I am impressed with the combination work of my 5D Canon could with the 35 mm lens, in a very dark bar and restaurant. The camera focused on Kelly and the lens softened the background so to highlight her beautiful smile. Kelly is a strong woman, I think of all the debates raging on about women and how men deal with them and I think that one of the great breakthroughs in my own life was coming to learn to support and accept strong women in my life, to listen to them, hear their voices and make sure I appreciate them, they are coming to take over the world and save it from men.
I have a new lens, I told Kelly – we go to the Bog once a week, usually on Thursday – and she said, “do it, you’re the artist.” I think actually that she is the artist, I am cherishing my Kelly Nolan portrait collection.
Some men cannot deal with strong women, they are imply unhinged by them. They think the world has turned upside down, they expect women to melt and fold under pressure. I don’t feel that way, I think the world is turning rightside up.
I went to New York City yesterday to trade for a new camera and to see my daughter for perhaps the last time before she has her first child. I was shocked to see her belly, happy and sad. I knew I was saying goodbye to one of the most remarkable chapters in my life, being her father, being so central to her life. It gave meaning and comfort to mine.
I messaged her husband Jay and said how grateful I am that he is such a good husband to her, she loves and trusts him so much.
My own family was shattered with conflict and illness, all of the mind. There was no normalcy there, little love and no safety My family was a maelstrom, it damaged everyone it touched, and I fled from it early on and stayed away my whole life, a terrible but necessary choice.
They would have destroyed me, they nearly did.
My mother was a remarkable human being, creative, intelligent, fiercely committed to living a meaningful life, but thwarted at every turn, she said, by the way women were forced to live, and by selfish and uncaring men, my father most of all.
She loved me very much, and told me every day of my life that I was special, I had great stories to tell.
She was perpetually at war with herself and the people around her, she could never find a safe or comfortable place to be. She never accepted her life, not in any way. She never stopped fighting, and never could win.
In the end, I kept away from her, and also kept my daughter away from her. I thought she was dangerous. I know she was.
I am sorry I did not get to say goodbye to her, she was found dead in a group home in Providence, she was 88 years old, I had not seen her or spoken with her for several years I didn’t know where she was. She had a sudden heart attack.
She died alone, before I could say a last goodbye or tell her that I did love her, for all of the trouble we had.
I asked Emma if I could take a photo of her belly on the street in New York, and she said yes, but just for me, I couldn’t share it, I couldn’t put in the blog. She would rather I never mention her on the blog, I think.
Emma and I are different in this way, I want to be open with my life, I have few secrets, she does not wish to be especially open about her life, and I try to honor her feelings, although I couldn’t always. I couldn’t quite believe it, looking at her daughter, my granddaughter, who was kicking, she said, as we spoke. This was my little girl, whose diapers I changed?
Emma seemed puzzled by my need to mark ritual, to take note of the passing of things. It is not something she does, and I had the feeling she thought I was being emotional in a harmless kind of way. She tolerates me, even when I confound her. In a sense, I puzzle her, in another she knows me all too well.
In my family, the first and the second, I was always making trouble by marking the passage of things, or complaining about the rituals of others, nobody wanted to hear it.
When I had lunch with Emma, I asked her what kind of grandfather she wanted me to be, what did she need and expect from me, and she was startled by the question. She said she wanted me to be closer to her daughter than she was with her grandparents, She said she remembered my mother very fondly, there was something about her that she connected with.
She remembered that when we visited my mother – Emma and the other grandkids all called her “Fa” for reasons that are lost now, they always had tea together.
My mother would invite Emma to tea with a great flourish – I recall it well also – and set up a small table and chairs, and she would bring out her very best antique tea service, linen napkins and silver, all a treasure, she said, she had gotten for pennies from a weak-minded antique dealer.
There were also cookies and pieces of freshly-baked pie. A British kind of tea.
I wondered at the sight of the two of them, sitting in their tiny chairs on the floor, sipping their tea (and nibbling on their cookies). My mother was in perpetual conflict and disappointment, raging about her lost dreams and railing about my father’s lack of support for her intensely creative desires. She could never quite manage to defy him, or say not to his often selfish decisions. It is true that he never supported or encouraged her to follow her dreams, he always seemed to find a way to sabotage her.
But none of this mattered at tea.
There the world seemed to recede, and she seemed so peaceful and happy. Here she was, sitting on the floor with my daughter, chatting and laughing like two life-long best friends. I remember the sound of my mother’s best china clinking against the teapot and the plate beneath. There were red, or at least red dragons circled the cups and plates. They were normally kept in an antique dresser, I often looked at them.
My mother never permitted her own children to go near her china or even touch it. And there was no holiday or dinner important enough for it to be used. It was only brought out for Emma.
She trusted Emma completely, the two loved one another, I could see it. Emma was right in the way she recalled it. It all happened at tea.
Ten minutes later, life returned, and my mother and father would be screaming at one another, rattling the china with their loud voices, making me uncomfortable and Emma nervous. My mother would be berating me for not coming to see her or call her often enough, for never inviting her to my home. What had she done to deserve this?
The truth is, I rarely think much about those days, I will never come to terms with my mother and our love for one another. But I loved the connection she and Emma had evoked, and which surfaced at lunch in New York City many years later, here we were, so far from those teas, sitting on our tiny chairs at our tiny restaurant in this all super-hip Thai place Emma found on Yelp, nibbling at our tiny portions. The restaurant the first gentrifying sign in a seedy block. New York is fascinating to me, I love being there, I no longer belong anywhere there.
Everyone around me could have been on the cover of GQ or Vogue.
Except me, of course.
In the story of Fa and her tea party, I saw what it was that Emma hoped for from me as a grandfather.
That simple trust, pure love and acceptance that comes from loving a small child so purely and openly. You leave the world behind, the one you struggle with, the one the child has yet to experience.
My mother, who had so much trouble learning how to live, had connected with Emma from the heart, she put aside her anger and hurts and created a special world for the two of them to share.
Every time we visited, which was not often, my mother would always at some point say “Emma, dearest, would you like a cup of tea?,” and Emma, even then not demonstrative, would nod enthusiastically. The two would rush off into the kitchen to turn on the tea pot and take out the china and place it so carefully on their little table in the corner of the living room. They told jokes and stories, laughed and gossiped, were ridiculous together.
It was their own space, no one else ever was invited in there.
And here, decades later in a gentrifying neighborhood off of once-seedy Times Square, was Emma, describing the scene to me as if it was yesterday. The world is filled with crisis and mystery.
That was what she wanted from me, and so for the first time I think I grasped how I might be a grandfather, how I could create that special space for me and my granddaughter, maybe at the farm with a dog or donkey or barn cat around. Maybe by a stream with fish, maybe in the deep woods looking for chipmunks.
I could offer her a memory like that, a feeling, a connection, a shared experience that she might remember decades later, long after I was gone.
I thought about this on the train, and it wasn’t until I looked at my reflection in the window that I realized I was crying, tears were streaming down my cheeks and I cried almost all the way to Poughkeepsie, an hour up the line, hypnotized by the clacking of the train over the tracks.
I never had a moment like that with Fa, and I’m not sure I had one with Emma either, unless we count taking her to her first baseball game and showing her how to score. For parents and kids, it is not so simple.
But I can do that, I think, I am the king of moments to remember, it will not come from the mind, where things usually come together for me, but from the heart, which is opening up all of the time.
I am beginning to understand what it might mean to be a grandfather. And what it means to be a son.
Maria spotted the first wildflower of 2016 in the deep woods this morning, I had my new camera and she went to work. It was sitting alone in the middle a fern path, the forest had closed over her, and was dark and cool and beautiful. I remember reading something by one of the prophets, long gone. He believed that wildflowers were a living song, and that they should be welcomed with words that draw out their hearts, calm their minds, and bring them joy.
Speak to them, he wrote, in words that arouse desire and love and in words that honor the awe of life. I was too shy to sing to the flower out loud, although Maria would have completely understood. So I sang a song in my own head to her, and I hope she heard it.
I’m not sure where some of those politicians live, but here, on my farm, in my county, climate change is understood to be real. I see it every day when I look out of the window, so does any farmer with eyes. It is drier and warmer, and the winter ice and snow pack is a fraction of what it was even a decade ago.
I see it in our pastures, which shoot up later, are shorter, and fade long before Fall. Our response to this – we have a pony, two donkeys, seven sheep – is a rigorous schedule of rotational grazing.
Todd Mason and Tim put up a fence to block off one third of the pasture, and we have two other areas – to the rear and the other side of the farm house – fenced off. We are on a two-or-three day rotational schedule. We grave for three hours in the morning, three hours in the late afternoon.
The area behind the pole barn is a paddock, really, the pony and other animals can graze a bit, but there is not enough sugary grass to make them founder or sick. A few years ago, we would not have had to do this, we had more than enough tall grass to last through the summer.
If nothing changes, it will become too difficult and expensive for people to keep animals, the cost of hay is rising and the grass just does not get enough water to stay tall for months. Hopefully, the rotational grazing will get us through the summer.
We reap what we sow, in every way, and Pope Francis reminds us to fulfill our moral obligation to care for the earth, so the earth can care for us. We are breaking our end of the contract, so she is free to break hers. This new fenced off area is worn down, it will need a couple of weeks with rain and sun to come back. Fingers crossed.
I went to New York on Wednesday, in search of a new camera and lens, in search of an idea as to what kind of grandfather my daughter, soon to be a mother, wanted me to be.
I was partially successful. I got a new camera, the 5D Mark III, but could not get enough money from B & H Photo to get the portrait lens I wanted as well. I was about $1,000 short. I have no complaints. B&H Photo is always honest and helpful with me, they are the only place I will ever go to buy cameras and lenses.
There was a time when I would have been disappointed to have gotten less than I wanted, but not any more. Sometimes I get as much pleasure from not buying something as I do from buying something.There is something satisfying about understanding how the world works and being honest.
As I told the man at the lens counter when he said it was a great lens, I know, but I can’t pay for and I won’t put it on a credit card, so I’ll just have to wait for it. He nodded. I understand, he said. I wasn’t always able to say that.
I’ll save up for the lens and eventually get it, I can wait. And I love my new camera, this shot is one of the first photos I’ve taken with it, and I love the softness and feel of the image. Fate watching, Red and Maria communicating across the pond. I have the new camera and my monochrome, and that is good for now.
Then, on to my other reason for going to New York City. Emma, who is about to become a mother.
It seems throughout my life I was always heading into New York City to scale some mountain. I worked at the New York Times, ran a magazine, lived in beautiful apartments.
I was often driven around in limos, I had lunch with Diane Sawyer at the Cafes Des Artistes, dinner with Dan Rather at Patrick’s Pub. I met with editors, sat in Random House conference rooms while beautiful young women (they were always women) told me how much they loved my books and writing. I knew they were mostly pretending, but I liked it anyway. I was dancing the dance. I lived in the Village when I was young and had wonderful sex with idealistic young women pouring into the city from everywhere.
Yesterday was different, I took the train from Albany and my past life was in shadow, in my own mind, but not any longer visible to most people. It doesn’t really matter any more, I have become who I want to be. And finally found love.
I had lunch with my daughter Emma at a chi-chi Thai restaurant off of Times Square. I asked her what kind of a grandfather she wanted me to be, I wanted to know. She said she wanted her daughter’s grandparents to be close to her.
What did that mean? I asked. She said, maybe visit three or four times a year, maybe invite my granddaughter up to the farm once in awhile. Emma said I was great with kids, which is a nice thing to hear from your daughter. I’m not so sure she thinks I was great with her. It was a powerful thing, for me to see my kid about to be a mother, her belly was showing, she is trying to sort out what it will mean, what it will cost, how it will effect her life.
I was glad to hear her define her idea for me in this, I was struggling to figure it out. I told her I wanted to know and love her child, but I didn’t want it to be the centerpiece of my life, for my sake or hers or the child. I didn’t wish to interfere, she has her life, I have mine. This is a boundary, this kid thing, between one part of life and then another.
Emma and I have a good but complex relationship. The pain from my divorce seems to be fading.
We are different and we live differently, but we are close and committed to one another. I told her not to listen to all of the dunderheads who tell her how exhausted she is about to become. I remember the joy of meeting her and living with her as a baby, I don’t remember if we were tired or not. I urged her to remember the joy and focus on it.
She is very serious about life, and very responsible. It was lovely, sitting and chatting with her, easy and loving and I was excited and happy for her. She is setting out on life’s greatest adventure.
Life in New York City and life in general is more complex when it was when Emma was born. This is all an exciting new chapter to me, and it meant a lot to see my daughter, perhaps for the last time, before she becomes a mother.
That is a big transition point for me, from one phase of life to another. It excites me, and also makes me a bit sad. I loved being a father, loved being involved in her life, being essential. Emma is moving deeply into her own life, as she should, an I am watching it from afar, as I must.
For me, the point is to not be essential to her, her husband is doing a good job with that. But it does feel like a loss, and I think I need to grieve it a bit. Emma’s expectations for me are the same as mine, and that is a good thing. I look forward to meeting this child of my blood, and loving her openly and fully, and, of course, undermining the anxious parents at every turn. Emma says she expects that as well.
Afterwards, I walked around Manhattan by myself for an hour until it was time for the next train. I soaked up the energy of the place, the diversity, the chaos and spirit, I breathed deeply of it and saved it until the next time. It was an important trip, and on the train ride back, I looked out at the beautiful Hudson and stared at the reflection at the water, and was eager to be enveloped by my new life, even as the memories of the other one began to blur again.
I was heading home, clutching my B&H Photo bag, grateful that Maria would be waiting for me at the train, I was pondering how I would get the lens I wanted sometime down the road and wondered about being a grandfather. All in all, a beautiful day..
