In The Wee Hours

Waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep is not necessarily something to fret about. Maybe it is age and experience or perhaps mere feebleness, but I don’t worry too much about it.

In my early twenties I experienced some bouts of real insomnia. Now that’s a different story. That is night after night of little or no sleep. Soon a kind of fear of bedtime begins to develop. I shudder at the thought.

In the quiet of the night I hear the occasional cars, the strange faint moaning version of snoring from a neighbor, a floor creaking somewhere.

I get up and check email, for some reason. I return to bed and read for a while.

I take off my glasses and try to sleep again - to no avail. Even with a t-shirt over my eyes and an old radio turned to a soft “nature” sound of breaking ocean waves, my mind lurches and scrambles around various internal spaces.

So, I get up and move to the couch and sit in the dark. I think about my day, about work, and certain people. I purposely refuse to allow myself to ponder worrisome things.

I return to the computer. For this.

Bad Bruck

My memory has always been weak, to say the least. I am not very sentimental but I do enjoy revisiting moments from the past. In 1974, right after college classes ended, I went to Switzerland to stay with my girlfriend and work at a place called Movenpick. It was this enormous structure outside of Zurich that stretched across the highway. The lower level had shops and the upper level restaurants. I worked even below that in an area where the food was stored and the garbage was collected. I worked with a tiny Italian man - who seemed elderly to me at the time - named Napoliano. He spoke no English but we got along famously.

I lived in an employee dormitory filled with young folks from all over the place.

Our closest buddies were from Scotland and Spain.

The plan was for my girlfriend and I to work until mid-July and then go off on our travels. Life interrupted, however, and I became upset and disenchanted enough with her to take off on my own. I was all of 19.

One of my sojourns took me to a tiny Austrian town named Bad Bruck, nestled in a valley filled with fog at the time. I had no idea where I was. At at lunch in a local inn, I asked about a place to stay. I was directed down a small road to a lovely little house run by an older woman and her husband. Their grandson was staying with them for a bit. The woman reminded me of my great-grandmother. She smiled and led me to a cozy room upstairs. The windows looked out on a little balcony, the surrounding hills, and a rushing mountain stream. The tops of the hills were hidden by the fog. The room had a sweet bed with a fluffy, thick comforter. In the mornings this woman would knock and enter with a tray that held a pot of strong coffee, toast, and a poached egg, all contained in white porcelain.  

As I explored the local terrain and the fog lifted, I found a path up the hills through a pine forest. At the top was a resort called Grunerbaum. Farther on and through the end of the pine forest, an enormous triangular mountain marked the beginning of the Swiss Alps. I felt as if I had come home. 

STUDIO: Work and Old and New

I have been working on shelves and drawer-fronts in my studio. They belong to a large built-in bookcase in a client’s home. I have to paint and glaze and varnish. It’s work. New work.

Across the room I decide to get out some older paintings and re-work them while waiting for this “New Work” to dry. These are painting that never felt finished, that gnawed at me. Paintings with certain parts that felt wrong or maybe  wrong on particular days. This is akin to the phenomenon of working on a painting for hours as the light fades and leaving for home feeling satisfied with the results...feeling that the painting went well.....and then arriving the next morning to feel dismayed or even horrified at the thing on the wall.

Time heals, refreshes, allows for the infusion of different energies. And sometimes returning to something older, a work that might even be a tad dusty...sometimes it yields a wonderful outcome. 

Guest Writer: Poet Edward Grayson

One writes to forgo the obvious and the easily explained,

instead alighting on moving realms,

adjustments turn shadings over on their bellies,

they sleep and fly through crowded cities.

Parchment skin is lit by an ageless sun, so words

remove damage, hurt, timidity or the plainly stupid,

we move fingers over decades and faces and

stories that might have existed before we did.

One writes when the brush is out of reach or maybe

muscles are silent in the brewing slip of living,

letters can be arrows, can elevate, can inspire

neurons to reach confusion at the clearest line.

One writes to escape, to hide, to love, to reject,

to anger even possibly to alter some old thing,

blossoms expand patiently like umbrellas, we

stride softly with our toes in warm sand.

Empty eyes scan a limitless universe for a single word

that might overcome the known, the lost sight,

we write to feel this loss as it draws forward,

embraced, these words defy themselves and us.

Edward Grayson is the author of So New I Hid.

Teen Seen

Taking my daughter Chloe and two of her friends to a thrift store last weekend was an experience. Whenever I am driving teen girls some place, the conversation coming from behind me never fails to amuse and is often really hilarious and kooky. I get to experience the teen thing from the girl’s side as opposed to the male thing I was immersed in at that time of life.

Not that long ago my daughter would not be caught dead in a thrift store. Now, it has a certain cache all its own. It seems cool. Who know what might be found and for a ridiculous price?

All the pressure, the school, the friends, the fun, the viciousness, the electronic obsessions (cell phones, iPods, Internet....), the hormones -

in spite of it all I like these girls. They are sweet and fun and funny and unpretentious. Any teenager can be annoying: self-centered, snarky, spaced-out, chore-averse. But when one puts aside the role, the place, the need to preach....then sometimes one can merely experience this strangest of times in the evolution of human beings. 

BILLIE

Billie Holiday haunts the world of sound like no other. Her singing voice taunts and teases, seduces and soothes. Sweetness and heart-wrenching sadness. She brings us closer to the flame of inspiration, the vibrating collaboration between worldly places, the desire of love as it mingles with despair.

I dream that within the impossible lost-ness of death and whatever comes with it...that she might allow me a moment to sit with her and listen to her voice, her stories, as she shares a bit of her self in the eternal unravelling and realization.