A trip to the US: going through New York to get to northern Virginia, for my mother's memorial service; and back to New York for four busy days.
From the beginning, the sheer ease of things was startling: the flight to New York, the early landing, an almost unbelievably efficient and relaxed JFK – I almost didn't recognize it all...
The memorial itself was emotionally calm, rather than sad. A lot of memories, endlessly discussed by the family staying at my brother-in-law's (which immediately morphed into a crowd comfortable with each other, as though we hadn't lived miles apart for years); plus a surprisingly large number of neighbors and relatives coming to the cemetery, dinner at a restaurant, and back to the house afterwards. Arlington Cemetery was, as always, a calm arrangement in grays and whites; gentle humor and remembrances floated among a lot of people who hadn't seen each other for years.
If you click on the picture, you might see that my father and my mother are actually in the canisters that held my father's developing fluid (for photographs). Back in 2000, when he died, it seemed right (in an admittedly affectionately odd way) to use these canisters as burial urns – we used one for my sister a few years ago (she's around the corner from my parents, about two rows away), then a third for my mother. Chalk it up to family peculiarity; hopefully the cemetery managers won't find out.
Back at my brother-in-law's, an afternoon and evening spent talking about everything under the sun... My sister had made a mural of photographs from my mother's life – I've seen perhaps half of them before, but many of the earlier ones were new to me. I remember one from the early 1930s, that she didn't use – my Greek grandparents with their three children; although her elder sister and brother look as assertive as they did throughout their lives, my mother looks, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, remarkably shy, frankly frightened. Later pictures show her shifting back and forth between shyness and cheerfulness, until the point – perhaps in her late 20s? – when she became strikingly beautiful for a time, when she began to look generally cheerful and happy with her life.
Driving back to New York, we were quieter, basically worn out. But from Sunday midday until Wednesday afternoon, I made a remarkable number of visits, personal and professional and mixed – and everyone seemed remarkably cheerful: people looked well, seemed busy, and were ready for spring, for new projects, for enthusiastically diving into any number of things. I was frankly surprised at how easy it was to restart where we had left off, after not seeing many of them for a decade or more (though in many cases that problem was smoothed over by Facebook – it's really useful for those of us who live far away from our pasts).
Mary Jo: hours of talking in her beautiful kitchen as she made a meal, packed to go away for some weeks to an Equity show outside the city, and took pictures of us on her roof (which will someday be reborn as a roof garden). Dinner with Trudy, and her husband Frank and a friend-composer Eric who flew in from the Left Coast – Trudy's fantastic curry and salad, plus a rapid criss-crossing discussion of everything happening in musical New York. Lunch with Libby in the sunshine, talking about her daughter, her husband, her work at Yale, and connections I could help her with for their archive.
Then waltzing off with Laura to the last big event to be held in Merce Cunningham's studio before it closes forever – seeing Pauline Oliveros get a prize, bumping into Carl Stone, and unexpectedly meeting Rhodri Davies, a young grantee composer who lives about five miles from me, right here in northern England (he's now invited to come speak to our students). Then a relaxed late Italian dinner back at Laura's hotel, where the staff have obviously decided that she is their favorite guest (understandable, as she often stays there, and is pretty lovable – as are many of the people mentioned here).
A visit to Meredith Monk's office, then walking over to her studio (well, I got confused about which address was which) went extraordinarily well – I finally met Peter (and got a pile of CDs and DVDs and reviews and such), then a long talk with Meredith over tea in her studio, which was sunnier in the spring light than I'd ever seen it. Lots of materials, lots of plans, getting to work there too, after letting that project slide for too long.
A relaxed Italian lunch with Melanie, who is away from her Irish home in New York on a grant, brought me through the NYU music department – and lo and behold, Suzanne, in a high-fashion pair of shoes (how can I describe them – sort of a silver techno-glitter?), and Michael, both of whom greeted me as a long-lost friend (though I haven't seen either in at least a decade). A last dinner with my sister and her husband, who put up with me for nearly a week in the midst of very busy schedules – sleeping in their crowded living room... we went to Ethiopian, which I'd been craving for a few months, and even had a choice of Ethiopian beers. (And then, after Ethiopian beer, decided we needed to test the meme of the Peep in the Microwave, only to be defeated by accidentally buying – I kid you not – sugarless, diet Peeps. Bummer.)
And a final busy tour of the Manhattan version of the Jung Institute – rapid connections with an amazingly helpful librarian (many photocopies); chatting with the pleasant Swedish women who run ARAS, the vast image archive; and a brief word with the guy in the bookstore, who sent me back with a query to refer to Zürich....
All very professional, cheerful. Even, generally, exciting: a confident moving-into-the-future that I've missed too often in the past decade.
I guess this all sounds like boasting (sorry about that). But, after so much whinging about being far from things, about feeling ineffective and forgotten by the wider, busier, more successful world, it was frankly startling – this, after all, is what success feels like....
Comments