Mallory's Camera

R & J have the type of kids one is immediately inspired to write a children's book about.

You know—the types of stories where the children find some sort of magic creature in the green hollow behind the pool that must be kept secret from the grownups and that grants Wishes That Come True With a Twist (Five Children & It, Half Magic). R & J's kids are just the most winsome, brilliant, beautiful children ever.

They were definitely the high point of an action-packed Memorial Day weekend during which I also hung out with real-life Flavia in the Catskills and Ichabod in Cold Springs.

Real-life Flavia told me our mutual pal Betsy has had a recurrence of her Lyme disease, necessitating a medical leave from her job. And I felt like such an awful friend because Betsy has reached out to me a few times in the last four months, and I just ignored her. Why? Because Betsy requires effort. And I like Betsy, but I just didn't have the energy, the Schlock job drained me so completely & left me feeling so...extinguished... as though there was nothing remarkable or special about me at all: I was just a colorless cog in an awful machine.

I was actually pretty lonely during that time. But I couldn't deal with anybody else's problems, and Betsy always has problems. I was lonely for someone who would be solicitous about my problems.

Sigh...

I will call Betsy sometime this week.



Watching R & J's enchanting children made me ponder the nature of childhood memory. The baby is the baby; her hippocampus still hasn't laid down neural connections with most of her other cortical structures. She doesn't even have enough neural connections for a personality yet, although she does have a temperament—remarkably serene, observant, easily delighted.

The two older children (ages 4 and 2½) are old enough to have personalities. Princess Star is independent, smart, choosy about the objects of her affection, with more than a touch of fire. Prince Fire Engine is a total charmer, extroverted, and possesses the largest vocabulary (words and syntax) I have ever observed in a 2½-year-old. They are lively, interactive children whose lives are filled with adventures—but in all likelihood, they won't remember a single one of them when they are older.



I saw this with my own children, too, of course.

When Ichabod was 2½, I threw a cup at his father. I missed! I'm a lousy thrower. But Ichabod, sitting on his father's lap, understandably got very, very upset.

His father & I got divorced about a year later, and in my defense, Mrs. Hare 2.0 subsequently threw an answering machine. Bill really was that infuriating! But the cup got mythologized, and the answering machine did not. Maybe because there were no kids present when the answering machine was hurled? I dunno.

All throughout his childhood, for years, whenever Ichabod & I fought over anything, there would alway come a moment on the downside of the argument when Ichabod would sigh dramatically and stage a pensive look, which would prompt me to ask, "What's up, Boo?" And he would tell me, "I am remembering the cup."

This naturally made me feel awash with guilt.

Last Thanksgiving, I asked him: "Do you still remember the cup?"

"Huh?" he asked.

And when I explained, he said, "Oh, that. I think I can remember remembering it. If that makes sense. But the actual event itself?" He squinched up his face.

Yesterday, since I'd just spent time around the remarkable H________ children and was curious about memory, I asked him again.

This time, he said, of course, he remembered it.

"But you didn't last time we talked about it!"

"Yes, I did!" he replied indignantly.

No, he did not.

But I let it slide. Because what would be the point of arguing?



Of course, it was fabulous spending time with Ichabod. It's always fabulous spending time with Ichabod. Ichabod & RTT are my two favorite people on the planet.

But Dia Beacon turned out to be closed.

And Cold Spring turned out to be very different than I had remembered it. I hadn't been there since before the pandemic. Back then it was filled with the most fabulous antique shops—there must have been a dozen of them on Main Street—including the wonderful Doll Hospital where I would stand for hours and watch the proprietor do restoration on vintage dolls.

But there was maybe one antique store open on Main Street yesterday.

And Ichabod was out of it because he hadn't gotten enough sleep, and I was out of it because my knee was really throbbing, and I'd rather stupidly parked my car at the top of a steep hill, hiked down to meet him at the Metro North Station, and thus faced the prospect of hiking back up the hill. (Of course, he volunteered to get the car and come back for me, but I said, No, because I am either (a) macho, (b) a masochist, (c) dumb, (d) all of the above.)

We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in the non-quaint-and-charming village outside Cold Spring where all the real people live, and then drove up to the Chuang Yen Monastery—which was not the same as I remembered it, either. The Largest Sitting Buddha in the Western Hemisphere was behind locked doors, and we spent a long time searching for the pond with the carnivorous goldfish, and when we finally found it, there weren't any goldfish, just a few brownish-green carp, and they no longer stormed the little landing when people gathered to look at them.

I could tell Ichabod felt bad that he was not "fully present" as his therapist would have put it.

This morning, he texted me apologizing again: I haven't been sleeping well.

And then he told me he had ordered a whole bunch of gnomes and pink flamingos for my garden—I think because he kept asking me yesterday what he could buy me, and I kept saying, Nothing. The only things I want are garden ornaments.

###

I had been thinking about gardening today, but I think instead I'm gonna stay sedentary & ice my knee.

The reception was fun. And posh!!! Took place at the Dashings (not their real name) mega-ginormous Pennsylvania horse farm:





They'd pay someone $75,000 a year plus benefits just to mow all this, I thought. And the Dashings are only here one month out of the year now! Mostly they live in Santa Barbara these days.

The other guests were mostly people I'd known long ago and oh so far away when they were a lot unhappier and a lot more conflicted. But, of course, they'd had to be unhappy and conflicted then since they'd all been supporting players in the unhappy and conflicted Drama of Ben & Patrizia.

In this present tense, there was a strong sense that they were all actors at some kind of wrap party. They were all jovial and having a good time now.



People I didn't remember were positively overjoyed to see me.

Here's something I didn't remember:

Sixteen years ago, Lew got me a gig tutoring the Dashings' son, Tucker who did not know how to write a college essay & was on the verge of flunking his SATs. I tutored Tucker long distance via phone & email from the Squalid Cement Bungalow in Freeville, so I never actually met him or his parents in the flesh.

So at the reception, I am approached by a handsome young man in his early thirties who greets me by staring deep into my eyes and declaring, "You changed my life!!!"

"I did?" I said.

"Yes! And it's very rare to be able to identify the influence of a single person in those kinds of things, but without you, I would never have gotten into college. And college was the best thing that ever happened to me!"

It was Tucker.

Huh!

(That's Tucker on the right with mega-rich Pops)



I was also apparently the best dressed person there since various members of the catering staff kept scurrying up to me, trays of prosciutto-wrapped figs and steak crostini be damned, to exclaim, You! You look amazing!

It wasn't my clothes! I was wearing $20-dollar pants from Marshalls, an ancient bathing suit, an oversized man's white Oxford shirt, and a thrift-store leopard-spotted scarf:



So, I guess I've still got it. At least from a distance.

Excellent for my vanity!

###

The blessed couple were very sweet:



And very shy! They kissed behind Lew's baseball hat:



###

TSWSOITC and his wife stayed at the same hotel I did. They live in Georgia—Republic Of, not Last Train To—& I've always been rather fascinated by her since TSWSOITC disapproves of me, & yet I'd say Keti and I have more similarities than dissimilarities. (TSWSOITC saw me primarily as Ben's accomplice.)

I got to know her a little bit over the abysmal Comfort Inn coffee when she'd come out in the morning to smoke:



Keti is one of those women who is beautiful without being pretty. Very, very smart—an economist by training, speaks Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, English, & French. Has lived through three civil wars. Very knowledgeable about what's really going on with the Ukraine War.

During the time I'd known him best, TSWSOITC was first married to Rachel and then—as a newly divorced man—the harbor master of Rockland, Maine. I'd begun writing a novel about him: The Harbor Master! As near as I can remember now, the plot had something to do with smuggled Ukrainian sex slaves! (Prophetic? Keti is Ukrainian.) I think I had a wee bit of a crush on TSWSOITC.

Anyway, this was my first time meeting Keti, and I found her very intriguing, and went about ingratiating myself to the best of my ability because I longed to be her BFF For-EVAH!!! Although, of course, I won't be.

###

And I see I am wayyyy over the writing time I alotted myself this morning! I have a busy schedule today. Nothing fun! All draggy, practical shit that must get done.

But I would be remiss not to mention:

• Day after the reception I met up with egg_shell:



We had a fabulous time chatting & sauntering about Edinboro in the sweltering heat, but the real magic was when egg_shell let me look at one of her art notebooks.

Now! I happen to think egg_shell is an artistic genius. The creative impulse is very, very strong in her. And looking through her notebook, I got the same sense I got when I visited that barn in Vermont where all those fabulous Bread & Puppet Theater puppets are stored or when I saw Michaelangelo's Prisoners In Stone at the Accademia in Firenzi so very long ago—that I was viewing the creative source, the pure, untrammeled heart of the creative process.

The hackles on the back of my neck actually stood up while I flipped through her pages.

• In Ithaca, I stayed in the most enchantingly beautiful AirBnB:



• And RTT & I had a really, really good time hanging out together:

RTT was down in the City for an Oliver Tree concert so we met up in The Big City.

He suggested brunch; I countered with the Museum of Natural History, and that’s where we ended up.

It was a fun trip!!!



I grew up on the Upper West Side.

Before it was the Upper West Side—

Meaning while I was growing up there, the Upper West Side was still a working class district. Amsterdam & Columbus Avenue were filled with utilitarian shops, locksmiths & cobblers & corner candy stores & the like. Junkies were forever passing out in the lobby of the tiny converted brownstone where I lived with my mother, & you had to walk up four flights of stairs to get to the apartment.

The apartment was on W. 74th Street & the Museum of Natural History was on W. 81st. In those days, museum admission was free-ee-eeeeee, so between the ages of 8 & 15, I divided my Saturdays between the Natural History Museum & the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the other side of town, directly across Central Park.

Very little remains of the Upper West Side I remember from the 1960s.

I mean, I guess the buildings remain the same, but I don’t recognize them. The only things that are recognizable are the subways, which are still filthy, hot, filled with dangerous people but undeniably efficient, and the façade of the Natural History Museum.




My favorite part of the Museum was always the dioramas.

As a young, imaginative girl, I could lose myself in those dioramas for hours. If only I could figure out the proper incantations, I knew I could transport myself— To the plains of Serengeti! To the humid mountain tops of faraway Java!







I imagine the days of the dioramas are numbered.

Taxidermy, doncha know.

Exploitation of innocent animals, bla, bla, bla.

I could hear it in the shocked voices of the Millennial parents ushering their children round the Hall of African Mammals: Are those things real?

The skipping children just clapped their hands & chortled.



Once upon a time, this statue stood in front of the Museum of Natural History.

It was removed because…symbol of colonialism & racism! Offensive!

Having grown up around this statue and devoted a significant number of childhood hours attempting to scale it, I—of course—was very much against its removal.

I thought the proper response to this statue would have been to commission an equivalent statue where bronze Native Americans got to piss on a bronze Teddy Roosevelt! And then, they could position that statue maybe a 100 feet away from the original statue on those imposing marble stairs.

I am very opposed to bowdlerizing the past. The past is a foreign country, remember? They do things differently there—but they did do them.

Museum administrators, though, for the most part, are an unimaginative lot, so such a solution would never have occurred to them.



Over lunch at the Museum cafe, RTT and I discussed the Oliver Tree concert (which sounded like great fun) and current events.

RTT is much taken up with the Vincent McMahon sex scandal.

Among the tasty tidbits that have emerged about Vince McMahon, the WWE CEO, is that he likes to shit on girls’ faces & use weird sex toys.

(Wow! I thought. Most men his age are dealing with constipation! Like what does he do—pop Ex-lax before his sessions with Bree Daniels?)

“Oh, honey,” I said. “That stuff is all so boring.”

“Boring?” said RTT.

“Yeah. Boring,” I said. “It happens so many times, and every time they expect you to clutch your pearls and gasp, ‘Quelle scandal!’ And it’s just so boring. Who fucking cares?

“The whole thing reminds me of an equivalent scandal like 30 years ago with Bob Guccione, who owned a magazine called Penthouse that was like the dirty Playboy. I remember that one, I guess, because Guccione owned a house in Staatsburg, which is close to where I live now. I forget what the big scandal was, but it was all supposed to be like super-racy and bad because Penthouse actually did photoshoots of girls showing their pussies, and those pussies had pubic hair.

“Anyway. This is one of the reasons why older people start tuning out. We’ve heard it all before.”

I looked at my handsome, brilliant kid.

“There’s one thing I’d like you to do for me.”

“Oh, of course! Anything!”

“I’d like you to try and remember this conversation when you’re about 65. I’ll be long dead, of course. But see, if you don’t agree with me.”

###





On my way back to Grand Central, I checked in with my grandfather who is still imprisoned in a wall mural near the shuttle stop in Times Square. Like something out of that brilliant Christopher Priest short story, An Infinite Summer. Or a diorama!

I bet I’m the only person in the world who still remembers that my grandfather used to play the cello. And played it badly! I thought.

Eight thousand words to go.

Can I pull that off today?

Probably not.

###

While I worked yesterday, I kept track of the various sensory impressions flitting through my consciousness:

Barbara’s house in Piedmont two hours before sunset: I saw the shadows falling over Barbara’s garden, the barest trace of a wafting mist filtering the golden California sunlight. It was quiet. Very, very quiet. Barbara’s little garden jutted up against a dozen other little backyards and gardens, and I thought it was just so odd to see so many million-dollar homes crowded up against one another with no sounds, no signs of life anywhere.

Buying a complete set of Dickens for Jane: I discovered the books in some antiquarian bookstore in a small town in upstate New York before I knew enough about upstate New York to remember the names of any towns. The shop was near a bridge. I remember I stopped and looked down into the river. (Of course, when I subsequently gave Jane the books, she got furious with me. Jane didn’t like receiving gifts; gifts made Jane feel beholden. Jane preferred to make other people feel beholden.)

Watkins Glen in the early 1990s. With Ben. We’re standing at the tip of Seneca Lake. We have just seen the house—some robber industrialist’s mansion standing high on the hill with five fireplaces, stained glass windows to die for, and an amazing wild, uncared for garden—and were doing the math: Yes, we could afford to buy it; I was making a shitload of money, and my Time Inc bosses were happy to let me work remotely. But who the hell would want to live in Watkins Glen?

Montour Falls in the early 1990s. Another house. This one built in the 1870s and standing at the very base of Shequaga Falls. We would afford to buy that one, too—except Montour Falls???

Insert ellipsis.

My mind would rather do anything than work!

And increasingly, I am understanding the phenomenon whereby old memories get more and more vivid while more recent memories fade.

###

It was a gorgeous day. Temps in the low 70s.

I went tromping—which was probably a mistake because (a) once I go tromping, that’s it for the day so far as any sustained work effort goes and (b) I may have reached the age at which it’s not comfortable for me to tromp five miles three days in a row.

The magnolias are at the height of their bloom:





But down near the river, the forest is still bare and somewhat ominous:



I listened to The Enchanted April because suzannareads mentioned it the other day.

Kinda interesting the way the basic rom-com formula has evolved in the last 100 years.

###

I won’t go tromping today.

But I do have to meet with Marissa.

For some reason, she hasn’t been able to transfer the GoFundMe $$$ into her bank account. I think because her legal address is a post office box, and GoFundMe doesn’t like to give money to people who live in post office boxes.

I understand their reluctance: It’s much easier to scam well-meaning benefactors if you live in a post office.

But Marissa lives in a post office box because her actual residence is a battered women’s shelter whose physical address can’t be shared.

Since GoFundMe has nothing in the way of phone-reachable customer service reps, the whole thing is wayyyyy more problematic and complicated than it needs to be.

Plus I think I’ve taught all the English to Marissa that I am gonna to teach.

These days I’m functioning more like a fairy godmother than an English tutor.

And I don’t want to be a fairy godmother.

Oddest experience yesterday. I was out and about buying plants when Neil Young’s wavery, eerie, slightly out-of-tune tenor and a familiar piano arpeggio suddenly spilled from the store’s sound system.

After the Goldrush:

Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s…

For a split moment, there was someone else in my brain.

And I knew instantly who this person was: It was me. Age 20 or so. I must have listened to this album 1,000 times or so when it first came out.

The odd thing, though, was that this me was an alien presence. Not the same me that now lives in this body at all. The coloration of consciousness was completely different.

Then wham! the alien presence was gone.

I have completely forgotten who that girl was.

###

This is actually a plot device I’m using in one of the perennially-being-written novels. In Where You Were When, there’s a group of people who are able to travel back in time because they’re able to seize moments like the one I've described above to go back into the brains of their younger selves. The kicker being that they can only travel one way – backwards – and that the pasts they find themselves in are always mutating though certain motifs appear to be inflexible. My heroine, Ybel, for instance always ends up working as a waitress in a place called The Buttercup Bakery and always witnesses a boy named Danny jumping from a window while stoned on acid. But the other details of her past are always changing.

Danny’s leap from the window has created a kind of temporal do-loop for Ybel, and the first novel – yes, yes, all unwritten novels must be trilogies or tetrologies! – is an account of how she is broken out of that do-loop so that she can be conscripted by the Forces of Good to fight unspeakable e-e-e-evil!

The catalyst for traveling backwards in time varies from time traveler to time traveler. Kind of like epilepsy triggers. For some, it’s a smell; for others, it’s a particular way that light flashes or glimmers. For Ybel, it’s sonic – that inverted 18th from Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

By the time the novel opens, we’re given to understand that Danny has made his leap an uncountable number of times, and that Ybel has developed some measure of control over her backwards time traveling. She only has to imagine the inverted 18th in order to go backwards in time. In terms of the actual words on the page, this, too, is problematic since in Chapter One, Danny and Ybel are actually listening to The Doors’ Light My Fire – from which it’s really, really hard to segue into Rachmaninoff!

Anyway, the odd experience yesterday was very illuminating in terms of my little literary experiment.

###

In other news, it’s very cold here. Like 8 degrees. I’m afraid those daffodils by the post office are popsicles.

The novelist Richard Russo sez you have to have a certain tendency toward OCD to write a fiction.

That seems about right.

###

Bruce Zapp (not his real name!) has a new girlfriend, B tells me. Her name is Julie! Bruce’s high school girlfriend was named Julie; his college girlfriend was named Julie, and his recently divorced wife is named Julie. If Bruce ever goes for gender reassignment, I think we all know what his new name will be.

The Zapps are former in-laws. I saw them on a regular basis throughout my second marriage and naturally developed a kind of impersonal, narrative interest in their lives.

I was shocked, shocked, shocked when I heard that Bruce and Mrs. Julie were divorcing. It wasn’t that I thought they had a particularly good marriage; it was that they were sort of the social equivalent to Planck’s Constant or the Ideal Gas Law; a fixed, immutable value in every meeting of the extended Plunkett clan.

###

B’s mother was one of five sisters. All but two of the sisters had died by the time I married B, but the children of the Plunkett sisters gathered at regular intervals at a beautiful, old Victorian cottage on Keuka Lake.

The Plunkett sisters were descended from an Irish saint! Oliver Plunkett who was executed in 1681 for promoting the Roman faith. How a devout Roman Catholic primate who railed against drunkenness and debauchery among his priestly underlings was able to beget a line of descendants that includes my own son Robin, I could not say. But the family tree is indisputable.

###

Bruce Zapp was this immensely good-humored guy who emanated a sense of bumbling incompetence, even though he was actually very competent, the Don Draper of Rochester, New York, in fact. (Leave us not forget that until Kodak and Xerox went under, Rochester, New York was a significant center of commerce.)

Julie was a nervous woman whose favorite breed of dog was Weimaraners. She reminded me a lot of a Weimaraner, actually, elongated, high-strung, always barking at silly things.

Bruce and Mrs. Julie had two sons: Maxwell, who took his mother’s incipient OCD tendencies to a whole new level, and Griffin, who mirrored his father’s laid-back charm.

Maxwell was considered the golden boy – super-competitive, a basketball star at an early age, and as far as I could tell, completely humorless.

Griffin was a plump kid and generally considered the family doofus. But I liked Griffin best. Even when he was a kid, I could see what Griffin was all about. One rainy afternoon a million years ago, I trailed Griffin through the Strong Museum and watched as he paused thoughtfully in front of every natural science exhibit: He was actually figuring them out.

Today, Griffin is a film major at Purchase, and Maxwell is on his second round of medical school applications. He wasn’t accepted anywhere the first time, and I have my doubts whether he’ll be meet with any success on the second go-round either.

###

I’m vibing on the Zapps so strongly this morning because I had this intense memory flash when I first woke up. The little triangular hub of shops just before the residential maze of streets where the Zapps lived. The doughnut shop!

Memory hits me like that. It’s never a linear recitation of events; it’s always these intense, almost hypnogically detailed flashes of physical places where I’ve once been, sometimes once, sometimes many, many times.

What’s up with that? I have no idea. But it seems to be different from the way other people remember things.

Also, it’s odd to me that children whom I once knew well are now adults whom I don’t know at all and who don’t remember me in the slightest.

Larry McMurtry is one of my favorite fiction writers. He's understated. In his latter novels, he often appears to be glib and officiously cozy in a peculiar Fannie Flagg-ish way, but it's a deliberate choice: McMurtry writes, for the most part, about people whose lives are absolute train wrecks, and the banal prose style serves to underscore just how disconnected from the true realities of their lives these characters are.

The Evening Star is McMurtry's sequel to Terms of Endearment, a tough novel that was adapted into one of the 1980s' biggest cinematic sentimental tearjerkers. Terms of Endearment itself is not exactly a sequel to Moving On -- a novel I absolutely adore -- so much as it is a kind of... expansion into the life of one of the novel's minor characters, fat, smart Emma Greenway who allows herself to be defined by that first adjective and tries as hard as possible to ignore the second.

At the end of the novel -- should I flash SPOILER-SPOILER-SPOILER here? Nah. Everyone knows Terms of Endearment -- Emma gets breast cancer and dies.

The Evening Star, a true sequel, picks up a decade or so after Emma's death and focuses on her mother Aurora, a monstrously self-involved River Oaks socialite, and her relationships with her three grandchildren, horribly damaged by their mother's early death.

The ending of this novel contains one of the most transcendent and emotionally moving passages I've ever read.

Aurora's youngest granddaughter has a baby; the baby gets dumped on Aurora. Aurora is very, very old by this point, and so close to death, she has finally evolved the capacity to love. And she loves this baby. The baby knows it too. They spend many hours together. She plays the Brahms Requiem over and over again.

Quick, confusing flash forward to a New York City street 25 years or so in the future. Aurora's great grandson -- now a Gen X-er with all the baggage that entails -- is walking down a cold autumn street, fretting about something or other. He has completely forgotten about Aurora. And somehow he wanders someplace where the Brahms Requiem is playing, and the music triggers a tidal wave of emotion so intense he can barely function. All he knows, listening to the music, is that someone loved him once and that he has lost that person forever. Standing on that busy Manhattan street corner, he begins to weep, and he can't stop.

And there the novel ends.

Past 12 hours have been something like that for me: Like something got triggered in me yesterday, and now I'm weeping. But I have no idea why. It's odd. I'm really good at connecting the dots to form emotional subtexts when I'm talking with friends about their feelings, but I've never been able to make the slightest sense out of the muddle that is my own emotions.

I better do something to calm myself down by tonight though. I'm meeting S2 for dinner and a movie, and comfort is not part of our social contract.

Every gritty little city struggling to reconcile its booming manufacturing legacy with the new realities of the service economy has a place in my heart, but none more so than Oakland. I didn’t grow up there but Marybeth and the Raffantis did, and I tapped into their memories. I did spend a major part of my young adulthood on the Oakland/Berkeley borderline, and sometimes when I have insomnia I try to remember the exact layout of the churches and the businesses that line Telegraph Avenue from 51st Street to Alcatraz Avenue. Goodnight Moon.

Do different landscapes summon different emotions or is the emotional resonance a human constant whatever the landscape it attaches to? There used to be a steel mill close to this freeway and back in the day when you could actually put yourself through college if you worked hard enough, Mark had a job at that steel mill as a night janitor. I used to visit him there a couple of nights of nights a week, riding my bicycle, without a light, over rusty railroad tracks, through the crazy streets west of San Pablo. I remember the shadows his flashlight made as I trailed him on his rounds, monsters without bodies, the huge casements and scaffolding and vats.

I’m the solo guardian of those memories now.

Maybe the sense of place is determined by just how many such memories, from hundreds or thousands of people, are embedded in any particular landscape.

Would make a nice central core to a Borgesian, dark urban fantasy story but I can tell -- I'm blithering.