Appreciating Life (visit to Granddad's)

It's hard to know how to bridge a difference in age and time.  Perhaps I will understand it better when I am finally much older than I am.  It's not the first time that someone has told me to value youth while I'm able; but how can I do that?  From their own admission there is no way for me to comprehend what it is like to have parts of my body leave me, things that I take for granted introduce themselves as neighbors neglected for years.

It is hard and strange to watch someone grow older.  To see their body become less differentiated, their faculties wear with less acuity.  Who is a person, at what stage of their life are they who they are?  Watching my grandfather this afternoon, I saw him struggle to express his thoughts in the same way a one-year-old might, saw him reach slowly for his cup and tentatively bring it to his lips.  But from this side of life, he is not the same as he was 90 years ago.  What a difference it makes whether one has more forward or backward to look, and how easily it is to admit it?  People seem to be running from one or another their whole life.  Is it possible to exist in only one time?  We would have to deny its existence all together, and along with it, the evidence that it inflicts wear upon us.

Today was different not only in his difficulty speaking, in the extent to which his body has shrunk, but also in his conversation.  Rarely, if ever has he spoken frankly about getting older.  It always seemed his practice to protect us from any unpleasantries he might be carrying, generally preferring to be our counsel instead.  But today he exposed them to us, saying he never imagined it would be so hard to speak, telling us to enjoy our youth.  And today he took us along a personal memory which was different in texture than any I had heard him share before, a memory of waking early in the morning to take a shower and listen to music in the middle of the night when neuropathy in his legs kept him from sleeping.  He said he had a memory of sitting at the dining room table with headphones on while the rest of the house slept.  A time before any other distractions from our daily pains could help us.  Just music to fill the empty hours.  

It isn't easy for me to hold the string that connects so many parts of life.   It's not easy for another, nor is it easy in myself.  Life bears so many abilities, beauties, confusions, ironies, absurdities, how can we comprehend it?  What is one person from another, the length of life, or its measure?  I feel very lucky to have been given a perspective from later years in life, not only from my grandparents but also from friends and mentors.  And yet I am stuck with a dilemma.  How can I possibly appreciate life for all that they realize it is worth?  

The hour when the snow turns blue

I beat the sun.  In the dark, just over the horizon a giant star was waiting, but I got there first.

First Snow of Winter

There are many dark things in this world, but I am so grateful for snow.  How blessedly beautiful it is, and lucky I am to be able to walk and run and in the park in the evening and in the morning and to see the way it glows from within, and softens the sound and the look of the world.  It crowns the trees and purifies the ground.  Perhaps one day, we will live in a world with little snow.  How heartbreakingly, wonderfully, wonderful to have had a day with a long walk with someone I love in the blurry white, to take refuge in an unplanned visit to a friend that lives on the edge of the park, to share hot chocolate and cookies, and to go back out into the white world, cold, but in no way alone.

People Mobility

On my way downtown, the train I got on at 116th announced that its last stop would be 103rd, because there was a broken rail at 96th Street.  There were no further helpful instructions.  So at 103rd Street, the hundreds of people on that train all had to get off, shuffle out of the station and find some alternate means of getting wherever it was they were going.  A lot of them got on a bus, a number of them hailed cabs, Vias, Ubers or Lyfts,  and others (myself included) walked the 7 blocks to 96th where we were able to get on an express train (missing a number of stops that we might have been able to take were it a local).

Luckily I was only going to a class with a very friendly teacher, and luckily I had been able to leave early enough to allow that despite the added time, I was only 2 or 3 minutes late.  But what if I had had a job interview, sandwiched between other obligations in my day?  Or if I had had to pick up a child from daycare and had maxed out on my number of times being late?  Or if I were going to work, or an important meeting?  Late for a flight to see a sick relative?  Why does this city not care about the worker that can't afford to pay to take a cab everywhere they go?

It made me really angry to think about it.  And angrier still to think how ineffective that anger was.  All the politicians know this is a problem, but no one is fixing it.  It wouldn't make a difference if I wrote an angry letter or yelled at them.  The feeling is that they don't care about a lower class that is not giving them campaign contributions.  It is a terrible feeling to be so ineffectual.

My life is quite devoid of such anger, and as such, it doesn't stick.  I come home to a warm space, have a very controlled and happy life, and something like an MTA glitch is merely an inconvenience in my day, not something that will derail most events for me.  But there are lives that constantly have these setbacks, that are filled with anger and injustice, that are not heard.  In this country, there is still an indentured class of citizens.  Class mobility is not easy when it costs so much time and money to be poor.

Is it a gift to relinquish such control in the face of so many hardships?  The borrowed feeling of powerlessness today was in many ways liberating.  What is there to fear if no one cares, if you have no control anyway?  Perhaps dying is much easier.

But is that a way to live, or a justification for not caring about others?  And then what am I to do of it?  That's the dull blow at the end of the fading anger, which admittedly doesn't even keep me up at night.  I am able to let it go, because it does not really belong to me.  One of the workers in our building, whom I've spoken with a number of times, calls me ma'am.  I know his name and use it.  But I'm neither entitled to a name, or better still, the silence in lieu of it.  I am of a different class, one that is served, one that doesn't speak Spanish, one that has generations living on this soil.  And it seems there is no way to bridge that.

May I discover another way.

Changing the Color

There are so many horrible things in this world.  It is hard for me to understand how people can have so much hate, or be willing to hurt so many others for personal advancement.  The news if filled with horrible stories.  Our government is doing horrible things; horrible and hurtful.  And yet one day we will all die.  The terrible things that get under our skin, the things that news outlets cycle and recycle, will one day not exist, nor will there be any record of it existing.  It will end.  Everything will cease to be.

It's not that these things don't matter, in fact, quite the opposite.  But how do we interact with them?  Starting my morning playing Bach doesn't change the news.  But it makes part of this universe, at least for this instance of time, more beautiful, more loving.  And to share that with others can change the color and the fabric of our world, at least for the time that we here.  And in the end, there is nothing else that matters.

A very long day, including a recital

Overall it has been really nice to hear my students' recitals this fall.  It's rewarding to start creating a deeper connection with people and to really see something forming in a way.  I can hear the things that we've worked on, that are there because we worked on them together, and I can also hear places that we can grow together.  In both ways it's exciting to be building something new with so many wonderful people.  

Flying Above

I might be noticing a trend in flying recently towards sentimentality.  Something about suddenly being lifted above the ground where I was walking, seeing hundreds or thousands of houses and people in one little window puts things in perspective.  Or it might be the air pressure.  That's actually my first guess.

Regardless, I appreciate emotions and the different reflections they offer the mind.  Whether they come from a physical or a situational place seems a bit irrelevant, unless I'm trying to "solve" them.  If I find myself pondering mortality and the wonder of existence, it doesn't matter if it is brought on by lack of sleep, or diet, or air pressure, or the very real absurdity of our ephemerality.  Who would have thought that any of the world we know around us would have been possible from the natural landscape in which it is nested?  It seems just as impossible that we could grasp the nature of ourselves and our place in it, and yet, look what we've been able to create.  Surely a flight here and there and the world becomes smaller and larger, in just a few hours....