guests

We had people over a couple of times last week. On Thursday we had the fifth Salon Slolab, the silly name we have given to dinners where we invite a group of 4-6 people to come over and eat with us. They have been a learning experience food and planning wise (we've alternated kitchen captaincy and both had big successes and times when we did not, ah, prepare enough food). Funny that despite a lifetime of going to dinners at adults' houses, it takes hosting to realize that actually it is nice to have multiple courses and doesn't feel quite right if there's only one. The dinners have all been really fun and lovely and each one different from the others. They've also felt faintly ridiculous, a little like adult-couple cosplay. But hey, SRB and I are an adult couple.

On Friday AF -- SRB's former roommate, back in town to apply for his visa to the States so he can join his girlfriend in NYC -- and a few other friends came over after a concert at FACE, the local arts nonprofit. AF has been recording music and he played us a couple of finished tracks, which was cool. One of the guys who came over was a huge rock star here in the 90s. I've met him a bunch of times, he's around and a nice and interesting guy. (His second act has been to create an animation studio whose flagship is a children's TV show about a schoolteacher in Pakistan who dons a burqa to disguise herself as she fights bad guys.) SRB had a friend from high school visiting in April, one thing led to another, and now she's planning to stay for the foreseeable future. She's a travel writer/vlogger so I guess Pakistan's as good a place as any to be, and apparently unfazed by the 23-year age difference.

Anyway they were over, and AF was clearly chuffed to play him the songs and get notes. And just as clearly, he was into the music and the role of veteran musician offering advice: got up to leave the circle of conversation and get closer to the speaker so he could really listen. It was cool to witness and something I couldn't imagine in the States: the equivalent of Alanis Morisette or Eddie Vedder happening to be over at my house in a group of 7 or 8 people, drinking a whiskey and soda helping a friend who's just starting to commit to music. 

faiz and the importance of poetry

The greatest Urdu poet of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was a committed communist and agnostic who spent time in prison for his activism in the years after Partition and eventually fled Pakistan altogether. A little while ago I picked up a copy of The Colors of my Heart, a collection of his poetry translated and published recently by a professor at the National Islamic University in India. No surprise: He wrote beautifully about the struggle against oppression, and also about compassion and love both romantic and not.

I've been thinking about Jack again a lot over the last couple of days. Today I woke up feeling slightly sick, and while I had to rally to go to a meeting in the office for a few hours, it was a temporary rally. Two words come to mind: malaise and melancholy. So this evening, while Steph goes to a party I was looking forward to but am definitely not up for, I've been reading Faiz.

"My Companion, My Friend"

If I was sure, my companion, my friend
If I was sure the weariness in your heart
The sadness in your eyes and the burning in your breast
Can be dispelled by my comforting words, my love
Were my words of solace a medic which
could bring back to life your desolate and extinguished mind
Wishing away the stain of humiliation from your forehead
and cure your ailing youth
If I was sure, my companion, my friend

Day through night, morning through evening
I would spending whiling away your pain
Singing to you light, melodious songs
Of spring, gardens and waterfalls
Of sunrise, of the moon and the planets
I would tell you tales of beauty and love
I'd tell you how
Unresponsive bodies of proud, snow-moulded women
Melt under the heat of passionate hands
How the stable contours of a familiar face
Change shape in an instant
How the crystal-bright visage of a beloved
Flushes red with a sip of the ruby red wine
How the rose branch offers itself to the flower-picker
How the night's mansion becomes fragrant
I would sing to you, go on singing for you
Weaving songs for you, always around you
But my songs are not the cure for your grief
Melodies may not be surgeons, though they
can be friends and sympathizers
Songs may not be lancets, though
They can be a salve for pain at least
There's no help for your affliction but the knife
And that cruel blood-letter is not in my power
Not in any earthly being's power
Except you yourself, you, only you

on writing, on bodies, on home

Lying in bed one morning a while back, I had a kind of half-waking dream. Jack was in his 40s, with a daughter, and they were in a car, on the run from some threat. It was the first time I'd had a real vision of Jack as an older man. There he was, wrinkled, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. A fifteen-year-old daughter in the passenger's seat, scared but full of love for him, trusting and not trusting him. Middle-aged Jack would still be sick, but maybe he'd be mellowed out a bit, maybe he'd be sober, maybe having a kid would have snapped him to in a way no other circumstance could.

In the weeks following that dream I wasn't able to get it out of my head. Much like in the days after we cleaned out his apartment I had a kind of loop playing: Jack on the balcony on his broken lawn chair, staring blankly at the frigid sunset and ashing his cigarettes into the empty Coke bottle on the ground. Jack five minutes later, scribbling furiously in his notebook. Jack frying an egg on the stove. Jack half-lying on his bed, looking at the wall, smoking. All the time thinking about death, about killing himself. Arguing with himself about it. But the loop is just images, no voiceover or even much sound.

So I've started writing about the dream. Playing it out. I googled some tips on writing a novel and have been following one of the sites I found. For a couple of weeks I kept to writing every day. That fell off in the last ten days but not altogether and this morning I wrote a chapter, the first chapter I've ever written. It ends with a fictionalized version of Jack and his daughter escaping in the false back of a refrigerated trailer. Heading toward Silver Spring, home.

**************

Friday marked six months since Jack died. I was thinking about it a lot on Thursday night. For some reason I kept coming back to his body, his physical presence. Get to a certain age and everyone is banged up in one way or other. I've had arthritis in my feet for nearly ten years. There's something screwy with my right knee that acts up sometimes when I try to run fast. I get migraines once in a while. But Jack had more than his share. His reconstructed left leg, which pained him at all times and especially when the weather was bad. His face, which had been bashed in years ago in an incident none of us will ever know. The crooked ring finger on his left hand, broken in the southern Utah winter when he was a teenager and then left to heal in a banana shape because he couldn't get his gloves on over the splint. (Pretty fucked up of the program that he was in at the time not to take better care of him, in retrospect. Get him a mitten at least.) His collapsed veins. The burn scars on his wrists and torso. The marks left over here and there from the worst case of chicken pox our pediatrician had ever seen.

But his body wasn't only an assemblage of scars. He had beautiful eyes, long lashes. Strong, straight white teeth that flashed when he laughed. Long legs and arms over which he had preternatural control even after drugs and disuse slowed him down. He only had to learn how to do something once before he could do it gracefully.

On Friday morning I'd forgotten. It's been a long few weeks at work and at home, too: SRB has been going through a dip; story for another time. So I went to work and plowed through the day. Budget details and logistics have a way of occupying the mind when they're pressing, and they were yesterday. But in the middle of part two of the proposal budget meeting I was having yesterday, Mom texted our family WhatsApp group to remind us of the significance of the day and to say she was planning to have a moment of silence around 1:50 PM, his time of death. It brought me up short. How had I forgotten? I did not outwardly react but inwardly I all of a sudden felt heavy and that I badly wanted to be alone and quiet. But we had to finish this conversation yesterday, time marches on. And my boss kept asking me to follow up on this logistic thing that shouldn't even be my responsibility. As a side note, I'm actually curious why he asked me to deal with it in this particular way rather than doing it himself. Involved dealing with other CEOs and I have to coax them with his implicit backing, whereas if he called them himself he'd have been able to get a straight answer right away. I'd ask him eventually but I think he'd interpret the question as a desire to avoid responsibility on my part.

Anyway, I finally managed to leave work a little early. Samson and Shamshad, our cleaner and cook, were here, so I went into the bedroom, closed the door, lay on my back, and put on "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" twice through, and then "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" three times. In the middle of the third one, SRB came home. Without a word, she came onto the bed and lay down on her side next to me, left arm on my chest and left leg across mine. I cried until the song was over and then cried a little more in the quiet.

That song is so much about bodies, about the physicality of being alive and being in love. And in it, love is home and home is love.

Home, that's where I want to be, pick me up and turn me round.
I feel numb, born with a weak heart, I guess I must be having fun.
The less we say about it the better, make it up as we go along.
Feet on the ground, head in the sky, it's okay, I know nothing's wrong.
Nothing.

Hi-yah! I got plenty of time.
Hi-yah! You got light in your eyes.
And you're standing here beside me.
I love the passing of time.
Never for money, always for love.
Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight.

Home, it's where I want to be but I guess I'm already there.
I come home, she lifted up her wings. I guess that this must be the place.
I can't tell one from another, did I find you or you find me?
There was a time before we born. If someone asks, this is where I'll be.
Where I'll be.

Hi-yah! We drift in and out.
Hi-yah! Sing into my mouth.
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view.
I'm just an animal looking for a home and
Share the space for a minute or two.

And you love me till my heart stops. Love me till I'm dead.
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head, I got ooooooh, oooh ooh ooh.

I am not the first person to find that song indescribably powerful. I've listened to it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, since I was a teenager. It means something different to me now than it did when I was 18, or 23, or 29.

Jack left his body six months ago. His body came home for the last time as ash. His scars exist only in photographs and in our memories of them. And his pain lives only in the echoes it left in our imaginations. In our pain.