1. On this day, the last Sunday of the decade, the fog settled into the Pennsylvania hills, blanketing the trees, bringing the sky down to the earth. As I looked out the window of the car and thought about the coming months and years, I felt a mix of satisfaction and unease. Important things in my life -- my relationship, my publishing job -- felt relatively settled, and for that I was thankful, but there was another part of me, the part I think about as my 'artistic' life, that seemed stagnant. I was tired of doing the same things over and over, of trying to recapture something ephemeral from my past. I had a tune stuck in my head, a part of a song -- 'NYC' by Interpol -- I had loved for a long time and had recently taught myself to play on the guitar. I could almost hear the hushed backing vocals in the chorus: 'Got to be some more change in my life (New York cares) got to be some more change in my life (New York cares) ....' Over and over, it becomes a directive, a mantra, a suicide note, a rebirth.
2. My brother, his daughter (my niece), and I had just spent the weekend in Pittsburgh with our parents and a collection of other relatives to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. The party had gone well. In addition to immediate and extended family, the guest list included friends who had known my father for decades and my father's weekly poker game buddies; almost 100 people in total. My brother gave a short, funny tribute -- 'my father taught me to hate utilities' -- that was followed by one of the poker guys. 'Dave plays the craziest games and [following an aside from a guy across the table] -- oh right -- he cheats all the time!' My father, eyes watery in the light, went last. He stood between the round tables and slowly turned on wobbly legs. His voice and hands trembled as he spoke through the microphone in a barely audible voice, first thanking my mother and then offering a few words to express his relief that none of his five children were in jail or addicted to drugs, that we were all good citizens. Everyone clapped, the music played, and people ate and drank and danced.
3. I didn't think much about it at the time, but in the days that followed, I found myself returning to my father's speech. Though I couldn't immediately explain how or why, his words seemed to reflect the yearning for change I was starting to acknowledge in myself. I felt a level of compassion for my father that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, when he drifted into the Fox News wing of the Republican Party and helped elect Trump. I had viewed his actions as a transgression against who I was -- not to mention everything I wanted our society to be -- but I now found it difficult to summon my earlier anger. Yes, we would always live on different planets, but it seemed to me that he, simply by growing old, had become a different person. More than his frailty, the way he had framed his expectations for us, his children -- though maybe a little crass -- struck me as honest in a way that so much of our past did not. For my entire life, my father had been competitive in the extreme; playing -- and winning -- had often seemed like the most important facet of his life and, by extension, ours. It was one of the reasons why, when we were growing up, we all played sports; consciously or not, it was playing sports -- and being good at them -- that, in our eyes, made us valuable to our father; it was how we earned his admiration, respect, and -- ultimately -- his love. But that version of my father -- and us -- was now gone, leaving an absence that felt somewhat miraculous to me, for it offered the potential of change when I assumed there could be none.
4. It's a psychological truth or cliché (or both) that, in order to become adults, we must learn to parent ourselves. Just as we possess an inner child, we have an inner mother and father, and while these inner parents may ultimately bear little resemblance to our biological ones, my experience is that the relationship and dialogue between these parties, particularly when we are younger, reflects the strengths and weaknesses of our own childhood.
5. It now occurred to me that, for as long as I had considered myself an artist, I had treated my artistic self in a manner that reflected the childhood relationship between me and my father. It was a relationship based on performance and discipline, of refusing to acknowledge defeat (and of framing life in terms of winning and losing). I didn't regret this kind of self-parenting; nobody learns to play an instrument or writes novels without possessing an internal voice that demands we practice or sit down to put some words on the page when the countless distractions of life beckon. And that's how I spent much of my time over the last fifteen years, putting words on a page, approaching the exercise with the same discipline I had learned from my father -- and coaches -- playing sports. As an adult -- even a gay adult -- I was no different. It didn't matter if I felt uninspired, or if I was tired or maybe wanted to watch some television; I just set aside the time to write and did it. This perseverance was -- or had been -- pleasing to me, or at least the part of me that felt like I was accomplishing something intrinsically worthwhile. And looking back, I feel like it was worthwhile, because I made records and wrote books that allowed me -- although I wasn't aware of this at the time -- to engage in a kind of cultural conversation that located me within a generation or era, and this sense of participation in something 'bigger' than myself, particularly in retrospect, allows me to identify (and, sometimes, identify with) the forces that shaped me. In short, it's because of my art that I feel as though I lived through something tangible (and artistic) that has nothing to do with nostalgia or -- worst of all -- its commidification.
6. But having marked my past in this manner, I was less sure that I needed to continue, or at least in the same way. I'm already fifty-one year old. Do I want to spend the next (or last) fifteen or thirty years of my life writing novels? Or is there maybe something else I could turn my attention to that would offer similar rewards but without the punishing discipline and disappointment I associated with writing fiction? Obviously, if I were a celebrated novelist receiving big advances for each new work, it would be a more enticing proposition. But I felt burned out on that dream, in part because I had done it once and could only look back at the commercial side of the venture with ambivalence. I realized that I could lower my expectations for my works of art. Like my father with respect to his children, I could be grateful for their presence beside me.
7. Having dispensed with the daily routine of writing, I've started playing the guitar again, but mostly just learning songs I've always loved instead of writing my own. I need to bring my acoustic guitar into the shop for some repairs, but I'm no hurry. It feels good to have the callouses back on my fingertips. I'm taking photographs and deleting them from my phone. I'm looking forward to spending time in the garden this spring with Stephen and the cats, to walking the streets of my neighborhood, to running under the George Washington Bridge, to hearing the seagulls as they turn and dive over the lighthouse.
8. As for this blog, I don't plan to post on a weekly basis, the way I did for the past few years. I knew it was becoming stale. I had reduced my subject matter to gardens and cats and the occasional observation about life in a time of small hopes and endless despair. But I have no plans to abandon it, either. I will always love blogging as both a form -- the perfect combination of text and images -- and the era it represents, when the internet felt like a place of opportunity and connection instead of capitalism and surveillance.
9. A few days ago, I found these pictures on my phone and asked myself if I was ready to post something new. I decided that, if I could describe the silver fog and the whisper of the trees, I was.
Comments