Anniversary

When I look back, it's always now.

October 4th was our anniversary. Richard and I have been together for 18 years. That is the number of years my dog lived. In dog years, we have been together all our lives.

A woman passed us on Warren Street, sitting on a bench, and she took this picture. I love to sit on this bench and watch the world of Warren Street float by. Richard is pretty sure it means we have entered the alter kakers portion of our program. I don’t care.

The picture was taken a few weeks ago. The woman said we looked happy. We are happy on Warren Street. We walk hand in hand or I link my arm through Richard’s. When I first met him, I tried walking with my arm around his waist, and he didn't like it. He felt twisted up and demonstrated the feeling as a wrestling hold. He said, "Can you walk like this?" I still miss that way of walking.

Today in bed, as we were having tea, he said, “Every day with us is a mitzvah.” I first laid eyes on him at Yaddo. There was more brown in his hair. He was wearing a different pair of very cool glasses. That and the English accent and the adorable face and the sleek body and a brain that is a dog, sniffing around at everything, were immediately appealing.

He's a witch, so after 18 years he doesn't look that different. Never mind about me. October 4, 2006 was the luckiest day of my life. Everything changed. Everything that is good in my life became possible. I was 60 years old, and he was 56. Life stretched out before us, not as more life but as a different life. If we act like teen-agers, you can understand why.

The people on the bus.

Spring rolls with a million vegetables, spices, herbs, and shrimp.

Sometimes when you post, people appear from the rainbow of your life. Oh, that one and I went to high school. That one and I wrote for the Village Voice. That one and I lived in Long Beach. That one and I used to pass each other on the Upper West Side.

I feel particular warmth toward people I met as part of a group, as part of a thing only we breathed and swam in, we think. The other day, I was thinking about the groups that made my life. Made my life in the way I'm describing, and when I hear from anyone in these groups, a peace falls over me, as if I was really there. Yes, that's me in the group photo.

What are the groups that produce this feeling? Woodmere Academy, the Village Voice, the early years of the women's movement, the world of professional catering and food service in New York City.

I always forget how long it takes to make food that tastes good. The thinking about it, the shopping—and up in Hudson the where the hell can I get this cheese or that spice (nowhere)—the chopping, the arrangement of pots and pans, the several stages of prepping, and then sautéing and deep frying. I forget because I like doing it in the context of a job and I don't want to think there isn’t enough money in this for me, given the time.

I like remembering the way service people are always secret ops, taking notes on power along the food chain and what your place on it is assumed to be. Will this person say please and thank you? Will that one make eye contact with you? Will this one restrict his questions to the food you've prepared?

Why do I like remembering these things? I'm not entirely certain, but it gives me a sort of charge to be misidentified although not entirely misidentified. I really am the caterer.

Seymour Kleinberg

I am missing my friend Seymour, who died four years ago. He was a writer, but he didn't enjoy writing. He was also a visual artist, and this work he could enter daily with a form of happiness uniquely his and that might also come with an oy.

I loved Seymour's sense of design—pottery vases on top of a chest, paintbrushes in jars, art books stacked on coffee tables. I loved his love for Gardner and Gardner's art. After Gardner died, I gave Seymour Gardner's clothes he could fit into and the rest he went on a diet to wear. When Gardner was sick, Seymour was there every day. You never stay hard toward a person who shows up like that. Every time Seymour and I threw up our hands with irritation, I came back when I thought of his care for Gardner.

I loved Seymour's work on paper. I loved the Jew in him and the way he'd been raised in a Bronx primitive grocery store. I was riding my bike down 10th Avenue when a car turned into me and sped away. In the fall, I snapped the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee, and a piece of the meniscus was torn as well. Seymour was at the hospital after the surgery, but I wasn't awake and he went home. When I came to, I asked a nurse to call him, and he said he'd come back. He didn't live far away.

As I was waiting for him, I was still a little under the anesthetic of the surgery, so when I was offered morphine, I said no thanks, thinking I might not be awake and entertaining enough for Seymour. That’s how little I knew about drugs. I didn’t know that post surgical pain is cells dividing and reprinting themselves in order to take over the world.

Suddenly I was in so much pain, I needed more than the usual amount of morphine to level out, and it took a little while, and Seymour held my hand, and we didn't know what else to do but laugh. I was very happy to see him. Most of the time, he was kind and patient with me. I learned about the beauty of morphine that night. I already knew the beauty of Seymour.

This evening I took a bath

And I was stretched out in the hot water, and it smelled like lavender, and my eyes closed, and I was also in the tub on Charles Street in 1971. The apartment had been a little bit of a wreck a design sense could see the bones of and clean. I built a box for the tub and laid hand-painted Italian tiles over the wood. I sometimes didn't have enough money to eat. You went to the 9th Circle bar and got the hamburger and salad for $3. In the tub, I was in two places at the same time 53 years apart. This is not a figure of speech. This really happened. The floors of the apartment were raw. I laid Italian tiles in front of the fireplace as well and built a hearth, and I burned wooden crates I collected along the nearby piers. The bedroom could fit only a mattress on the floor and a small chest of drawers. The apartment was thinking what is going to happen to me in life and with sex all over the place you didn't think was your real life because you were never going to have a real life.

One winter, I read the words money laundering as monkey laundering. As a child, when I discovered I had a vagina, I gained a new respect for doors. On this day I’m remembering, it was snowing, and Richard and I lost power for a few minutes, and we lay in bed, and I thought we could hold each other all day because we are afraid of our generator. Then the lights came back on. The branches were heavy with snow. Everything was white, and it covered the steps we’d taken to arrive here. When I look back, I’m a ghost who’s never going to leave. In college, I looked up to a girl. I thought she was brave and glamorous, drunk and reckless, in a way I was never going to be, and for all the years we have known each other, she has seen that look on my face, and it’s as good a definition of love as I have ever come up with.

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