Flying Home from Chicago during the 50 Year Anniversary of the Summer of Freedom...

I'm on the flight home from Chicago, and the young girl beside me is singing.  I'd been on a research trip where I spent a wonderful day driving around with my cousin Mike, visiting neighborhoods I hadn't been to in half my life, standing in front of my grandmother's apartment building, riding the city's rails, remembering the pavement under my feet.

I was putting the finishing touches on the novel I'd spent the past two decades working on.  It seems as if I began it in another life, but the Jazz Palace, the story of a white piano player and a black trumpeter, will finally see the light of day next spring.  And I'd come to get my Chicago geography right.

I'd forgotten so much about my hometown and in fact as I said to Mike, I feel as if I'm trying to remember a place I never knew.  The city of my novel hasn't existed since before I was born.  But the fact remains that the South Side of Chicago is nothing like the North Side.  That hasn't changed since the first wave of black migration to the north.  Chicago is still, in my opinion, a divided city.  (A good book to read on this subject is Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton)

It wasn't lost on me that it's fifty years since Freedom Summer - when volunteers flocked to Mississippi to help register blacks.  It's fifty years since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts into law as well as the Voter Registration Act.  I'm remembering all those years of turmoil from James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi to the assassination of Martin Luther King.  I'm thinking of the history of my city, my country and my youth as I ride up and down Chicago from Lawrence Avenue to 47th Street and back again.

It's been years since my friends and I used to come down to the South Side of Chicago to hear the black entertainers at the Regal Theater (something my parents never knew about and would have grounded me for weeks if they'd known, never mind that my father used to hang out in the black and tans all during his youth and my mother did her share of clubbing as well).  Or since we went to the Lyric Opera auditorium to hear Martin Luther King talk about freedom and what it meant to be black in America.  He talked about dignity and he told us that as long as one man isn't free, the rest of us aren't either.

Words that have never left me.

On the flight home I sit next to the girl.  She's got the window and I'm on the aisle. There's nobody between us.  She's black, she's young, and seems to be alone.  I have work to do and just say hi.  She barely gives me a nod, but as soon as we take off she starts singing.  The singing doesn't seem to be about or connected to anything.  She isn't wearing headphones.  She's just singing.

I find it a bit distracting so I decide that maybe she's nervous.  I start to talk to her.  I ask her if she lives in New York or if she's just visiting.  She's just visiting, she tells me in a whisper. I ask if she's flown before and she has.  That morning.  I ask if she's alone and she points to a large black woman seated on the window across the aisle.  "My auntie."

I wonder why they aren't sitting together or even near one another.  Perhaps they both want window seats. It's an odd configuration, but it is what it is.  I smile and go back to my work, but a moment later she starts singing again.  The drink carts are coming around so I put my work away.  The girl is staring at me with big, wide eyes so I ask her how old she is. She's only ten and her name.  Skylar.  We chat a bit.  I tell her I'm a teacher which I am part of the time.  She's only just finished 5th grade.

"Are you from Chicago?" I asked her.
And she looked at me with those big eyes. 'I'm from Hattiesburg, Mississippi," Skylar told me.  She had never been north before.

Then I started to ask her all those silly questions that adults always ask kids when you don't know what else to say. "And what do you want to study when you grow up?"
Now Skylar perked up.  "I want to be a nurse," she told me.
"I bet you'd make a good nurse," I told her.
"Or a lawyer.  I might want to be a lawyer."
I nodded.  "I bet you'd make a good lawyer too."
Now she was smiling, animated.  "And I know where I'm going to go to school."
"And where's that, Skylar?" I asked her.
"I'm going to go to Ole' Miss."

I'd be lying if I said that this moment didn't choke me up.  If I didn't hold back my tears because everything, all of it, that whole past from 50 years ago, I relived it right then.  I was wondering if she could know, if she could possibly know, how improbable such a statement would have been fifty years ago.  I was relieved to see the lights shining outside the plane.  "Look," I said, "that's New York City."  And she gazed out the window, humming to herself, for the rest of the flight home. And for the rest of the flight we both gazed out the window as the city loomed.  And Skylar kept singing.

Later as I recounted the story of Skylar to my daughter, Kate, we both wound up with tears in our eyes.  I said to Kate that Skylar had no idea how far things had come, how much history is behind her, for her to be able to say those words.  And Kate in her wisdom replied, "Maybe she does."

"Nobody has ever described the place where I've just arrived."  Paul Theroux from the Pillars of Hercules. 

My Resolution for 2014

Don't be afraid of anything that can't eat you.

And be respectful of those that can.   

Street Walker - Brooklyn 1/1/2014

At the Start of the New Year

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky."

Kerouac.

Writing in Cafes

Friends often say they'd like to travel with me, but actually I am a boring travel companion. I don't really to do much of anything. I don't go sightseeing. I don't head out first thing in the morning to capture a sunrise or stand in line to be the first into Pompeii. I've never made it inside the Duomo in Florence.

What I do almost every morning when I am in the road is go to a cafe. And there I sit and write and watch the world go by. I sit with my journal and paints and perhaps a book I am reading or one I am writing. I edit, draw, and scribble. And I generate new material. Cafes are is in fact where I do most of my work. And especially when I am away.

I used to think that it was odd that I spent much of my travel time in this way until I read about Graham Greene. Every winter he went to Capri for a couple months and here he did all of his writing. Then he returned to England where he revised and tended to the business of his life, but he never actually wrote anything there.

And so, when I'm away, I search for the perfect cafe. It has to be one where they let you sit for hours. Here I'll work, not on a laptop, but by hand in my journal or on yellow pads. Clearly, especially in Europe, there is a tradition for this. Once when I was living in Rome, I met a screenwriter who told me to stop by his "office" one afternoon and talk about film. His office turned out to be a cafe off the Campo di Fiori where he sat all day, sipping espresso, mineral water, and, later in the day, compari and soda.

I have taken to finding my own office wherever I go. In Vienna recently it was the Cafe Eiles. Truly one of my favorite cafes in the world. One of those Old World places where men and women come and take one of the many newspapers available on those long wooden sticks (I don't know what these sticks are called. Is there a word for them?).

At the Eiles my husband, Larry, and I would find a table that didn't get too much sun, but was light enough. We'd ordered a Viennese breakfast of coffee with whipped cream and bread and butter and jam. And there we'd sit. Hour after hour. The drawing from my journal here is a page I made at the Eiles. In Florence it was the Gilli at the Piazza della Republica. In every city I find one of these cafes and make it my own.

Except Paris. I know this will sound strange, but in Paris I have had a difficult time finding just the right spot. The tables are too small and too close together and, despite France's literary history, the waiters actually don't seem very patient with a writer taking up a table all day long. What's the point of sitting and reflecting if someone is mad because he cannot turn his table around.

In New York, Brooklyn, near my home I have several haunts and this summer in Spain they sprouted up everywhere. Even a short walk from our house in a little square that served wonderful coffee and tapas in the morning and poured effervescent glasses of the Basque wine called txacolin in the early evening. Apparently, I read recently, Americans are reluctant to start and finish their day at the same establishment.

Hence we have our coffee shops for the early part of the day and bars for the evening. But in Europe these places are contained in one so you can literally begin and end your day in the same spot and I must admit I have done this more times than I can remember. I can see why writers have always been drawn to cafes. Life goes on around you, yet somehow you can be isolated and contained. No one bothers you and yet you are never really alone.

Ithaca - In Honor of Cavafy's 150th Anniversary

Ithaca

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy -
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don't in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn't deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you'll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy