Lady, as Always, Takes Charge!

Well, I knew what it was the moment I happened upon it. But since I hadn’t seen it in six years, why did I know what it was?

I tell myself—that morning six years before was drenched in emotion. It had been only two months since my mother had died, and now my two brothers and I, with our spouses, were standing in the wildflower garden my mother had made in the twenty-acre woods which she owned, and in which she had lived.

OK—correction. The garden was a small affair, smaller than my mother’s living room. And since most wildflowers tend to be rather inconspicuous, as well as fleeting, it was really difficult to tell where the woods ended and the garden began.

My mother had begun the garden after my father died, and thus had called it “Jack’s garden.” He, of course, barely knew a trillium from a dog-tooth violet, and would have snorted at having a garden named after him, but my mother had been a strangely wonderful, practical sentimentalist. He was dead, after all, so if she had wanted to make him a garden? Well, he wouldn’t mind…..

So it had been therapy for her: I could imagine her visiting all her wildflowers—she knew where everything was—and deciding which ones to transplant. It’s therapeutic, after all, these mundane things you do. Clearing out the closets, for example, and facing the inevitable questions: his favorite sweater, he wore it seemingly always, but now fresh eyes see it. And isn’t it a bit ratty? What about those holes on the elbows—had they always been there? Why hadn’t you noticed them? So is anyone at Goodwill likely to buy or need this sweater?

So you are there, weeping a bit over the sweater, which is dumb, really, since your father had no particular love for clothes of any kind. You must do one of two things: discard (read: throw in the trash) or donate (read: give it to Goodwill, who will throw it in the trash). All of a sudden, the decision seems momentous: are you crazy? Who could possibly throw away Jack’s sweater? So there you are, seriously considering taking a sweater back to a tropical island, where sweaters are about as needed as fireplaces.

Now you know you’re crazy….

So she had made a garden for a man who had no need or even love for gardens, and that was the point. Grief is in one sense a stupid emotion: love will make you donate a kidney to your brother, or give a stern dressing-down to your son. But once a father dies, well, what use does he have for your tears? Or a husband, for that matter: the joke in the family was that Franny was going to find herself a gigolo named, of course, Juan. And why not? She had loved my father for fifty years—half a century! Why not have a fling with Juan?

So that morning, a month or two after my mother’s death, we had been in “Jack’s Garden,” and we were not there for Jack. Because later in the day, the memorial service would begin for my mother, and then the next day, we would all disperse. We were picking up our lives again, after the disruption of seeing our mother off, and much of that “picking up” meant going on, emotionally. There is, after all, a time to stop crying. There is a time when your friends really don’t want to hear that you spent the morning sobbing, since you had had the first dream of your mother after her death. And so real had it been that the dream seemed to be real just after you woke up! No, you think, she had been alive: you were dreaming that she was dead!

See?

Right?

It hits you again, just as hard as it hit you all that time ago, when the nurse had his stethoscope on your mother’s chest for a solid minute—you checked, since you were a nurse, too, and knew that it was state law….

But you have work to go to, or a breakfast to make, and you pull yourself together. If you’re a woman, you know that everybody will see your puffy eyes, this morning, but they’ll also see your bright smile. And hear you say, “just fine!” Because you are, after all, just fine. Know what? In six years, you won’t miss her so much. In fact, I am weeping now, just thinking about her, but I also have to confess: for the first time in six years, I forgot the anniversary of her death. Yes, May 3 went by, and not a tear did I shed. So I’m paying her back, with interest….

So I am going on, and we were going on, that day of the memorial service, though we have all gone on a lot more, nowadays, then we had gone on that morning. Which means that everybody was in tears, since my brother, who doesn’t so much make decisions as he herds his brothers, like a sheepdog, into doing the right thing. Which was, that morning, standing in Jack’s Garden. Remember? That garden that Jack didn’t much want, and probably wouldn’t have proclaimed just a piece of damned foolishness, but guess what? Dead men get no votes, Jack!

So why were we standing in the wildflowers / probable-and-or-presumptive poison ivy? You know, the stuff that will send my eldest brother—who inhaled the smoke of a fire burning the weed, and turned hyper allergic—to the Emergency Room? We are there because John, my sheepdog / brother, has decided to get my mother’s ashes, and to bury them, where else? Among the wild flowers and poison ivy of….

Somebody dug the hole. Then, we lifted the bag out of the box. And then came this:

      

“Crem” must mean ‘crematorium.” “Serv” is what, “service?” “SP” is a mystery, as is the “12954,” though I highly suspect the corpse before my mother was “12953….” Anyway, it was on the bag that held my mother’s ashes, and it both secured the bag and identified the ashes.

Which, as you may know, are not really ashes. They are roughly the size of small-grained rice, and it would take a quite a wind to scatter them. So John had taken the tag off the bag, and then looked at it. What to do with it? He turfed and handed it to my eldest brother. And what did he do?

Why me? Had it been because I had been there all the way through her death? Had it been because I had, a bit more than the others, masterminded her death? Or perhaps it is simply the case: the younger child is given the last of everything, from his mother’s milk to his mother’s ashes. Anyway, I held the thing in my hand, and then slipped it into my pocket.

I should have put it, of course, in the hole, along with the ashes. That would have been logical, but had my mother enjoyed the services of Juan, the gigolo? Of course not, so it felt, somehow, totally, totally, important to have this disc that had sealed up the remains of “12954,” or rather….

…my mother.

And so I got to Puerto Rico, after having placed the disc along with the small change into the security bowls at airport security. I pulled off my Wisconsin clothes—the six layers of needed clothing even in June—and pulled on my shorts. Then I emptied my pockets and said, “what in hell….”

Well, I had lost my mother: was I now to lose “12954?” Of course not, so I put the disc under the candleholder in the guest bathroom, and hoped against hope that some guest would find it valuable enough to steal….

And so I discovered it today, after six years, since cleaning is not quite cleaning in my house. It is, in fact, more akin to an archeological dig. And so here I am, as befuddled today as I was six years ago, because you know what? I lost a mother and then substituted her through a book, but I still cannot, I really cannot, bear to throw away….

Lady comes by….

“Take this,” I tell her. “And keep it utterly, utterly safe, because I will never see it again.”

I hand her the disc.

“But…” she begins.

I purse my lips towards my computer: it’s a Puerto Rican thing, why be so rude as to point, when you can purse your lips?

“Tomorrow,” I tell her.

She kisses me, pats me on the head, pockets the disc into the purse that shelters the thousand mysteries, relics, and memories of her life, which is everybody’s life, and my life as well, and now “12954’s” life, as well as, now…

….my mother.

  

Silence in the Poet's Passage

“I have utterly no idea why I did it,” I told Lady, “except that it seems to be an occupational hazard of mine. Remember my obsession with the Polish Papal Nuncio to the Dominican Republic? Or the time that I could leave poor Martha Argerich alone? Well, this weekend it was Kathleen Battle, though I’ve no idea why….”

“Whatever happened to her,” asked Lady. “She was everywhere for a while in the early 90’s, and then she disappeared.”

“The old story,” I told her. “Every opera singer knows: it’s not just about getting the engagement, it’s about getting the call back….”

“And she didn’t get the call back?”

“Worse, the Metropolitan Opera fired her, and then she was dead in the water, operatically speaking. Nobody would touch her….”

“Wow—what did she do?”

“Well, you could make a sort of children’s book out of it. You know, ‘A is for Arrogance, B is for Bitchiness…’ She didn’t, for example, like her dressing room, so she simply moved into another singer’s dressing room. Bad enough, but she also threw the singer’s clothes out in the hall. So when Carol Vaness—that was the singer—came back…well, Vaness is a lady, so we don’t know what happened. But we do know that when they were taking their final bows together, Vaness assured Kathleen Battle that, speaking for the entire company, she heartily wished never to work with her again.”

“Dear me, and I though poets were bad….”

“The stories are go on and on. The best being, of course, when she called her management company in New York, from the back seat of her limousine in California. She wanted the company to call the chauffeur, and instruct him to turn down the air conditioning….”

“What! She couldn’t tap on the window and ask?”

“Miss Battle does not address chauffeurs…”

“Good Lord,” said Lady.

“Or the time she checked out of the Ritz, in Boston, because the put peas in her pasta…”

“Clearly a major no-no….”

“So she got fired from the Met, and when they announced that, the entire company cheered! In San Francisco, they actually made t-shirts, after she appeared there, saying ‘I Survived the Battle!’”

“Wow!”

“So I began obsessing about that, since the Met has decided to invite her back, but just in recital, and of spirituals. But it doesn’t sound like she’s had much of a life. One post in an—admittedly rather bitchy—forum said that she’s back in her home town of Portsmouth, Ohio, and that she shops in the Walmart, there. Oh, and she returns stuff, without receipts, which doesn’t make the staff happy….”

“Marc, you really have to curb the tendency…”

“I know, I know…it’s a curse, these obsessions of mine. Remember the time I actually spent 20 minutes listening to Joyce DiDonato give an interview in French? All under the guise of brushing up the language from High School?”

“Out of control,” said Lady, “and what you really should be doing is tackling the strange case of the disappearance of Pablo Neruda.”

“Well, I thought it was the known parrot rustler, young Montalvo, when I first about it….”

“So did we all. In fact, we all hoped it was Montalvo, since the bird would have been well taken care of. But he’s in the clear—the bird disappeared on a Wednesday afternoon, and Montalvo was nowhere in shight….”

Neruda was—or hopefully is—a green Quaker parrot, who lived in a cage with Maya Angelou and Robert Frost. Maya met a natural end in both senses—that is, both the poet and the bird did. Curiously, well, here’s what I told Lady….

“You should have thought about that when you named him,” I said, ‘since everybody has suspected that the poet Neruda’s death was hardly accidental. Remember, they exhumed him, a while ago?”

“Well, I could hardly have imagined…”

“Anyway, the videos should tell you…”

“That’s just it,” said Lady. “Do you know, when I finally got into my brother’s apartment upstairs, where the camera monitors are located, and when I finally convinced the se3curity company that I was authorized to look at the videos, the videos for that day were gone! Poof! They said they were doing a reboot, or some such thing, and there was nothing recorded for that date! So why have a security system if stuff like that happens?”

Theories abound. Montalvo, last night, speculated that someone was trying to frame him. After all, almost no one could touch Neruda without getting his hand shredded: Montalvo, though, could hold the bird in his hand, and even get the bird to lie with his belly facing up.

“The bird is dead,” said Mr. Fernández, though he declined to give a reason why.

“The bird is probably very depressed,” said Maritza, “since birds are very emotional.”

“I think the parrot guy—the same one who had the famous blue macaw that formed that powerful attraction top Montalvo—has him,” said Lady. “So all we have to do is go down, and see if he has any Quaker parrots, and then call out ‘Neruda!’ And if he comes, then we’ll know it’s him.”

Would that stand up in court?

“You really should have trained him to recite some of Neruda’s poetry,” I told her. “Maybe, ‘I, a dead man, want to leave my grave….’”

And so we have no Neruda.

What do we have?

A great and terrible silence! 

      

On Goings-On

Is it information overload or underload? Because before this all started, I knew just what to do: find an issue that interested me, look it up, evaluate as much as my simple bear’s brain could do, and then come to a conclusion, presented as fairly as possible. So it was pretty easy. Clerical sex abuse! I came out, I’m proud to say, ringlingly (is it just happenstance that I’m inventing words today?) against it! Yes, others of a lessor moral backbone may have been taking the side of the pestering pedophile priests, but did this blog waver? Was it ever for a moment equivocal on the subject? Nay, a thousand times nay!

GMO foods—how easy it would have been to defend those pioneering scientists at Monsanto, who only wanted to grow better and better seeds, only so that the burgeoning third world hordes could go to bed at night with a morsel of food in their bellies! How facile to argue that the improved seeds were our only hope against global warming! But again, a thousand times nay!

Yes, I have crusaded. Gun control! It was I who pointed out that shooting a gun may have a significant addictive kick—based on the experience of my brother, the only person I actually know who has shot a gun. (And only because he was in the army….)

I tell myself—in my rare moments of self indulgence—that my father, a crusading journalist, would be proud. However many detractors apple pie, motherhood, and dimpled babies had, I was never afraid to take the unpopular view! No, no—St. George never took on as many dragons as I!

But something happened. Is it the lingering effect of my broken back, which goes along nicely for four hours, by feeling nothing, which is the proper state of body parts. But then the back announces itself, proclaims that it’s tired of the anonymity that it had been sharing with my legs, arms, kidneys, red blood cells—in short, all those organs and tissues and limbs that had been doing what they were supposed to, and doing it silently. No, after four hours, my back becomes the nagging mother-in-law, the bitter ex-wife, not the smiling politician’s spouse gazing adoringly at his or her mate. No, my back is demanding attention, love, a spa, a massage—something and everything, and it won’t be quiet until it gets it.

So maybe that’s it.

Or is it the general dysreality of the times, here in Puerto Rico? Because we had always done unreality quite well. But unreality is the opposite of reality: dysreality is reality that has been twisted, skewed, contorted, but still has some connection to reality. It is neither the opposite nor the absence of reality….

When did it start? For me, it was when the government decided to take all the (meager) sums of money from the Government Development Bank and put it in private banks. It was a story that had me stuttering, first, “but….but…but” in the first several paragraphs, “bu…buu.buuuu” in the middle, and simply gasping inarticulately by the end.

At this point, the menace of Zika had suddenly raised its unlovely head, or perhaps microcephalic (damn, there I go again!) head, and that was a puzzle, since the whole world had blithely ignored Chikungunya. Remember that? In two or three months, Puerto Rico became the island of Frankensteins: we were suffering agonizing joint pain, raging fevers, blinding headaches, all manner of diseases. And now the world was going crazy about a disease that is asymptomatic for 80% of the victims? Oh, and when you do have symptoms—generally because you’re immunosuppressed—they’re weak, and only last a week! But now, the CDC is telling women of childbearing age to postpone having children, in affected areas, until somebody figures out what to do about it.

OK—that’s bad enough. Now, the CDC came out with a recommendation that we fumigate the entire island—or as much as we can—with a chemical called Naled. And that would be? An utterly harmless to humans, but deathly lethal to mosquitos, substance that has been used for decades in the United States! So, not a problem, right?

Of course, those pesky Europeans and their silly EU—wonderful news about Brexit, by the way—well those fussy people have banned the stuff. Of course, they also have banned GMO foods, so that tells what sort of nonsense that is! Hah—be it on your heads, EU, when the bellies of the entire Third World, craving their irradiated food….

Well, of course, the naysayers were here as well. So we started in on the information over / under load. CDC: Naled kills 90% of the mosquitos. Environmentalists: Naled kills 10% of the mosquitos! And on and on it went.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the whole affair was the CDC saying that it recommended and would approve the use of Naled, if the governor of the island gave the go-ahead. This made sense to me. To the rest of the island? It seemed crazy.

“If they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it,” said one friend.

“The Americans are going to spray poison over us,” said another, though through Facebook, not to my face.

Full disclosure—it would not be the first time that the medical community, or the chemical / pharmaceutical companies have done exactly that. Remember those little five-year old girls who were fully-developed sexually all those decades back? That didn’t take place in Minnesota!

So the governor had to give the approval for the use of this chemical—that to me was simply following the long-standing arrangement / compromise of federal versus states’ rights. But to many here, it was a ruse. All well and good.

And then?

The news today is that the chemical has arrived on the island, but nobody knows how much, or where it is, or who authorized it, or whether it will be used, or whether it’s here….just in case. No, nobody knows, but the governor is calling the CDC this morning, and then we’ll have the answer to all these questions about which—have I said this before—nobody knows.

Errr…

Don’t they?          

Really, Must we?

It’s the old, old story: what should we do to “popularize” classical music?

To the purists, the answer is nothing: inserting a Cuban popular song into an already quite jazzy rendition of “Sound the Trumpet,” by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell, cheapens and degrades the music. And—so goes the thinking—it makes us look ridiculous. Who are we kidding, after all, when classical musicians venture into heavy metal? Will we ever be as good—or as bad—as AC / DC, or whoever they are? Do we want our bankers and US senators to wear purple Mohawks, black leather and chains?

The other side of the story, of course, is that if we keep being purists, we’ll end up playing to six old ladies in Dwindling Light Nursing Home. And when the fl;u epidemic carries them off, where will we be?

Tonight, we will go to the opera, taking young Montalvo with us. But Lady will come along as well, and Gabriela. And though I say it’s the opera, it’s really a hybrid form: the Metropolitans Line in HD, which is shown in movie theaters throughout the world.

Since Montalvo has been sprung from puritan clutches of the criminal justice system, there is every likelihood that he will approach the opera with a chemically enhanced brain. It’s probably for the best, because the crowd at the opera takes a little getting used to: there’s no disputing that they are lovely, absolutely lovely ladies. And so it’s no surprise that they have many friends, each one of whom will also be attending the opera. And so the ladies will stop and kiss, compare notes on their most recent trips to Gstaad, and invite each other to their villas in Nice. This will take time, of course, but it will also take place in the absolute middle of the lobby, and since there will be three or four such pairings, the lobby will be completely impassable. And so there we will be, wondering if it would be really low-class to cough, murmur “excuse me,” and wade our way through.

Raf’s mother, of course, has solved the problem for us, since she uses her walker on the ladies as the train uses the metal triangular device on the cows. My point? Montalvo has become an adept at the opera: “didn’t we see Kristine Opolais in Manon Lescaut,” he asked recently. We told him he had, and he went away. The next day he posted a video of a pre-paraplegic skateboarder performing death-seducing feats. And the music? The worst of Reggaeton!

It’s an open world for Montalvo, in short. And does anyone think, by the way, that whoever the “singer” of the Raggaeton will be singing “O mio Babbino Caro” tomorrow? Of course not!

What an extraordinary cowardly people we have become! Because tonight we will see La bohème, the plot of which is a familiar as the tears that will spring from my eyes. Yes, Mimi will lose her keys on the dark stairs, Rodolfo will find them but pretend not to have, since what has happened?

Really, do I need to tell you?

Montalvo, of course, will snort at this, since in his mentally-unenhanced state, while under the wing of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, well, he had been rather different.

“He was high as a kite last night at the poetry slam,” said Lady. “And really, he was totally cool: chilling, relaxed, good with the world. Is it too terrible to say that I like him….”

I knew just what she meant….

“I’ve noticed that these bitches always get their way in these operas,” he snorted, when he was in an unimproved state, several months ago.

“You know,” I will tell him, “this opera is the absolute best way to get any woman to…well, be where you want her to be. It’s a total aphrodisiac for them. You take her out, ply her with oysters and champagne, and then, bam! Hit her with Puccini!”

“Panties off!” he will respond, probably in a voice that will carry through the lesser Antilles, and be heard in Caracas.

“It’s a bit easier than winning the Nobel Prize for literature,” I will tell him. “Though also a bit more expensive. Anyway, it’s a definite plan B….”

These are the fatherly tips that it is my duty to confer….

So we will see the opera, and I know everything but when it will be set.. Because the stage director has to do something, after all, to ear those juicy Metropolitan bucks. So it may be that the whole thing will be staged in ancient  Mesopotamia, or mayber in a distant planet in a far distant time. So Mimi will lose her keys in a spaceship, and….

It won’t be quite that bad, of course. Though I have seen a clip of Philippe Jaroussky covered in motor oil—supposedly—and singing Monteverdi. Oh, and in the same production, poor Cecilia Bartoli had to sing “Piangero, La Sorte Mio” wearing a canvas hood. Wonderfully—opera singers have such good training—the sound was quite unmuffled.

Well, Montalvo at the opera is definitely as good as the opera itself, since he has proven himself completely capable of giving a “popcorn shower” to the woman in front of him. Just as, of course, I immediate countered by proving that a 6’3” man can quite easily cower under a movie seat….

Stay tuned!