That Old Cape Magic (or 'What I Did During My Summer Vacation')

Chatham (top) and Provincetown

There's this scene in the opening chapter of Richard Russo's 2009 novel, "That Old Cape Magic":

The narrator recalls himself as a child in the back seat of his parents' car as they drove along Route 6. Crossing the Sagamore on their annual trip to Cape Cod, they would sing "That Old Black Magic," substituting "Cape" for "Black." If it was a prosperous and happy year, they would rent a place in Chatham.

2020 has not been a particularly prosperous and happy year for any of us, but I tried to capture some of that spirit with a recent short visit to the Cape with my wife to celebrate our anniversary. (Massachusetts being one of the few places we could visit from New Jersey without quarantining ourselves afterward.)

It indeed made us happy to visit Chatham for a few days, with a side trip to Provincetown. All around were subtle signs that reminded us how quickly things can change, and how lucky we are to have this moment in time together.

So I took more than a few photos. I wanted to try to capture happiness and preserve it... and share it here.

Four from Chatham: turkeys roaming the street... social distancing at the Queen Anne Inn... no lifeguard on duty, a lone photographer at sunrise on Lighthouse Beach... when I stopped running along the road to admire the distant haze and a fisherman in a pickup truck slowed down to call out, “It’s a California sunrise!” (referring to wildfires more than 3,000 miles away).

Four from Provincetown: Lobster Pot up close, Nancy in the distance... an artist working on the corner at the library, his signs say "Reality: still preferable to going online" and "No the world isn't broken. Yet..." the old stone sign for the Provincetown Theatre... unexpected greenery along Commercial Street.

Related post from six years ago today: "A Taste for Something Different"

Here Is New York in 2020 (Stylized by Google)

At the close of this summer of discontent, I side with Jerry Seinfeld and Patti Smith, and against James Altucher, on the subject of New York City.

Not that it matters. All four of us are privileged, so New York isn't really ours.

Also, as E. B. White eloquently noted in the 1949 foreword to his love-letter/essay, "Here Is New York," the city can't be written about or "brought down to date" by anything other than opinions and observations offered at the speed of light.

But what if...

What if, in 2020, we have the speed-of-light technology to see into the soul of New York?

I think we might.

This summer, returning to work in New York in mid-July after sheltering at home in New Jersey in mid-March, I took many cell phone photos that needed no development process. The files automatically uploaded to a digital cloud. Instantly, using a mysterious algorithm that mere mortals cannot initiate, Google's vast artificial intelligence (AI) engine selected several images to machine-edit.

My little corner of the Google Photos cloud is now filled with "auto-stylized" images of New York in the summer of 2020 that differ from the New York I saw with my own eyes.

This technology is not new, but it appears to be evolving. Before the pandemic, after taking cell phone photos of New York, I would often be surprised to see an additional image or two that had been auto-stylized by Google in my photo feed.

Almost invariably, the AI had edited the images in black-and-white -- as if Google had the same nostalgic view of New York as E. B. White in 1949.

In 2020, many more of these auto-stylized images have magically appeared on my phone in a very different form. 

As if it has transported me to the land of Oz, New-York-as-stylized-by-Google now appears in hyper-vibrant color.

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My return to New York was a plot hatched by my daughter Maddy, who lives in an East Side apartment just one block from composer Irving Berlin's former home, two blocks from Katharine Hepburn's former home, five blocks from the workplace where I met my wife Nancy, and eight blocks from the site of our first date (when Nancy lost her wallet outside a movie theater playing "The Natural," yet with great relief found her cashed paycheck stashed separately in her purse... for we all lived from paycheck to paycheck in 1984, the year before E. B. White died).

My daughter and I are enamored with New York's poetic nature. Poetic, in the sense that it "compresses all life... into a small island and adds music." That's how White describes the city in his famous essay.

He also describes his enchantment at living in such close proximity to so many magical people. For White, only 18 inches separated these random encounters -- the distance between his luncheonette booth and one frequented by Fred Stone, a local actor who played the Scarecrow in the Broadway version of "The Wizard of Oz."

When I lived in New York before marrying Nancy (29 blocks from Maddy's apartment, on the other side of Manhattan), I think perhaps I once shared a wordless ride on the 7 Train to Shea Stadium just 18 inches from writer and Mets fan Harper Lee.

In 2020, 18 inches has become 6 feet, and my daughter has experienced her own random link with Oz in a casual nod of recognition exchanged with actress Mary-Kate Olsen in her Turtle Bay neighborhood.

Maddy is perceptive and literate. In April, she offered great editing suggestions to a pandemic-related short story I wrote. A few weeks later, she said she planned to be out of town for a week and suggested, just like White's editor Ted Patrick, that "it might be fun" for me to hole up in the city in mid-July to write about New York.

Maddy offered the use of her apartment, but between her work responsibilities and other family obligations of my own, the "week" turned into the Sunday night before I was scheduled to return to my office at 777 3rd Ave., between 48th and 49th streets. Instead of spending several days alone in 90-degree heat at the Algonquin Hotel, I spent a single, comfortable, air-conditioned night with Nancy in Turtle Bay.

We drove in and parked that Sunday at the U.N. Plaza, where Harper Lee's friend Truman Capote once lived, and Nancy and I gingerly explored our old stomping grounds.

As I posted here last month, a feeling of great forlornness and forsakenness struck us. We had the sense that New York had become strangely vulnerable during the pandemic.

We were comforted by a visit to an old, familiar bar.

"At least Murphy's will always be here," I said -- then learned in the weeks that followed that it too had closed for good at the end of August.

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Which brings me back to Google, and its conjuring of New York's ghosts.

E. B. White wrote that summertime is a good time to re-examine New York and to receive what he called its gift of privacy.

So much is happening in New York at any given time, he reasoned, that individuals can choose whether to attend or pay attention to any particular thing, and that no one thing can throw the city off balance or inflict itself on a person.

He also wrote that although no plague could wipe out New York, the city was -- with the then-recent development of planes carrying nuclear warheads -- for the first time in its history, destructible.

It seems to me that in 2020, Google (which I am using here as shorthand for "Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, ubiquitous connectivity and high-speed Internet access") has dramatically changed these equations, and White is now wrong on both counts.

People nowadays can ignore what they choose, creating their own realities from a vast global storehouse, with myriad ways to experience sudden rejuvenation. Because of technology, "New York" is now everywhere. And we now know that, over time, pandemics have the same destructive power as our bombs.

I think the idealized version of New York today -- which Google's AI somehow senses and changes over time and then reflects back to us -- is the idealized version of what's best in each of us. It is the New York of the person in quest of grand achievement, a more meaningful life or simply better days to come.

I think these stylized images are digital versions of the old willow tree that E. B. White wrote about.

Off and on in the '40s and '50s (and while he wrote "Charlotte's Web"), White lived in Turtle Bay Gardens, a complex of 20 contiguous townhouses in two rows on the north side of 48th Street and the south side of 49th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Personal favorites Bob Dylan and Kurt Vonnegut lived there in later years too.

The buildings enclose a private, central backyard. White particularly loved a willow tree that grew there. It stood outside his apartment window and next to a replica of a fountain at the Villa Medici in Rome.

In "Here Is New York" he wrote that this "battered tree, long suffering and much climbed... symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun."

He concluded: "Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadows of the planes [bearing possible annihilation overhead], I think: 'This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.' If it were to go, all would go..."

As it turns out, White's willow is now gone... like Murphy's, like the New York we all remember. The tree died and was removed in 2009.

With support from composer Stephen Sondheim and other Turtle Bay Gardens residents, Urban Arborists in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn cared for the tree until the very end, and founder Bill Logan has been nurturing its cuttings so that they may be replanted in parks across the city.

(PS - On Sept. 23, Logan sent a note that Urban Arborists replants more cuttings from White's willow every year. The original offspring from the tree "is now more than 40 feet tall in our yard in Brooklyn.")

All this is alright with me. I don't want New York back again, back the way it was. I'm excited by the prospects of the New York that is to come.

Besides, Google has my back. It is creating little digital snapshots of an idealized version of New York that will truly live forever. Technology has dispersed these ageless pixels into the ether, to be perhaps deciphered one day by the life forms discovered this past week on the planet Venus.

I cannot bring New York down to date on paper. But if each picture can be worth a thousand words, then the seven auto-stylized images posted here are Google's homage to White's 7,000-word essay.

The photo on top of this page, for example, is a Google-styled vision of Turtle Bay Gardens. When I returned to my office on July 20, I realized -- for the first time -- that our Board Room windows on the 23rd Floor overlooked these buildings, and the interior gardens where White's tree once stood.

Our building had been vacated due to the COVID-19 lockdown, and the windows had not been cleaned in more than four months. Google's AI brightened my camera's God's-eye view and nostalgically blurred the dirty, dried droplets of rain as if they were heavenly stars.

Google -- like me and Jerry Seinfeld and Patti Smith -- knows the value of this city... this mischievous and marvelous monument which, not to look upon, would be like death.

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This post is dedicated to White's stepson, the writer Roger Angell, who is celebrating his 100th birthday this weekend. Angell originally commissioned White to write "Here is New York" for Holiday magazine, and his foreword graces the 1999 edition of its publication. Below is Edward C. Caswell's illustration of White's willow tree from the tailpiece of the original 1949 edition.

3 Tweets: The Capitol Theatre in Passaic

Peak @springsteen 42 years ago this weekend at the Capitol Theatre... the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be

Jungleland (Passaic, NJ 09/19/1978) https://t.co/oAHHb1vhTD via @YouTube

— Bob Varettoni (@bvar) September 18, 2020

I posted the above on Twitter, feeling nostalgic on a Friday morning. Then I noticed Van Morrison trending, because of this:

 A little more research, and my descent into melancholy was complete.

This is the site of the Capitol Theatre today https://t.co/0Lay8adaWW pic.twitter.com/PHwhu3DhTb

— Bob Varettoni (@bvar) September 18, 2020

 

19 Years Later, 9/11 Remembered

Empty Sky Memorial, Liberty State Park, NJ, 2020

This year I've again updated a Pinterest site of photos and stories recalling my former Verizon colleagues and their heroic response to 9/11. You can reach it at https://www.pinterest.com/bvar/verizons-response-to-911/ .

Newly added is a booklet from 2005 about the history and recovery of 140 West Street, the old headquarters building that was severely damaged at Ground Zero... and from which workers snaked temporary cables from open windows to get the New York Stock Exchange up and running just days later, beginning our national recovery.

Here are links to a half dozen related posts here (from most recent to oldest):

• 9/11: A Lesson in Accountability
• Revisiting My 9/11 Diary Pages
• New Insights on Verizon's 9/11 Recovery Efforts
• A New Generation Runs to a Crisis
• 9/11 Memoirs of an Invisible Man
• How Long Until the Elmos Show Up at Ground Zero?

I hope you can make sense of it all.

Even 19 years later, I can't.

Last Call at Murphy's Pub

That’s my shadow, holding up a cell phone to capture this image at 5:19 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, 2020, on Second Avenue, between 51st and 52nd streets.

It was the first time my wife and I were back together in New York City since the outbreak of the pandemic. We walked around our old haunts on the East Side, without any direction.

Nancy turned to me at one point and said, “It’s odd. I’ve never seen New York look like this.”

“How so?”

“The city looks vulnerable,” she said. “I never thought that would be possible.”

As we approached 52nd Street, I had an idea. “Let’s have a drink at Murphy’s,” I said, eyeing a temporary terrace, constructed of 2x4s, jutting out into the empty red bus lane along the west side of Second Avenue. A temporary sign proclaimed that the site was “Murphy's Pub,” although the permanent signage on the building called it “Jameson’s.”

When we were dating, Nancy and I often had drinks at Murphy’s – usually with colleagues from the newspaper where we worked nearby. We were regulars. When my wife entered, the bartender would cheerfully call out, “Gin and tonic!” – as if she were Norm on the sitcom “Cheers.”

We took seats at the outside bar, and a waiter dutifully handed us menus, since we’d need to order food (in accordance with Gov. Cuomo’s restaurant-opening restrictions). We did – and Nancy, who for years has ordered only wine on date nights, ordered a gin and tonic with her meal.

Surprisingly, from a makeshift stage at the front door, music began to play. It was “Mae & Henry” – a guitar and violin duo of locals Mae Roney and Henry Raber.

Mae is a wonderful fiddle player with a soulful vocal range, and her version of the great 1990s song by 4 Non Blondes, “What’s Up (What’s Going On),” gave me goosebumps. Live music is vibrant and immediate, raw and energizing in a way that can’t be replicated in the streaming videos of homebound musicians.

The waiter retuned with two large, clear plastic cups, one filled with a perfectly-headed Guinness for me and another, with ice, containing a strong, cool, smooth gin and tonic.

It was as if a ghostly bartender had been waiting for 30 years just to serve a perfect drink, in a perfect moment, to Nancy.

The gin and tonic looked refreshing and timelessly regal. Drops of condensation made the cup glisten in the descending sunlight.

My wife offered me a sip, and it tasted like New York.

---------

In the month since, I’ve returned to New York other days in my current job. Last night I detoured past Murphy’s Pub on my walk from a parking garage… and found out that it was vulnerable too.

A post on its Instagram account (adorned with the logo of its co-owned sister/neighbor, Jameson’s) said, “our attempts to negotiate reopening that would allow us to operate and recover from the pandemic proved unfruitful… Go raibh maith agat!”

I tried Murphy’s door, but it was locked. An amiable young man with close-cropped curly red hair poked his head from an open window. “Couldn’t get another lease,” he explained with a brogue.

I looked past him and saw chairs stacked on top of the pub’s familiar wooden tables, and some half-packed boxes. “We’ll be open around 5 today, if you want to stop by then. But we’re closing this weekend. On to better things.” He shrugged and smiled.

So after work last night I had a last burger and drink at Murphy’s. No music played, but I imagined Mae & Henry performing an old Dylan tune, and I toasted all of us who once shared some time together here.

Here’s to you, Nancy, and Joe and Cathy, Mary and Dennis, Mia and Bill... to Tricia, Ken, Rich, Monica, Laurel, Claudia, Sue, Mia, Gina, Marguerite... to Randy and Barbara.

We were once together in a magical place. It wasn’t just this bar near the corner of Second Avenue and 52nd Street. It was all of it.

On to better things.

Wherever any of us are now, in New York we are forever young.

Aspiration, Faith (And Poetry) in Montclair, NJ

I had a friend who lived in Montclair many years ago, right after college, when I lived with my parents before moving to New York.

Me and E spent many happy hours exploring her home town. It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend.

She had studied to be a broadcast journalist, and she resembled the actress Candice Bergen. This was a few years before the first episode of her legendary sitcom. E’s fate was to have her alternate life meticulously scripted and portrayed by a talented actress for our viewing pleasure.

In real life, E was always better than Candice Bergen. Years ago, I had promised to write her a poem explaining why.

I didn’t keep my promise. I thought of that the other day when my wife said she had an appointment to get her hair done in Montclair on Sunday. I offered to tag along so I could spend the waiting time re-exploring Montclair.

I’ve been there other times in the ensuing years: our wedding reception was at the Marlboro Inn in town, and our oldest daughter graduated from Montclair State.

But, since the pandemic, every familiar place seems irrevocably different.

In Montclair, the Marlboro Inn, which my wife and I drove past on the way to the hair salon, is now a condo complex. The big old Hahne’s store downtown, where E’s mother once worked, is now a condo complex too. Those two changes happened long before the pandemic.

However, here are two telling photos from Sunday: one outside the iconic Clairidge Theatre on Bloomfield Avenue, which was closed (temporarily, I believe) on March 16, 2020… and the other advertising events at Hillside School, also frozen in time in March 2020:

All that remains the same in Montclair, I found, are its magnificent churches. Consider these photos:

Immaculate Conception Church

Christ Church

First United Methodist Church

First Church of Christ Scientist

  

All these churches are within blocks of each other.

I’d like to write something profound here about the permanence of what E.B. White once called our visible symbols of aspiration and faith.

But I don’t trust these troubled times one bit.

Consider the photo at the very top of this page: It’s the hair salon. It used to be a Baptist church, then a Masonic temple.

So I’ll offer this instead. It’s a poem I finished last night. The pandemic can never change a word of it:

 

Why You Are Better Than Candice Bergen

(for E)

 

To begin with,

despite your striking resemblance,

you weren’t an actress.

You wore no makeup. You had no lines.

 

Replaying scenes with you in my mind, 

I see Isabella Rossellini, without pretense;

Eva Gabor, in the city;

Jane Fonda, unbound.

 

You are the tangible version of Candice Bergen

in Montclair, New Jersey, pre-“Murphy Brown.”

I still see us spooning ice cream at a diner.

In our booth, I hear the sound of the mini jukebox.

 

We improvised.

You took my hand,

and we sang about the morning rain,

when I felt so uninspired.

 

Harrumph.

Before the day I met you, life was so unkind.

Your unrehearsed laughter was the key

to my peace of mind.

 

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Do you have a suggestion for a book to read before Labor Day?

I've only read seven books since the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. Eight, if you count watching the movie version of "The Great Gatsby," a book I usually re-read every Memorial Day weekend.

In the age of COVID-19, reading seems to take extra concentration; meanwhile, my mind frets and wanders.

Watching 1974's version of "The Great Gatsby" rekindled the memory of driving my daughter to college in DC. We were listening to the book together, but the Turnpike traffic was so light that our version of the story ended with the scene at The Plaza, when Gatsby might have ended up with Daisy.

My daughter's reaction? "As far as I'm concerned, Gatsby never went for a swim before they closed up his pool."

So in our version of the Great American Novel, we still live in a land where happily ever after is possible.

A dear friend in Minnesota once rapturously describing movie-going as the shared experience of strangers in a darkened room staring at a screen filled with infinite possibilities of light and sound.

In the age of COVID-19, watching a movie alone in my living room on Memorial Day, I realized that this magic now eludes us.

An excellent alternative to reading, I've found, is listening to books. Audible is a great service (and a company proudly based in New Jersey). An email this morning reminds me I've now been a subscriber for nearly 20 years. How is that even possible?

No matter. But I am curious about what you think. Have you read any good books lately?

---------

Here's what I've recently read or listened to...

Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy by Margaret Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this was poignant in the recent days following Pete Hamill's death and the shuttering of the Daily News' New York City newsroom. A long intro lays out an ambitious premise for what is ultimately a short book. Perhaps there's simply not that much more to say.

I admire Margaret Sullivan very much, and there's good reason to give this read 5 stars -- and, yet, for all the fawning admiration of the talent of trained journalists and the god-like qualities ascribed to Washington Post editor Marty Baron, there's still a germ of a doubt in my mind about how we got to this place and how we can recover.

For one thing, I believe smart people will adapt to the changes caused by technology that led to many self-inflicted problems in the business of journalism.

For another thing, a recent story in the Post (precipitated by an email to Ms. Sullivan, or so I have read) devoted a good deal of the paper's resources to investigating a DC-area Halloween party several years ago where a private citizen wore an ill-considered costume (for which she expressed regret) and was shamed and fired from her job because of the Post's coverage.

If what remains of hallowed journalism is so precious, it should not have been squandered like that... by people who should have known better. 

Blood: A Memoir by Allison Moorer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an outstanding book by a talented writer.

Even better: Listen to the version of this book narrated by the author.

"Blood" is a memoir centered on the murder/suicide of the author's parents outside her bedroom window when she was just 14 years old.

In less-capable and thoughtful hands, such a shocking story might be impossible to tell.

Instead, I found listening to Moorer's plaintive voice both touching and intimate. It inspired me.

On one level, it's inspiring to experience the act of being told a story. It harkens back to Homer and Shakespeare, to the days my parents read stories to me, and to memories of reading stories to my daughters.

On another level, I was inspired by the book's theme of acceptance, forgiveness and love.

This book is stunning: haunting and lyrical.


Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm so angry at this novel. It reminds me how my senses have become so numb lately. Blame the pandemic.

I started and stopped, started and stopped reading this book so many times over the past two months. I even read many thoughtful reviews, which encouraged me to read on, because Ron Hansen's work is so highly regarded.

Rightfully so, I imagine. The writing here is impressive. But all the pretty words and imagery, the author's impressionistic style and slow pacing, all the petty characters (save Mariette)... ultimately left me flat and cold and, much worse, uninterested. Was it the storytelling? Or me?

I've read or seen reviews that this book's ambiguous ending is very profound and holds many secrets. This is a reflection of me today: I am not able to discern a single one. 

Rejoice and Be Glad 2020: Daily Reflections for Easter to Pentecost by Mary DeTurris Poust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book very much; the personal stories from the author made the daily reflections entertaining and relatable. (Full disclosure: Mary DeTurris Poust is a former colleague, and a good friend. Also, I supplemented this book with daily emails from the great Notre Dame website fath.nd.edu.)

SPOILER ALERT: The main character disappears into thin air in the middle of the story... or does He? 🙂 


Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Billions" used to be one of my favorite shows. But the recent premiere of Season 5 left me with a hollow, "so what?" feeling.

The Showtime series is a soap opera about rich people, and the outstanding production and writing quality hasn't changed since Season 4.

The world has changed. I've changed.

So too with Bond. I couldn't concentrate on the psychological/religious novel I began to read a few weeks ago ("Mariette in Ecstasy," above), so I picked up Ian Fleming's novel instead, hoping that the escapism would comfort me.

I was wrong.

This is the original, best Bond. It lacks the Bond Villain Stupidity of some of the lesser movies based on subsequent installments. (My wife could always tell when I'd watch one of these because, like Dr. Evil's son, I'd be shouting, "Just shoot him! Just shoot him!" from the living room).

This is the Bond-in-Writing that attracted my Dad as a fan. Dad was an intelligence officer in the Navy. So, high praise.

This book -- like "Billions" -- is a still Worthy Effort. It's just not resonating with me these days.

Curiously, both the Bobby Axelrod character in last night's "Billions" episode and the James Bond here wonder if there's something more to life than what they've devoted their efforts to. Then both are betrayed, and both revert to their broad, impossible, more-appealing-to-a-commercial-audience selves.

I willingly suspended belief for Bond's view of women the way I suspended belief during all the plot twists in "Billions" -- but I can't suspend the haunting feeling, in the age of COVID-19, that there's something more to life than reading or watching all this.

The world has changed. I've changed.

As my Mom says, "Did I already say that? I'm sorry. I find I'm repeating myself a lot these days."  

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Chalk this up to displacement in the age of COVID-19. I've read a little of this book every night these past three weeks... to put myself to sleep. I found the book incredibly boring, like slogging through ankle-deep mud. Uphill.

I've had similar reading meltdowns: for example, my epic "Pride and Prejudice" debacle of 2013.

As much as I want to give this less than 3 stars, I can't: Alan Alda is a favorite actor, and he seems like a perfectly wonderful person in what I can glean is his real life. I wish him all the best. I really do.

I even promise to read any sequel titled "My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating... and Zombies." 

 
What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently enjoyed -- and highly recommend -- Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, "Talking to Strangers." When I subsequently realized I had purchased "What the Dog Saw" as an audiobook years ago without listening to it then, I dove into this one too… and was not disappointed.

I can't quite give it 5 stars because I didn't find it as relevant. I wasn't as interested in all the topics covered here as Malcolm (I now feel we're on a first-name basis) was. This is an eclectic compilation of past New Yorker articles, so stories also date back years earlier than the book's 2009 publication.

And yet, Malcolm's depth of reporting, writing style and analysis are consistently thought-provoking. He challenges all assumptions. He analytically and anecdotally shows that life is complicated and messy, and truth is elusive.

The moral: We aren't as in control of things as we like to think we are.

This especially hit home for me this morning (March 11, 2020). I finished the book on an almost-empty bus during my commute to New York City. Walking to work, I found only a ghost of the usual crowd on the midtown streets.

I wonder, what is to become of us?

Adventures in Photojournaling: 3 Views of Love

These past two months, I've taken part in a photojournaling class organized by the New Milford, NJ, library (thank you, Anna Kim!) and led by an encouraging teacher and neighbor, Janet Dengel.

We bring photos to Zoom class, and Janet gives us prompts to write extemporaneously for a few minutes and tell a story about each one.

We never know what to expect. Two high school students in the class are talented writers, and I am enchanted by what others write about random images.

It's evidence that if we approach the world with curiousity, awe and wonder, we find the mundane can be profound and the ordinary can possess deep beauty.

I've also learned two things about myself: I'm fascinated with photography because it gives me the superpower to stop time, and I'm obsessed with writing about love.

As I grow older, both time and love grow more magical.

Here are three examples of what I've written: from an old photo found in my garage, a recent photo I took at the boardwalk, and a photo by classmate Luzel San Pedro.

First Love

I don't know why my first girlfriend gave me this photo. It shows her at a party at Seton Hall, when I was a thousand miles away.

We had broken up a few years earlier. We were still friends... and had been for years... but by that Halloween I was already several boyfriends removed.

What I'm showing you here is a poor Polaroid print, dark and faded. She's the one with red bangs, wearing a green knit cap, and an oversized orange rain slicker in reverse.

It was just a fraction of a second, so many years ago, but this photo explains everything about why I loved her:

Dressed like a pumpkin, she almost looks vulnerable.

Into the Mystic

That's my daughter near the water... on the Seaside Heights boardwalk on a foggy night in June 2020.

She had come home to visit on Father's Day. I hadn't seen her since the pandemic lockdown in March.

I didn't post photos of the two of us together on social media. No matter. The outside world wouldn't be able to see me smiling from ear to ear under the mask I wore that night.

Before this moment, I had stopped to take a photo of a comically large stuffed gorilla at an amusement stand. My daughter kept walking, without knowing I wasn't beside her.

I want to believe she simply assumes I'll always be at her side. I want to believe I will be. But each day it becomes clearer that "always" is an empty promise.

I am powerless to stop time, except when I take photos.

That's why this image matters. It matters because the distance between us will never grow any larger. It matters because even as my daughter steps forward into the mystic, she is never diminished in my view.

I dare you to look at this photo of my daughter. I dare you to unmask me. I dare you to try to see how much I love her.

Photo by Luzel San Pedro

3 Questions, 1 Answer

This photo suggests three questions:

- Is everything beautiful inherently dangerous?

- Are we afraid of beauty when we shouldn't be?

Or...

- Are we too foolish to heed the warning signs?

I have only one answer, and everyone of us learns the same lesson the hard way:

The closer you get, the more likely you are to be stung.

Me on the left

The Evolution of a Poem, Decades Apart

Scenic overlook of Paterson, NJ, from Garret Mountain,
with New York City in the distance.

As I rooted through old boxes to clean out my garage during this pandemic lockdown, Neil Young's song "Vacancy" began to play on Sirius XM.

I lifted my head.

I didn't recognize the song... surely, it was new. Yet something about it seemed different than recent Neil Young songs.

His voice was immediate and clear, and the opening riff and beat seemed straight from the mid-1970s, reminding me of his first famous band, Buffalo Springfield.

"That's extraordinary," I thought, given that Neil is now 74 years old... but not entirely surprising, considering his continued passion. Witness this performance of "Mr. Soul" just nine years ago.

Then the DJ explained that "Vacancy" was a song originally recorded in 1975 but released only last month as part of the "Homegrown" album.

How does aging impact creativity?

I admire the art Paul Cezanne produced toward the end of his life. But his career was rare, almost magical.

In the world of music, Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" is a favorite song of mine and my wife, Nancy (just another reason I love her). I think, and Nancy agrees, it's a song he only could have written when he was young. It's about beginnings, an invitation to a journey that can't be replicated later in life.

Could he write a better song now that he's 70? Perhaps, because Bruce is Bruce. Still, it would be a different song by a different Bruce. And, sigh, "different" is different than "better."

Steve Jobs sometimes compared two versions of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" performed by pianist Glenn Gould early in his career in 1955 and as a mature artist in 1981. Jobs considered the later version more nuanced and soulful.

I wonder.

---------

Found poem.

Cleaning out my garage has been a revelation: Boxes of old photos (see Saturday night's post) and old papers. I found a folder of writing assignments I had submitted many years ago in classes taught by a Notre Dame literature professor, the talented poet Sonia Gernes.

Reading my poems decades later, my writing voice, like Neil's singing voice, seemed more immediate and clear in college. Clumsy too. Much of my early writing seems creepy and obsessive when I was shooting for "tender and evocative." That probably explains a lot about my past love life too. 🙂

I also, apparently, thought I knew everything. Despite helpful and insightful comments made by Professor Gernes, I never (except once) tried to revise my poems.

I will now.

In fact, I have to: I told friends in a local photo-journaling class I would, and I feel I owe it to my social media friend, journalist Laura M. Holson, who has often written about embracing creativity, especially as we age.

Here's a poem titled "Scenic Overlook," in which I tried to describe the arc of a relationship in terms of someone who exited a highway to admire a panoramic view.

You can see my struggles in the "found poem" photo. I didn't have a panoramic view of life when I was 20. The original read like this:

Scenic Overlook

In the distance, in the

break in the clouds on the horizon,

I can see laughter.

A sunset.

I had forgotten about that.

It's an old story --

separating the forest from the trees.

It seems to me now that there are

a lot better places I can be than

standing here, surveying my past,

when the only thing within my reach

are the cold, damp car keys in my hand.

I have a plan.

Don't get me started on the cliches and sloppy language: "separating the forest from the trees... it seems to me now that there are a lot better places I can be..."

However, I still like the idea behind the setup of the poem. I'm not throwing away my shot.

Here's a re-do, written last night during a heatwave in New Jersey:

Revised in 2020

Scenic Overlook

This is a dangerous place to stand.

 

In the distance,

in the descending dusk on the highway's horizon,

I see a house fly

alight on your thigh.

 

It's 40 years ago, and you are in bed at my side,

languid and nude.

I didn't pull over for this. Despite all signs,

I find it a dizzying view.

 

The fly rubs its hands and plots its next move.

A dismissive twitch of your flesh shoos it in a flash. 

Then you disappear too, just like that,

as cars on Route 80 flee to the west.

 

I look to the east.

Behold this precipice: these wounds, dark and deep.

Alone on this road, alone in my bed,

40 years later,

 

I still watch you while you sleep.

---------

Finally, trimming a few words, adding a Gatsby reference, and answering the questions, "Why might she be sleeping?" and "How can her lover still watch her if she's disappeared?":

Revised in 2023

Scenic Overlook at Garret Mountain

 

This is a dangerous place to stand:

Cliffside in Paterson, in the descending dusk.

 

Past the highway below,

in the horizon of the city skyline at my feet,

I see a housefly alight on your thigh.

 

It's 40 years ago, and you are languidly napping in our room.

The road signs pointing here didn’t warn me of this.

I find it a dizzying view.

 

The fly rubs its hands, obsessed, plotting its next move,

until shooed in a flash by a dismissive twitch of your flesh.

Decades disappear, just as fast, as cars on Route 80 flee to the west.

 

As if an old gravestone, I face to the east.

Behold this vanished breast of a new world.

I hold my breath on the precipice… these wounds, dark and deep.

 

40 years later,

I still watch you while you sleep.

            -- Bob Varettoni

I caught a double rainbow there in 2021.