Ropography 6.10.24

I'll wake up older and I'll stop all my tryin'

Inputs

Just Kids by Patti Smith: My knowledge of PS’s work is pretty limited to that one song, but this memoir mostly about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was on so many lists and my appetite for memoirs about grimy New York has yet to meet its limits. My husband’s intellectual soul mate is another physicist who works at Stanford. A few years ago when they were at a workshop together, they stayed up all night working in their AirBnB and then at dawn they made ribeye for breakfast. When T told me about it, it confirmed as I had long suspected that there were vast acres of territory within my husband’s innermost self that this gentleman has access to and from which I am barred. PS published this book after RM and PS’s husband had both died, and I can only hope that if my husband writes a book about his physics life partner he will do me the same courtesy in the timing.

The Country Girl by Edna O’Brien: Also a memoir, easily confused (by me) with her novel Country Girls. It was pretty meaty stuff at the beginning: the colorful brutality of the countryside, tumult of youth, literary awakening, dramatic absconding with a not-quite-divorced writer, slowly stifling domestic life, divorce and disgrace. I thought wow, she must have had a wild life if we’re already here just a third of the way in. But once she is established, the rest is comprised mostly of lists of every famous person EO’B interacted with. Hey look, crossover!

Why did Robert Mapplethorpe, whom I met in a loft down in the Village, look at me and look through me with such cold, compassionless eyes?

Well, Edna, as spirited as I’m sure George Plimpton’s parties got, around that time RM was photographing people who drive nails into their dicks for pleasure so it feels plausible that you did not have an immediate connection.

Outputs

Yesterday we were at Market Basket and I had one of these interactions where someone compliments your kids or makes a joke to them and you say “Haha ok thanks!” and suddenly you are deep in conversation with them. Sometimes they just want to tell you about their grandchildren, especially when the daughter-in-law is Korean and your kids, they swear, look JUST like them. Sometimes, however, they are a lonely person whose adult children are not present in their lives in the way they would like, and you have unwittingly activated deep feelings of longing and nostalgia that they want to process with you. The latter is more common with men as was the case here. He dove, more abruptly than most, right into the sins of the faithless daughter who never wanted for anything when she was a kid but can never be bothered to call and now she’s got this boyfriend, he’s a - are you Italian? I said no, less as a statement of fact than as a desperate signal that he should divert the train from the direction I saw it taking. I’ve mentioned that people often take me for a compatriot and these moments are usually lovely, but I’m sorry to say that what follows a mid-sentence “Are you Italian?” is often leading to a dark place as was the case here.

He’d picked up too much steam to stop and it took some time to extricate myself even after I stammered “That’s…not something I agree with”. Why didn’t I walk away immediately? I needed pistachio ice cream (for spumoni cake, of all things), and I resented having to prolong my errands if I left without it. I also live in terror of becoming this kind of person, and if they are telling me their story out of hope that it will help them make sense of it, I am listening out of an equally irrational hope that by listening to what happened I will be able to avoid their fate. I saw my mom uncomfortably stuck in many conversations of this or an equivalently awkward degree. My father I saw getting annoyed or impatient with strangers, but never exuding “how am I going to get out of here” in the same way. My children were over by the cart babbling away about something. Oblivious? Maybe, maybe not. The previous week we’d been walking home (also from getting ice cream) when I saw a man on the sidewalk give a handgun to another man sitting in the driver’s seat of an idling car. I took the children’s hands and briskly crossed the street. Later I was telling T about it, and the kids were in the room so I said it had been a “Second Amendment item” with much eyebrow waggling, and N piped up “You mean the gun? I saw it!”, carefree as a bird.

Condiment Corner

Gift from a Ropobuddy! There has been a lot going on in the past few months. I came upon a span of hours with nowhere I needed to be and nothing I needed to do, at least in the short term. The lack of constraints was so disorienting that I was afraid the time would be overtaken by emotional collapse. Instead, I made a cup of tea and a sandwich with this spread and some Little Bo Peep soft sheep cheese from Wegman’s. Equanimity was restored. Next time I think I’ll go for a slightly stronger cheese, the spread is up to it. I have been blessed never to have found cheese binding in a gastric sense, and conversely I am grateful for its emotionally binding properties.