Music in the rain...

The emotional position I’m expressing myself from is not good this rainy week as February crawls into March. Sure, I’ve stopped drinking alcohol almost entirely, due to an “incident” last summer (July 2019) involving me falling down some concrete steps while leaving a party, and then slapping and swearing at my husband when he tried to help me up— but finally learning my lesson doesn’t make me a great person at last. But I don’t want to be a great person. I wanted to be a great something-else-specific, such as a writer or musician. No one gets recognition for their achievements in personhood— in fact they’re more likely to get taken for granted. I do realize now that, that night, with five beers in my system, I felt like the same “person” but apparently was not, behavior-wise. Oh, well. Alcohol, no matter the occasion, was no longer making me feel good, just sleepy and mostly silent. My aging animal energy was no longer bubbly enough to bring motivation and excitement to the drunken state (until I was threatened with what I thought was humiliation).

As our house fills up with boxes, papers, and random objects, I scan the domestic landscape and cringe. It is some relief to turn the lights down; even more to focus on the television screen. The best part of the day is the end of it, when I’m getting into bed with a book or something to listen to on my headphones. It’s nice if my husband is there next to me, reading or sleeping, but it’s not required. I’ve always been wary of “pleasure,” especially when deliberately sought, but I do admit to the occasional sensual journey provided by jazz classics. I relate more to piano and guitar, since those are instruments I’ve played, but I don’t object to horns, which surprise me with their aggressive precision sometimes. In this complicated sound world, everyone’s a genius but me.

I used to think of myself as a great appreciator of many things, but now the awareness of being ONLY that fills me with shame, which I manage to hide from myself long enough to enjoy the music. If I eschew the music and listen only to news podcasts, I avoid the shame (except for the slight embarrassment of not actually being a good activist) and embrace the world’s slide into dystopia while slowly realizing that it’s always been that way. These are the gifts of getting old.

My cynicism is not a pose. It’s a treasured inheritance, mostly from my father. Though my mother had faith, it was the kind that posited heaven as the goal and ignored the possibilities of earthly existence, or so it seemed to me. I’m probably wrong, though. She was a lively young woman before marriage and children, and I know she laughed and played and enjoyed exercising her mind, skills and charms. In a few days, if I’m not mistaken, she’ll have been gone six years. I suspect that she was proud to have passed the 90-year mark, mostly because her sisters did not, though they came close. I cried at her funeral after-party, but only because I was angry with my brother Michael for taking over the living room with his sons into the wee hours. (That was the last time I cried at all, about anything.) My mother-in-law may be on a similar trajectory to my mother’s, but no one is sure about that, because who can be? My mother had a stroke during or just after her hip operation. My mother-in-law did not, so my mother-in-law is better off, but she’s not happy about her situation. My mother had religion; my father had his intellect; my mother-in-law is bored and miserable. How can I not be aware of this constantly? How can I not be wondering what will happen to me eventually? My thinking tends toward, “Well, I have maybe five more years to keep going to these open mic events and playing a song or two, but even if I do become more proficient at it, what difference will it make? Because I’ll have to stop at some point, probably for some health reason. I wonder what that reason will be?” (I already have numb feet, to which I pay little attention unless I suddenly do pay attention.)

These open mics and jazz jams, though. They’re fun. I become a bit manic and strangely elated. I usually get to sing at least one song at the jazz jams, although I sometimes mangle it. Watching a video of myself from last week, I realized that for the first go-round of “All of Me,” I was singing in a key that wasn’t exactly the key that the musicians were playing in. How did that happen? If I don’t have the right starting note in mind I apparently can’t intuit the key in the chords played, at least not right away. (This was never a problem with my ol’ good-time band because the chords and keys were very simple.) During the second go-round of “All of Me” I was right on, but too late; I’d probably already established myself once again as a wacko wanna-be. I heard Marcia (who filmed it with her phone) in the background saying to another singer, “She’s got her own style.” Marcia is very kind, one of the people I feel I’ve bonded with at these events, although she isn’t a musician. She’s an appreciator par excellence and proud of it. It’s enough for her.

The open mics are a different story. I’m struggling and learning how to accompany myself on ukulele, and now on my tiny new tenor guitar, so I have some control, but it’s not easy. Every other week at Mad Malts, a local brewery, I try to do three songs I haven’t done before. I use the music stand and have stuff written down that I can refer to—I’m not proud. Lately, at our infrequent and pointless Lonesome Lovers band practices, I’ve been appreciating Huey’s guitar-playing and, most important, his prodigious memory. He may never have been the most subtle of players, but he knows hundreds of songs by heart, including the lyrics. I used to get so irritated and frustrated with him for his lapses and lacks, but now I realize I was probably lucky to be backed up by him when we were going strong in the early 1990s. I’m also realizing that, just very possibly, my loud, forceful, pseudo-Ethel-Merman-style singing and random harmonica playing were suitable only for my band, and almost nothing else.
 
So, now music is back in my life in a big way, but who knows how long it will last? It’s a great world to get lost in when the “real” world seems not to satisfy. But my longing to “achieve” something with music will not ever be fulfilled, and is pretty mockable. I need to chill. Perhaps simply learning a few new things is enough?

Maggie in the Sky with Subpoenas

With American political news podcasts in the mornings, followed by crime dramas on the TV screen in the evenings, pouring into my brain, I think I might be suffering from ongoing deafness/blindness to my own impulses and thoughts. I dream for what seems like ten hours every night, and that’s the world in which I feel most comfortable, despite the aforementioned inputs. It’s a world influenced by my memories and the few real-world happenings that affect me these days, such as my former boss texting me a request to pick her daughter up at school. It turned out (that day, anyway) that the child’s grandmother was available to pick her up after all, but the damage had been done. Lillian had injected herself into my mind. My dreams that night featured a party at her house that I was obliged to co-host. It doesn’t matter that the party might have been dreamily strange and amazing, or that the location was dreamily strange and amazing. This was a scenario I’d lived out before, just a few years ago. I woke up feeling depressingly under her thumb.

And yet, I am wondering if my personality actually seeks being under someone’s thumb, or at least seeks someone to do things for. It’s the rare occasion when I invent my own projects. If I’m in a situation where inventing my own projects is encouraged and expected, then I’ll invent my own projects. Just hanging around my house does not facilitate my creativity, though. Well, OK, I do create new dinner offerings occasionally.

The huge project that whines at me in the face all the time is the crying need to remove all this “stuff” from my house. But it’s mostly Russell’s stuff, so I hesitate. I also hesitate due to lack of (positive) energy. Mostly I look for excuses to go on errands, or to the gym (where I either swim or walk on the treadmill without much enjoyment). My sister (11 years younger) is still doing CrossFit over there in Spain, despite having broken her foot weeks ago and being obliged to do rehab exercises for it. And my nephew Tomas has won a CrossFit competition. These people are trying to set a good example, eh? But I had an athletic era of my own when I was in my 50’s, so wasn’t that enough? A dozen trophies for running far and fast are sitting on a shelf. I’ve had eras of many kinds, from innocence to jadedness, from ambition to dogged pursuit of the mediocre, from laziness to nervous activity, from musical adventures to no-music. Once in a while I’ve tried something new, hoping it will ‘stick,’ but nothing does. Writing always comes back. Music is currently back. But that feeling of having something to say is long gone; now I’m into writing about the past and learning some technical things about music and singing. I know by now that nothing I write or sing will help anyone, and in fact, the wanting to help anyone is very faintly felt. Barely a pulse.

I am not sure this is a result of, or preceded, my going on the wagon. I’m off alcohol and onto kombucha, which has sugar in it. That sugar is augmented by a new craving for spicy gumdrops, even more sugary. I don’t think I’ve gained weight beyond the ten pounds I slowly put on after retiring in 2016, but I’m not svelte. I am still flexible, though. I am attending what’s called Yin Yoga, led by my friend Joy, on Monday nights at the strangely elegant house on Holmes Avenue (near UAH) known as The Center of Light for Applied Metaphysics (formerly the Light of Christ Center). And I do meditation there every Friday, also led by Joy. This provides me with the necessary dose of being in my friend’s presence, although we rarely get together just the two of us. There are things she doesn’t like about me, and of course there are things I don’t like about her. We both persist in not changing for the other (not that we could). My notions of Friendship, and my notions of Love and Marriage have morphed so severely that I couldn’t define either at this point. Nor could I define Family.

I no longer have my parents as a reason to travel north, and of course, there’s the dog, whom I couldn’t bear to leave for more than a long weekend. I’m stuck right now, but I am the only one to blame. I just need some motivation. However, given my age (nearly 70) my idea of motivation will have to morph also. There is no future to be prepared for or personal adventure to hope for. Anything I do will have to be its own reward. And I was never able to take in that sort of reward easily. At least I still enjoy petting Maggie and watching the sky.

"The Teenager"

On August 2nd, 2017, my nephew, Tomás Del Pino Coffey, came to live with me and my husband in Huntsville, Alabama, for the 2017-2018 school year. He was 13 at the time; his 14th birthday was October 2nd, 2017. (That was a “cheat day,” when he allowed himself to go off his strict-but-plentiful diet). As a CrossFit devotee, he was into protein and carbohydrates, but not fat or sugar. On “cheat day,” however, he and Russell had breakfast at IHOP (International House of Pancakes), we all had burgers and fries for lunch, followed by donuts.

That evening we went out to a pizza restaurant, where Tomás consumed an entire large pizza and glimpsed his first American football being played on the television there.

He found it boring compared with soccer (which he’d played at school in Spain).

By his birthday, then, we had adjusted to his being here. His bedroom was my former office space. I was attuned to his needs, fixing his breakfast (three eggs, two waffles, fresh fruit, ice water) every weekday morning at 7 am. He was picked up for school (freshman class at New Century Technology High) at about 8:00 am by a friend whose daughter went to the same school. I was responsible for picking both of them up three days a week in the late afternoon. At first I would get to the school very early to get a parking spot and wait in the car, listening to the news. As the year went on, I pushed my arrival at the school later and later, but I was always there before “the bell rang.” Tomás was bored with school, for the most part. He turned out to be slightly rebellious in his approach to his “studies.

Having access to YouTube to learn anything he wished to learn, he didn’t appreciate having to listen to things that weren’t interesting to him. It turned out that English literature and history were two of those things.

This was shocking to me at first; as a high-schooler, I had initially respected the “authority” of my teachers, and even admired some of them. I wasn’t sure if I should scold or push him or leave him alone about it. It took me a while to remember that I, too, had rebelled, in a worse fashion. I had skipped classes, wandered off, and finally dropped out. Tomás wound up with A’s and B’s anyway, for final grades. He’s a smart kid, math-oriented, but not a reader. This meant that the enthusiasms and recommendations I had to offer were not needed. Instead, Tomás introduced us to newer, contemporary amusements via his cell phone.

Most evenings, I’d drive Tomás to the CrossFit “box,” a ten-minute drive. The class was an hour long, which meant I had to drive back to pick him up an hour later. Sometimes I’d grocery shop during this time; sometimes I’d take the dog to the dog park. My life became a series of car trips. Grocery shopping had to be done at least every two days. The kid ate a lot. I was making meals on the 1950s plan: a meat, a vegetable, a “starch.” My sister had given me access to some money in an account, which paid for his food. He’d eat twice as much meat as I did, or even Russell did, and would often follow dinner with a huge bowl of cereal and milk. Gallons of milk per week were also mixed with the protein powder he needed before and after workouts. He started indulging in a self-created workout at 6 am in addition to his evening WOD (CrossFit-approved Workout of the Day), doing “double-unders” (jumping rope) on the deck, swinging a 50-pound kettlebell, pumping 50-pound dumbbells. Of course, we’d hear his thumping as we lay in bed, not quite ready to get up ourselves. Tomás’s body shape was spectacularly muscular, and he was enamored of this aspect of himself. I (the contrarian) tried to ignore that aspect and pay more attention to his mind.

He was a funny guy. He and Russell had a rapport, part of which involved speaking in Maggie the dog’s voice, a rough, gangster-style persona that Russell invented before Tomás came, but to which Tomás added an incredible backstory that kept growing and growing. Maggie was more than a hundred years old, it seems, and had been everywhere and done everything, and been responsible for almost every important technological development of the last fifty years. She was a braggart and sometimes a liar; not to mention a narcissist, violent enforcer of her likes and dislikes, and a cattle baron (because she liked steak). Maggie, through Tomás, would berate me for not giving her enough steak.

In March came the workouts for the CrossFit Open. Five consecutive weekends of brief, but strenuous workouts that were scored by his coach, Nathaniel. Tomás wanted to do each workout twice, once on Friday and again on Sunday, to see if he could improve his score. He always did improve his score, and ended up 70-something in his age group in the world, out of nearly 2,000 contestants. A few weeks later he was officially invited to do the Online Qualifier workouts, which were to be filmed. I think he had hopes of jumping up to the top 20 with these four workouts. This was unlikely, but he was very angry with me for messing up one of the films (I was not used to using my phone for filming, and ended up switching to my video camera). With these workouts, he rose to 62nd in the world in his age group, a fantastic achievement, but only the top 20 would go to the annual games in August.

Before I witnessed Tomás doing this competition, I had no idea of his capacities. I was blown away, watching him. He was a real athlete, possibly even “gifted.” The first hug he ever gave me was after completing the very first competitive workout in March.
I was as supportive as it was possible to be, and would become as nervous as he was before one of these competitive workouts, the first series of which were done in groups, with a judge for each contestant, and a big digital clock ticking away on one end of the gym. The more “reps” and rounds of activities that were completed within the allotted time, the better the score. Usually the weight to be lifted was prescribed, but there were two workouts that involved increasing the weight. The kid dead-lifted 235 pounds, if I remember correctly. Some of the other activities were pull-ups, ring-muscle-ups, “burpees,” and handstand pushups. He was impressive at all of these. I was his CrossFit mom.

I don’t think Tomás and I started to become “close” until later in the spring, after the competition was over and he had resigned himself to not being in the top 20 this year. His achievement was amazing, but he had had an unrealistic, ideal goal. It took him a while to accept that, and to move his hopes toward next year’s games (2019). We would talk (or argue/discuss) while I drove him here and there. We would talk at breakfast and at the dinner table. For a while he was learning the guitar at school, and I shared some musical knowledge with him; I feel I could have done more of that, but I didn’t. It was difficult to get him to watch an entire movie unless it was an action picture. We did manage to expose him to “2001” and “The Wizard of Oz.” I took him to a shooting range because he wanted to try that. And, while he was here he found a girlfriend, Karla. She was 15, a bit older. They saw each other at school, but would occasionally meet other friends at the movies (more driving for me). After school ended, Tomás had ten days before his scheduled return to Spain. During this time he wanted to get together with Karla frequently (even more driving for me). By the time it came to say goodbye, the scene was a bit heartbreaking. Tomás had attended Karla’s sister’s wedding all afternoon at a house in Decatur. I went to pick him up at 6 pm, and waited for more than half an hour while they said goodbye, trying to give them privacy in the carport (I don't think they saw me take that picture). Karla cried. Tomás wanted to cry, but didn’t until later. The next morning, we all got up at 5 am to leave for the Nashville airport at 6:15 am.

So, this was my year to attempt to be a mother, since I don’t have kids myself. What I discovered was that it’s mostly a lot of hard work, none of which I minded, because it kept me busy and kept me from thinking about things I hadn’t done for myself, or in my own life. I felt a vicarious thrill when Tomás did so well in the competition; I was very proud of him. I adjusted to his not being an “intellectual” in the style of his mother and my father. He has a very healthy ego. He is not “troubled,” as I was at his age. I am sure he will endure some more disappointments in the next few years that may be even worse than not making the top 20 CrossFit kids’ list (in the damn world). He will grow and learn. He may or may not keep in touch with Karla, although at this point, he wants to come back to visit at Christmas. We don’t know yet if that will happen; flights are expensive.

What else I discovered was that it’s not possible to see into a teenager’s mind or soul; I could only surmise, suspect, project, and express caring, and laugh at his jokes (not difficult). When here, he did not have a problem with confidence; he indulged in over-confidence (it seemed to me) a lot of the time, but that is part of being a 14-year-old, good-looking male with physical energy and a future ahead.

As many young men do, Tomás fantasizes about being an “entrepreneur,” and not having to go to college or pay workplace dues or be under the thumb of a boss. He thinks he will invent, implement a thing or a process, and become rich and powerful. Some other ideas that he toyed with were becoming a CrossFit trainer, a policeman, or joining the U.S. Army (he has dual citizenship).

But now Tomás is back home with his mother, my beloved sister Felicia, who has lived in Spain for almost 30 years. She’s recently divorced from Tomás’s (and his older brother Gabriel’s) father, so it’s a bit tough for her to do all that chauffeuring and cooking, since she’s also working, teaching English at the University of Seville. Gabriel (18) now works as a steward for Ryanair, based in Frankfurt, Germany.

He comes home to Seville once a month. Tomás is having a summer of leisure at the moment, except for CrossFit. I saw him on Skype the other day, wearing the gray hairband I gave him to hold back his fashionable top-of-the-head long dark hair. We miss him, but it’s not that yearning kind of missing a person. It’s more like, “Wow! A teenager lived with us for a year, and it was pretty cool!” Should it be a yearning? Did I grow to love Tomás? I already loved him by default; he is family. I acquired more intimate knowledge of him, and that is part of love, I think. I care about Gabriel, too. We chat sometimes on WhatsApp, during which short moments I try to persuade Gabriel to give up being a fan of Donald Trump. Tomás does not share Gabriel’s political taste, fortunately, and I think Gabriel adopted his attitude partly to counter his mother’s very liberal influence; to be different, to have his own identity. They are so young, these nephews.

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Gilmore Swirls...

Oh, how I’d like to watch another episode of “Gilmore Girls” on Netflix right now instead of write this. I never knew of the series until the recent resurrection of it that got lots of publicity. A friend of mine wanted to watch the new episodes, but felt compelled to catch up on the old ones (from 2006 to 2011, I believe) before she indulged in the new material. Against my better judgment (as my mother used to say), I followed my friend’s example. Now, at the beginning of Season 2, I can’t say I’m hooked on “Gilmore Girls,” but I do enjoy the experience of disdain I feel for the character of the mother, "Lorelei." The actress, Lauren Graham, is, of course, attractive in a chipmunk sort of way; and self-absorbed as the day is long. She possesses the gift of gabble, the clever repartee of a dozen television scriptwriters working overtime. They gave the character their severe caffeine habit, among other things. And what’s with all the handsome people of color in the background? That is not realistic for a quaint New England town without an Ivy League college located within it. Or maybe things have changed, I don’t know.

Having come of age (12-18) in a quaint New England town WITH an Ivy League college in it, I suppose I’m nostalgic and jealous of the Gilmore Girls’ “Stars Hollow.” I could have stayed in Wellesley, right? I could have remained a town character (like I actually was for a year when I was 30, living in an apartment on the third floor of an historic house around the corner from my mother’s house, with a series of pathetic roommates). That apartment’s rent has probably quadrupled by now. I worked at the town newspaper (since swallowed by a generic publishing company) as a typesetter and artist, and had a crush on the one lowly photographer there. I had bad dates arranged by friends (the photographer was taken). I took to drinking apricot brandy with milk every night at bedtime. I didn’t stay in bed, though; I took night walks and ran into the another town character, Harry, who worked at the grocery store, was in his fifties, had a lisp, and apparently wanted to be spanked. I do not know if he ever found anyone to do it. I would wander by another historic house wherein lived another town character who smoked weed a lot, and I would partake, although it always made me paranoid. That feeling, pre-David Lynch, was not a good one. I saw “Eraserhead” in the fall of 1980, and thereafter I felt more comfortable with the paranoia that pot gave me. I applied for a position on the Wellesley Youth Council based on my experience with waywardness when I was a youth (and continuing), but didn’t get the acceptance letter until I’d already moved to Huntsville, Alabama. I wrote in my application that youth needed real adventure, and that was what had gone wrong. There was no longer any real adventure for the sheltered darlings, so they had to strike out.

And now, after 35 years in Huntsville, Alabama, I’ve retired from a job I enjoyed for almost 18 years, as secretary for the Department of Art & Art History at an Alabama state university. There were struggles before that university perch welcomed me, other jobs. I suppose I, and probably my brother Michael (only a year younger than me) considered ourselves scrappers, fighters, outsiders. We would NOT succumb to a secure, full-time job. Michael was tempted several times (once by the Harvard Law Library) but resisted. I succumbed to the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Michael is now an expert organic farmer doing what is really “sharecropping,” and has no home-base, now that our parents’ house has sold. I’m getting a pension and Social Security and married to a self-employed magician (and fellow art major) who is not YET retired, and probably never will. The amount of stuff accumulated in our household is appalling, because while I was working full-time, I paid no attention to my house as a place. The computer screen removes one from one’s immediate circumstances, as we all know. The pile-up resembles somewhat the pile-up my mother once created, with her bags of saved junk-mail and holy relics. I swore I’d make a film (I’m an amateur filmmaker) about her collection and her personality, and actually BROUGHT bags of junk-mail back with me from my expensive ($450 flights from Huntsville to Boston and back) cleanup sessions in her bedroom in Wellesley. But, by golly, I’ve LOST INTEREST.

Which is the main point of this blog post: LOSING INTEREST. What does that mean? How can I be consumed by one idea for about a year and then just LOSE INTEREST? I hate myself for this! The people I worked for bought me a very nice video camera for a retirement gift. How can I “betray” them by doing nothing with it? I have taken plenty of classes in the medium; I know what I could do. I just DON’T WANT TO. This is a betrayal of my mother’s life and of my department’s parting faith in me! I just don’t know what how I can go on with this charade. I have various “talents” and abilities. I have propensities, like the propensity to write. But gosh, unless I have someone demanding artistic products from me, I am NOT going to all that effort. And yet I go to simplistic physical effort three or four times a day to walk my newly-acquired little dog. Having taken plenty of (free-because-employed by same) UAH classes, I know that the idea of a “TEACHER” demanding things is something I’ve always responded to. But is that really “ME”? Why should I, Marylyn Coffey, make cheap little films when gods like Mike Leigh are making expensive, fantastic films using hundreds of people to help? I never was a team player. What am I supposed to do now? That is my question. And I have only beer, no apricot brandy at this time.