Maybe I’m just a lazy blob of passive acceptance but audience questions during a presentation make me crazy. Interrupting a speaker or tour guide or docent mid-talk with questions like “What year was that?” or with a story about how her father did it differently is not about elucidation. It’s about obfuscation. It’s about the questioner heaving himself on stage.
 
In my most impatient moments, I want to mutter “Shut the fuck up. We don’t interrupt actors on stage. Let it flow. Trust the storyteller.”
 
But that’s just the angry controller in me. Just because I prefer a sense of contemplative study to a sense of relentless query, doesn’t mean everyone must.
 
But, really, no one cares about your father.
 
Art: Apollo the Python-Slayer. c. 350 BC. Part of a set. Attributed to Praxiteles. (Greek, c. 400BC-c. 330BC). Greece, Athens, mid fourth century BC. Bronze, copper and stone inlay. The Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access Collection.

So honored to be in the "She Persisted" issue of Earth's Daughters. Here's the poem that appeared. I started this poem nearly 30 years ago and finished it just in time to meet Earth's Daughters deadline.



Immortality
 
Even in the absence
of my footsteps,
this oak floor
sighs and creaks --
 
as if she still elbows
her sisters in the forest
and heaves boulders aside
with her muscled roots;    
 
as if white-throated fungus
and snarls of moss
still mount
her pleated bark;
 
as if her limbs
still sprout ruffled fronds
to snag the perfect
suitor’s pollen;
 
as if she still prays
at least one of her young
escapes the squirrel’s
lethal pantry.
 
 

My iPhone started generating a report on Sundays outlining how much time I’ve spent that week with it. Nearly 3 hours a day! That’s a lot of research, news, shopping and general farting around.
 
Thumbing that soft warm home button was more of a preoccupation than I thought. And I had other things to do. For real.
 
So I became more mindful of my use. I didn’t take it on walks. I delayed opening it until later in the morning. And the first week my screen time was down 34%. The next it was down 11%. I read more. I cleaned up the kitchen before dirty dishes inhibited sink use. I cooked. I day dreamed. I’m down to two hours a day.
 
I wonder if using it as an actual device to talk with someone counts as screen time. Or listening to audible books.
 
 

For the first time in my life, I’m not sure what New York City means to me.
 
Before I lived there, it was a “Marlo Thomas: That Girl” goal, a sky’s-the-limit kind of life. On my first visit, the sheets were discolored but the Rockettes were awesome.
 
When I lived there, it was half ecstasy and half torture. On a day when I felt adventuresome, I sat in Washington Square Park, chatted up butchers, braved the subway. On lonely shy days, I stitched satin and tulle bridesmaids’ dresses for friends’ weddings in my sunless apartment. 
 
When I left, I visited at least once a year. With my husband. With my husband and kid. With just my kid. With friends. I curated each visit to meet my travel companions’ needs. Bead and fabric stores. Restaurants. Central Park playgrounds. Ping pong in Bryant Park. Countless Broadway shows. One time my son and I taxied directly from the airport to a Monday Night Magic Show in the Village.
 
Then I went alone. To be alone. Three or four times a year. Museums. Literary events. Science lectures. I even did poetry readings there. I even made friends there. I loved it and lived for it and probably used it to escape something at home that I could not yet name.
 
The day after my divorce, I visited for the New Yorker Festival and by some strange circumstances found myself homeless for a night. The only available room was $2,000 a night. I found a quiet place in that luxury hotel lobby and sobbed. And longed to phone my husband, my not-husband.
 
But then I found myself on a friend’s sofa. And she helped me settle.
 
So now I’m not sure what’s next for me and New York City.
 
Maybe Brooklyn.
 
 

Reading the Sunday New York Times is my church, a sacred ritual of discovering the world as those dear reporters and editors see it. I savor their words in every section like I savor the chicken and squash I roast for lunch, like the butter cream icing on my tender-crusted apple dumpling.
 
Except the back of the Style section -- the wedding announcements. 
 
I used to savor them, too. Maybe more than butter cream. They’re kind of like obituaries in reverse. I even thought about working them into an art project. Until their cheerfulness felt like false optimism, like icing without the butter, and I found myself composing obits on the marriages.
 
And that’s not how I want to spend my remaining precious breaths. Unless for my next project, there’s something there…    
 

“Compassion is not a relationship between healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals… it becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” Pema Chodron
 

After seeing the movie “Shoplifters” at the recent Milwaukee Film Festival, I realized most films and books and poems end on an exhale, a let-go, a silence.
 
“Shoplifters” concluded with a close-up of a girl and her inhale. I want to figure out how to end poems in mid-inhale. And then
 
 

I won’t be watching the movie, “Goodbye Christopher Robin.”
 
All that cuteness irks me. And those all-knowing, innocent gazes that parents never see in real life because they are too busy weaning their toddlers from diapers and their adult children from heroin. Without one thank you.
 
At movie’s end, I’ll feel guilty for wanting to slap him, my handprint embossed on his dimpled cheek.

At a funeral, a youthful 84-year-old woman charmed me with some helpful hints about my iPhone. I couldn’t help myself from asking her how she stayed so young at heart. And that complexion!
 
Smoothies, she said.
 
I bought a NutribulletRx the next day. Consuming six different vegetables and fruits each day is a challenge for me or I should say was a challenge! Today in one gulp, I had nine. Fennel, red pepper, spinach, black beans, carrots, red grapes, apple, orange, banana. And that doesn’t count the snap peas I had at breakfast or the broccoli at dinner.
 
Glorified blender hogwash, I used to think of Nutribullets and their ilk. Not anymore. They are pulverizing machines, steamrollers in the world of kitchen appliances. The instruction manual calls what they do extracting. In one minute, they convert dense organic matter into liquid nutrition. I call it an age defying miracle.
 
You’re welcome.  

An elderly fellow restaurant patron compelled my attention and I couldn’t figure why. She had wire-rimmed glasses, elastic waist linen slacks and a careless grandma perm, a little smushed where her head rested on her recliner earlier in the day. She looked so vital, so youthful.

And then I noticed her bust, perky as a 27 year old’s. Her age-defying secret -- her bra! Foundations matter!    
 
So what are you waiting for? Get a new bra. Fitted by a professional. Here’s one I like.
 
https://altheasfinelingerie.com/