fragments, anniversaries, flishes

I've been writing things in random places lately: my day planner, a business reply card for Pantheon Books re-appropriated as a bookmark, a receipt from Frank's Market for two half-gallons of milk destined for reincarnation in yogurt form.

This comes out of the first fragment, written on the M4 the other morning as I listened to Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse's The Dark Night of the Soul on my way to work:

I'm reading Hurry Down Sunshine, a father's memoir about the summer his adolescent daughter was "struck mad." There is an electricity to this book that comes in part from its urban Manhattan setting and in part from the kinetic, frazzled energy attributed to the daughter, the ex-wife, the new wife (though this is of course just the father's interpretation, and these women with whom he surrounds himself may not be quite the nerve-jangled, high-wired creatures he makes them out to be). There is a strange living situation that seems not uncommon in New York (my own living situation being somewhat less than normal), and Hasidim in the psychiatric ward.

For some reason this got me to remembering Dave talking, years ago, about a friend of his who grew up in the East Village. She was under strict instruction, when going home by herself after school, to always check to see what kind of drugs the people sprawled in her building's entry way were doing. If they were shooting dope it was okay for her to step over them and go inside. But if they were smoking crack, she had to go across the street to a neighbor's apartment and stay there until one of her parents got home from work.

I guess I've been thinking about girls in the city, and what that kind of life can do to them. For the record, I'm pretty sure Dave's friend turned out just fine. I'm not sure yet about Sally of her father's memoir.

This comes out of another fragment, written yesterday morning:

Lauren said the other day, over margaritas and carnitas, that the more weight she's lost this past year the more she sees her father every time she glances in a mirror, a window, the shiny surface of her 2009 Prius. She seemed unnerved by this, though I found myself envious. Specifically, as layers of fat have melted away, it is her father's hands that have begun to emerge from underneath, long-fingered and bony and pale. I laughed, and confessed to disappointment in my own chubby, short-fingered hands, so unladylike, so pudgy and pink and unfit for rings of any sort. My father, when I was little, joked that I was given sausages in place of fingers, and he was not far off (though they did prove useful for playing the violin, the perfect width for half-notes).

I do not have my father's hands, though sometimes I wish I did: callused and ink-stained, the culmination of his odd mixture of academia and carpentry. Lauren, I think, would gladly eschew being confronted with her father's hands, and especially the image of him clutching them to his hospital gown after she'd scared him "nearly to death" during an adolescent outburst of running away from home.

The last fragment, written late last night, has to do with Shelley, my first and best friend at Barnard. Shelley, also known as Flish my Love (oh how I loved to invent nicknames for people; nicknames that really meant something; nicknames that stuck), was in an odd way a mother figure to me during our college years -- something I needed desperately yet would never have admitted.

I was thinking of a particular April evening during our freshman year, fifteen years ago this month. We were sitting on a bench outside the Barnard Library, which is housed in Lehman Building and not to be mistaken for my own Lehman Library, which of course is housed in the International Affairs Building. (Columbia is sometimes funny like that.) We were talking about this and that, probably boys and books and skipping class, when she turned to me suddenly and said she sometimes wondered how our college experience would be different if my father were still alive, still hanging out in the history department up on the 4th floor of Lehman.

I imagined him hunkered down in his chair, feet propped up on the desk in front of him, grinning as I knocked on his open office door with nasty McIntosh coffees in hand. I imagined meeting him after classes on Thursdays, bringing Shelley or Deepa or Maria home with us for a weekend in Mohegan Lake.

I was thinking last night of that evening with Shelley, and these intimate and carefree fantasies about another sort of college experience we might have shared, I suppose because this coming Sunday, the 18th, marks seventeen years and more than half a lifetime since my father passed away.

I have not yet met Shelley's daughter, who just turned four this past weekend, which just goes to show how easy it is to get caught up in our own particular lives. But Shelley herself, well, she still inhabits a place in my life that I treasure deeply, that I will always treasure deeply.