tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2171454613677082912024-03-13T12:26:10.115-07:00This Is the WhaleIn which I read <i>Moby-Dick</i> slowly and keep an eye on the horizon
Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-36947086564304081742023-05-30T20:05:00.001-07:002023-06-08T16:22:00.908-07:00Finale<p><i>It is a time-bound book of distinctively American accent, mainly in the sense that Melville realized, with his great contemporaries Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Thoreau, that the very idea of America entailed an obliteration of the past that placed unprecedented demands on the resources of the self. </i>A.D.<br /><br />Sorry, I was never going to finish <i>Moby-Dick</i> this way. Now that I’ve finished it I can see that. I still didn’t finish <i>Moby-Dick</i> in a normal way, just by sitting down and reading it. I had to rope someone else into the project, and he and I read about twenty pages a week for nine months, with a final sprint at the end. We didn’t meet and talk, we just read it separately and then emailed each other on Sunday nights, our letters crossing each other and usually going unanswered. He wrote to me about philosophy and his experience in the army, and I wrote to him, often enough, about how I didn’t understand what Melville was doing. <br /><br /><i>Moby-Dick</i> wasn’t much fun to read, was it? Let’s be honest with each other about that, and all other things. I had to google all the biblical names and most weeks I felt either that I was missing a lot or that I was bored out of my head. Especially after I made it out of the opening chapters, which belonged to a different book than the rest of it, one with narrative thrust and a sense of humor. I had read those once already, in order to write the previous posts on this blog. But once I sailed out of the harbor of those earlier, familiar, more obviously novel-like chapters and into the deep symbolic waters (I’ll stop doing this soon) of the rest of the book, I found myself putting off doing the reading each week until Sunday night, when I made a big deal out of it. I said, I have to go read <i>Moby-Dick</i> now, dramatically and as if everyone, meaning my husband and our younger son, should feel bad for me. As if I were important. Then I retreated to our bedroom in a bad mood and did a Sudoku puzzle on my phone. And eventually read it. And sent an email to my friend, who had already read the chapters and written to me about Aristotle, or Rousseau.<br /><br />I finished <i>Moby-Dick</i> towards the end of the plague time, which coincided with the conclusion of my children’s childhoods—Henry was in his junior year of college and John finished high school while I read <i>Moby-Dick</i>, and I read the last page of it on a trip we took to Spain to celebrate John’s graduation. The world around me, and inside me, was a world of scarcity and if not depletion, then something that felt like it at the time. But the mode I read <i>Moby-Dick</i> in was one of expectation. I approached the book imagining that as I read on and on, and on, I would see its greatness unfurl, so that when I turned the last page I would lay the book down and, inspired, seek out friends to whom I could say, I have read <i>Moby-Dick</i>, it is fantastic! It changed my life. I would shake them or maybe just bore them a little, talking about how great it had all been. There were moments where I saw something of its significance, I had glimpses of beauty, insight, tenderness. They just didn’t coalesce into a form I understood. So when I turned the last page I found myself sort of lost. I’d seen something, but it hadn’t been what I’d expected, and I was disappointed by it.<br /><br />I had traveled to Spain with an old, battered, relatively compact copy of <i>Moby-Dick</i> so it was not until we were back in San Francisco that I was able to open my pristine Penguin edition and read the introductory essay by Andrew Delbanco I’d been saving to read at the end. Imagine my pleasure when I read:<br /><br />As anyone encountering <i>Moby-Dick</i> for the first time will discover, it is a book that struggles to maintain its narrative drive against the impulse to digress and meditate and play. <br /><br />I actually laughed out loud at that. Because I didn’t think Melville struggled, in the sense of resisting this, at all. <br /><br />And Delbanco had other criticisms of the “boggy,” dense, inconsistent work, each of which I treasured, even as I knew that Delbanco hadn’t written this introduction to argue that <i>Moby-Dick</i> was a bad novel, poorly written. No. Of course not. The opposite. He was describing what he considered the best novel ever written in the English language. To make this argument, he put the book in historical and literary context, giving it its place, as well, in Melville’s life and oeuvre. And the essay’s good, it’s helpful, you should read it. You’d like it. I liked it. Just forgive me if I’m not convinced by any of it, even though in the end he and I come to the same conclusion about the book’s value. My take is this: I should have read <i>Moby-Dick</i> with the understanding that it was great, and that I was going to have to shift my ideas of what great was to fit with what Melville does in <i>Moby-Dick</i>. Not because someone, or even everyone, had told me what to think about it, but because that’s what you have to do, to make sense of anything. Melville didn’t write <i>Moby-Dick</i> so his readers would understand how a whaling operation worked, although he did know something about that, and he did write those facts into his book. He wasn’t writing an adventure tale, either, although he’d written those before. Melville wrote <i>Moby-Dick</i> to express something complicated but true about his life and the difficult, shifting, conflicting times he had been born into. And if I wanted to understand my current moment and maybe, even, express something about it—to myself or to someone else—I would have to work with what I had. And I’d have to love it.<br /></p>Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-74192190672544857322019-06-21T16:01:00.001-07:002019-06-21T16:01:12.418-07:00Knights and Squires<i>“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”</i><br /><br /><br />My older son graduated high school and is driving across this country of ours with a friend of his. They planned out the trip together over the course of several weeks and shared the route with their parents via Google Drive and Google Maps. We were asked to make comments in the documents and so I copied and pasted the links to roadfood.com, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and the new ticket policy at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. On the last night before he left, Henry and I drove out to Immigrant Point and sat in the car and while the wind blew in off the Pacific, he told me things he doesn’t normally tell me, but that he wanted me to know before he left home. Then we went to Walgreens and wandered the aisles looking for bug spray and sun screen. Then we went to the grocery store and bought eight honeycrisp apples and a bunch of bananas that are still in the kitchen, because he forgot them.<br /><br />I imagine an infomercial that begins, So you’ve raised a son to adulthood! Now what? And then offers to sell me something strange that will take my mind off him leaving. Teach a snake to bike ride! Build your own birch bark canoe! Become extremely flexible!<br /><br />And then footage of tearful parents desperately pressing the numbers on their phones. Yes! Something! Anything!<br /><br />One thing that nags at me is the worry that I haven’t passed along everything I wanted to give him. Four nights ago I went over that list, with my husband. I said, He likes music. He reads books. He feels connected with the world. He hates fascism. Check, check, check, check. The list seemed pretty complete. But on the way back to the house from the supermarket, I sat there trying not to spout a series of last-minute additional bits of wisdom at my son. They were all probably things I’d told him before. Also, he’s a smart and reasonable person, and they were all things he could easily figure out. And also, it wasn’t like he was going somewhere there was no cellphone access. We were going to speak again. Nonetheless, I urgently wanted to tell him these things. Luckily, he was feeling kindly towards his old mother, and when I said, as he parked the car, I’ve been trying not to give you final pieces of advice, he said, It’s fine, do what you have to do. <br /><br />So I did.<br /><br />Then we unloaded the groceries, and went into the house. David and I made dinner for the four of us, and Henry packed, and we all, including his younger brother, watched a movie together. In the morning, before Henry left, I woke up from a dream and thought about his elbows, which were, in what seemed to be recent memory, soft and hung over with rolls of fat. I could hold onto them and stroke them when he rode in the baby carrier on my chest. And then sometimes he would fall asleep in the baby carrier and slump forward, and become so heavy that it seemed I was carrying a different baby on a different planet with a different gravitational force. I thought about how when he was still little but a little older than that, he would lie with his head in my lap and I would look in his ears and I would think that I could see right into his brain, even though ears don’t work that way. I could hold all of him, right up until I couldn’t. And once I couldn’t hold all of him, physically, I still knew him, continuously, from the time he was born, and I could hold him, in my mind, like that. <br /><br />Henry ate leftovers for breakfast. Then, to everyone’s shock, we were done with his childhood. <br /><br />He and his friend are currently driving through desert. After that, they will get to the hot and swampy South, and then, some time later, they’ll turn the car northward, and head up along the highways and forests that lead to the nation’s capital, and then New York, and then finally to Nantucket. There he will meet my parents and relax for a week or so, before, in truly anticlimactic fashion, flying home again.<br />Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-43717876615106052912018-10-04T15:45:00.001-07:002018-10-04T15:45:13.969-07:00Postscript<i>Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.</i><br />
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To hold a baby’s hot head in your hands. You pour olive oil on it, and scrub off the cradle cap, and the baby yells, and you wish you could do it over again.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-80156042760933640132018-10-03T09:59:00.000-07:002018-10-03T09:59:00.705-07:00The Advocate<i>But though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us a profound homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!</i><br />
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I am a mother, and my mother is my mother. This June, driving near her home in New York, she had a heart attack, and my father drove her to the hospital. In California, where I live, my family and I had just arrived at the airport. We were flying to New York to drop our older son at his summer program. So when we got the call from my younger sister that my mother was having a heart attack, all that happened was that everything became clearer than it was before. All we had to do was get onto the plane we were planning to board, and go to see her.<br /><br />By the time our flight, delayed, took off, I knew that my mother had had a stent inserted, and that she was stable and doing well. It was an extraordinarily fine day, clear and cloudless almost to the center of the country. I watched the U.S. pass under us and felt things I hadn’t known I would feel, even though I think about my mother, and myself, all the time. It turned out I didn’t think about her deeply enough. I didn’t think about her with any accuracy. I didn’t normally see what I saw as we passed over thousands and thousands of people, and miles, which is that from my point of view, my mother is equal to all those people and all those miles. She has been that powerful. <br /><br />And then, at the same time, she is weak. I hadn’t thought about her body as a mechanism I had a relation to since I was a toddler, when I needed her to take care of me. I remembered, or anyway I remember now, the fact of her heart, as I knew it then. It beat hard within her—almost excessively, I found. When I came to my parents’ bed one morning, and Mom, needing more sleep, lifted me onto her chest, that heart sounded in my ear, and filled her lungs with air so that her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and instead of feeling comforted to lie on top of her I felt jostled. I lay awake on her, trying to match my breathing to hers, wondering why I couldn’t get comfortable. After a little while I couldn’t stand it anymore, and had to go. I don’t think that I ever went back.<br /><br />Is telling someone about a beautiful flight on an airplane like telling someone about your dream? When we were almost in New York the plane dropped down over Long Island, the cloud cover dispersed into strips and rags of fog, and the watery marshes below us were so still that they could have been fifteen, rather than a thousand feet below us. In the hospital in Westchester where we saw my mother the next day—O Westchester, green and lush with spring rain and summer sun, probably the only landscape I will ever really love—she was sitting up in a chair, nauseated, unable to eat or drink. My sisters and I, my children, my husband, my father, some cousins—eight or nine of us spread out around her room with the Sunday paper and salads and snacks from the Au Bon Pain on the hospital’s first floor and had a very good time. <br /><br />Finally the nurse cleared us out so she could check on my mother, and I saw my mother get out of her chair and climb back into the room’s high bed, where she rested on her back like a statue, arms at her side, nose presiding, under a light.<br /><br />My children left, one of them for four weeks. The other I saw the next day.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-47163683991523781642018-01-18T12:29:00.000-08:002018-01-18T12:31:57.917-08:00The Lee Shore<i>Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?</i><br />
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I don’t remember the flights. I don’t remember being cold, although I must have been cold. I do remember viewing Lenin’s Tomb, although I remember it in such a hazy and provisional way that it’s possible I’m just imagining it. It was February, 1989, and I was in Russia on a school trip with the other students in my high school’s Russian program. We were not supposed to buy things on the black market, said one of our teachers, who then sheepishly purchased an army jacket on the black market. We were there at the end-ish—<i>we</i> didn’t know—of the Soviet Union, unable to imagine the past, present, or future of the place we stood in. We were American high school students on a foreign language trip staying in hotels otherwise frequented by businessmen and hookers, with considerable freedom to wander around foreign cities on our own. From our point of view, the dismantling of the Soviet Union was a time of sexual tension, personal growth, and fun.<br />
<br />
By choosing to room with each other and not, either of us, with her, Angela and I confirmed what Katharine had known, but tried not to admit to herself, but had been resentful of, ever since she moved to our town from the Midwest, which was that Angela and I were the real friends and she was the third wheel. She had to room with Elissa, who wouldn’t share her maxipads because she was afraid she wouldn’t have enough when her period came. Maxipads! Not even tampons. Meanwhile, Angela, whose boots always needed an assistant to remove, and I fought several battles of our own. After one, I walked out of the hotel and crossed underneath the highway that separated it from the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad, where I wandered around, trying to read the labels on the displays and feeling alone in the world. Boohoo, contextually speaking. After another screaming match, the football player staying in the room next to us came in wearing his boxer shorts to try to broker a peace. He was good looking and the underpants thing was distracting. Angela and I set about making ourselves less opinionated and difficult and more interesting and fun-loving, stat.<br />
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I lost a pound a day on that trip, which was like, Thanks Soviet Union, for your easy diet plan! At meals I sat with a group of funny boys who played with their mashed potatoes. One of them wasn’t important, one of them threw all the windows open in his hotel room so the curtains billowed in and out, sneered at people who didn’t know Sting’s “Little Wing” was a cover (I totally knew that), and also went missing for a day and a half while looking for and possibly finding, allegedly, hash, and one of them had a crush on me that I publicly rejected. He became someone else’s nice boyfriend when we got back, while I continued to wander around in a virginal fever until graduation and then for an additional period of time I’m not going to specify here. Not that virginity is anything important, meaningful, etc. Obviously not. Why would someone ever want to have penetrative vaginal sex for the first time?<br />
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Little Wing had his luggage tossed on the way out of the country. <br />
<br />
We went to visit a Soviet high school, where we met, as one does, students our age who spoke English much better than we spoke their language. One of the boys exchanged numbers with Amelia, a girl the year behind me I considered impossibly dramatic and pretentious, even relative to the rest of us. They made plans for her to come to his apartment. Maybe because I was her only option, she asked me to come with her, and for some reason—not only were we not friends, but at heart I was (am?) a chicken—I said I would. Two boys picked us up at the hotel and we took the Metro across Moscow together. The number-exchanger was good-looking and an excellent English-speaker; his friend was dumpy and silent. I didn’t appreciate the implication, but whatever. The apartment was in an area that had nothing but tall identical apartment buildings. The boys made us mushroom soup and a second course I can’t remember. Maybe a salad? They did not serve us alcohol, although I had prepared myself for that possibility by worrying about it. After this uncomfortable meal, Amelia and the alpha guy went into another room and I sat on the couch with the beta friend for a while being like Now what? Because there is no universe in which I am making out with you. I don’t think we spoke. On the way back to the Metro the boys informed us that everyone in the neighborhood could tell we were Americans because we smiled. That was one of the only moments during the trip when I noticed something significant about the country I was in. Relatedly, I didn’t give anyone the presents I’d brought from the United States, which were copies of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> and Sting’s latest album. They seemed embarrassing and juvenile, suitable only for dorks.<br />
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We went to the circus and I was so upset for the animals I had to step outside.<br />
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I don’t think that is the last thing that happened on the trip, but I remember it that way: Snow was falling, beautiful, silent, soft and and white. Angela and I had gone off on our own, but now we had to meet up with the rest of our group at a tourist shop near the Rossiya Hotel. Again, the rules on this school-sponsored trip retrospectively continue to surprise me. Why did we have so much free time? Why were we allowed to go wherever we wanted? I had been at a stranger’s apartment in Moscow without any supervision for hours. And now what would have happened if we hadn’t made it to the store in time? We didn’t have a map. We stopped someone to ask her how to get to the Rossiya, and she told us a set of directions, all of which, after the first, we either couldn’t understand or promptly forgot. So we’d walk a little while, ask someone for directions to the Rossiya, take the first direction, then stop someone and ask them directions to the Rossiya. We arrived, finally, at the top of a set of stone stairs that led down and then up again, and we could see across this little gully to the Rossiya Hotel. We burst into the store snow-covered and steaming with our success, to find everyone buying pins and flags from a country that to us was best understood as someone else’s mistake.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-26421813543431846832017-05-19T09:18:00.000-07:002017-05-19T09:18:09.122-07:00Merry Christmas<i>It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say goodbye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came back on deck, and looked to windward, looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lanterns, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”</i><br /><br />You are in a room. It is a fairly spacious room, for a bathroom. The walls are white paint above white tile, the floor is also tile, old brown tile, with old dark grout between the tiles. Everything in the room is old—not ancient, but, if you had to guess, thirty years old. A little younger than you are, at the time. The sink is the kind of sink you’ve been seeing your whole life—it sticks out from the wall, its guts are visible underneath, it has a tiny lip around it that can just fit soap and a drinking glass. It has a mirror above it, and to that mirror you stick, by their suction cups, two plastic animals, an elephant and a giraffe, whose bellies open up to hold toothbrushes. This is not your bathroom, after all, it is the bathroom of your infant boys. <br /><br />The toilet is standard issue. When you are potty training your son, you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, sitting in front of him as he sits on the toilet, as if he is an idol you must prostrate yourself before. When the other toilets in the house are all occupied you sometimes sit on this toilet yourself, generally in some kind of wet.<br /><br />The closet has two louvered doors that open so you can step inside it a little, and look around on the shelves for what you want. It is more generous than any bathroom closet you’ve ever had, and is a good place, if you’re little, to hide during hide and seek. A low shelf on the right holds a pile of soft white cotton towels, each with a corner stitched over to make a pocket that will hold your baby’s head. You have scattered thermometers a higher shelf, and spread Band-aids around on another. The humidifier on the floor was bought in a humidifying emergency, and will never be used again.<br /><br />The tub is a very familiar tub. Every American who is reading these words knows this tub, with its white, sloping, ceramic sides, its once-tacky, worn-down, anti-slip shapes on the bottom, its metal and frosted glass surround, the doors running in a sharp metal track that cuts your arm when you lean over it to hold your boy, to scrub your boy, to fetch toys from the drain for your little boy to play with. The toys fill with water and then with mold, and are a minor source of dread, since mold is probably bad for babies, but you can’t figure out how to keep the toys, with those little holes in their bottoms, from developing the mold, which then squirts out shamefully when the boys squeeze them during playtime. Unless you’re just supposed to throw the toys out all the time? Some people, you’ve heard, wash their toys with bleach. And some people have net bags that they hang from the side of the tub, into which they load all the wet toys at the end of the bath, but you and your husband don’t do this, you leave the toys in the tub where they lie stranded, once the water has drained out. <br /><br />When your son is sick, you two sit on the cool tile floor together in the middle of the night. He goes to sleep in your lap and wakes up to be sick, and then comes back again to sleep on you. You sit on some towels, so you will be more comfortable.<br /><br />The light coming through the window behind the toilet is green from the leaves on the trees in your backyard.<br /><br />It is really a very pleasant room. Bath time at night can be hard because your boys don’t want to get into the bath—and then, almost always, when the bath is done, it seems they don’t want to get out of it. And in the summer, you decide that swimming at the town pool is like having a bath, and put the boys to bed without washing them, which means, I guess, that you sometimes find the whole thing a pain. <br /><br />But now that you are not strictly and officially in the room, the room is bathed in a heavenly golden light. The boys are so little, with such slippery, sticky skin. When they’re a certain age you bathe them together. You wash first one uplifted, twisting face, then the other. One time you knock your boy’s loose tooth out while you do this, and he sees the blood and somehow is out of the tub before you can stop him, running around this room screaming and trailing pink blood over the towels and across the tiles. You clean each boy’s hair by soaping it with a soapy washcloth, then tilting his head back, pouring warm water through it, leaving it shaped into soft clean curls. You <a href="http://thisisthewhale.blogspot.com/2016/07/his-mark.html" target="_blank">sing to these sons</a>, songs about baths, but you also have strange, unmeasurable periods of time, where they play happily in the water, and your mind is free and untethered to the place where you are. And you see, although you don’t see this for some time, that this room is a room machine, and you can go there, or leave there, anytime you want.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-9836623278906658522017-03-31T18:02:00.000-07:002017-03-31T18:03:05.803-07:00Going Aboard<i>“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.”</i><br />
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Dentist yesterday. I sit in the chair—there is a fountain somewhere, but the water in it doesn’t tinkle, it splashes—with my mouth open, and I think, What is the answer to this? Do I have them pull all my teeth and replace them with fake teeth and then I have only fake teeth and those teeth can’t rot? But is it accurate to say that fake teeth can’t rot? And even if they can’t, don’t you still have to take care of your gums and get check-ups for your gums? So then what should I do? How can I possibly get out of coming here three times a year, every year, for all my days? How can I avoid feeling my mouth fill with water until it dribbles over my lower lip? And involuntarily clasping my hands together in my lap? And having to stare at the overhead lights and listen to the music that is still elevator music even though it has been upgraded to tasteful covers of famous songs performed with guitars and quavering female voices? And the answer is, There is no way out of this that you would like.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-3827248304546718602017-03-08T12:28:00.003-08:002017-07-18T16:13:20.157-07:00All Astir<i>For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.</i><br />
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Sunday I discovered that Gmail had erased almost all of my sent mail from the last fifteen years and all of my research and writing notes. It took less than seconds for technology to take on, for me, the guise of a faceless ravening force, not unlike an angry spirit in a Miyazaki movie, intent on devouring everything I had. Every time I opened my mailbox I could see this force moving messages, thousands of messages, tens of thousands of messages, for its own evil purposes, into the trash and then, as far as I could tell, immediately deleting them. <br />
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I closed my mail app down, quickly, but I had to open it again to check on what was going on and try to stop the carnage. Every time I opened it I found the spirit there already, awake and active, shoveling everything off into oblivion. I searched the web for answers. I called technical support but it was after hours. I had trouble breathing. I started to sob.<br />
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My husband came in and sat beside me on the couch and looked on horrified at the destruction. We kept searching for what was lost and trying to locate and save whatever we could but we could only find things from the last few days. It was late, the children had taken themselves to bed, we had to get up in the morning, but I had the feeling that if I didn’t placate whatever unhappy animus was at work, I was going to wake up to find everything—all my mail, my documents, journals, stories, sketches, novels, photos—gone. When I finally turned off the light I couldn’t sleep—I lay on my stomach envisioning the malevolence in my computer as it destroyed everything on my hard drive and then extended itself out from my computer to my various back-ups and corrupted them, wiping out every piece of my writing life. I saw myself waking up in the morning with nothing I’d written left. What it would be like to have to live without these pieces of cyberpaper existing, except within the current version of myself? Everything that I hadn’t already absorbed into my body would be gone. People lose things, I thought. They lose keepsakes, records, and manuscripts in floods and fires. They lose their keys and phones to carelessness. I once thought I’d lost my favorite necklace, a long strand of green turquoise beads that had belonged to my maternal grandmother and that I could wrap three times around my neck, although as it turned out my mother, to whom the necklace really belonged, had taken it back from me without telling me. But then I had taken the necklace back from her and managed to get it stolen. <br />
<br />
You have to go on, but you go on as a different person. The other day I was looking through photographs and I thought about the time before cameras, when most people only carried with them what they could remember. Maybe, I thought, it would be good for me to be reborn without things and to have to start all over again. Maybe it would clarify who I was and what I wanted to do. Pretty sensibly, I didn’t want that. At midnight I ran to the computer and checked to make sure my novel was still there. Finding it extant, I worked on it for an hour or so, making a number of improvements.<br />
<br />
In the morning after some searching I found a link that Gmail provides for users to ask for help retrieving emails; as soon as I filled it out Gmail wrote me to say, “Hello, We received your request to recover deleted emails from your account. Unfortunately, the emails were permanently deleted, so we're not able to get them back for you.” The word “permanently” felt bad. So I spent the day, except for a lunch date, where I drank down a large, yellow glass of wine, on the phone with Apple technical support. Late in the afternoon, a tech friend sent me an email from a contact at Google with the link I’d used that morning and directions about how to effectively use it. After which I received a new email from Gmail that said, “Good news! We are currently restoring your missing Gmail messages.”<br />
<br />
I opened my mail again and found that the machine, still a spirit but now almost excessively benevolent, had started giving me back my things. I watched as it downloaded hundreds, then a hundred thousand emails, pouring them into my inbox and all my other mailboxes. I was inundated by messages, virtually drowning in them. I went to bed. In the morning, happy to have my messages back but feeling an urge to get my inbox a bit more organized, I deleted a big chunk of them. This was a mistake akin to something a family friend of ours once did: just recovered from a terrible bout of food poisoning and once again hungry, he opened the refrigerator looking for something to eat, and found and ate the clams that made him sick the night before. The evil spirit stretched its arms and opened its mouth, and my messages started disappearing again, in bulk. <br />
<br />
So I started the whole process once more from the beginning. Now the messages, are, once again, gushing back in. I could spend the rest of my life figuring out what to do with them all.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-46363894944596143532017-02-17T14:24:00.000-08:002017-02-17T14:24:17.150-08:00The Prophet<i>“Look here friend,” said I, “but if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that’s all I have to say.”</i><br /><br />I reread, just now, work in my novel from the last few days, and I can see that there is something wrong with the way it is written. I have also, today, been looking at a book called <i>A History of Pictures</i>, by David Hockney and Martin Gayford, and in it they talk about a picture of Caravaggio’s in which all the figures are sort of occupying the same space, but without a real relationship to each other. It is clear to me that I am doing the same thing, in my writing, but it is less clear how I can correct that.<br /><br />Usually when I need to figure something like this out, I leave it alone and go do something else. For a long time what I’ve done is read the next chapter in <i>Moby-Dick</i> and try to write about it. I have rules about this, namely that I read the chapters in order, and I can’t read the next chapter until I’ve written something about the last one. My problem, now, is that several months ago I read the next chapter, “The Prophet.” For weeks I hadn’t known how to respond to the chapter, but one day I went out for a walk and on the way back, in the sunshine, an idea came to me with its first several lines attached, and those lines were in verse.<br /><br />I don’t normally write poems and I am, in all likelihood, an inadequate poet; nonetheless I was quite taken by the poem that I then wrote, also titled “The Prophet.” I decided to send it in to the <i>Paris Review</i>. I knew that it was entirely improbable that the <i>Paris Review</i>, which publishes really wonderful poetry, would publish my poem. But, as it happens, I was once, myself, employed (barely) by the <i>New Republic</i> to cull unsolicited poetry submissions. This history made me particularly able, I thought, to cast myself into the mind of the person at the <i>Paris Review</i> who would be reading my unsolicited submission—who was, after all, in some way just a younger version of me. I still thought it highly unlikely that the magazine would publish me, but at least somewhat likely that I would get someone’s attention.<br /><br />So I wrote a cover letter that would convey this coded information, and settled back to receive what I expected would be a personalized rejection letter, sent through the years, from myself to myself. Months have passed without that letter, or any response at all. During this time, so many memories and ideas have surfaced, and I have put them aside without writing about them. Today, for example, reading Hockney’s and Gayford’s book about pictures, I remembered the little mirror my mother bought me in sixth grade, when I first got contact lenses. It had a square yellow plastic frame and it sat on my desk, and I stared into it when I put in my contact lenses every morning. My desk was covered with all kinds of things I don’t remember, most of them—the clock radio and this mirror being the exception—absolutely without utility to me in my daily life. But the little mirror was really useful—not only did it perform its contact-lens service, but I liked to sit in front of it for hours, sketching myself in the lined pages of a black-and-white Composition notebook. <br /><br />I made one successful drawing of my face. More by chance than skill, dragging my pen across the pale blue lines, I captured some true aspect of my appearance by drawing my eyes, accurately, as differently shaped from each other. One eyelid was puffier, and the lashes curled differently, but also I allowed the eyes to relate more to the rest of my face than they did to each other. In sixth grade this mismatch struck me as a flaw. In art class we had been taught to draw faces by dividing them into parts and proportions, and when I drew, I strained for symmetry. Yet there my drawing was, mismatched and unmistakably me. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to go on from this. I kept sitting down in front of the little yellow mirror and trying to draw an ideal.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-91181427984257242622016-07-15T14:33:00.000-07:002016-07-15T17:51:28.882-07:00His Mark<i>Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—<br /><br />“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “sposee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.”<br /><br />“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats.”</i><br />
<br />
<br />
I used to dream that one day I would be marked out and plucked from obscurity and, if I am going to be completely honest, I dream of it still. When I was young the dream involved my singing voice. I hoped that it was beautiful. I had read in a child’s biography of Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind being discovered by an impresario wandering by her open window and I thought it might happen the same way for me. And so it came to be that one evening at Tanglewood I lay with my family on a blanket, singing along to whatever the orchestra was playing—I can’t imagine what classical piece I knew that well—when we were approached by a man and a woman who had been seated with some friends nearby. <br />
<br />
“Your daughter has a beautiful singing voice,” they said, and I believed them, although some part of me must have had my suspicions about what they meant since I remembered the scene well enough years later to figure out that they were have a gentle laugh with my parents at my expense.<br />
<br />
I sang in the car and imagined a man on top of the car, waiting to catch a few notes.<br />
<br />
I had a very small singing part in the high school musical, and a smaller dancing part.<br />
<br />
I auditioned for but was not asked to join the chorus at a college known as the “singing college.”<br />
<br />
Still, I loved to sing. When the children were newborns I found that talking to them was unbearable, and that taking care of them in silence seemed sullen or even hostile. Imagine wordlessly stuffing someone into a pair of pajamas. The only thing to do was to sing, and I sang a lot of impromptu songs about what I was doing, including making the bed and hoping I wouldn’t find shit in their diapers. I also sang along with the radio, and, especially at bedtime, I sang actual songs. If you’ve read the book <i>Mating</i> you probably remember the protagonist walking through the desert to her true love, singing to keep herself sane. She discovers within herself a catalog of songs that she knows all of the words to, and while her repertoire was more wide-ranging than mine was, because she was fictional, it was pleasurable for me to wander my desert and figure out that in fact I had a solid catalog of patriotic tunes that my children found soothing. I also sang “Sweet Baby James,” which is really, really long, every night for about seven years. During that period, I found I was able to cut my brain off entirely from what I was doing, and kind of ramble around it with a flashlight in my hand while my chest vibrated and pushed sound up through my throat and out of my mouth.<br />
<br />
I watched an interview with Hugh Jackman, who did such a nice job in <i>Oklahoma!</i>, and he told me that the trick to singing well is to mean every single word you’re saying, and then I tried to do that, when I wasn’t trying to cleave my consciousness from whatever I was saying or doing at the moment.<br />
<br />
And then one day the children were grown, or more grown, and they loved my voice. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-74374287413751612412016-05-18T13:19:00.000-07:002016-05-18T13:25:10.407-07:00The Ramadan<i>Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.</i><br />
<br />
My Uncle John had been handsome and charismatic in his youth, but when I knew him he had a mustache and a belly that looked like a beach ball stuffed under his shirt. When my mother told me he had died by driving off a road into a tree, I had to suppress the urge to smile at the news. I wasn’t happy he was dead. I was the victim of some faulty wiring.<br />
<br />
John has been a kind of secret in my life, in the way that slavery is a secret, by which I mean of course he wasn’t a secret at all. He was right there—I just didn’t ever inquire too deeply into who he was, and what his life meant. Almost nothing I write after this will make sense if I don’t first write that John had bipolar disorder. He had gone to one year of college—my college—before dropping out. He lived in places you couldn’t really live in—an unheated summer cottage, a motel, both in rural New Hampshire. There was a girlfriend we saw sometimes but I only met his daughter, who was then nineteen or twenty, six years after he died, at my grandfather’s funeral. She died before I saw her again.<br />
<br />
Mom kept many of the details of John’s life from us, I think because she didn’t want us to be scared by her brother, whom she loved. I knew that she went to see him in hospitals, that he didn’t like his medication, and that he smelled, generally, of beer and cigarettes. When we went to New Hampshire in our early years as a family, in the mid- to late ’70s, John stayed at the old house with us, and organized games for us and our friends. We could choose between being Rockwell’s Angels and Rockwell’s Rangers—Rockwell was his middle name.<br />
<br />
Only once, when I was in high school, did I talk to him in a manic phase. He called the house for my mother and when she wasn’t there he talked to me for twenty minutes about Vietnam, where he hadn’t served and where, in any case, the war had been over for some time. He was full of conspiracy theories that might also have been racial theories. He didn’t stop talking, and he didn’t make sense.<br />
<br />
After John died, I wrote a long essay about him and about my family’s visits to New Hampshire, which was, for me, a strange and unresolved place, physically beautiful but psychologically dense. I remember describing how, in the kitchen in the house my mother’s family owned, the old refrigerator and the old stove stood next to each other, and it was tempting to brace yourself against the stove to open the heavy refrigerator door. But there was something really wrong with the wiring in that kitchen, and if you touched both appliances at the same time you would receive a serious shock. One day I watched the woman I called Grandma forget this and fly backwards across the room. <br />
<br />
It must have been the summer when I wrote about this, and I was home from college. I printed it out and kept it in my bedroom, where my mother found it and read it while secretly going through my papers. In the middle of an unusually terrible fight, my father betrayed my mother’s confidence about this to me while my mother begged him not to. Then I buried the essay, buried Uncle John, buried my questions about New Hampshire and my mother’s side of the family. <br />
<br />
In 2004 I named my younger son after John. Apart from this I forgot, more or less, to think about my uncle until a few weeks ago when, alone at home, I watched a Robert Mapplethorpe documentary on HBO. Mapplethorpe’s duck’s ass hairstyle reminded me of pictures of my uncle as a young man. As Mapplethorpe grew sicker he grew thinner, and John got fatter as he aged. But there was still something about Mapplethorpe, physically, that made me think of my uncle. <br />
<br />
The details in the documentary also brought me back in time. They played a snippet of an AM radio broadcast from that period and I remembered driving with my family into Manhattan, trying to hear the traffic report before we had to commit to a route. At one point, while watching the documentary, I noticed the edge of one of Mapplethorpe’s photographs that had been cut and then mounted on a board. I realized that Mapplethorpe died in 1989 (John died in 1990), a few months before I graduated high school, and that, while the subject matter, among other things, of our photographs had been different, the technology we’d used had been largely the same. Kodak film, gelatin silver paper, developer, fixer, wash, water.<br />
<br />
In the documentary they claimed that Mapplethorpe was part of an artistic revolution that was establishing photography as a mainstream art form, and this reminded me of a class trip I had gone on as part of a summer photography course, into Manhattan to see a Cindy Sherman show. Not her film stills, but a series that followed: images of plastic butts and boobs in saturated colors that made me feel physically ill. Still, for my final project that summer I had borrowed a tripod and taken a series of photographs of myself trying to express different emotions. I wanted to get closer to what Sherman was doing, in whatever weak way I could. <br />
<br />
I had never liked Mapplethorpe’s photographs, particularly. As a young person I had mostly seen his flower photos. I had hated how highly stylized they were, their sense of airlessness, their lack of immediacy, and their rather overt symbolism. I had seen some of his photographs of men and I hadn’t liked them either, although even then I had suspected that part of my reaction to those was juvenile revulsion, and that I might understand them better when I was older. <br />
<br />
Watching the HBO film several weeks ago I saw both that I would never like Mapplethorpe’s visual language and that I had been mistaken in feeling that the photographs were inauthentic, airless, and unreal. I saw how hard he had been trying, through sex, through the manipulation of images, to get at something that may or may not have eluded him. I saw that even my high school self, at work in the darkroom, exposing paper, cutting it and measuring to mount it, then gluing it to its board—that even I, in a van of high school students, driving into Soho, then back in my room, pressing the shutter release—had been close, in some way, to the non-magical, physical process of photography, just as it was exploding, even though I had had no idea that this was the case at the time. <br />
<br />
And this, too, was something that made me think about my Uncle John—about what kind of adult he had been, and how, juvenile and well-meaning, I had never known him, although I had been close to him during important periods in his life and mine. <br />
<br />
I shut off the television and turned over and over in bed, unable to sleep. I will find out more about him, I thought. I will conduct interviews. I will go to Great Neck and Roslyn, New York, and Gilmanton, New Hampshire, I will look for birth and death certificates and find the state hospitals where he was committed. I will do this properly, and in the end I will write him up and he won’t be a secret anymore. But the more I developed this idea, the more I saw the amount of work it would involve grow and spread, overwhelming me. To understand John I would have to understand my grandfather, a distant, principled figure unlike anyone I knew. I would have to understand my real grandmother, who died when my mother was seventeen. I would have to understand the world of the town in New Hampshire where my mother’s family had summered since the early part of the 20th century, and which had, even when I was a very young girl and despite my mother’s family’s ties to it, seemed on some level absolutely alien to me. <br />
<br />
Then I remembered that when Uncle John died my mother went to his motel room with only one other person, went through all of his belongings, and cleaned it out.<br />
<br />
Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-92102949720717558502016-04-01T12:26:00.000-07:002016-05-17T11:09:01.392-07:00The Ship<i>She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpannelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the Sperm Whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of landwood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.</i><br />
<br />
Lately I have been depressed and it has been hard to see the point in writing. I go through the motions of my day, all the while looking for a sign that will send me in the right direction. Yesterday after I dropped John at school I took the dog to the park, as usual. As we came around the corner by the tennis courts I saw a woman whose dog had a heavy head and dark, sagging teats. This dog was interested in my dog, and the interest was mutual. So the woman and I chit-chatted as the dogs sniffed each other’s butts.<br />
<br />
While we spoke I tried to determine whether this woman was a rich eccentric or someone only marginally attached to society. She had a bright pink sore patch on her face, which is often a sign of mental distress or difficult physical circumstances—but it was also maybe just a pimple that she hadn’t yet covered with makeup. (I myself had a pimple on my face.) She wore a puffer coat that went down to her knees, around the waist of which she had tied a dog’s leash like a belt, but I didn’t think she thought the leash was really a belt, I just thought she thought this was an efficient way to carry a leash. Her shoes were covered with sparkles, like a child’s shoes, but they were in good shape, and in fact looked a little too nice for the dog park.<br />
<br />
She told me that her dog, Dolly, was a rescue dog, which is what everyone says unless they’re walking a Portuguese Water Dog or one of the doodle breeds. I don’t say it, because I can say that my dog is a failed assistance dog, which is also a socially acceptable origin story for having a dog. But Dolly was not a regular rescue dog. The woman told me that Dolly had been rescued from a South Korean dog meat market. “They like to eat dogs there,” she said, as an explanatory aside. While we spoke some more I imagined the rescue operation at the South Korean market, from the dogs’ point of view. I imagined the dogs as the compromised heroes in an action movie, moving ever closer to the villain’s chopping block. Finally, at the last moment, the Navy SEALs arrive, taking out the dog butcher with sniper’s bullets before moving in and hustling the dogs onto a chopper bound for an air field and from there to the safety of the United States of America. Mission accomplished.<br />
<br />
While I was imagining this and still making chitchat, Dolly was busy pooping. The woman didn’t have the same reaction I do to my dog pooping in a park, which is that I wait in a crouch for her to finish and then spring into immediate, almost manic action. We were still talking, and she in a sort of desultory way pulled a yellow plastic bag out of her puffer coat pocket. She then used it to pick up the massive dump, incidentally also picking up some sticks and leaves that it had been lying on. Then, and I really wish I could remember what we were talking about as this happened, she stood in front of me, talking and talking, and carefully picking the sticks and leaves out of the poop in the bag in her hands, and throwing them on the ground. Then she tied the bag up and we went our separate ways.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-2951120178367003882016-02-19T09:57:00.000-08:002016-02-19T10:03:43.204-08:00Chowder<i>And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”</i><br />
<br />
205 Thompson Shore Road, Manhasset, New York, 11030. When as a child I was given an address book I wrote that down as neatly as possible. I had a desire, never fulfilled, to take something beautiful like a new address book and make it more beautiful with lovely, grown-up handwriting, but what happened instead was that I wouldn’t judge the length of the lines correctly and have to cram letters in at the end or would make an error and have to x it out. Nana’s was the first address I would add, because she was the person I loved most in the world outside of my immediate family, and because I wrote to her and she wrote back. It’s probably more accurate to say that in the reverse order. Her letters began My Dearest Darling, and, believing them abundant, I have lost or thrown out all except the one I found seven months ago in my basement while I was employing a professional organizer. She darted in and out of the storage room, printing labels and moving boxes, while I stood underneath the lightbulb listening to the blood run through my ears.<br />
<br />
The house is gone. The plot it was built on was large enough to hold two houses, according to the zoning laws, and so now, after a touch of skulduggery on the part of the person who purchased it from Nana’s estate—she died in her bed there—it does. Neither my father nor my aunt could drive on the street after this happened, and I couldn’t either, although I have looked at it on Google Maps. Nonetheless the house is entirely recoverable for me, with the exception of the basement, the steep stairs to which I almost never descended, though they departed from a door in the kitchen, where, things being what they were, we spent most of our time. It’s tempting just to list the things I used to eat at Nana’s house, the things she bought, rather than made: Mallomars, frozen Sara Lee poundcake, sweet Nabisco zwieback teething biscuits, pretzel rods, canned pears and peaches in their syrup, chocolate kisses. She kept a bowl of realistic fake fruit on the table and I remember sitting next to the bowl, looking from the three prongs on my fork to the three holes in the electrical outlet on the wall, and back again, and then raising the fork up to put it where it so obviously belonged—and everyone screaming.<br />
<br />
When my parents wanted to be rid of us for a night, which they now assure me they never did, we stayed at Nana’s, and she made us dinner. Every dinner began with a half grapefruit that Nana cut roughly around the outside of the sections, leaving wide swaths of pith attached to the delicious fruit segments. Because I was spoiled by a mother who liberated each individual piece of grapefruit from that spongy white stuff (although still not as carefully as I would have liked) I found this to be an ordeal. I wouldn’t eat the pith, but it was impossible to get the fruit free of it without it putting my fingers in my mouth. I would have passed the grapefruit half up altogether except Nana would have remarked on this, and in fact she still remarked on me not eating enough of it, even when I had really tried very hard. I wonder how Amanda handled it—she was younger than I was, and a pickier eater, but is today a person who peels a grapefruit and, leaving a thick coat of pith all over it, consumes the whole white globe.<br />
<br />
After that Nana would serve us either: chicken fricassee; “baby” lamb chops she cooked in the toaster oven; or what we knew as Nana’s Spaghetti. Sides were either a salad of iceberg lettuce dressed with Wishbone Italian dressing or green beans that had turned soft and gray from being boiled. The chicken fricassee had loose, pimply skin, scant meat, and made you run almost immediately to the toilet. The lamb chops were eaten down to the nub, although I still don’t know why she cooked them in the toaster. Nana’s Spaghetti was coated with margarine, Velveeta, and some kind of canned sweet tomato sauce that was just this side of ketchup, all melted and mixed together until it formed a granular paste.<br />
<br />
There had to be other main courses, but I don’t remember them. I remember that for lunch she would make us a toaster oven pizza with a slice of ham crisped on top. For holidays she cooked chicken soup with matzoh balls and refused to sit down, even though my mother, whose own mother died young, would call her Ma and insist on it. Nana called the matzoh balls kneidlach, and they were very light, like little clouds. Later I described them as being excellent to her daughter, whose recipe I use (<a href="http://thisisthewhale.blogspot.com/2012/10/breakfast.html" target="_blank">or used to use</a>) to make my own holiday soup, and she said, “Mine are better.” My mother also thought that Nana’s cooking left something to be desired. At home Mom cooked our vegetables so they retained their shape and color. Mom didn’t think much of iceberg lettuce, she bought us fresh fruit, instead of canned, and she replaced margarine in Nana’s spaghetti with butter and the Velveeta with cheddar. And when I was older, I should say, I hated staying at Nana’s house. It was too quiet, there was nothing to do, and I missed my parents. So I can’t tell you if Nana’s food was delicious or not. I can’t say, either, that I chose to love Nana’s food just because I loved Nana. But it’s true that I do still love almost all the things I loved when Nana cooked them for me.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-72475380252718842492015-07-28T18:16:00.000-07:002015-07-29T07:55:36.339-07:00Nantucket<i>Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow the same direction.</i><br />
<br />
I woke my sons at five in the morning on Monday. They were already packed and had their clothes laid out. David came out to hug them and our older son asked if he should put away his saxophone, which lay on its case on the living room floor. This activity woke up the dog. Our younger son hugged the dog, the dog wanted to be fed, we left David and the dog. The newspaper hadn’t been delivered yet.<br />
<br />
It was still dark, of course. Stoplights along the route had been changed to blinking red lights. There was almost no traffic on the surface roads, and only a little on the highway. It took us twenty-five minutes to get to the airport, even with all those blinking lights. I pulled into a space in the short-term parking garage, and the boys shouldered their backpacks and rolled their duffels to the elevator, into the terminal, onto the moving walkway, into an elevator, and up to the security checkpoint. <br />
<br />
Our older son held their passports and boarding passes. We hugged and kissed goodbye, and they passed through the doors onto the security line. Occasionally I could see one or the other boy lit by a spotlight, visible through the snaking line of passengers. I waved once to each of them. Then I couldn't see them anymore. I read the newspaper on my phone until I received the texts “Made it through” and “Love you.”<br />
<br />
That was it. I was home by 6:30 am. I ate breakfast and read the paper. Eventually I was alerted that the boys had landed in Boston. Eventually I learned that they had taken off again and landed in Nantucket. Late last night our younger son called to tell me that he felt very far away from me. I said all the things you say to that.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-27655021195733964432015-06-03T09:43:00.000-07:002015-06-11T17:42:38.052-07:00Wheelbarrow<i>But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the mainsail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness.</i><br />
<br />
My family went whitewater rafting down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. To do that we took a small plane into the middle of the Frank Church—River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho. We weren’t roughing it. My parents had made this trip a few years earlier with an outfitter that ran supply boats down and set up tents for you, cooked for you, and cleaned up afterward. When my parents had done it, just the two of them, they had had the most marvelous time.<br />
<br />
There were no grandchildren. My youngest sister, Julia, was fourteen. My middle sister was unattached. David and I were married a year, I think, and I was the fattest I have ever been, which felt terrible, especially when I wore the wetsuit. My parents wanted us all to be together on the river, so on the first day we went down to the put-in, met the other people on our trip, and arranged to be in the same raft, which was guided by a woman I’ll call Eileen.<br />
<br />
It was just at the open of the season, and the river ran high and cold: 55 degrees Fahrenheit, or something like it. When we hit the first real rapid, Eileen couldn’t get us to turn fast enough, and instead of shooting through the space between a large submerged rock and the shore, we were thrown up against that rock and pinned there by the force of the water. When that happened, Julia and Eileen were thrown out of the boat, and the rest of us watched them floating rapidly down the river, Julia looking back at us, too scared to scream.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile we were trapped in the boat, guideless. Downriver from the rapid, a guide from another outfit pulled his boat over to the riverbank, secured it and then jumped into the water. As we watched, he walked up the river to us, the current cresting above his waist, against his chest. When he reached us, he hauled himself into the boat, and directed us down into the calmer shallows. Julia and Eileen had been picked up by another boat further down.<br />
<br />
We regrouped. No one wanted to suggest that Eileen was incompetent—and in fact, perhaps she wasn’t, perhaps this happened, from time to time, to all of the guides—so we went back out with her again. The famous rapid on the next part of the river is called Velvet Falls. To get through it, apparently, you have to enter the falls, a nasty drop that was that day about as deep as the raft was long, on one specific line. We failed to do this successfully, and as we went over I could hear Eileen say, “Oh, shit.”<br />
<br />
We were thrown from the raft and submerged. The water, even through the wetsuit, was cold enough to make my heart contract and my breathing accelerate. On the other hand, I wasn’t caught under the falls, and nothing hurt. I generally feel pretty comfortable in the water, and I put my feet up, as we had been told to, in a V and headed down the river, where I caught a paddle and was pulled into another boat. Eventually everyone was found, and hauled into one of the boats. The following day, Eileen was reassigned to running the supplies, and we were transferred to the raft piloted by the General, a short, knowledgeable man who showed us how to read the water, let my sister Julia ruin his flies by hooking them on bushes, played guitar at the campfires, and loaned my unattached middle sister his sweater.<br />
<br />
In camp a couple nights later I tripped and managed to drive a stick into the spot between two toes, which hurt, and raised concerns about infection; I had to keep it elevated, and, sitting by the campfire, grew fatter. By the time Dave and I got to San Francisco, my pants were tight, I had to wear sandals over a bandage, my foot throbbed, and I looked, and felt, ridiculous.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-6154789612347933462015-05-27T09:57:00.000-07:002015-05-27T09:57:32.854-07:00Biographical<i>Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let go, though hacked in pieces.</i><br /><br />In June and July, 1991, between our sophomore and junior years in college, a friend and I sublet a loft apartment in Little Italy for the summer. She worked at an internship near Times Square, and I worked at an internship near Union Square, and in the evening we came home on the N/R and cooked free pasta we’d gotten from my boyfriend, who had leftover boxes from the Friday night dinners he organized at our college, and ate raw whole carrots.<br /><br />The building was at the corner of Mulberry and Broome. To get to the third-floor apartment you climbed a long set of stairs that rose to a landing, and then, when you expected it to turn, continued on up in the same direction. Night after night, we ate our little meal and watched <i>Perfect Strangers</i> reruns on the tiny television. I had previously hated that show, but that summer it revealed its hidden charms. We weren’t watching it ironically: We enjoyed it, and I remember laughing at the jokes. <br /><br />There were limited seating options in the loft, so we took turns sitting on the day bed and lying in the hammock. The hammock was better, because, since it was so difficult to get in and out of the thing, whoever was in the hammock would be served by the person who was not in it. The phone, with its lengthy cord, would be brought to her, the remains of her carrots would be taken away, floss would be delivered, etc.<br /><br />We did almost nothing. We did nothing inside the apartment, because the apartment was unrelentingly hot. We left the lights off. We took cold baths in the dirty tub. There was a ceiling fan, but it was very loud, and eventually you couldn’t stand the sound anymore and had to turn it off, until the heat became ridiculous and you had to turn it on again. My boyfriend came to visit and I thought, Why do people think hot summer nights are sexy? No one wants to be touched. I don’t remember him visiting the apartment again.<br /><br />We didn’t take out the garbage for a month, and when we did it was as heavy as a person, and left a wet stain where we dragged it, together, down the stairs. <br /><br />We also rarely left the apartment. Once we went to South Street Seaport for a free outdoor concert, and were asked to dance by strange men, and refused to dance with them. Once we went downstairs to a bar in our building and drank with a friend who was in from out of town. We went up to Central Park for a concert and were rained on. We went to the Angelika and watched French films in the air-conditioning. I had a shiny rough silk jacket I liked to wear, and walking home from the Angelika one night a guy shouted, “Nice jacket!” as he and his friends passed us. Once I took a taxi back from something because it was late and I was by myself. Once I saw my uncle on the subway platform but he didn’t recognize me and that made me doubt that I had seen him. On the weekends we generally went home to our parents. <br /><br />My friend’s work took her to a public library where she was supposed to do research, so she brought back the newest romance novels, and we talked about writing a romance novel together. How hard could it be? There was a place nearby that sold cheeseburgers in pita bread and we loved eating those, sometimes, for a change. The loft’s owner made pastels she sold to artists and I liked to open the drawers and look at them. I mean, we cloistered ourselves. We didn’t really drink, we didn’t take drugs, we didn’t make friends, we didn’t fall in or out of love. We didn’t do anything but hang out with each other in the heat. The story of that summer is almost not a story, except that it ended, and everything in it—the place, the time, the friend, the friendship, the boyfriend—is changed, or gone, or both.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-29706661464902355572013-08-09T21:20:00.000-07:002013-08-10T07:02:23.685-07:00Nightgown“<i>Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not; but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give</i>.”<br />
<br />
My mother has been in the sun for weeks, and it has turned her skin nut brown; she has been taking care of my children, and that has made her tired at the end of the day. One recent evening, after I put the boys to bed, I went into her bedroom to say goodnight and found her lying under her covers, only her neck and head exposed, her brown head resting in the center of her white pillowcase, deep creases radiating outward. Her eyes were closed and she was clearly as good as half asleep. Still, as I stood over her, we began to talk about mice.<br />
<br />
There is a mouse in the backyard of my new house. I know almost exactly where it lives. When I first saw it, I thought I would have to kill it, that is to say to have it killed. Then, after sitting at the kitchen table and watching it run around and gather things from the grass, I found that it was cuter than I thought a mouse would be, and became attached to it. It became harder to imagine causing its death. But then there would be times when, sitting at the table and watching it run around for ten or fifteen minutes, doing whatever it wanted, I became irritated with its sense of safety and entitlement. So I sent the dog out twice to chase it, immediately regretting this decision both times, because the dog almost caught it, and I screamed at the dog not to do that, and confused her, and so felt bad about the dog, as well as the mouse. <br />
<br />
I told my mother that now I wonder, when the dog goes out into the back yard, if in fact she is looking for the mouse in a friendly way, and if one day I might look out and find the mouse stretched out beside my dog on the grass, the two of them enjoying each other’s company.<br />
<br />
Mom nodded, her eyes still closed, or maybe open, but with heavy lids. What color is the mouse, she asked, gray or black? (Gray.) Mice can be very cute, she said. She had two white mice as pets when she was young, Herman and Josephine. They had babies, and she had to decide which of the adults was Herman, so she could take him out before he ate the babies. She couldn't distinguish physically between the parents, but it was a fifty-fifty chance, and anyway she had gotten it right. Her older brother John, who wore his hair in a ducktail, had learned to sew so he could taper his pants, and then had sewed pockets on his shirts so he could carry the mice around in them, and bring them to the breakfast table, where they might poke their little heads out during the meal. But the mice were my mother’s: She had gotten them at least in part in order to perform an experiment she read about in <i>Scientific American</i>, which tested depth perception in rodents. You built a series of steps that had a clear plate over the top of it, and saw if the mice would go out onto the clear plate, or not. <br />
<br />
I asked my mother what her findings had been.<br />
<br />
She didn’t remember. Still sleepy, still just a head, a little sadly, she said: Other people tell stories and they’re complete stories, but I only remember pieces of things. <br />
<br />
I thought for a moment about how rarely my mother tells me stories from her childhood. I think I can count her stories on one hand. I said: It’s the same for everyone; everyone remembers only pieces, and if they put them together into a story then it becomes only that story, no matter what really happened. She nodded, agreeing. Then I lay down on the bed with my feet between my parents, so that my father, who had joined my mother there, could scratch my feet while I read. I have been jet-lagged since I arrived on Nantucket, and that night couldn’t fall asleep until 4:30 in the morning.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-15708778764163280742013-07-04T16:11:00.000-07:002013-08-16T14:47:49.815-07:00A Bosom Friend<i><br />“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair.</i>” <br />
<br />
David has a stress fracture in his foot, or at least something we call a stress fracture for convenience’s sake—he hurt his foot, but then it was all right, but then it wasn’t, and it hurts to walk on it, but the X-ray didn’t show a fracture <i>per se</i>—and at night he takes a Vicodin before bed, and falls fast asleep. Also, we’re in a new house, and we have only one bedside table, on his side of the bed, and one small light, on the floor on my side. So the room is dark. The dog is unnerved by her new surroundings, and wants to come, every night, up from the first floor into our bed. Tonight I let her, and she lay her head against my leg. As I stroked her face her eyelids flickered, her side rose and fell rapidly, and we stared at each other: I said Shhh, Daphne, it’s all right. Once when Henry was a tiny baby, I took him to a meeting of our childbirth group, the only one we held after everyone’s babies had been born. It was at the house of a couple who lived outside the city, and I had Henry—we were in Brussels, and no one worried about whether this was dangerous—in his car seat in the front passenger seat next to me, facing backwards. I looked over at him and he looked at me so meaningfully that I said, What, Henry, what is it? He stared deep into my eyes and I said, What is it darling, what do you want to tell me? Then he was asleep. But that’s not really what I think about when I stroke the dog’s face and she passes, fretfully, into a dream. I think about the time, three summers ago, when my parents’ dog, Ollie, lay down on the grass outside their house on Nantucket, and we all gathered around him, stroked him and soothed him, until someone went inside and called the vet. My father and my sister took him in together and then left him with the vet to be euthanized. You can stay with him, the vet offered, and my father, who had been moved to tears by the end of the dog’s life, declined. I don’t like pain, but I like feeling something that can’t be separated from pain. Two days ago I heard a story on the radio about a man who died. After he died he was lonely, so he packed up his things and went home, and, when he got home, slid into bed with his wife and said, Darling, it’s me. In the morning he took his children to school. The author didn’t know how to end the story. Of course not. How do you end a story about flickering, inconstant connection?Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-61205450026952380112013-02-13T09:52:00.000-08:002013-02-13T10:11:12.317-08:00The Sermon"<i>As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, He oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.</i>"<br />
<br />
<i>"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind."</i><br /><br />
<br />
Our dog Daphne was sick recently. She vomited eight times, always on a carpet. It reminded me of how David will never put a spoon on a counter, he likes to put spoons on top of pot-holders. Or maybe, I thought, scrubbing the carpet, again, it was an aesthetic decision she had made, as if vomit just didn’t look right to her on the bare floor. <br />
<br />
By the time she’d vomited four times I knew, even though I had not yet called the vet, that I would have to take her to the vet, and that they would have to x-ray her, and that it would cost $600. <br />
<br />
I did it, even though I believed, correctly, that the x-ray wouldn’t show anything, even though I didn’t want to leave my house and my children that night and go out to the vet’s office, where, the last time I was in the waiting room with Daphne, a woman said to me, in the most unfriendly way, I’m passing a kidney stone so could you keep your dog from getting my dog to pull?<br />
<br />
A long time ago, before we were married, I made David promise that someday we could get a dog. I remembered loving the dogs my parents had when we were young. I remembered calling Molly to me at night, and holding her by the collar so she wouldn’t leave me and go to my sister’s room.<br />
<br />
But when we did get the dog I didn’t love her. And when we moved from New York to San Francisco, and flew Daphne out on an airline, now defunct, that carried pets in the plane’s main cabin, and met her in Los Angeles, and drove her up the Pacific coast road for three days, and arrived at our new home, and she decided, in her wisdom, that she would not shit on the sidewalk, but only on grass, and for the first few weeks we were there I had either to run her several times a day up the steep hill on Laguna to Lafayette Park, where she would grudgingly shit, or to take her out to one of the trees on our street and yell at her and sometimes cry, while she wouldn’t shit, there—then I wished her dead, I really did. One day, as Daphne and I entered the park across from John’s school, I threw a ball for her to chase. Except instead of throwing it into the park, I threw it hard against a tree at the entrance of the park, and it bounced off the tree and into the street, where Daphne was almost run over by a car.<br />
<br />
If she had died, my children would have mourned her. At night, John calls her to his room, and tries to keep her on his bed. She submits for a minute or two before sliding to the ground and heading for her spot under the piano. Dogs are not children. They don’t hold, within them, a future, or at least they don’t when you raise them, as we’ve raised Daphne, to be a guard who greets people by licking them, a retriever who looks only for orange balls, a baby who can’t have babies of her own. Daphne will never be transformed. She is a dog, and always will be a dog, and I will be her master.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-18616297435372122602012-12-10T15:03:00.000-08:002012-12-11T07:38:08.245-08:00The Pulpit<i>“Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.” </i><br />
<br />
My parents’ basement is vast and unordered, but when, home for Thanksgiving, I asked my mother where I could find my piano sheet music she led me downstairs, moved a chair aside, lifted one box off of another box and said, I think it’s in here. Throwing things out is not one of my mother’s strengths, but she has other talents that compensate for this, including a strong sense of geography. Underneath a series of violin exercises my father used when he was young and a couple of manuals circa 1985 explaining computer languages I am certain none of us ever used, or contemplated using, but which I replaced in the box, I found a book of Bach Inventions that I had played from, with the penciled fingering, reminders, corrections, and exhortations of my piano teacher, Mrs. Minkoff, intact.<br />
<br />
When I took the music upstairs, I could play it.<br />
<br />
So: This was going to be a story about my limitations, which include being a poor pianist. And about Mrs. Minkoff, who had bariatric surgery while I was her student, and who became thin for a while, and then slowly or not so slowly, depending on whether or not you were Mrs. Minkoff, became fat again. I, of course, had been fine with Mrs. Minkoff being fat—I had expected her to be fat, in fact, and didn’t realize, until I saw her thin and happy, that she was, like me, a person who wanted to be wonderful, and maybe even perfect. I’ve been sad, lately, and one thing about being sad is that you never know how sad you are. You think you have a sense of where the bottom is, you think you’re floating in maybe seven feet of water, but it turns out you’ve been pushed out farther than you thought, and are dangling above more serious depths.<br />
<br />
Then you look down and you see you’re writing a story about not being able to play the piano, even though you have a piano and play it, for example, while the children put their shoes on in the morning. Also, my premise was wrong. My premise, when I went downstairs at my parents’ house, and when I sat down to write about it, was that I could only play the songs I played when I was fourteen, and was stuck, for better or worse, following along with my younger self, and Mrs. Minkoff, in the music she selected for me. But for Hanukkah this weekend David bought me two new books of music. It turns out that I can play Haydn's Sonatas, if I choose the ones without too many sharps or flats.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-16696799505553263232012-11-09T17:13:00.000-08:002012-11-11T20:39:11.842-08:00The Chapel<i>“Methinks my body is but the less of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”</i><br />
<br />
One morning towards the end of our time in Nantucket, David and I left the children at the house and went for a walk towards the beach. Most of the streets near my parents’ house are unmarked, I don’t know their names, and I find them difficult to describe to other people, since they are all sandy and veer off gently one way or another. So now, instead of saying something concise, I have to say that we had reached the part of the route where the road turns towards the right and another road, which you might think is the main road, but is not, continues out straight towards the ocean—this is a landmark on the walk—when David noticed a dog running through the grasses on its own. We waited to see what would happen, which was that the dog came towards us and lay down in an enormous muddy puddle, and two women walked by who weren’t its owners.<br />
<br />
The dog, a golden retriever, seemed to be in high spirits—he loved the mud—and also good-natured. We called him to us, and caught him around his collar. His name was Tobe, and his address was a street I knew, not strictly in my parents’ neighborhood, but probably about a mile, I thought, away. I called the number on the tag, but there was no answer. We decided to walk him back home. “Come on, Tobe,” I said, and Tobe started off with us.<br />
<br />
Initially Tobe confined his activities to carrying dead animals in his mouth—he dropped the animals when I asked him to—and sitting in mud puddles, which he couldn’t resist. As we approached the short bridge over Long Pond, though, Tobe ran ahead through a gap in the grasses and bounded into the stinking water, which is filled with snapping turtles and the rotting remains of chicken legs and salami and all the other stuff people use to fish for snapping turtles. “No, Tobe!” I said, and Tobe listened to me, if listening means doing what you want until you’re done with that, and then doing what the other person asked you to do. He came out of the pond and through the grasses unashamed.<br />
<br />
Crossing the bridge brought us into a more densely populated area where the houses were close to the road. Tobe started running away from us to check out the houses, and, in one case, to eat the cat food they had left out for their cat. At first we were hopeful, when Tobe ran towards people and those people greeted him warmly, that everyone knew each other. But it was just Tobe being himself, friendly and hungry. At the house where Tobe ate the cat food, the people gave us dog cookies to help us lure him back to the road.<br />
<br />
I think this is related to everything I have told you so far about Tobe: he was not neutered. You know, I liked Tobe. He was courageous, and lucky, and dirty, and he knew what he wanted. David said to me that Tobe was “the kind of dog you read about in books.” Yes. Tobe was also like any character who desires things, and whose desire lead the other other characters, in this case me and David, into new territories. Still, it was taking a really long time to accomplish Tobe’s return. We had left the children at home by themselves, which was fine for the length of time it took to walk to the beach and back, and less fine for the length of time it takes to have a picaresque adventure, which can be years. <br />
<br />
I called my parents to come get us, and they came, but I didn’t feel we could load Tobe, stinking of carrion, into the back of their, or anyone’s car. Since we still had to get Tobe home, the last part of the trip became a parade, in which David and I walked ahead and called to Tobe, rousing him from a series of mud puddles, as my parents drove a Volvo station wagon behind us at a walking pace. When we got to the address on Tobe’s collar, there was a little parking lot in front of a line of condos. A red lead hung from a front door knob, the empty neck begging Tobe to just put his head back in it again. A neighbor who didn’t know the dog’s name came out and said, “I was wondering where he’d gotten to!” She opened the door of the condo with the lead on it and shoved the muddy, stinking dog inside. She told us that Tobe was often tied up outside the condo, and had escaped before. <br />
<br />
I couldn’t blame the neighbor, who just seemed to be helping out, but I did blame whoever tied Tobe to the door and left him there. I thought that was wrong. Maybe the fact that a disgusting, mud-covered Tobe was now walking around inside the condo was some kind of retribution for this. In any case, I was relieved that it wasn’t my problem, anymore.<br />
<br />
Or was it? I worried about Tobe. Was someone coming back for him? When? I left another message for Tobe’s owner, and that afternoon she returned my calls with a series of messages that made it sound as if she had left Tobe with someone who had left him with someone else who had not treated him right, and that she was going to straighten the situation out. I think the lesson to draw from this—if you’re interested by lessons—is that we all do the best we can. His owner wanted to go off-island. The friend who was supposed to take care of the dog thought someone else was helping out. That person was called away. The neighbor didn’t know what was going on. David and I had to get back to our children and the rest of our lives. And Tobe, who was really a great dog, was going to get out of his lead again and go back to doing what he wanted, just as soon as he could.<br />
<br />Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-78409706579606626412012-10-30T19:51:00.003-07:002012-11-30T09:59:44.134-08:00The Street“<i>And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.</i>”<br />
<br />
Brussels is famous for its destruction of the human scale, for poor city planning, for preferring the car to the pedestrian and for ruining itself. But that’s not where we lived. We lived outside the city center on an old street lined with trees and mostly well-kept buildings occupied by embassies, diplomats, and the well-to-do. We lived in the rattiest building on the street, above a baron who had run out of money and was working for the European Commission, his wife, who wore a fur coat and rarely washed her hair, and their son, the baron-to-be. They lived above a male couple we never saw; they lived above a very handsome Belgian couple with a young girl who once threw her mother’s keys into the bottom of the elevator well; and they lived above an Anglo-Swedish couple whose newborn and ours were born four weeks apart, and with whom we became friends.<br />
<br />
But we were at the top, and had windows on three sides: northwest, towards the city center and the terrace of a couple who stopped us on the street to tell us, unnecessarily, that they practiced <i>naturisme</i>; south, with a view over the surrounding apartments and houses; and southeast, over the avenue. On a typical day in Brussels the wind blew through town, pushing clouds and rain over and past us until about a half an hour before sunset. Then the sky cleared, the remaining clouds were lit pink, orange, blue and purple, and for a half an hour the view from our windows was sublime, first because it held that last light, and then because it turned a deep soft blue.<br />
<br />
We had a whole floor of the building: three bedrooms (the smallest was my office), a living room and dining room that ran, prettily, into each other; a kitchen; a utility room we filled quickly with a washer and a dryer, and crap; a full bathroom; and a narrow, dark, and cold half-bath. This was essentially the same for all the apartments in the building on <i>avenue</i> Molière: each occupied three sides of the building, the fourth taken up by the stairwell, which wrapped around the space through which rose the tiny, ancient elevator, a metal cage in a metal cage. When David came home from work I would sometimes open our door and wait for him, and I could hear the elevator start up and then see the top of the elevator and the top of his head and then his face and so on as he came rising towards me in the cage. Often the hall lights timed off as he rode, and the rising elevator was the only source of light. <br />
<br />
Heat came through a set of radiators that I touched lightly, constantly, to see if they were working.<br />
<br />
The kitchen had a balcony off of it where we stored garbage, and sent people to smoke, and that was structurally unsound.<br />
<br />
The floorboards between our bedroom and what became Henry’s room creaked loudly, every single one of them. The floorboards between our bedroom and the baronial bedroom below us allowed sound to pass freely between the floors.<br />
<br />
David wanted to live there forever, and I wanted, eventually, to move back to New York. So we did move back to New York, and lived there for about seven years, gaining another son, a house, and even a dog, before moving again, this time to San Francisco.<br />
<br />
For almost the first year of our move here I felt that I wasn’t entirely where I physically, actually, was. I could walk through the front door of our house in San Francisco, through the hall to the kitchen, and when I sat down and looked out the window what I saw was my backyard in New York. This was the opposite of how it had been when we decided to move to Brussels and, even though I didn’t know where I was going, what it would look like, or how it would be—we flew out there for the first time after all of our belongings had been packed into a container and put on a ship—I spent the months before our move under the impression that I was already there, and not, despite appearances, running around New York. Even now, when our lives, mine and David’s, I mean, are braided together in these thick ropes of sex, debt, books, phone calls, groceries, and stomach flu to the point where there is nothing, as far as I can tell, that is not about us, there are still times when I want to, or have to, follow the line back to the apartment on the <i>avenue</i> Molière, the place where, two years after our wedding, we began in earnest our married life.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-71028243831458630712012-10-13T20:52:00.001-07:002012-10-13T20:57:45.340-07:00Breakfast<i>“But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.” </i> <br />
<br />
I am the cook. <br />
I make chicken soup. <br />
I don’t know how other people make chicken soup. <br />
I assume they make it badly. <br />
To make it the right way, you need hen fowl and beef long ribs. <br />
You can’t get that in San Francisco, because of the lack of Jews. <br />
Maybe if I were Chinese I would know where to go.<br />
Long story short, I spent $100 on two chickens and some beef short ribs from Bi-Rite.<br />
The chickens came with their heads and feet.<br />
The butcher at Bi-Rite said, The heads will give it lots of flavor.<br />
They threw in some extra heads.<br />
The heads had eyes in them.<br />
To make soup you have to boil the meat, skim off the scum, then add the vegetables and simmer for two to three hours.<br />
Then you have to pick out all the bigger pieces of meat and vegetables, and pass the<br />
broth through a sieve lined with paper towels.<br />
The broth was gelid, because of the feet.<br />
I had to really push down with a spoon to get it through the sieve.<br />
I thought about pushing down on one of the chicken eyes, which were no longer on the heads.<br />
I thought about it exploding.<br />
I held onto the sink and retched a little.<br />
I never saw an eye.<br />
I wasted a lot of soup.<br />
I froze the soup I didn’t waste.<br />
The soup tasted good.<br />
I am the cook.<br />
I kill things, I cook things.<br />
The world is a love poem to me and my family.<br />
Everything we need is supplied to us, at great cost.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-22609952158926463692012-09-19T16:32:00.000-07:002012-11-13T16:14:02.701-08:00The Spouter-Inn<i>“But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.”</i><br />
<i><br />“‘Landlord,’ said I, ‘tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.’”</i><br />
<br />
Sunday morning my family went on a hike above Aspen, Colorado, with Howie, a local guide who told us that the hanging valley we were standing in had been formed by a glacier that slid off the side of another glacier, that a human skull found in a local cave had been dated back 8,000 years, that aspen stands are one organism, connected through their root system and genetically identical, and that the bird we saw was a goshawk, which hunts its prey among the trees—something that is, I imagine, difficult to do. Then we tried to get on a plane and fly home to San Francisco, but the flights out of Aspen were canceled and the flights out of Denver were full, and so we decided, by looking briefly at a map, that we would rent a car and drive to Las Vegas, where we could catch a morning flight. Six hundred and thirty-six miles, plus an additional mile-and-a-half loop I drove when I started out in the right direction, thought it was the wrong direction, turned around, then turned around again. No one complained. We were all thrilled by our audacity, and eating the candy bars I’d taken from the free section of the hotel minibar right before we checked out.<br />
<br />
At some point the sun set, and everyone grew tired, and we turned off the music so that people could sleep, and people cried from how tired they were, and other people shook the ice in their cups repeatedly in order to eat the ice, because we were out of other water sources, and I became enraged by this, and we turned the music back on, and people fell asleep briefly, before they were woken because the adults had turned to a satellite station that played political speeches, and we stopped at a rest stop and for some reason David didn’t want to use the rest stop right where you got off the highway, he wanted to use another one farther away, and we had a little fight about that, and we got more water and switched drivers so that I was driving again, and everyone including my husband fell asleep—but before that, and after that, the ride was everything I wanted it to be. I drove us through the Roaring Fork Valley in the Rocky Mountains to I-70 and then down out of the mountains along the Colorado River as the sun set and great alien mesas rose up on either side of us, the road curving to follow the river, which, low from the year’s drought, revealed gravel spills and high grasses along gentle banks. Speed limit 75, but it was so easy to go faster than that. In Parachute I was clocked at 88 in a 75 zone and, for no good reason, let off without a citation. Just look out, said the officer, because this is the time of day when elk try to cross the highway. He gave us his card. For the next 45 miles the boys watched for elk.<br />
<br />
We got dinner at Burger King just as the sun set. David drove 350 miles through Utah in the dark.<br />
<br />
Now I was driving again, this time through the northwest corner of Arizona. It was after midnight, although I didn’t know the exact time. I was the only person awake, and I knew I had to concentrate very hard on what I was doing to do it at all. I had been singing along with the radio but even that was too much, too extraneous, I had to marshal every scrap of consciousness to remain focused on keeping the car on the road; I couldn’t let my mind wander, or imagine that any of this was a dream. The radio played on. The speed limit dropped to 55 and signs warned me of high winds, strong curves, and falling rocks. The only other vehicles running were big trucks, and if I wanted to pass one I had to get inside it and press the gas down more than I wanted to and then wait longer than I wanted to to get back into the right lane again. At one point I fought the urge to pull over to the side and let it—by “it” I meant the curving descent—pass me by.<br />
<br />
Then this was over, too. The road into Nevada was flat and straight, and we passed into a section of the highway where the state was “trying out” a new speed limit: 80. David woke up and we watched, together, as Las Vegas went from being a glow on the horizon to being a sea of lights below us. I’d never been to Las Vegas before. We took the highway down through the middle of it all. When we pulled up to the hotel we were relieved to find out that Las Vegas was on Pacific time, and it was only 1:51 am. We had four and a half hours before we had to get ourselves to the airport.<br />
<br />
There were people around, of course. They were all drunk. For the children, forced to march the huge marble hallways and the carpeted casino, each carrying a backpack, to our room, this last part of the trip was frightening. At the elevator bank we let four guys in cargo shorts carrying orange beer bongs take the first elevator. The next elevator disgorged a woman in a bathrobe with her hair teased and mussed, her eye makeup smudged, and her entire face, really, undone. She couldn’t look at us. When we all lay down in the beds, the boys fell asleep, quickly, and I must have done the same, but I was woken several times in the short, short night by the sound of one of them crying in his sleep.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217145461367708291.post-80057344762150305842012-09-18T10:07:00.000-07:002012-09-18T10:08:18.577-07:00The Carpet-Bag<i>“For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.”</i><br />
<br />
While bike-riding last week, my father hit his head and for a few hours could not remember the month of August. He didn’t know that my niece had been born, and he couldn’t remember that David and the boys and I had been in Nantucket with him for almost that whole month. I felt as if we both had been partially erased. <br />
<br />
My parents keep a boat on Nantucket that they named after their dead dog, although they did that before, rather than after he died. The Great Ollie. It’s a little motor boat, and we use it primarily to go to Tuckernuck Island, first weaving through grassy Hither Creek, then following the buoys marking the route through the Tuckernuck Flats, which are too shallow in parts even for a boat, like theirs, that draws only 3 feet of water. Tuckernuck itself has a relatively deep harbor ringed on one side by a nice half-moon of sand, where we pull up and drop anchor among the other pleasure boats. At the other end of the harbor there’s a dock used by the people who have houses on the island.<br />
<br />
Every time we go to Tuckernuck, Dad wants to swim across the harbor to the dock, and he wants me to swim it with him. And every time, I start out with him before betraying him by turning around and swimming back in. I don’t intend to do this, but I always do this, because I’m afraid. We swim on our backs, usually, or do that breast stroke where you keep you head up above the water, and the knowledge that beneath my body lies a living world filled with things I don’t know about unnerves me.<br />
<br />
This past August when we performed this ritual, a ritual, on my side, of refusal, I decided that I wouldn’t let fear hold me back anymore. I love my father, I love to swim, and while I was not going to swim the harbor with him that day, the next time I would come with my goggles and swim normally, as I swim in a swimming pool. I would put my head under the water, and would see that there was nothing to be afraid of. And so the next time we came, I brought my goggles, and we started swimming across the harbor, he on his back, blowing plumes of water out his mouth, as usual, and me on my front, doing the breast stroke I have done in swimming pools across the world. But it turns out that if you put your head underwater in the Tuckernuck harbor, all you see is a blue-green wall. It turns out, as well, that the vision of this wall is more terrifying to me than anything I used to imagine. And even though I love my Dad, I now know that I’m never swimming that harbor with him, ever.Carey Lifschultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08778273396027235027noreply@blogger.com2