Thinking about Journals

Yesterday I took the G train - a train I'd never been on - and rode over to Pratt. I've lived in New York more than thirty years and here I was, having a new adventure. Two people asked me for directions. I'm a New Yorker now yet I knew nothing. Finally when I arrived, I found Pratt was beautiful. Wonderful old buildings, public art and sculptures, famous cats that roam and are cared for by the "CHIEF ENGINEER" of the boiler room (where a sign reads "Do Not Let The Cats Out."

I wanted to sit down and make some notes in my journal, but I didn't have time. Even as I approached what I believed to be a sculpture and turned out to be a pile of unmelted snow, I wanted to jot it down. Because if I don't jot it down I forget it. It's as simple as that. I began thinking about my journals and the roles they have played in my life life. The role of journals in general. I know I've written about this before, but it is a topic I keep returnign to.

I began keeping them in 1967 when I went to France (which is a whole lifetime ago, it seems). My father gave me a diary with me named embossed in gold. Inside he wrote, "This book with its blank pages if for you to bring to life during your Paris year. Your special thoughts, your precious experiences can be relieved in future years and shared with those close to you...At the year's end life will become more meaningful for you. If our prayers were answered, you will find the true beauty of life."

I did not have the year my father hoped I would have. It was fraught, filled with loneliness, some pointless love affairs, and tedious studies. I did take a cooking class which I enjoyed, though when I missed one class to go to Naples and visit my college roommate, I was dragged through the streets of Paris and made a spectacle of to my program. My dear friend, Mark, still refers to this as "L'Affaire Mary Morris."

Anyway I wrote about it. I wrote about all of it and have never stopped. When I go to my shelf of journals this one, perhaps the one in which I am the most unhappy, is always the first. I return to it from time to time. I return to them all.

My father set me off on a journey - one he didn't anticipate. He thought he was sending me to France. Instead he helped me find my voice. He was not always the easiest man, but I think somehow he knew something about me. It is he, afterall, and not my mother who dedicates this first journal of many.

For years these journals were really more like diaries, what I did, or didn't do, with my day. But as I began to write more and more they became the place where everything began. All my writing starts here. Well, it might get scribbled first on the tiny notebooks I always carry, or the napkin or placemat in front of me, or on my hand, but eventually it will make it into the journal. Perhaps the next day or so.

This is how and where ideas take hold.

Perhaps a decade ago or more I began to include visual materials - Polaroids, sketches, crayon drawings, collage. Whatever. Now I like them even more. They are fun to do, but, for whatever reason, I never work in them, not really when I am home.

It seems as if my journals only happen when I am on the road.

This journal shown above is my Vienna journal and the drawing was done in a cafe. I am proud of this picture because it was shown at a diary exhibit that included the only facsimili of Anne Frank's diary. Anne's diary is directly above mine. I cannot describe the feeling I had when I saw it there.

I have never lost a journal. I've lost many many things - cameras, sweaters, tickets, lovers - but a journal never. I've hidden them from Soviet border guards and used one as collateral to rent a paddleboat on the Vlatava River. I left one once on a train in France and a young man ran off, bringing it to me. I kissed him on the lips. I'm not sure if he got back on that train, but I can still see him, standing there.

A morning with coffee and my journal

The best laid plans...

On Monday of last week we were making plans to head to Paris for two weeks in June, then I was going on to Italy for a workshop. And today less than a week later all of that has imploded. It turns out that Larry may be allergic to the cat in the Paris apartment where we were to stay and Italy, well, that's another story for over a glass of wine, not on my blog.

I'm frustrated and annoyed; it's true. But I also know that this is just one of the rules of travel. Expect the best; prepare for the worst. My father used to say don't worry about something until it happens. A great line I always felt, worthy of Yogi Berra. Or, as a flight attendant recently said, "shift happens."

How many times have I been on my way somewhere when something else happened. A snowstorm, an illness, somebody finking out. There was the baggage handler's strike in Barcelona and the snowstorm up north that left me, heavy sigh, stuck in Key West.

And then there are other things - the people we love, the losses. What we cannot account for in this world. When I was about to start my sabbatical and had a million travel plans, I was worried about - no, obsessed over - the jury duty summons I'd received. What if I got put on a jury? What if it was a long trial? Criminal? Murder? Would I be free in four weeks? Six?

But before I got to go to jury duty to find out, I fell ice skating and broke my leg, hence cancelling all my plans for the next three months and turning my sabbatical into disability. Indeed three months into my injury Larry and I did go to Europe, but armed with wheelchair and crutches as this picture before the Eiffel Tower depicts. I have hobbled away in my "walking" cast (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) to take it.

So why worry about those delays and detours along the road? Things change. Perhaps they cause us anxiety because they make us aware of something we'd prefer not to be aware of. That life is uncertain. We have little control over it. We have little control over anything. So we can bemoan a flight delay, a snowstorm, a sinus infection that keeps us from flying. But in truth there are greater delays and inconveniences ahead.

So, to quote my father again, "roll with the punches." The Buddhists understand that holding on to either the good or the bad just leads to suffering. It is best when we can to let go.

Meanwhile Larry and I are thinking that our holiday might be in Canada - where he's from and where we rarely venture. Or maybe just a staycation, right here where we live, but have so little time to visit because we are so busy making plans for all the things we think we are going to do.

Bagel shop, Mumbai

After the Quake...

I was going to post soemthing funny today - some anecdotes I've been thinking of, but somehow it didn't seem right. It didn't seem like the time for humor. My mind has been thinking about something else.

For several years now I have taught Haruki Murakami's wonderful collection of linked stories, "After the Quake." The stories all in some way connect back to the Kobe earthquake without exactly evoking it or calling it by name. It is an elegant, thoughtful collection, but one that has also given me pause in the wake of the events of the past week. The 8.9 earthquake, the tsunami, and now, the nuclear meltdown.

It is, as my friend Russell Bank noted on FB today, as if the world we live in has come to resemble Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." I find Japan to be in a darkness we can hardly imagine. To have everything taken from you in seconds. To have 10,000 people literally washed away. To be afraid of the very air you breathe.

In 1993 I traveled to Japan. We stayed in a ryokan in Kyoto. Traveled up to Hokkeido and also went to Hiroshima. I went with a friend who was what is called a hibakshu - a survivor of Hiroshima. As we stood on the Peace Bridge, he told me what he'd seen the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He had a strange, nervous laugh as he desccribes things that no one should ever have to see.

My friend, Mr. Tobita-san, a wonderful translator, is now gone. He suffered, as many survivors did, from a cancer that found him late in his life.

A neighbor called me this morning about something else, then mentioned that her sister was on her way to Japan for a long-planned holiday. My first words were to tell her sister not to go. How can anyone have a holiday amidst so much suffering.

A number of years ago I had been asked by the NYTimes to write a piece about the Big Island of Hawaii. I was thrilled by the assignment and spent several weeks, planning my itinerary, booking at some amazing B&Bs. And then just days before I was to leave 9/11 happened. My Hawaii trip was over a week away but I knew I wouldn't go. I knew I couldn't go.

There are times to travel and have fun, seeing the world. And there are other times when we just have to stop and think about what all of this means. I always loved that old 60th song (was it Joan Baez or Dylan who wrote it). "There but for fortune." Really we just dodged this bullet. It could happen to any of us. Anywhere. Anytime.

Mumbai, January 17, 2011

Bed, Bath and Beyond???

My last day in India, roaming around Mumbai. I was hanging out in Bandara, a lively hip neighborhood when I spotted these two men, sleeping on the street. Beside them a handcart and in it some parcel, wrapped in a Bed, Bath and Beyond bag. For me this image said it all - Third World meets First World, rich and poor, disenfranchised and corporate, pre-industrial, post-industrial. All of these contradictions made up India for me. Somehow it made sense that at rush hour oxen freed of their yokes stroll home on the national highway, that in the middle of a dirt hovel an electric sewing machine, and this.

Bed, Bath and Beyond actually holds a funny place in my heart. When my father died, the funeral home FedExed his ashes to me. However, I'd forgotten they were coming and I was expecting another delivery. The chiropractor next door called me personally about my delivery. He said, "I have something for you."
"Is it from Bed, Bath, and Beyond," I asked him.
He hesitated. "Well...it's from Beyond."

This anecdote has nothing to do with this picture except it resonates in my memory and gave this moment a special poignancy. Also I had learned via my friend, Naresh, who hosted me in Mumbia, that a famous Bollywood star who lived around the corner from him in Mumbia had driven up on to a sidewalk in the early hours one morning and ran over four bakery workers who were getting some shut-eye in the street. I walked by the home of that Bollywood star who is out on bail, pending trial, which may never happen, and saw dozens of people, waiting on the street by the Arabian Sea, hoping for a glimpse of their handsome celebrity.

Somehow my father and the runover bakery workers by the Bollywood star and these two men asleep right here in broad daylight, it made me feel how fragile and vulnerable we all are. And how life is filled with contradictions.