two billion beats

I wondered how many rooms there were inside me that I'd yet to explore, how many doors still clicked closed, how many palindromes, how many people, how many worlds, and whether they would all be as beautiful as the stone in the sky we call earth: this planet holding oceans and fields and so many human hearts, each with two billion beats in a lifetime. That's what we get, two billion beats, not much more and sometimes much less. All humans, our hearts hammering on until one day they stop, and the body gets buried, and we go back to being atoms with their spinning centers, microscopic flecks of enormous energy and light, as though packed with all our lifetime love--its curves and caresses, its sudden surprises, its real revelations, its long-gone losses, its mourning melodies, its coconut-soup comfort--all of it happening in two billion beats of the human heart turning on our stone in the sky. 

-- Lauren Slater, "Her Over Him," Elle

what the living do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

- Marie Howe

i am a visitor here, i am not permanent

My good friend Sean passed away two weeks ago.

I got the news - via facebook message - while I was helping two of my friends practice for their first dance at their wedding the following day. I cried after they left and tried hard not to think about it. And except for it creeping up on me when I least expected it a few times in the last week, I've done a pretty good job not thinking about it. Which meant that I had not prepared myself for his memorial service today as well as I might have liked.

What was so nice about the service was how much emphasis was placed on Seany's music, and how much he loved it and loved sharing it. The gigs and gigs of music I have saved on my hard drive are due, almost entirely, to him. We didn't have exactly the same taste, but had much in common; he was responsible for a huge amount of my development as a music listener, and he grew to know my taste better than anyone. He would nearly pounce on me as soon as he'd found a new album he thought I'd love, and he was always right.

Sean was always, always a good friend. He was always ready to listen whenever anyone needed it. He was a genuinely open and caring guy.

We'd drifted apart the last few years - both busy with our jobs, I think, and not spending as much time chatting online (as we did all through college). I'd been meaning to text him for at least two weeks before he died, and was just too distracted to follow through. We'd planned to hang out when I was on spring break, and he was dead before that happened.

At least he went while he was with friends. At least it was just as simple as falling asleep listening to Coldplay, one of his very favorite bands.

I went back through emails we'd exchanged, and found a paper he'd written for a music course and sent me back in 2006: a list of his favorite albums of the moment - some of which are still my favorite albums, and ones I most associate with him, because he shared them with me - and an accompanying short analysis and his favorite bits. I thought, in the spirit of his musical generosity, that I'd share his list with you; especially if there are ones you are unfamiliar with, I'd strongly recommend you listen and lose yourself in some music for awhile.

I love you lots, Seany. I miss you terribly, and I'm so sad we didn't hang out more the last few years.

for brian

April 21, 1984 - August 10, 2013

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

vonnegut on the blues

 . . . Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today - jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop and on and on - is derived from the blues. 

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country - an atrocity from which we can never fully recover - the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. 

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.

- Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country

bear

My parents put down their Great Pyrenees yesterday. He had cancer in the joint of his left front leg.

We got him almost six years ago. I had already moved back in with my parents when I found out I was pregnant with a girl. My dad, realizing that he would be the only male in a house with (soon to be) four female humans and two female dogs, decided to find a boy dog to help him stave off the estrogen.

He found Bear through a rescue program. The story goes that there were several other families that wanted to adopt Bear that day, but when my dad saw him, he knelt down so they were at eye level and Bear came right up to him, and the rescue people knew my dad was the one who should take him home.

We used to joke that Bear would be the dog that Joley could ride, and in fact, he was the only one of the three that tolerated her babyness without complaint. He watched out for her more than the others.

He drooled constantly. He was so stubborn that we could never cure him of his deep, slow barking. And he was huge and lumbering, and when he'd just been groomed his fur looked and felt like a marshmallow cloud. He had tiny soft triangles for ears and big droopy jowls, and he was incredibly strong.

I loved him. And the worst part, besides feeling like I've lost some bulwark in the world, is feeling like his life could have ended differently. That better choices could have been made.

It didn't hit me until today. I kept hoping that my parents had changed their minds and decided to amputate the leg instead of putting him down. Then, moments ago, an image of his huge carcass on its side, somehow deflated to only skin and bone and wiry hair, floated to the surface of my mind. And now I can't help but face the fact that everything that was Bear is gone.

He was a good dog, and I miss him terribly.