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Monday, May 7, 2018

absence and presence



The endless Winter ends.
And just like that, it’s cherry blossom season in nearby Branch Brook Park in Newark, and in Brooklyn, where the online cherrywatch alerts visitors that it is now peak blossom time.  Cherry blossoms are lovely, but I’ve always been more of a magnolia girl; there’s something so lush and luxurious about those silky pink petals.  And like their better publicized cousins, I’m aware of what a precious short season they have, which I follow on my increasingly longer walks with Ruby.                      

Like their owners, her furry friends suddenly appear in neighboring yards with the warming weather:  there’s Juno and Titus and Jamie, all coming out to greet her from behind their fences.  “How ya been girl?”  There is much tale wagging and sniffing and some excited peeing.  They're all back out except for Nibble, the sweet little beagle who lives a few doors down with his extended family. They  own our local Chinese restaurant, and could be a textbook case of the immigrant experience: the elders/grandparents speak only a few words in English; the parents/middle generation are fluent but retain their accents and some issues with tense; their children are typical teens, no different from their peers walking to school plugged in to their phones and music and helping out in the restaurant on weekends when they aren't busy with soccer practice or exams.  I don’t understand how anyone can be anti-immigrant -- I can’t think of anything more all-American. 

The grandfather collects recyclable bottles and is often outside sorting them in an elaborate array of bins in the yard, so I see him the most. Our conversations:  "Good morning! Is Nibble home?" "Yes, Nibble”, he nods and goes and opens the porch door and out comes Nibble. Or “No Nibble”, as he shakes his head and I know that she is somewhere in the house, or out on a walk to the restaurant.
 
Last week I see the dad, an affable friendly guy. "Good morning. Beautiful weather finally. Where’s Nibble been? We miss her," I say, looking down at Ruby as if she were the one with that sentiment. "No Nibble," he says and shakes his head and looks at the ground.. His normally friendly demeanor seems a bit flat, and I suddenly realize that he doesn’t mean "No Nibble" the way his father always did. "This winter she get sick. We take her to doctor but too late. (pause) No more Nibble."

I let out a gasp of surprise. All these months assuming she was inside safe and warm when in fact she was gone.  On the way back home we pass the yard, with the bins for the sorted cans, the chair by the door, a big tree and I feel his absence. No Nibble, ever again.

Absence is also why I’ve stopped posting on this blog.  I still write because that is what I do and who I am, but with no sense of anyone out there, blogging  compounds rather than alleviates my sense of isolation, especially disheartening given how social media is supposed to connect us.      


Years ago, when I was able to spend much of my time writing (both commissioned reports, articles and solo theatre work) my friend F approached me after a performance and said  that she thought my stories would be great on the radio, and offered to put me in touch with D, a radio producer she knew.

Soon after I met with D and shared some of my work,  slices of city life and the people I met. I was especially fascinated by those moments and places where worlds collided or you could see the shifts in neighborhoods: immigrant housekeepers and young apartment dwellers at the laundromat, inter-generational audiences in rapt attention at the free concerts I’d frequent in city parks, the newly landed hipster population rubbing elbows with the older construction workers at my local coffee shop, where a great tuna sandwich was a common denominator.

D liked them and agreed they’d work well on the radio, and he asked me to go make some recordings of around 3 minutes each.  I got in touch with a nonprofit I worked with, a wonderful place that provided affordable recording time to musicians and performers, booked a space with a technician one afternoon and told those same stories with sound effects:  the washing machines, the clanking of dishes as the busboy cleared tables,  horns honking and horns playing as I rode my bike to a concert.…

It was an arid cavernous space but the most amazing thing happened. I sat on a stool and spoke into the dark void - alone, yet with an absence of loneliness. I could feel the presence of  people I was speaking to, sense them listening and laughing, and taking it all in.  For a windowless room it felt terrifically alive, with a palpable sense of communion.

D liked the recordings enough to share them with the executive producer of public radio’s most popular show, and gave me her private number. I called and she actually answered her phone (clearly another era) and spoke to me with enthusiasm and encouragement. Make more and send them to me, these will work.


I have no recollection of why I never followed up or made more recordings. At the time I had a lot doors open to me but I can’t imagine why I would shut one with so much promise. All I remember is how much easier it was to connect before the internet,  how much more generous people were with their time, how exhilarating it was to feel possibility in the presence of things not seen.



About five years later D won a MacArthur Genius Grant for “making the listener complicit in the act of imagining other people’s lives” as he continued to connect storytellers with an audience; and I was the mother of two with a trajectory that would simultaneously take me further away from that land of opportunity than I ever could have imagined, and connect me to a wealth of lives I never could have envisioned: hundreds of remarkable people representing millions more who through some combination of disability, illness, addiction, age, race, income, or other factors are far less likely to have their stories heard.  "Nobody has a clue what our lives are like," is a line I hear often.  I hoped I might find a way to change that  but I haven’t found it yet.  I'm feeling hopeless lately, but I haven't completely given up.  I keep walking and taking it all in and hoping my mind and the universe will provide some answers.

Every tree, every animal, every person has their own arc, and change is unavoidable. My story is still being written and if there's anyone out there, don't give up - your story isn't finished yet either.