6-28-09

The Rachel Stories—A Blog

6-28-09

It’s Sunday, my favorite day of the week. I like the inherent quietness of a Sunday. The Times on the front step, doing the puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR, Weekend Edition with Lee Ann Hanson. How I love the radio. My friend of 40 years, the radio. A voice in the wilderness all those years ago in that isolated, snowy town.

Not everyone likes Sunday the way I do. My brother says Sundays are the most depressing day of the week. That they sadden him as much as a Bob Seger song. Nothing worse, he says, than hearing a Bob Seger song on a Sunday. Makes him want to jump off the Tappan Zee, it depresses him so. And those new green signs they’ve hung along the bridge—that “Life is Worth Living” and the 800 number to call—don’t make an ounce of difference. Wouldn’t stop him from pitching himself into the cement-like Hudson below on a quiet Sunday afternoon with Bob Seger singing on the radio.

Sundays are quiet days, church-going days, I guess. But not for me. I get my spirituality from other places. Like the radio. Like the food pantry where I volunteer. Like the way my 7-year-old laughs sometimes. I’ve seen all the churches I need to at this point in my life. Saw Little Richard testify in a neglected old church in an Upstate town. Witnessed a bunch of believers getting slain in the holy spirit. Watched people speak in tongues at a Holiday Inn gathering that had me bolting for the exit sign. Saw the Mighty Clouds of Joy moving the mostly-black crowd at a long ago NYS Fair, me and my mother among them; and her sprinting down the aisle, eager to answer their call to claim Jesus as her savior, having traded in Engelbert for Jesus a few months before. And after, the bass player hawking a diet pill remedy while the band was on break. Spent more time still mouthing phrases so ingrained in my head that I’d long since lost track of the meaning. Inthenameofthefather, andoftheson, andoftheholyspirit, amen. Even at a young age, I wondered where the women were in all that. And I always thought it was the craziest notion that Mary conceived her baby through immaculate conception. What a field day Cosmo could have with that one, after the list I read yesterday. And don’t get me started on the Orthodox Jewish women I teach—who arrive for class in the back seat of a cab or their husband’s or father’s car; their hair hidden under wigs, their support hose and sensible shoes and long sleeves, even on the hottest of days. We are so afraid of women’s sexuality… So, yes, I reject the shrink-wrapped, white-washed organized religion of Sundays—in favor of my own spiritual journey. Which is limited, I admit.

So I’m always looking for redemption. Not consciously of course. More often it finds me. It’s funny how shit like that happens. We get gifts from the heavens when we need them most. It’s like God (not the white bearded, staff-holding, egomaniac that Religion has packaged, but Something Else) going, Hey, Stupid, I’m right over here. These days I can feel that Hand, saying, here, take this. A gift. It’s what you need right now. And me, not smart enough to recognize what’s being offered. I’ve got my Agenda. Got my Plan. Driving 100 mph in a big fucking circle. That’s how smart I am.

So, it’s Sunday and all that. And thanksbetogod it’s sunny again. And I sleep until almost 9am, which is very late for me. I make breakfast, listening to the radio. Comfort my son over a loose tooth that pains him—and he wants to be a baby again in my lap with his long, peach-fuzzed legs, his 60 lbs, his neck still slightly reminiscent of baby powder and lotion. But we move on: he to his “maff” books and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Me, upstairs to take a bath for the second day in a row because my hair is still rocking. No need to shampoo. Get dressed.

And the day shifts. I head into Manhattan.

As always, I find parking. Lucky like that. It’s hot already, muggy. I wedge my Ipod headphones into my ears. Listen to Them. It’s Sunday after all—and my spirituality also comes from music. From people like Van—who I saw perform in a polyester brown suit outdoors at Tanglewood on a hot August night, that plump Irishman whose spirit sustained us when we got home and found the note that someone close to us had been murdered and someone closer had committed suicide… So I walk cross-town on 53rd, with a young Van in my ear, heading for the Folk Art Museum. And just past 6th Ave., there’s some kind of gay pride parade assembling. Techno thumping from the flatbed trucks lined up to glide down 5th Ave. Beautiful, tanned men in all manner of undress and women’s dress are dancing, laughing. A Caribbean-theme truck with men in enormous feathered headdresses in vibrant shades of blues and pinks. And then I notice the truck celebrating the older men’s leather bar; and these men are not “beautiful,” not tanned, not buff. They are middle aged men in their middle aged bodies. Undressed. Dancing. I watch one overweight man, dressed in nothing but a thong and a hard hat, dancing to the pulsing music. Here I am, world, he seems to be saying, love me for who I am. And beside me, a couple nudges each other and laughs. Tourists with their fanny packs and digital Canons. Wipe that smirk off your face, I want to say, but the music is too loud; and I can see that they are too smug in their convictions for my remark to hit home. Probably went to church this morning, and will go back home with stories and photos of all the faggots on 5th Avenue today.

Inside the Folk Art Museum it’s quiet, except when the door opens and another visitor comes in, bringing the techno with her. But just for a moment, and it’s quiet again. I use my student ID to buy a reduced price ticket from the androgynous person at the front desk. The museum building is 5 floors, but very narrow—dwarfed by MOMA, the Goliath next door. The concrete staircase is magnificent in its apparently unsuspended design. But overall, I’m disappointed. Yes, there are the quilts. The Nadelstern creations that appear as though you’re looking at them through a kaleidoscope—her only “studio,” a kitchen table in a small apartment in the Bronx. And there are the wood carvings by Ulysses Davis, a black southern barber, who created over 320 wood carvings that he kept in his barber shop—carvings mostly of patriotic and religious symbols. Most amazing is his series of carved busts of forty U.S. presidents, from Washington to The Moron’s father, George H.W., all lined up in two neat rows along the length of a wall. But I found a certain melancholy in the number of “artist unidentified” works displayed throughout the museum. These self taught artists, unrecognized, unacknowledged for their contributions. How hard it is to be an artist in this country. To claim yourself Painter. Sculptor. Dancer. Writer. As Mademoiselle Reisz tells Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, an artist must have very strong wings.

Which most of us don’t. And tonight I’m thinking about Helen Marish. Self taught Painter. Artist. Whistling at her easel while listening to the radio or her John-Luc Ponty records. Me writing on the couch beside her. Canvas after canvas after canvas disappointing her. Hundreds of them never shown, never revealed. Her paintings like the 1800 poems discovered after Dickinson’s death. Helen’s McKeesport and Port View—her own Pittsburgh in all those off-kilter, slanted images. And beer drinking Joe, trying to relate to his artist daughter the best way he could that night many years ago, by making her a squeegee so she could finish a silk screen. And Helen, of course, rejecting it. Helen Marish, Painter, Artist, Friend. She has saved every single one of my stories, every single letter and card. Believing—no matter how long I never deliver. I miss you tonight, Helen. My 30-year-long friend out there in Hell A, probably cruising the streets as I write this, tossing an interesting bit of trash into your car, to make into something later. To make into art.

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