A Tourist in New York
January 2002
I.
Are we different they ask? They are somber. They are quiet. Like a dog, kicked, they cower in a corner of themselves. Eyes watching. Brows twitching. They wait.
The cabs no longer honk their horns. Even now I hear a bird sing. We jumped when a box hit the ground. There is fear. But a new kind.
There is no petty larceny. No pickpockets. No muggings. No sirens. No jackhammers. No wolf-whistles. No whistles at all. Gone are the pulsing cars with blaring bass lines. People are polite. Polite! A construction worker said excuse me as I pushed by his shoulder on the corner of 6th and 19th. Excuse me. I’m sorry. And he moved over to let me pass.
I spent a significant amount of time wondering what was going to happen next.
II.
The prevailing winds send a cloud of ash and dust up the avenue. A gray, acrid haze hangs in the air. Motes of white, like dandelion fluff float and land invading our eyes, our noses, our throats. The wind blows cans and friends into the street. I point my nose high like a dog sniffing the wind for rabbits.
Is it a fire? We need a radio but use the cell to call a friend. What is it? No one knows and we think again of the unseen hole guarded by red ticket holders. We were barred entry and instead looked up at the impossible sky.
The smoke drove the joy from our day. The winds swept us uptown to more mundane dangers. Death by taxi cab. Death in the park. The unbearable burn of the cold.
We bought mugs of orange soup and sat with the dog, dreaming of aliens.
He never wants to go out I thought. That dog never wants to go outside.
III.
Tattered flags are flapping from cars and off poles in my neighborhood. I saw them too in Harlem. On Queens Boulevard. We feel like patriots and hold our breath as the plane bumps and grinds its way back home to the unreasonable beauty of California.
Halfway home my breath comes easier knowing the fuel tanks have lightened their load and we are beyond the danger of being recommissioned as a missile.
I am ready to go home. I miss my children, my husband, my dog, the boredom, the laundry. I miss the tranquility. I close my eyes and anticipate the memory of eerie stillness in the city that I love like a parent, a brother, a friend.
Times Square and no horns. Stuck in traffic, in a cab for God’s sake. For hours.
Nothing.
Patience.
Breathe.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
So much for therapy - fiction (sort of)
“Look at us,” he said, “We’re time travelers!”
I was trying in that moment to reconcile the face in front of me with the child I had left behind 40 years ago. Left but never left. Left but have a spent a lifetime searching for. “Who are you?” was what I was thinking but what I said was “You look like your father” which was true enough and he said “You look like Rayna Star” which was an amazing compliment since I had not been Rayna Star for 30 odd years trading off husbands and last names in a series of new identities each one taking me further and further away from Tailwind Lane. The home of my youth. The last place I used Star to define me.
“I am old,” I said. “I was molested by a priest” was his answer. “After we moved away.” and so it was out there. The missing forty years. Just like that. I said nothing. I had been talking about my trauma and my mistakes now once a week for twenty years. There was nothing about them that was interesting to me anymore but still I plopped down $130 a week to go over them. Week after week. Year after year. The same stories. “I’ve been in therapy for twenty years” I said in an offering of solidarity. “I just quit,” he said. “How many times can you drag the garbage to the curb?” I hugged him then. Or wanted to. Instead I let go of my own sacks. Just put them down then and there. “I loved you,” I said. “And I you,” he answered. And I said, “I don’t think I ever recovered from losing you.” And he said, “Me either.”
There was never that moment. That ‘Now What?’ moment. The moment where everyone recognizes in awkward self consciousness the horrible lapse in judgment that led to the reunion. The moment where the fantasy past and the realistic present collide. I expected we would have it. Reinforced my coping skills with positive and affirmative internal messaging. Shored up my diminished self-esteem. Provided exit strategies and possible outcome scenarios in order to rehearse comfortable escapes and soft landings. I prepared with mental imaging of my support network, the current partners, friends and professionals that could help me process the shame and disappointment that I might be feeling if this opportunity, like so many others, did not play out the way I expected. I calculated minutes to hours to dollars ratios to project a cost analysis of recovery due to yet another hair-brained emotional recovery plan gone array. But it was all for naught. Despite my best efforts to plan for self-sabotage and implement a self-soothing recovery plan, none of my usual machinations were called for. We had fun. Although I had thought that I would never in my life experience it again in such a pure and innocent manner.
This is what happened:
After forty years of interruption, we met, we remembered, and we laughed.
I was trying in that moment to reconcile the face in front of me with the child I had left behind 40 years ago. Left but never left. Left but have a spent a lifetime searching for. “Who are you?” was what I was thinking but what I said was “You look like your father” which was true enough and he said “You look like Rayna Star” which was an amazing compliment since I had not been Rayna Star for 30 odd years trading off husbands and last names in a series of new identities each one taking me further and further away from Tailwind Lane. The home of my youth. The last place I used Star to define me.
“I am old,” I said. “I was molested by a priest” was his answer. “After we moved away.” and so it was out there. The missing forty years. Just like that. I said nothing. I had been talking about my trauma and my mistakes now once a week for twenty years. There was nothing about them that was interesting to me anymore but still I plopped down $130 a week to go over them. Week after week. Year after year. The same stories. “I’ve been in therapy for twenty years” I said in an offering of solidarity. “I just quit,” he said. “How many times can you drag the garbage to the curb?” I hugged him then. Or wanted to. Instead I let go of my own sacks. Just put them down then and there. “I loved you,” I said. “And I you,” he answered. And I said, “I don’t think I ever recovered from losing you.” And he said, “Me either.”
There was never that moment. That ‘Now What?’ moment. The moment where everyone recognizes in awkward self consciousness the horrible lapse in judgment that led to the reunion. The moment where the fantasy past and the realistic present collide. I expected we would have it. Reinforced my coping skills with positive and affirmative internal messaging. Shored up my diminished self-esteem. Provided exit strategies and possible outcome scenarios in order to rehearse comfortable escapes and soft landings. I prepared with mental imaging of my support network, the current partners, friends and professionals that could help me process the shame and disappointment that I might be feeling if this opportunity, like so many others, did not play out the way I expected. I calculated minutes to hours to dollars ratios to project a cost analysis of recovery due to yet another hair-brained emotional recovery plan gone array. But it was all for naught. Despite my best efforts to plan for self-sabotage and implement a self-soothing recovery plan, none of my usual machinations were called for. We had fun. Although I had thought that I would never in my life experience it again in such a pure and innocent manner.
This is what happened:
After forty years of interruption, we met, we remembered, and we laughed.
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