the weekend with a bunch of other teenagers, approval and permission to go would not have been granted. In any case, I did like Fogelberg’s music, his voice, and in secret, his looks. I couldn’t tell S— this; I wasn’t out to her. I wasn’t out to many people. Among the various things I’d learned from all those missteps in Late High School was how far out of the closet to step, and with whom. But I could and did talk openly and freely about how much I loved Fogelberg’s voice and songwriting, and I realize as I’m writing that this provided a way of talking about a man turning you on without talking about a man turning you on.
Of course, I knew of Fogelberg from the single “Longer”, which peaked at Number Two on the Billboard charts back in 1980. “The Innocent Age” yielded four Top Ten singles, including one of the great all-time pop ballads, “Same Old Lang Syne.” The song is reminiscent of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” in that it tells a somewhat mawkish personal story, but it was an instant classic. Even at 18, I'd already suffered real love and real heartbreak, so I related to the song. Listening to some other samples from “The Innocent Age” while I’m writing this, I still hear the easefulness of the melodies and the lyrics that first, in combination with Fogelberg’s voice, captured me. I also hear the sound of a man who had found his passion and his gift and was using it, and I can’t help wondering now if that captured me as well.

This will be my last entry for the year. On Friday I am returning to New York City for a week. It will be my first visit there since my move to Buffalo in May. I am looking forward to seeing friends there; just as I now have a Buffalo family and a West Coast family, I still have a New York City family, and I need/want to see them. I also intend to “do” New York the way I need/want to: lots of social visits, but also sightseeing, restaurants, and maybe even a Broadway show. I am also curious to see what it is like to be there again, the city where so many of my own stories occurred, the city where I also found my own voice. Who knew that I would learn that you can, as Fogelberg did, take your voice anywhere and still sing the way you're supposed to? Wherever you are now, Mr. Fogelberg, I hope you're still singing.

A Few Acquaintances in a Big, Noisy City

Henry James has long been one of my personal passions. I’m not entirely sure why. He’s both hard to read and prolific, an irritating combination when just one of those distinctions can be annoying enough, but that challenge also appeals to my prideful side. I can say (with pride, yes) that I’ve read enough of James to know his work, but I can’t say I’ve read everything he’s written. Several times I have tackled one of his late-phase novels—The Golden Bowl, for example—and given up in complete frustration. It’s like the triathlon—you have to be ready. But I can say I’ve tried, just as I’ve tried to read Proust. I’ve read most of the tales and the early novels: Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady. I especially love The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square, and for a long time my favorite of the novels was The Bostonians. I read this many years ago in California and enjoyed it, but it took living in the East and seeing more of the world to develop a better understanding of and appreciation for the novel’s large subjects and themes. I’d be willing to bet that Claire Messud had The Bostonians at hand when she was writing her last novel, The Emperor’s Children. But I think I’ve a new favorite among the novels James wrote during this phase.
Like The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima was written in the 1880s. It’s a long novel, divided into six books. The hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is a bastard, the issue of a liaison between a nobleman and a courtesan. He lives in London in the mid-nineteenth century and falls in with some revolutionaries and radicals. He meets the title character, who has been converted to the revolutionary cause as well. The novel is lively, more energetic than one might give a writer like James credit for. Like The Bostonians, individual scenes and the overall story have the liveliness of a certain kind of Robert Altman film. Some of the secondary characters in The Bostonians, like Mrs. Birdseye, are as memorable as some of those in Nashville, like the Jeff Goldblum character, a magician who never says a word of dialogue. In The Princess Casamassima a number of personalities meet, connect, disconnect, and meet again. As in The Bostonians and Nashville, they are driven—sometimes together, sometimes apart—by purpose, ambition, cause. It’s remarkable that for the novel’s length, we don’t really meet more than two dozen characters, but we stay with them and close to them, while the teeming society they wish to change is this constant presence, with its implied constant motion, just beyond their garrets and parlors. I saw the new movie version of Sweeney Todd yesterday afternoon, and was aware of how Sondheim’s musical and Burton’s film version frame this pocket of people within a teeming city-society. Dickens has this aspect; I’m thinking of scenes in Great Expectations where the reader observes two characters in conversation, yet a lot of implied activity is going on in the street behind them. Middlemarch, one of my favorite reads of all time, has this as well. I feel like I know everything about mid-Victorian England by thoroughly knowing its four main characters. One contemporary novel that does this, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, goes even further I think, taking us so far into the lives of many, many individuals in the city of New York that rather than our having a sense of the blur beyond the immediate action, we have a sense of the main characters gradually dissolving into that blur.
I’d love to re-read The Princess Casamassima someday, but those other James volumes are lying in wait. The late Mr. Dwyer specialized in James; he has a complete hardcover set of the New York Edition and there they are, above my own paperbacks. Six volumes down, twenty to go.

Tradition

A friend and I used to have a tradition of making up a top-ten list of the movies we’d seen during the year. Actually, we used to see so many movies that we sometimes had top-twenty lists. This friend was sometimes able to say she saw at least one movie a week, often even more than that. I was intermittent about movie-going; some years were heavier than others. Still, I usually managed to cram in some of the summer blockbusters, or at least the year-end releases. This past year the following movies were memorable for me: Zodiac, Knocked Up, Hairspray, 3:10 to Yuma, and No Country for Old Men. I mention these five because they were the only movies I saw all year. Even taking into consideration those years when my moviegoing was light, this year was unusual. Part of this is due to the huge change I made in my life. I don’t have a circle of friends or even casual acquaintances to see movies with here in Buffalo. My brother and I have seen things in the past, but we didn’t rush out to see anything this year. I wasn’t compelled by the latest Pirates of the Caribbean installment and I’m not into Jason Bourne. I watch more movies on cable and DVD that I did in years past, but even that has dropped off as the months have gone by. In New York City, one felt socially pressured to participate in the sport of moviegoing. Moviegoing there is practically an amateur sport that most people participate in whether they know it or not. I would even go so far as to say that movie-avoidance in New York is a sport. You are bombarded with trailers and posters and publicity; you are likely to hear about movies before they open, as they open, and after they open. So the admission that one didn’t go to the movies in New York City would be like saying you didn’t read, almost as bad as farting loudly in a crowded elevator. Here in Buffalo, I feel in no way pressured to see the latest from the Brothers Coen or the newest documentary about the situation in Iraq. I read, of course, but not the way I did in New York; all that time on public transportation was especially useful there. So I miss long stretches of reading, but maybe I’m still adjusting. Because I’m in a car for several hours a day, I do listen to NPR more avidly, even compulsively. I websurf more, and stay in touch with current events via Internet, but I’ve stopped watching cable news, which has frankly gotten pretty silly. (The tipping point was CNN’s unveiling of an expensive new Weather Center the year after Katrina. The set looked like the stage of American Idol; you could feel the producers rubbing their hands in anticipation, then disappointment when an active hurricane season failed to materialize.)
But today, with the first truly heavy snowstorm of the year, I was ready: I wanted a movie, something escapist, ideally set on a tropical island, because of the weather outside. And there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Bee Movie. August Rush. Awake. Hitman. Alvin and the friggin' Chipmunks. Nothing.
(Sigh.)
Well, at least It's a Wonderful Life was on Friday night. Suspicion is on Turner Classic Movies, and I bought the Tim Weiner book on the CIA. A birthday present for myself, a tradition that hasn’t changed. Even if the kind of books I’m buying lately have changed. But that’s another story.

Solid Water

Of all the weather I’ve ever lived with, New York City weather was the least predictable. Because there weather is not the deal-breaker it is in other cities or parts of the country, a truly “beautiful” day—clear, dry, sunny, even a little warm—is a surprise and a gift, the kind of day that brings the masses out to lunch on the Bryant Park lawn or to Central Park to sunbathe. When I moved to NYC in 1992, the weather patterns still regularly brought spectacular electrical storms, as well as snow by the foot. I used to live on the sixth floor of an apartment that looked out over the Hudson, and when a good thunder-and-lightning storm approached from the west, I would open the window to watch the periodic flashes make their steady progress across New Jersey, sometimes counting “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand.” When the rain finally came down in a gust, I’d close the windows and watch the storm pass.
One evening in winter (based on where I was living, in Morningside Heights, this would have been the winter of ’93 or ’94), I came off the subway and noticed that the trees along Tiemann Place looked like they’d been dipped in liquid glass. They looked fragile, beautiful, magical. They caught and reflected light like jewels. I looked around and saw that every tree and even the fire escapes had the same clear coating of ice. During the day the snow must have started to melt, then the temperature probably dropped so fast that it froze quickly enough to remain perfectly clear. I’d never seen anything like it. I even went upstairs and looked up the word “rime,” as in “rimed with ice.”
The weather pattern here for the past few week has been the same: grey, cold, but not frigid. There’s a heavy dusting of snow on the ground. Lake effect snow comes at some point each day, but for now we’re not experiencing anything like the cold of last week. Even long-time residents were saying it was too cold. But there wasn’t much snow yet, so it wasn’t cold and snow. I asked my sister- in-law this morning if the sun ever comes out. She laughed, and said that it does, but that when it does it’s usually clear and cold. I’ve figured out where to keep my scarf, hat and gloves at all times, and I’ve learned out to use the four-wheel-overdrive on the battered used truck I often drive. I’m ready. Bring it on.

In the Wings, Part Two

And then it’s opening night (day, actually). You have a lot of work to do in the front of the house—briefing the ushers, answering questions, directing everyone to their dressing rooms, greeting the school groups and teachers—before double-timing it backstage, getting into your costume, distributing tasks to volunteers and collecting payments from the school groups who have reserved for the performance. Then you go back upstairs and cross behind the curtain because you are the one making the welcoming remarks and reading the synopsis of the ballet. The stage lights go out, the music rises in the darkness, and your heart races. It’s started before you know it, and you know there is nothing you can do but go on, that your cue is about to come up, that the woman playing Clara’s mother is miming to you as Clara’s Father to enter. Which you do. You’re moving onstage for the first time since the high school production of Auntie Mame. You’ve learned your gestures, your blocking, your two dances, and you begin to realize that the scene is going by much, much faster than it did in any rehearsal. Then you and the woman playing your wife are dancing stage front and center, and then you’re back against the wall again. You help Grandmother offstage. With that, your part onstage is done.
But not your part backstage. No, that is just beginning. You have a lot to do. You have to help drag the sofa into the wings during the fight between the Soldiers and the Mice. You have to keep the kids away from the side lights, so that the audience doesn’t see them. Now it’s intermission, and you have to help untie heavy canvas drops and roll them up and out of the way: the clock is ticking, you’re hands and fingers fly across the bar, and you feel like a crew member in the America’s Cup. You can’t look around; there’s so much going on you’ll get distracted. It’s like the worst restaurant rush you’ve ever seen, multiplied by ten. As the call for curtain is made, you hustle offstage and the second act begins. It’s less frenetic than the first, and you can actually watch some of the dancing. But you help pull Clara’s sled into the wings, and push Mother Ginger out in her five-foot-tall hoopskirt-and-stilts costume. When the soundman jostles the CD player (your humble troupe can’t afford a live orchestra, not yet) and the soloist has to improvise, you are enthralled and astonished and proud because she does so, like a pro. And you realize the Nutcracker doesn’t have to be what it was to you for so long, a piece of kitsch that came ‘round once a year like the Oscars. In fact, the ballet will never look—or sound—the same to you again.
The curtain closes and you hear the applause, and you know that part of it is yours. You still have work to do: organizing costumes. Where are the props for the first scene? And why is that crewman sitting down? Up! UP! There’s work to do. And when you next look out into the theater, it’s empty. Everyone’s gone home. There may be some little kid who thought the whole thing a waste of time, boring, stupid, and what was up with those guys and their crotches? He’s the one who’ll become you. But for each one of him, there’s a boy or a girl who might take this production to heart, who will believe—who wants to believe; needs to believe—in magic. He or she has no idea who you are, or what part you played, and there is no reason to know. Sure, eventually every artist needs to learn how to take art apart to see how it works. By and large, that’s for critics. Not dreamers. And you are still a dreamer.

In the Wings, Part One

You were sick of it: the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Waltz of the Flowers, that five minute Overture. Perhaps you saw (and were tortured by) Care Bears: The Nutcracker, or Barbie in the Nutcracker. Maybe you managed to reserve a bit of critical snobbery for the dancing mushroom sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. (Perhaps another kind of mushrooms helped.) In any case, it was the first ballet you were dragged to when you were a child. You snickered at the men in tights, yet wondered how that Christmas tree magically grew. You knew that theater mechanics were required to make it all work, yet a part of you believed—or wanted to believe; needed to believe—that magic was still possible.
You grew up; you thought, No way. You lived in San Francisco, but the Nutcracker staged by the excellent ballet company there…well, that was for kids from Contra Costa County and retirees from Hillsborough. Not you. You had taste. You moved on. To Trisha Brown, Mark Morris, Lar Lubovitch. When one of the New York or European companies swung through the Bay Area, you caught at least one of their shows. When you moved to New York City, you subscribed to dance wherever you could. You were in the dance capital of the country, and there were so many venues for dance, almost too many. The Joyce. Brooklyn Academy of Music. City Center. And of course, Lincoln Center. And the companies and choreographers! Ballet Frankfurt. Paul Taylor. Martha Graham. Rosas. Pina Bausch. You made discoveries of your own, companies you’d never heard of out in California: Susan Marshall, Doug Varone, Wally Cardona. You realized that the Joyce didn’t have a bad seat in the house; you noticed that Mark Morris went through an ecumenical phase and came through it a better choreographer. You saw a performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Rain,” set to Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians,” and tears came to your eyes because how could anything be so simple, so beautiful, and so moving. How could movement be moving?
Eventually you found yourself living in Western New York, with your brother, a retired professional dancer, who started a ballet school with his wife, also a retired dancer. You thought you could be of some help to them, at least for a couple of months, and two months turned into four, four into six, and before you knew it, you were caught up in preparations for their non-professional production of that tired old chestnut. They wanted to cast you as Mother Ginger, as a lark, and even considered you for Drosselmeyer, but you ended up as Clara’s father. You have other duties, important duties, in and around the production beside this role: grantwriting, fundraising, writing press releases, handling various administrative tasks, and you make light of your upcoming “debut” in the Nutcracker.
Until it begins to dawn on you that these kids have studied dance all their lives. That they have done so regardless of their color, their weight, their body type, their ability, their talent. That their parents make sacrifices of time and money to get them to class, weather permitting. That those parents drive them faithfully, for the most part, to rehearsals every weekend. That they’ve helped with fundraising and volunteer work. You realize that your own grantwriting and administrative work has been a part of this production, like it or not. And during rehearsal, you find yourself wanting to be as good as you possibly can. You keep missing the count in the parents’ second dance, and you haven’t rehearsed enough yourself, but you’re good at the miming and gestures that help bring the Party Scene to life. You recognize cues in the music you didn’t know were there, because you’re familiar with Tchaikovsky’s suite and not the full ballet score.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (with apologies to Sherman Alexie)

“What did you do yesterday?”
“Well, I woke up and had coffee then we all rode to the studio for Nutcracker rehearsal.”
“How’s that going?”
“I wish we had one more week, but I’m sure it’ll come together.”
“Are you in it?”
“I’m playing Herr Stahlbaum, Clara’s father.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Do you have any lines?”
“It’s ballet! There are no lines. Just acting and dancing.”
“Well, do you have to dance?”
“Yes, but not ballet. There are two dances in the party scene that I have to dance with Frau Stahlbaum. I keep getting off count in both. And the two of us are front and center.”
“Is it fun?”
“Sure. My favorite stuff is the acting. Large, expressive gestures.”
“What else did you do yesterday?”
“In the evening I went to the Bills game with a friend from New York.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, and we had box seats, courtesy of Seneca Niagara Casino. My friend’s a regular at some of the Connecticut Indian casinos, and some of the staff he knows through Mohegan Sun transferred to Seneca Niagara. They get these promos, and have an entire box at the eastern end zone of Ralph Wilson. Not the choicest view, but still, nicer than sitting outside. And they have this whole spread of great bad-food classics. Chicken wings, nachos, deep-fried cheese-stuffed shrimp.”
“Um…there’s a reason that cows are on land and shellfish are in the oceans.”
“I know.”
“Who’d the Bills play?”
“The Patriots. The undefeated Patriots. My biggest thrill—other than the private Escalade that got me there and back—was seeing Tom Brady in person. Even from a distance.”
“Hmmm.”
“It’s crazy how rowdy the Bills fans were. It was like the mother of all keggers. There was even a fight in the box, believe it or not!”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. Imagine. ‘Dude. I went to the Bills game and got thrown out of a luxury box.’ Nice story for your friends and family.”
“That game was a blowout.”
“I know. The funny thing was that the guy sitting next to me somehow decided I was the Bills expert in the house and kept asking me questions.”
“Did you know the answers?”
“That’s the scary part. I did.”
“Hmmm. Maybe you are a Buffalonian.”
“Buffalo Bills and the Indian: A Farce, by God…”

Beautiful Letters

A week of literature and irony here in Buffalo. Not to mention the first lake effect snow of the season.
On Wednesday I went to a reading of two poets at Buffalo State. The reading was part of the college’s Rooftop Poetry Club, which I recently joined. The featured readers were two women and at the end there was an open reading. Another open reading on politics and poetry was scheduled for the following afternoon and I decided to attend and read something myself. I dug out an older, previously published poem written about two Latina maids in Malibu who were left behind during a wildfire. Not an overtly political poem per se, but I’d been thinking about the recent fires in Southern California and newstories about the number of “illegals” who were caught hiding in the brush by the blazes, about the fact that Bush responded so quickly in an area where the demographic is nearly the observe of the one affected in New Orleans, about the fact that after the election of Schwarzenegger to the governorship there was discussion of introducing an amendment to the constitutional requirement that the president be someone native-born, about the recent controversy here in New York and the western part of the state in particular over immigrants and drivers’ licenses. These historical ironies politicized the poem, so I read it, followed by a poem called “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri” from the new collection Time and Materials by Robert Hass. He was scheduled to read the following night at UB, and I’d forgotten that he spent so much time in Buffalo. The poem even mentions Buffalo, but I read it because it was slyly political, because there was a serendipitous correspondence between his poem and mine, because it mentions restaurant work (I was a waiter for too many years), and because Mr. Hass and his work have become a model for what I aspire to in my own poetry. That hasn't always been the case, but I knew him when I was a student at Berkeley. One evening right after I’d graduated and was applying to MFA programs, including the famous one at Iowa, Mr. Hass and his wife Brenda Hillman and the writer Frank Conroy came into the Zuni Café on Market Street, where I was then working. I didn’t know what Conroy, the director of the Iowa program, looked like, and when I mentioned to Mr. Hass that I’d just applied there, he said, “Well, let me introduce you to Frank Conroy.” I didn’t get into Iowa and ended up at Columbia instead.
Later that same night, after the political poetry event, I went to the Orhan Pamuk reading sponsored by Just Buffalo. Pamuk was delightful, more winsome than I’d expected him to be. He read an essay from Other Colors on the art and nature of the novel, and was captivating. The following night I went to the Hass reading. It was a sublime event: I forget how he was once seen as a kind of nature writer, but as I overheard someone at the reading mention, there can often be an implicit ecological agenda in American nature writing. (Sometimes not so implicit.) Hass’s more personal and political work have captured some part of my spirit; his poem “My Mother’s Nipples” is one of the most beautiful long haibun (a poetic form that interests me lately) I have ever read. He read “I Am Your Waiter…” as well, and I was amused to see that the challenges of its digressive structure made his reading of it something of a high-wire act. Mine was more low-wire. Afterward I said hello and reminded him of that encounter at Zuni Café. But believe it or not, my first meeting with him dates back to the early Eighties, at a workshop at Foothill College. So here I am, listening to him once again, but taking—and able to take—deeper inspiration and (moral, political, personal, spiritual) stimulation from his work. Here, so far, as he inscribed in my copy of his book, “away from Market Street and Zuni Café…”

Eastern Standard Randomness

After a long summer and the warmest October in Western New York in over 130 years, fall has finally, permanently arrived. The first “killing frost” of the year occurred the other night, and the leaves are quickly dropping. Last night we were all sitting at the table eating an early dinner—-though 6 pm no longer seems so early to me—-and three fawns wandered through the backyard. “They’re females,” said Bill. “How can you tell?” asked Susie. “No antlers,” he replied.
I’ve taken responsibility for cooking on Saturday nights, and had been craving pork, bitter greens, and cannellini beans (you can take the boy out of the restaurant industry…). I couldn’t find a reasonable cut of pork with the bone in that would feed six, so I tried this chicken saute with forty cloves of garlic instead. And we didn’t have any butter or white wine. Don’t tell Julia, but I used olive oil and a little bit of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” (which frankly I should be using more of, period) and substituted lemon juice and white wine vinegar for the wine. What you really need is simply an acid, and I’ve had chicken with vinegar sauces before. The beans were canned cannellinis—-they were on sale at Wegmans, 69 cents a can—-but I cooked them with half a pound of bacon, red onion, celery, and oregano. I let them cook a long time and they were creamy and rich. The chicken turned out just fine, and what with the steamed carrots and the sautéed escarole, we had a nice dinner that had sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. All fairly inexpensive and easy. Then we had some leftover apple pie with ice cream and sat on the couch nodding off for a while. The girls were hyped up from the sugar, however, so we piled in the van and drove to Target.
Saturday night at Target in the ‘burbs: I couldn’t believe how busy it was! It almost seemed to be the place to be. I do like Target for various things, including clothes, but I hate, hate, hate shopping; my dream would be to have a “uniform” I wore every day in which I always looked good, something classic, like the late designer Perry Ellis’ everyday blue shirt and khakis (the ones he wore; not the ones he designed). Then I wouldn’t have to think about what to wear at all. I especially didn’t feel up to shopping for clothes after that big dinner, but my brother is kind of a shopaholic. He’s always online, checking out new cars, new computers, new whatever. I like to have a clear idea of what it is I’m looking for, get in, get it, and get out. I did pick up a few basics, but I am overdue for some new clothes. Before I left Manhattan I wore all my clothes one last time and then threw them in the trash. They weren’t really in proper condition to donate to charity.
Speaking of restaurants, and maybe holiday crunches, a friend who used to work in restaurants used to laugh about Tea Hell—-that was when you worked as a waiter in a place where you prepared your own pots of tea. If you found yourself with multiple orders from multiple tables, that was Tea Hell. We’re approaching Nutcracker Hell—-which for some may be a redundancy. The next four weeks are going to be busy. We do have a nice break at Thanksgiving, but that’s only a break from classes and rehearsals. By them I’m sure my brother, sister-in-law and I will be running around in circles. Or maybe not. Bill likes to work under the pressures of self-induced procrastination, and Susie is methodical like me. As long as we get all the candy-fundraiser-orders in, and the fleecewear preorders in, and the patron ad forms in…

What's In a Name...

Nguyen is a common Vietnamese last name, like Kim or Park in Korea, like Garcia in Spain or Mexico, like Smith or Jones. I first heard the name sometime in 1974 or 1975, when I was a boy in Northern California. Because my parents had adopted three children from outside the United States, we belonged to a social network of similar families, and within this network, I met some of the first Vietnamese refugee children who came to America. At the same time, entire families who had escaped Southeast Asia—the first of the boat people—were finding sponsorship through churches and other charitable agencies. Each September for the next several years, as more and more of these kids showed up in schools, teacher after teacher struggled with the name Nguyen. Did you pronounce every letter? Was anything silent? What about the unfamiliar “ng”? Sometimes you could just tell which name was next just by where the teacher was in the roll—“…McDonald, Myers, Nardin, Needham…”—and the way he stared at the sheet of paper. Finally the kid, having been through this before, spoke up from his or her desk and politely offered the proper pronunciation: “win.” (More or less.) The teacher scribbled something—a phonetic, maybe—and moved on. As the days passed, the teacher would get more and more comfortable with the pronunciation and soon he wasn’t taking roll at all; he knew everyone who was supposed to be in his class by sight and first name. As the years passed, I one day realized that it had been a long time since I’d heard a teacher struggle with the name Nguyen. Maybe that’s when the conflict in Vietnam really ended.
My brother’s real last name is Nguyen. His first name was Tuan, which is pronounced “toon.” (Again, more or less.) Tuan came to America with his real father, whose name was Quang. Quang died about a year after their arrival and a family belonging to the church that had sponsored them offered to foster my brother. That family, one we knew through that adoption network, gave him the name Bill. I’ve never thought the name suited him, but then I don’t know what name would. Bill chose Alexander as his baptismal name; he was studying ballet by then, and he liked its classical sound.
In revising my autobiographical book, I figured it was best to change names, and tried to find names that I thought suited the various persons. When I came to my brother, I tried out a couple things, but none of them suited his character. Then I hit upon Ian: although it’s Gaelic for “John,” it sounds sort of of Asian—or, as-Ian. And I liked the fact that it both sounded and looked like Tuan and Nguyen. I especially liked that it sounds like Bill’s real last name. One morning this past summer I was explaining all this to Bill and Susie. They were still trying to decide on a name for The Boy, as we were all calling him then. When I said “Ian” they looked at each other and said, “Ian. I like that. We should call him Ian.” Susie was especially pleased that the name could be linked with her own late father, who was John.
I’m watching Ian as I write this. He’s finally fallen asleep: he was fussing for a bit, but I walked him around the house and showed him the view through the windows where his late grandfather lived. He likes looking at the trees. I like showing him the trees. Maybe that’s the Indian in me. Or rather, the “Ind-Ian.”

Mister, Mister

“Give it to Mr. Jerome…”
“Ask Mr. Jerome...”
“Mr. Jerome? Do you have a safety pin?”
In all my born days, I never thought I’d be answering to Mr. Jerome. But it seems to be a ballet school custom that at a certain level instructors and other personnel are referred to this way. My brother is always referred to as Mr. Bill, my sister-in-law as Miss Susannah, even by their students’ parents. Likewise with all the other instructors, and the ladies are invariably Miss. There have been exceptions. I imagine that the great primas like Alexandra Danilova and Cynthia Gregory were called by their surnames, while Mr. Misha and Mr. Rudolf frankly sound like a couple of émigré hairdressers. Balanchine was respectfully referred to as Mr. B., and in “The Company,” Robert Altman’s underrated and underappreciated movie about a Chicago dance company, the artistic director played by Malcolm McDowell was called Mr. A. Among insiders, this was seen as a reference to Gerald Arpino, co-founder and artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, whose dancers and choreographers were used in the movie. (It also could have been a sly reference to Altman, though I think most of his friends thought of the late, great director as Bob).

When I arrived in Western New York this spring some of the parents around the ballet studios already knew who I was and what my relationship to Bill and Susie is; others had no idea. But as the school year progressed and I became better known, I started hearing myself referred to as Mr. Jerome. It makes me feel a little like I’ve just come out of a class on Introduction to Follicles, or like an offstage character in an Athol Fugard play. But the other day I finally succumbed; writing the reminder that there wouldn’t be any classes after 6 p.m. on October 31st, I hesitated. My dry-erase marker hovered. Then I wrote, “Please see Mr. Jerome if you need to make up a class because of Halloween.”

Well, interacting with kids on this level is for me a whole new game. Tonight I hear that the Creative Movement class—a kind of preschool ballet/calisthenics for three- and four-year-olds—will be having a little Halloween party next Monday. Maybe I should start thinking about my costume.

Almost Golden

I haven’t watched this much college football in years. I didn’t always like the game. I didn't even watch it when I was a kid. Not until I became a fan during the ‘Niners' Montana-to-Clark Cinderella season did I start following football at all, and the only reason I started following it that particular season was having my left leg in a hip-to-ankle cast (in a freak accident, I’d nearly severed my Achilles tendon). There was little I could do besides watch television, and that magical, Bill Walsh-coached season that brought the West Coast Offense to the world’s attention changed my life. I was soon a solid pro fan of the kind who spends all Sunday in front of the television watching the games, drinking coffee, and reading the newspaper. I started watching the college game as a kind of adjunct to following the NFL; I wanted to know where all those draftees were coming from. Cal’s team was at the time overshadowed by UCLA and USC, so out of allegiance to my father’s favorite teams I followed the Big Ten, Notre Dame, and Boston College.

Though I followed Cal Sports as a student, not until I left did I start following them in earnest. Becoming an alumnus made everything about my alma mater seem different--I could even use the phrase alma mater, and it meant something--and that included tracking Cal's Nobel laureates and following the Division I football and basketball teams. Yes, I became a proud Golden Bear. I was merely annoyed at our one-time head coach Steve Mariucci for leaving Strawberry Canyon for the NFL as quickly as he did, an annoyance that was mitigated by the fact that he left to coach my beloved ‘Niners, but I will never forgive Jason Kidd, whose high school career—high school!—I’d followed, for entering the NBA draft in his sophomore year. Man, what ever happened to taking it slow and making it last? What ever happened to loyalty?

As a kid on New Year's Day I used to watch the Ohio State Marching Band do the Ohio Script at halftime at the Rose Bowl. I know the melody of “The Victors,” Michigan’s fight song. I hate the USC Trojans—always have, always will--and said that if Cal ever made it to the Rose Bowl I would move earth and heaven to get there. So you can imagine my disappointment this past weekend. Cal had the Number One ranking in its grasp; the Golden Bears were brushing their fingertips up towards the top of the coaches’ polls the way Michelangelo's Adam is brushing the hand of God on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Kentucky helped us by beating LSU in triple overtime (one of the greatest college games I’ve ever seen, by the way)…and Cal lost. Worse, we lost to Oregon State, a Pac-10 team that was three-and-three. Whether mercifully or miserably, I wasn’t able to actually watch the game because it wasn’t broadcast here in Buffalo (and my brother doesn’t have one of those football-addict’s cable channels), but I followed it online. I was already planning to have the coaches’ poll from today printed on a t-shirt.

Jesus wept.

Oh, well. That’s okay. Pasadena gets too much smog anyway…

Zoom-Zoom

I haven’t had a car in about twenty years. I’ve driven, sure, but nowhere nearly as much as since moving to Buffalo. There is a public transit system here—bus routes, and a light-rail downtown—but this is a car culture. My brother finally bought the van he’d been shopping for all summer (with three kids under six, he needed it) and gave me his wife’s old Nissan sedan with 110K on the odometer. It’s a sturdy car, a good car, and a dependable car. He had the leak in the back left tire fixed, so we don’t have to check the darn tire pressure every other day. So now I drive that car everywhere. And it’s pleasant to be able to get up and go whenever I want to, but there are drawbacks.

For one thing, and I’ll get this one out of the way first, there’s the price of fuel. I almost lapsed into I-remember-when, but I’m sure there are people driving who really remember when. Thank God the cost-of-living here is otherwise reasonable, and that for me it’s really at moment a non-issue. There is also the drive-in thing. It’s not just that the food is there, and that it’s convenient. It’s that you end up eating in your car. And what you end up eating is so unhealthy. And you’re not getting out of your car and walking around as much.

But for me the most exasperating thing about the car culture here are the street systems and the freeway system. Driving on the Buffalo streets and highways can make you crazy. Growing up in California, with one of the greatest and best-designed freeway systems in the world, I guess I’m spoiled. San Jose itself didn’t have much to recommend it when I was growing up other than its proximity to other places, but its freeways and streets were excellent. There were ample access lanes; surface streets were wide. Buffalo’s interchanges, on the other hand, tend to be too small for the traffic whose flow they try to manage. Freeway-entrance and exit lanes are so short as to be non-existent. You often have to use the same lane to exit that other drivers are using to get on. Surface street lanes are narrower than the soccer-mom SUVs and ballet-dad vans that crowd them. I learned this when riding my bike; more than once I was honked at or yelled at for following the rule that says you should bike on the right shoulder, with traffic. There is also the matter of the mix of kinds of drivers. Buffalo has young drivers, old drivers, and busy suburban professional drivers. It’s a bad mix. I’ve already become adept at profiling drivers by the way they're driving. But then, maybe I’m being profiled too. I’m an older driver than I was twenty, even ten years ago, but I'm still someone who drinks coffee while he drives. My Bluetooth does allow me to talk on the phone and drive at the same time. At night, however, my eyes don’t seem to work as well as they used to.

There’s also the matter of the wildlife. I've never seen so much roadkill. Skunks. Raccoons. Squirrels. Rabbits. The occasional deer. And that's just on my own street! As I drove here in May in my rental car, a large deer bounded out from the side of the Thruway and I had to brake harder than expected. And just the other morning on my way to Orchard Park, I was talking on the phone and drinking coffee (the Nissan is an automatic, natch) and a woodchuck came waddling across the road. It wasn’t in any hurry. I’ll bet it had an opinion about drivers in Buffalo.

Revisiting Brideshead

Evelyn Waugh is considered a major writer, and Brideshead Revisited his masterpiece. I was long in thrall to the novel (and the BBC miniseries that brought the story to a new generation of English and American audiences) but hadn’t picked it up in some time. I did so recently, wondering if my perspective on the novel had changed. Certainly part of the novel’s appeal was the evocation of the relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. Further appeal lay in the geographical, historical, and material settings—Oxford; Europe between the wars; Brideshead itself. Flyte’s family, the Marchmains, are extremely wealthy, Catholic, dysfunctional. I don’t think Waugh would have liked that label any more than I do, but in my recent re-reading it seemed especially apt.

What also came through this time around were various things that I’d missed and, truth be told, lacked the maturity to see before. For one thing, the novel is more melodramatic than I’d remembered. I actually found the dialogue in the final scene between Julia and Charles embarrassing, almost unbelievable. I was also struck by the number of occasions on which various characters convey large amounts of crucial information to Charles in private confidences—he hears a number of rambling, elliptical monologues from Julia, Rex Mottram, Cordelia, Anthony Blanche. In this novel narrated by Charles, an avowed agnostic, it’s interesting how many confessions he hears. Lady Marchmain never struck me as such a terrible person before, but this time around I was really taken aback by her character. She has the best of intentions, but her devotion to her faith frequently blinds her to the ways in which it suppresses and in some cases damages her four children, rendering them incapable of fitting properly into society. This struck me as painfully sad, even tragic.

Cordelia repeats the line from Chesterton that gives the second half of the book its title: the quote refers to an ability to bring back one who wanders far with a mere twitch upon the thread. This quote and the book as a whole have been given a positive read by one Catholic critic—that the power of faith even reconciles all the Marchmains, even the father, in the end. But at what a cost! In her earliest scenes, the youngest daughter, Cordelia, shows signs of what we’ve recently labeled “social intelligence”, but by the book’s end resigns herself to spinsterhood. Sebastian nearly pays for his alcoholism with his life, but also eventually gets both the financial support and the geographical distance he seeks. The elder son, Bridey, has the socio-economic makings of a British elderstatesman, yet it falls to the comically endearing Rex Mottram, a parvenu Canadian, to claim that position. Bridey’s sense of duty to family and church prevents him from claiming his proper position in society. Julia, the beautiful older daughter, also fails to attain her rightful social position, and is pulled back to the dysfunctional family core at the cost of one unhappy marriage and an affair with Charles.

All this was lost on me before, and noticing it this time around felt like I’d made my peace with the novel as Charles makes his with memories. It’s a book that because of its material and moral weightiness easily lends itself to a symbolic, positivistic reading, but I think its truth is darker, sadder, and much more ambiguous. I will be curious to see whether the forthcoming movie version will capture this or not.

Erie Co., Pop. 921,390...plus 2

Yesterday morning I woke to the sound of muffled phone calls and an air of urgency and steadiness. From my room I heard my sister-in-law say, “…hospital…” and I knew: the baby was on the way. I woke up and was pulling on my pants when she rapped on my bedroom door. “You are a lifesaver…I mean, light sleeper,” she said, laughing. (I savored that little slip-of-the-tongue; Light Sleepers is the title of my novel.) “My mom’s on her way,” she added. “Nina may or may not go to school.” Overhead, I heard my brother’s footsteps. Nina was on the couch, watching DVR recordings of “Arthur.” She was sniffling, which meant she’d been crying. She’s funny, with moods that swing like a weathervane in March, so I ignored her. Bill came downstairs, followed by Camille, who was being cranky in her own way, and off the parents went for the birth of their first son. The girls and I watched “Arthur” together for a little while, then I read them an “Arthur” book. Susie’s mother arrived around half-past seven and I had a chance to try to get a bit more sleep. But the phone kept ringing: Bill, from the hospital, reminding me to drive Camille to preschool; Bill, again, reminding me to pick Camille up; Bill a third time, telling us that the baby was definitely coming.

At 10:45 the other phone rang: Susie, bright and chipper. “He’s here. Nine pounds, six ounces.” “Is he ‘wahee’?” I asked. “No,” she said, laughing again. I carried the phone upstairs to her mother. Bill’s skin the color of caramel that’s been allowed to darken about a minute more than necessary. Susie’s skin is really pale, and “wahee” is my brother’s old joke-Pidgin for “whitey”. (Susie’s vanity plates say “WAHEE”) Nina is pale, thought not as pale as her mother, and Camille gives indications that she will someday be a "brownie" like her father, though maybe not as dark. We’ll have to see how “the boy,” as we’ve been calling him, will turn out.

About 11, Bill called to say he was picking Camille up himself. He called back a few minutes later to ask me if I wanted to go see the baby; we picked up Nina on the way. The girls were super-excited, and I was as excited as they were. Standing in front of the nursery window, I watched as two nurses hovered over my nephew. Ian Joseph still had that purplish hue newborns have. An hour old! I’ve never seen a baby that newborn! Nine pounds, six ounces, and he’s already got quite a thatch of dark hair. I stared and stared. I watched the rapid flutter of Ian’s little belly as he breathed his first living breaths and thought about how much new information his body was being exposed to, second by second by second. I was reminded of standing at the window of San Francisco International, waiting for a PanAm flight from Seoul, South Korea, that was bringing my new sister. I thought of myself having been an hour old once. I thought of my birth mother. I thought of the toast I made when Bill and Susie were married, about family and the odd ways and means through which families grow. I found myself wanting to cry. I find myself wanting to cry even writing this. Nina and Camille had to be lifted and balanced on the railing. The nurses kept glancing up and smiling; my nieces, with their Amerasian looks, have that affect on some people.

We looked and looked and chattered and laughed, and my brother took a few pictures of us looking, and then we went to see Susie. For someone so recently in childbirth, she was in good shape, but tired, natch. My brother and I and the girls went to the cafeteria for lunch, passing the nursery on the way. I saw that Ian’s skin was already warming from purple to red-pink. By the time we returned to the nursery window after lunch, his skin had lost its reddish flush. Ian was looking even warmer and rosier, a healthy, hammy pink. We left the hospital reluctantly, going home to rest and nap and leaving Ian and his mother to do the same.

Erie Co., Pop. 921,390...plus 1

In California, whenever I didn’t know what else to do, I could always go for a drive. I like driving two-lane highways, and I like driving alone in small cars. When I was a little boy, I frequently took off on my bicycle for hours. Yesterday, hand-delivering promotional materials for the ballet school, I had my first real opportunity to drive around this part of the state. It was a hot late-summer day, and you could feel that it was going to be one of the last for a while.
Once you get out of Buffalo and the actual suburbs, Erie County becomes rural fairly quickly. It is like New York City in that way; within a surprisingly short drive of a major metropolitan area, you can find cornfields and pastureland. As a whole, this part of the state is flat. You can feel how the glaciers during the Ice Age really did their work. The region is so flat that it took me a long while to learn which way was north, and I always thought I had a pretty good sense of direction. I’ve since noticed that weather patterns pretty consistently sweep west-to-east, off the lake, so I’ve learned to watch for that. But I’ve also gotten a feel for the position of the sun and the light and such. I imagine that will all change with the onset of winter weather; I can already see how gray skies and snow could be disorienting, not to mention darkness.
The terrain in the southeastern part of the county rolls a bit more than in the north. Not much more, but some. I stopped at a number of Catholic schools on a list my brother had given me. I was not surprised to see that schools even that far out in the country have to take security precautions. Every school had a camera and a buzzer-operated door at its entrance, and in one case the principal himself came out to meet me. He and the man at the Elma Boys and Girls Club were the only men I had any contact with. Otherwise, it was a day of showing up in offices staffed by women, sometimes several women. The church office at St. Catherine of Siena in West Seneca. The school office at Annuciation in Elma. The library in East Aurora. The Boys and Girls Club in the same town. I paid a surprise visit to the offices of one of the papers that advertises the ballet school; it was also staffed by women, and while waiting to introduce myself to the woman on our account, I couldn’t help feeling the effect of being a man, and a stranger at that. In fact, several times during the course of the day I was aware of being appraised as a male animal by my female counterpart. This isn’t altogether new to me, of course; it’s just not entirely familiar, especially coming from a city like New York.
For several hours I criss-crossed that part of the county, doing my drop-offs, getting a fuller and fuller picture of Western New York. I even drove into Lackawanna, the city on the shore of Lake Erie just south of Buffalo. Lackawanna is depressing. I wouldn’t even say “in decline”—the phrase implies some kind of process. Lackawanna feels beyond process. On the very same street I passed several Catholic churches within walking distance of each other—St. Barbara’s, St. Hyacinth, St. Anthony’s—and wondered when the city ever had need for so many of them. The city of Lackawanna also has an enormous and impressive Catholic basilica, Our Lady of Victory. It is a huge church, and I wanted to stop and check out the interior, but there was a wedding in progress. The bride wore white with the traditional veil, but the groom and his ushers were wearing black suits, bright red shirts, and black cowboy hats, which they respectfully removed before they entered the church proper.

In Search of Marley

Last night my brother and I went to his new ballet studio in Orchard Park, New York, to do some more finishing work. After installing the flooring, he realized he should have put foam underneath, which gives the floor more spring and more cushion. It’s better for the dancers’ bodies. So we went back and rolled up the vinyl flooring that he refers to as Marley flooring, although he just calls it the “Marley.” It’s like a roll of rubber mat, black on one side, grey on the other.
We’ve already reset the Marleys in my brother’s first two studios, and now we’ve set the Marley in the new studio twice. He also has a portable Marley for his off-site performances, and it’s a heavier grade than the kind he uses in his studios. Dealing with Marley flooring is a hell of a job, but it goes with the territory of dance and dance studios and dance performances. You have to make sure there are no air bubbles or pockets, and you have to make sure the seams are as aligned as you can get them before you start taping them together. You use a special kind of tape that usually matches the color of your Marley. A dancer could slip or trip on a loose flap or a bulge and hurt herself. Since I’ve been here in Buffalo I’ve now dealt with more Marleys than I can keep track of. Last night, on my hands and knees for what felt like the umpteenth time and again putting down a Marley floor, I thought, Who or what the hell is Marley anyway? And what the heck is it?
It is calendered vinyl, as it turns out. To calender something means to feed it through heated rollers in order to give it a smooth and glossy finish. Calender is a corruption of the word cylinder, which comes from the Greek kylindros, which itself comes from kyklos, or "cycle; wheel. " You can get calendered silk and calendered cotton. I picture a kind of huge pasta machine, and also imagine that taffy and marzipan can be calendered. As for Marley, the name refers to the original manufacturing firm, which started in 1948 in Kent, England, and was later merged with another textiles company. I'm guessing that it was started by someone named Marley; there was no further information on the Marley company website.

In my search for more information about Marley Ltd. I also found a website called flooradvice.com. Flooradvice.com is a product information website, and according to its FAQs page, “dance surface floors made from vinyl and linoleum are often referred to as ‘Marley’ floors; this is the same as referring to all tissue as ‘Kleenex’ or referring to all sodas as ‘Coke.’ Actually, the original vinyl surface floor made by Marley for the entertainment industry stopped being produced around 1978, so it is truly doubtful that anyone is dancing on a ‘true Marley floor’ at this point in time.”
Flooradvice.com also has a page about a Marley-type floor called Primafloor, as in prima ballerina. “The most durable dance vinyl available,” Primafloor is “dimensionally stable.” My recent experience with vinyl floors leads me to believe that this means that Primafloor is less vulnerable to stretching or buckling or bubbling. Whether I'd be able to install a Primafloor remains to be seen, but I’m most interested in the product on flooradvice.com called "Divafloor." I clicked the link, but the product information on Divafloor isn't available and is "coming soon.” Just like a diva, to be coming soon, and probably also not dimensionally stable.

Border Crossing

The customs official on the American side of the Peace Bridge asked my brother where he was born.
“Saigon, Vietnam,” Bill answered.
The official craned his neck back and looked at me. “And you?”
“San Jose, California.”
The official, much friendlier than the one who had admitted us all into Canada earlier that day, shuffled our identification papers and driver’s licenses. “And how do you all know each other?” he asked. In his tone, I thought for a split-second that there was something more than mere formality; I thought I’d heard genuine puzzlement. Or curiosity.
Well, sir…officer, I imagined myself saying. My brother came to America when he was eleven years old. He and his wheelchair-bound father escaped Vietnam by boat. They left behind the rest of their family, my brother’s mother and two sisters. Apparently my brother’s father couldn’t convince them to leave. Another man, some kind of uncle, maybe someone not even related by blood, got them passage on a ship leaving the country under cover of night. The boat took them to Malaysia, to a refugee camp which in comparison to life in Saigon my brother would remember as a paradise of palm trees, white beaches, and turquoise waters. They didn’t stay there long. Along with others in that steady flow of refugees from Southeast Asia to the United States, my brother and his father were processed for admittance. They ended up in San Jose, California, where a Protestant church sponsored them, setting the father and son up with a place to live and a job for the father repairing bicycles, which he could do despite his handicap. Within the year, however, my brother’s father died, quietly passing away in the middle of the night. A family belonging to the church offered themselves as a foster family for my future brother, a family my parents knew because they too had adopted and fostered several children. So on Memorial Day weekend 1977, Bill came with my family on a camping trip, and a few days later, came to live with us for good. He was eventually adopted and naturalized as an American citizen. He became a professional ballet dancer, and in one of the many companies he danced with, met his future wife, Susie. They were married in 2000—I was the best man, Officer—and in 2001 their first daughter, Nina, was born. Tomorrow she’ll be six. Camille, the other one, was born in 2004, and as you can see, they are expecting another child any second. As for me, well, I am American Indian, and was adopted at birth by the couple who later adopted him. And that, sir, is how we all know each other.
Fortunately for everyone, I wasn't the one answering the questions. And was wrong about the note of curiosity I thought I heard. The official was just doing his job. Maybe, just maybe, however, he did really wonder. After all, there was a human being behind those aviator glasses and uniform.
“He’s my brother,” said Bill, “and the others are my wife and my daughters.”
“And what brought you to Canada?”
“We went shopping at Ikea. In Burlington.”
“And that’s the merchandise in the trailer?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s its value?” My brother had the figure at the ready. The official walked back, checked out the trailer, and came back to Bill’s window. He handed our passports and driver’s licenses and birth certificates back and said, “Have a nice day.”
“Same to you,” said my brother. With that, we were back, in America, on our way home.

In The Basement

My sister-in-law Susie grew up in the house where I now live. It’s on a street busy enough that it’s sometimes hard to pull out of the driveway, but there is an acre of land, so wooded that deer have bounded through the backyard. Earlier in the summer we saw rabbits foraging in the unmowed grass. The house feels big because of the number of trees and the acreage, but because there are five, sometimes six of us (with a seventh on the way), and because my brother usually has at least one of his dance students staying here, and because there are often other houseguests, it feels small. Earlier this summer my brother and sister-in-law and I cleared out the downstairs basement. It was a period piece, that basement, with veneer paneling, a dropped acoustic ceiling, a built-in wet bar, and a fireplace. We cleaned everything out and carpeted the room, and I stayed there for a few weeks until the dance student living upstairs left for her summer study in Miami. The basement room is still sort of musty—the other half still needs cleaning and organizing—and now it’s become a kind of rumpus room for my two nieces and a place to go when the rest of the house, which lacks AC, is hot. Fortunately, it's been a mild summer here.
Right now there is a pile of about thirty boxes of books in the middle of the basement, which still leaves plenty of space for the girls to play. My five-year-old niece Nina and I “opened” an art gallery downstairs, with a crafts table and construction paper and glue sticks and safety scissors and glitter and paints and crayons. Nina, who will be six in a week, is a budding artist. She loves arts and crafts; I taught her how to fold origami cranes, and she folded them for at least a month. Camille will be three in December, and doesn’t have any interest in sitting still and making things. She likes to climb and run and move; I have to tell her to stop climbing on the boxes of books or she’ll get hurt. She listens, and instead decides to run from one end of the rumpus room to the other and back. She shouts, “Look at me! Look! At! Me!” When Nina and I finally look up from the arts-and-crafts-table, Camille charges across the carpet to the airbed on the floor and throws herself across it. And then she does it again. And again. And again.
The books in the thirty-or-so boxes all belonged to Susie’s father. He was an English professor at Buffalo State College for many years. In the other part of the basement there were already at least fifty boxes of books, packed away with slips of notebook paper listing the titles, but John still had another officeful of books that hadn’t been moved in years. I finally boxed them all up because Bill wants to redo the office for his own use. I’ve never sorted through books so fast in my book-loving life. I divided them into three general categories: books that had obvious value (first editions, backlist keepers); books that had potential resell value (the old Vintage mass markets—John even had Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold in mass market paper!); and books that are too niche or have no value whatsoever (Magill annuals, French lit-crit). It was something else, going through that library. I really enjoyed throwing all the poststructuralist lit-crit in the third pile.
I only met John once, at my brother’s wedding. We chatted for what felt like five minutes, mostly about Diana Trilling. John was very interested by the fact that I’d worked for her and had known her so intimately. Unfortunately, he was stricken with illness not long after that, and passed within the year. Susie recently told me that the room where I’m now staying is the one where her father was right up to the end. Staying in the room where he spent his last days is a kind of contact; so was going through all of those books. I imagine he’d read in all of them at some point. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, but it's one of my projects for the months to come.

Buffalo '07 (continued)

Walking to a recent appointment here on a block of Main Street at the heart of downtown Buffalo, I was reminded of downtown San Jose, the city where I was born and raised. During those years, the Seventies, San Jose was a city that was dying if not already dead at its center, yet it was thriving at its edges. The last patches of farmland in the suburbs was sold off to developers and turned into residential or commercial real estate. The city built out rather than up, but because San Jose is enclosed by hills and water and other communities capable of stopping runaway construction, its outward expansion eventually reached various limits. Before that happened, however, the city’s old, historic core was discovered by individual investors and development companies interested in its empty buildings and blocks. Downtown San Jose’s decline slowed during the Eighties and with the economic boom of the Nineties, especially in the dot.com industries, was more or less stopped and even to some extent reversed. It will never be a city in the European sense, and will never be a city again as it was before suburbanization. It will, however, always be my hometown.

Speaking of hometowns, in my new one I did two unusual things yesterday. First, in the afternoon, I visited a Dominican nuns’ monastery courtesy of a friend of a friend. On Doat Street near Schiller Park there is a monastery of nuns in the Dominican Order of the Perpetual Rosary. Most of the nuns are cloistered, and I got to meet one of them through the visitors’ grille. Later, in the priests’ dining room, I met another one, Sister Maureen. She was an extern, which means she can go out and about in the world. About sixty, sixty-five, she accepted her vocation later in life, after years of marriage and motherhood. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing that her husband may have passed away after their children were grown. Sister had beautiful blue eyes and a lively manner; she taught English literature in her previous life. Later I was shown the church attached to the monastery. It was beautiful as only a Catholic church can be, and behind a large grille, in a chapel off to one side of the altar, a postulant was meditating on the Blessed Sacrament. When I was young I took Catholicism seriously, with the fervor of a child and a young, young man, and though I did not hold onto the Church and do not make regular contact with it for purposes of religious or spiritual practice, it is still a part of me and always will be. The monastery had a particular kind of spiritual power, perhaps the kind of energy others find at Dharamshala or Machu Picchu or Stonehenge; perhaps others find it in their own local parish. I have found my own spiritual practice, but was not at all sorry to have had the chance to touch base with the stillness and serenity of that monastery.

As if to demonstrate how dizzying reality can be, a few hours later, in complete contrast to the Monastery of the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, I was in Ralph Wilson Stadium for the home opener of the Buffalo Bills’ preseason. They were playing the Atlanta Falcons, and my brothers’ friends had box seats and two extra tickets. The only other professional game I ever attended was back in 1978, a San Francisco 49ers match at Candlestick Park. I don’t remember who the other team was, but I do remember that I got to see O.J. Simpson play. I wasn’t a fan by any means, but I did eventually become a diehard ‘Niners’ fan over the course of the Montana-to-Clark Cinderella season. I might not have become a football fan at all, but surgery on my Achilles’ tendon left me in a full-leg cast for the three months which coincided with the last three months of that season. I haven’t followed football much lately; the ‘Niners have fallen far from those glory days (R.I.P., Bill Walsh) and I could never really get behind the Jets or the Giants during my years in New York City.
Due to traffic and his characteristic reluctance to hurry when he isn’t in the mood to, my brother and I didn’t get to the game until halftime. I’m sure that if he had paid for the seats and/or if it had been a regular season game, we would have gotten to the stadium sooner. Our box was in the end zone, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there and I felt like a kid again. Of course, it was a treat to be in a box seat. The weird thing is how far away the game looks even from that close, odd angles aside. We left before the final gun, but did get to see one great interception and one touchdown by the hometeam. Oh…and we got to see a fan thrown out of the stadium. (Someone else in the box said, “Imagine getting thrown out during preseason.”) We did the Wave, and ate kettle chips with onion dip, pizza, and I finally had my first Buffalo chicken wing since arriving in Buffalo. Because Marshawn Lynch went to Cal, my alma mater, I got to keep the souvenir photo that they gave out. And since I have already been to a box seat in Ralph Wilson Stadium, maybe I’ve arrived in Buffalo for real. I even saved my wristband.

Buffalo '07

Earlier this year, I moved from NYC to Buffalo, which is where I am writing this. I'd lived in NYC since 1992 and it was time to move on. My brother Bill and his family have lived here for a while, and he had extended several invitations to come and stay as long as I cared to. Bill and I are close--which in my large and unwieldy family is saying something--so that wasn't the hard part of the decision. The hard part was giving up NYC. I love--have always loved--its energy, its crowds, its messiness, its insanity. At times I felt completely in synch with that, for better or worse, and certainly at other times I was absolutely out of step with it--more accurately perhaps, out of step with myself. From time to time, especially in the last few years, it felt like the exchange of energy had run its course, yet I still didn't know if I could give NYC up. Living somewhere as aweseome as NYC for fifteen years...well, it felt like I'd made a committment and was giving up on it. Without apologies for sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, I was waiting for NYC to break up with me, rather than the other way around.

But as I was crossing over the GWB in my rented Prius on a May day so beautiful it felt criminal, the sky above and the water below saturated with springtime blue, Manhattan shining behind me, the bridge's towers overhead, I thought, "This is right. This feels right." A few months later, settled in Buffalo, I wrote this poem (the title is a direct steal from Didion, who was stealing from Robert Graves).


Goodbye to All That

West Side Highway, a potholed ramp
Winding up, then the bridge’s pitch
Into light and air. A last glance south
At towers and places where towers were,
Other parts where I lived and where
I nearly died. No regrets, none.


I am actually in Williamsville, a Greater Buffalo suburb about thirty minutes from downtown. I honestly don't know how long I will be here, but it does look as though I'll be here through the academic year to come (I'll let you know about that later). What's important to me is that being here has granted me greater freedom and opportunity to write. Even something as simple as this blog seemed hard to get off the ground in NYC, and now I can stop saying "someday I'll get a blog going."