Sunday, November 30, 2008

VA Hospital I

Getting into the VA Hospital was not an easy task. The fence surrounding the complex was simple to breach; holes all along the perimeter allowed someone willing to get dirty underneath access. But the buildings were boarded up tight. Not many windows even within climbing-in distance, and none of them broken. A hulking main hospital building was joined on the grounds by what looked to be a smaller hospital building, an office building, a few duplex homes, several outbuildings, and a neat row of private houses. Inside the first house we just felt like we’d broken into someone’s home – and a nervous raccoon was upstairs – we ignored the houses and aimed at the institutional buildings. We found access to the office building, but – hard for an explorer to say – nothing of interest was inside. Upstairs were dormitory style bedrooms done in boxy wooden 1970’s institutional furniture, portending things to come. We left without shooting and headed for the big hulk.

The main hospital building had been retrofitted with countless other buildings attached to it by a web of trailer-built hallways; like an octopus it had reached out and suckered onto the smaller buildings around it. But all those attached buildings, and still…no open windows. Circling the building was no easy task with all the appendages it had grown, and three vehicles were parked in front of a much smaller building across a large parking lot. We worried they were associated with human beings who might catch us. Surreally at one point, a fire truck made a circuit of the road around the complex. We hid behind one of the attached trailers. We tried everything: air ducts (too slippery – only works in the movies), lowering the tops of windows (they stuck on pieces of plastic designed to stop them from lowering), climbing down into cellar window areas (none opened). It was hard to believe we were going to be stymied. That’s happened only once before and at a place that was not abandoned, only closed. This place was definitely abandoned.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

old friend

A couple of weeks ago my mother, who is a hospice chaplain, sent the family an article from the NY Times about hospice chaplains. I read part of it, it was two pages long, and left it open on my desktop to finish later. As is my habit, it remained there for a long time as I kept seeing it and not having time to finish it. But last night I was trying to catch up on old reading and instead of ignoring this article as I’d been doing for weeks, I decided to simply finish it. I scanned the first page for a review and clicked to page two. In the very first paragraph it mentioned a name I recognized as someone who was using a hospice chaplain to help her die. I thought, well there have to be several people with this name and I continued on. But like coming upon a wreck that’s broken apart and strewn pieces over a debris field I found more clues: she lived on the lower east side of Manhattan (so did my Karen Gilbert), she was the same age as my Karen Gilbert. At least she was the age I thought my Karen Gilbert was, I’d not communicated with my old friend in over 24 years. We’d been in graduate school together, working on our Master’s degrees. She married a lovely man, a guy we’d all thought was pretty cool. The wedding was in Goshen, NY – a bunch of us took the train up. Her wedding cake was homemade with loving hands, not bakery bought, decorated with real flowers. We kidded often about how her husband, Paul, was one of the few good men in the world and how mostly they were just pretty well useless. When she got pregnant I asked what she’d do if she had a boy and she answered that would be bad because then she would have to leave it at the hospital. Her beautiful baby girl came home a few months later. Thanks be to the gods for that one, huh?

The hospice chaplain article said its Karen Gilbert had died of colon cancer; and a narrated slide show was attached to the piece. I still hadn’t discovered the hulking shell of the wreck that my debris field was pointing toward. But when I played the slide show, there was her husband’s name, Paul Gregory, yes that was him. I knew it was impossible that all these clues could not be adding up to my old friend and there in the slide were pictures of her. It was difficult to find in the photos of a 56-year-old woman dying of colon cancer the same woman I’d known a quarter century ago. But when it showed photos of her and Paul from their wedding I knew my long ago friend had died on September 29, of this year attended by her friends, husband, and a Buddhist hospice chaplain.

How odd, to find out someone you knew a long time ago as a vibrant young woman has died a sad and painful death – or any kind of death. How should one react to this sort of news? Should you be sad even though you’ve not seen each other in years? Years of missed opportunity for reconnection have passed and now the chance is over. Are you allowed to miss a person you haven’t talked to in two and a half decades, someone you’ve not been close to, someone who simply passed through your life for a few years – years ago? One death summons all loss and particularly Karen Gilbert’s death for me. The article mentioned her sadness and guilt at having to leave her children. She died of colon cancer, the same disease that claimed my mother, who also had to leave her child. I recall our months and months together in classes, late night conversations, the people we knew. I think about how many of them have died in the intervening years – the roommate I lived with when I met Karen died of breast cancer several years ago. I think of the number that counted her years and it seems foreign to me. How could we be that age? How could we die at that age? How can we leave children, husbands, a life well-made? How could we have come from graduate students to here?

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

what to write

I’ve missed talking about a couple of abandonments we’ve visited lately. I can’t quite remember, but I may have also missed putting up the address of my new website (built for me by my exploring partner) where all my photos are now going. The site for seeing my photos is secondlaw.net – the main text has appeared here. I will now also be setting off as a blogger to blog the exploring on that site. But I am not abandoning this blogsite. I will not leave this site to deteriorate and be explored by virtual explorers in some dark electron-disintegrated future. I will maintain this blog and continue my writing practice here. Promise.

A colleague just published a book wherein she writes short essays about people who’ve influenced her life in various ways but who are now dead. I wish I’d thought of that. I would like to present a twist on the theme. What could it be? People who’ve influenced my life who are now executed? People who’ve influenced the lives of people who are close to me but who are now dead? I’ve always loved (among pretty much all her review writing) Dorothy Parker’s assessment of Margot Asquith (wife of the 1908-16, British Prime Minister, she was a writer well known in London’s social circles). Asquith’s autobiography told of her many encounters with important folk. Parker noted “I don’t say that Margot Asquith actually permits us to rub elbows with them ourselves, but she willingly shows us her own elbow which has been, so to say, honed on the mighty.” So I thought I might write about other people’s dead folks, show off my elbow that I’ve rubbed with them. We shall see how it comes out.

Friday, November 21, 2008

what I remember

What do I remember from what came before? Garrison Keillor says we remember things from childhood more vividly than those things that occurred last week. Especially as we age, the things lodged more effectively in the memory are those that have had long to find their place. So what do I remember?

One day when I was five or six I wanted my dad to come play with me. He was on his bed, newspaper spread in front of him. When I asked him to come on out and play he said he would as soon as he finished “this article.” “What’s an article,” I wanted to know. “An article is the word a, an, or the.” Well that is true. Those three words are articles. But why? Why would a grown man tell a six-year-old child, to whom he’s just said “wait till I finish this article,” that this is the definition of an article. Did he, in the ten or fifteen seconds between my first question – “come play” – and my second question – “what’s an article?” – forget that the two questions were linked together by his answer in between? Was he intentionally trying to mess with the kid? Did he somehow think that those three words were the most essential meaning of the word article, such that it trumped having his tiny daughter know what he meant? Did he think I wouldn’t notice that he’d performed a semantic slight of hand? What? What was he thinking?

It’s not as if I didn’t notice the incongruity. In fact, I spent many hours between the moment of his utterance and my learning parts of speech years later wondering how it could have possibly taken him so long to finish reading one of those tiny words. Even if he’d been reading all three of them, how could that have taken the 15 minutes that passed until he emerged from the bedroom for some play? When he did appear, I couldn’t figure out how to articulate a question that would indicate perplexed-ness. I was, after all, only half way through the single digits. But I was terribly confused. And I never forgot it. I never forgot how he absent-mindedly answered me and how I tried desperately to make sense of what he’d said.

That absent-mindedness, I think, accounts for many confused children. A friend told me that she once, at about the same age, asked he mother why, when addressing an envelope, she was supposed to write “New York” twice. Her mother’s reply? “I don’t know.” It seems impossible that her mother really didn’t know. But it was one of those “oh really” answers you give to three-year-olds whose speech is still unintelligible, one of those “don’t bother me,” or “I’m not paying attention to you” replies. Usually those answers rush by in the heat of a thousand a day. But every now and then one lodges in a child’s mind and you can have years of wondering...what did she mean by that?

Sunday, November 16, 2008

second law II

To continue some ideas about my photos:

Each abandoned site was once a humming, functioning, part of American culture. But each has been consigned to obsolescence as society moved past them. Factories closed down as manufacturing processes shifted in both location and method; hospitals that warehoused and prisons that tried not to were replaced by different institutional approaches; theatres, resorts, and other entertainment venues slipped into disuse as patrons abandoned them for other amusements and the economy forced them off their rails. What were once ways of life in America have become our distant past, with the clock turning ever more rapidly.

Technology goes not alone into obsolescence. It is joined (in Kuhnian style) by our worldviews and our ever-fluid relationship to the environment. This trajectory toward entropy becomes opportunity another McLuhan dictum: that all things once useful return eventually as art. Here, then, is my humble recording of the journey of these places as they slouch toward their destiny.

Friday, November 14, 2008

The moment before

There’s that moment, the moment before it happens, that the world is still the same. Everything is in its place, all you know is as is always has been, nothing you see is any different from what it’s always looked like. Just before the car is broadsided, just before you open the door to find the stereo missing, just before the diagnosis arrives, just before you touch her forehead and find it cold. And then…the world changes. Irrevocably. Eternally. Nothing will ever feel the same. No matter how much time passes, you will always be a woman who lost a child. Never again just a teacher. Never again just a dancer. Never again just a parent. But always a teacher who’s lost a child, a dancer who’s child died Sudden Infant Death, a parent who’s child was kidnapped from her tent.

After that moment comes another moment. The moment in the pocket, when only you and the few gathered with you know. To everyone else in the world she is still alive, the murder has not yet occurred, her body not yet turned on her; everyone still loves a living, breathing woman. But soon the echo chamber will cry out the news and slowly the darkness is populated with eyes filled with sympathy. The world is forever changed. You are forever changed.

The moment has far less to do with the event than with knowledge of the event. We live in a constant state of not knowing, altered periodically by searing tragedy. The trajectory of our lives bounces wildly off these moments, atoms carving paths through the ether. The moments in the pocket are precious moments, moments of held silence where the news hovers before its ignition. The moments we long to recreate.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Veteran's day

Tuesday was Veteran’s Day. Or as it used to be called: Armistice Day. When the first of our republican idiot presidents signed the Uniform Holiday act in 1968, he moved four holidays to Mondays: Washington’s birthday, Memorial day, Veteran’s day, and Columbus day. Washington’s birthday has become President’s day; I won’t address the stupidity of celebrating Christopher Columbus (although I am surprised it hasn’t become Explorer’s day); Memorial day has stuck. But veterans throughout the land were unwilling to give up their date. Everyone remembered – soldiers, children of soldiers, people who cared about the country’s wars – that the armistice ending The Great War (World War I, before World War II appeared on the scene) was signed on November 11, and celebrating it on a random Monday (for some odd reason I can’t explain the first one after the UHA was celebrated in October) violated the symbolic sensibilities of the nation. Hooray for the veterans who insisted on the symbolic meaning of 11/11. They knew that their treaty, signed at 11 AM on the eleventh day of the eleventh month had meaning beyond ending this particular war. By the eleventh hour we must end all war. If we don’t we are surely consigned to the abyss of mutual suicide that any war eventually becomes.

Friday, November 07, 2008

end of election week

Listening to the news is safe again. Well almost – 74 days till the ass is out of office. I heard my first Obama press conference on the way home from work. What delicious cadences, what a marvelous deep and sonorous voice, what intelligence, confidence and thoughtfulness. So much the opposite of what we have had for the last eight years. No more of that idiot, no more of that twang, no more mispronunciation, no more misunderstanding, no more ridicule of ideas, or hostility to reason. Praise be to the gods.

Now. Can the damage be undone?

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

post election day

I spent last night in front of the TV as I do every election night. Unlike twenty years ago when they took down Dukakis’s picture and put up Reagan’s vice president (GW Bush) by half an hour after the polls closed in New York, tonight they waited until polls on the West coast were closed. But just moments after 11, the election was called for Barak Obama. Tears streamed down my face. And Jesse Jackson’s face. And Oprah Winfrey’s face. And the faces of people all across the country. So incredibly emotional was yesterday’s election. A catharsis.

For the first time in a long, long time, I’m hopeful again, proud again to be an American. I’m not ashamed of my country or my president. We may be just reinvigorating that old 60s idealism, but I genuinely feel this man can change politics. Maybe we can have a government that works again. There’s still the religious right that’s infected the other party to deal with. That party will need to do some soul searching. And find ways to reconnect with actual people and not just corporate interests. Real people and not just ideology. Real people and not just hatemongerers. But this man’s presence is the picture of hope and calm, he is this generation’s inspiration.

How far we have come. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime; I never thought I’d see a black person even contend for the nomination. But now he is our president. President Obama. The words have come smoothly for months, it always felt right. He is powerful and calm and reasoned and smart and he ran a perfect campaign. Never wavering from his primary message, never reacting to unreasonable and silly attacks, never changing approaches, never making ad hominem his tactic, never losing faith in his ability to scale the height. When he came out last night, “America’s next first family,” he looked so calm and in command. This is our next president. Our smart president. Our president who was actually elected, not one who stole an election and then drove every important element of government into a ditch, leaving it there twisted and burning. This president will surround himself with smart people not afraid to speak their minds. He will base his decisions in sound reasoning after listening to what he needs to hear. This will be a good president, an honorable president, a president for the 21st century. Our eight year long nightmare is over, it’s morning in America. Now is the time, and yes we did.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

election day

I cast my vote early this morning. Too excited to remain in bed, I got up at 6 AM. Arriving at my polling place at 6:30 I found a line awaiting the 7 AM opening. I talked eagerly to the folks in line near me for a short while then read the magazine I’d brought and put in my iPod headphones. I found it difficult to contain my excitement. A small cheer went up at 7 when the line began to move into the building. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would to get to the registration table. I assisted the blind man in line behind me and then took my registration card to the next line where a man stickered me with an “I voted” sticker. He put it on vertically as if it didn’t matter. But it does matter, it matters so much.

The Provisional Ballot Booth, off to my left, was a piece of cardboard table display tri-folded to look like the voting booth privacy sides – like a child’s copy of a real voting booth. In magic marker the poll workers had written “Provisional Ballot Booth,” seeming almost a joke. It sat low on a child’s desk, this being the elementary school gym.

Finally I was called to the booth. It’s not a booth any more, but a small Diebold machine on thin metal legs, plastic privacy sides stand up left and right, the cover of the machine forms the front barrier. My first choice was for president and my guy was listed first. Barak Obama and Joseph Biden. I voted. As I ran through the rest of the ballot – bond issues, judges, constitutional questions – I was eager to get to the end. I reached the end of the ballot and it gave me the page for review; I saw at the bottom right corner a large button titled “cast ballot.” As I touched it my eyes welled up with tears. I just can’t believe I’m getting to do this. I never thought, in my lifetime, never, that I’d be able to vote for a black man for president. I never thought, ever, that there would be a man who energized the electorate like this man. I never thought, ever, that I’d be cast a vote in an election where the choices were so stark – between a mechanical, twentieth century approach to the world and a twenty first century digital-age understanding. I never thought.

I’m beside myself with excitement. I’ve been ferrying voters to the polls from the senior center near me. But many of them voted absentee so the load is light. Later today I’ll go to the gym for a little work out. I’m just trying to pass the time until 6 PM when some polls start to close and I can start listening to results.