Hushed Conversations

There are very few times on my commute to New York that I actually sit beside somebody. Usually I'm in an early train to arrive in the morning so that I can be the good corporate citizen and punch in for my full 8-hours.

It is a rarity, then, when somebody plunks down beside me.

And usually, I have either my laptop open and my Ipod or minimally my Ipod so that I can appear the least interested in my surroundings. In public transportation it's a necessary trait.

My last trip to the city was a little different, in a broad variety of reasons...I left mid-day, worked my way through a fairly large crowd of fellow travelers and also had somebody sit next to me prior to even departing.

She was young, probably my daughter's age, and if somebody asked me to describe her I think that the most effective word would be Persian. Dark hair, tee shirt and jeans, she sat next to me and immediately put her head in her hands and leaned forward, hunched.

She was clearly upset...not distraught, not at a loss of control, but rather she looked like she had received atrocious news.

As the train departed, she made some calls and despite my desire to merely look away and listen to the 80's music that dominates my Ipod, I did hear snippets:

"Just came from the doctor's office"

"I haven't told a lot of people"

"The treatment takes about three weeks and then it's over."

Now, as a former Army Intelligence officer, I didn't need to hear everything to come to some conclusions...and by her body language and hushed tones it was clear that this was something piercingly personal...and unprecedented.

I ventured a guess to myself that she had become pregnant, and that she was either doing something about it or was thinking about it.

"My mother was a wreck...my father was very quiet"

Spilling out upon the fabrics of the cloth seats, this poor girl's fabric was rapidly unraveling. I sat there fairly muted, not wanting to intrude. When she called one of her friends, she admitted that she was heading out to a date in New York City that very night.

"Do I even tell him anything?"

I listened a little bit now and then, not because of some voyeuristic quality but because she was so close in age to my daughter that I figured I could learn something. Figured I could hear how this girl's world might unveil slowly, over the course of 3 hours on a train. She grew stronger on the ride, likely comforted by the friends on the other side of the call, offering advice, and thoughts and in brief tiny moments a laugh.

I don't think I was judging her either. I don't think I was filled with "how dare she?" I actually think that I felt like she had discovered a problem and was very matter of fact in fixing it. Yes, it was debilitating, but she seemed very up front and resolute. I think I was impressed by the straightforwardness.

Almost to New Jersey, the calls started up again, and one included her mom. It was a quiet conversation, and the fact that she called her "mommy" made me smile...for it is a term that my wife continues to lobby for when our kids talk to her. My daughter I think sometimes tries...my son outright refuses.

"Mommy...how are you feeling?"

She went on for a bit and then made one last call. The call that actually became the big reveal, leaving me feeling extraordinarily stupid and naive. A call as we rolled almost into view of the city when she brought up the entirety of the circumstances.

"I went to the doctor today. With my mom."

"She has cancer...she's very upset...she needs to start right away and she's very scared."

In my brief recollection, I wanted to know if I should have come to this conclusion, always assuming the circumstances were hers. That the privacy of her conversations were of her private life, whispered in discreet volume so that only I, her seatmate, could hear.

I felt different as well...that her postures and exhortations were not about her, but for her mother. That she wasn't some "unlucky girl" who got unknowingly pregnant, but rather she was victimized in an all too familiar manner that unfortunately afflicts too many mothers.

I felt foolish in that regard. My stupid conclusions. And I felt like I was sitting too close, almost invading, as this young girl tried to make her mom feel better and support her at these early moments.

I asked her if she was getting out at New York since I needed to step over her to exit.
She was, and she got up and walked out the opposite door. I knew that I had something to write about, this trip, this quiet small conversation that was not between anybody that I knew but certainly got to know. I think I was trying to do the math in my head about how many passengers on the train were sharing such private discussions.

I was in the line to go out the door when two people in front of me were discussing a colleague who was featured in The New Yorker for behavioral psychology. A man still seated, a complete stranger, asked the two if they were psychologists.

"Yes, we are."

"Interesting. My son was diagnosed with autism yesterday. We're working with some experts."

The two, sort of stunned by the revelation, fumbled their response.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Oh, I wasn't looking for any sympathy. Just thought I would share that."

I shook my head as I walked past, exiting the train, following quiet individuals who I truly preferred would stay that way.

Cusp

And so we arrive at the time when the pinks of sunburn become the reds of maples. We atone for the summer of lazy days and hazy skies and find crystal blue mornings with our breath fogging aloft as we start our day.



It is a reminder for those of us who live where seasons start and end with abrupt delineations; not say, those in Florida who can only determine the season by the calendar.



I love the transition of Fall, I love the heightening beauty of an object as it begins to die, like trees consumed by flames as they reach their apogee of color and then sputter and crumple in bits and pieces strewn on the ground. Whole forests engulfed.



But then just empty and brittle husks, beneath skeletal remains.



That's later...for now we are just on the cusp of Fall.



For people born under the astrological signs that fall on seasonal cusps, they carry the energy of both signs...or so I'm told. But with a daughter with one foot squarely in summer and another in autumn, I believe I've seen the delicate balance as these two seasons collide in colors, temperatures and intensities...

She is a kid with a popsicle. Perpetual laughter that splinters the humidity of an afternoon. She is a hot-house plant, craving the covers and blankets when the house dips below 73-degrees.

She is exceptionally placid, a smooth plain of a lake in a day without breeze. She is effervescent, the clanging melodies of the ice-cream truck as she flits through her day.

She was named after a flower, which thrives in full sun...and as described provides a seemingly endless parade of blooms. But she is far from delicate, far from frail. Her personality shines as a thousand day summer, and while she has been handed some exceptionally tough cards in her all-too wonderful life, she remains bouyant, and shining. She beams. She radiates. She has created a sun from which many fall into its gravitational pull.

The transition to fall, and the intermingling of high pressure systems colliding with cool jet stream air creates the opportunities for thunderstorms, the chance of showers. But like lightning seen across a darkened sea, it smolders mostly on the horizon. Her intensity flares mostly on the playing field, at a time when her energies and focus are on performance and the desire to excel.

It is mostly in this fall sport where her autumn begins to show.

But it peaks in other times, like the smoldering embers of a late November fire. The direction of intellect and energy, a keen focus on achievement, a single-mindedness that is rare for somebody just shy of two decades old...

And like trying to predict the chaos of summer-swinging into fall weather, she provides her fair share of unpredictability. She has the confidence to swashbuckle, to hang by a thin-thread rope and dive violently into a challenge. She has the confidence to question, virtually everything, to reconcile in her sometimes-closed but many times open mind. She has the perspective of a humbled survivor, and she has had to pick herself up with the help of a couple of people and brush herself off. Again. And again.

She is no wide-eyed ingenue. She surprisingly defaults to cynicism, until she learns or experiences something to offer new value in a new perspective. She sometimes can be cool as an October morning...but her sun burns away the mist fairly quickly. Her sunrise returns.

She shares the same first initial with my wife, a choice made deliberately. If I ever got a tattoo, it would always be an "A". They share many of the same traits, many of the same elements, a clear apple from the tree. Although my wife is infinitely more patient, while my daughter has inherited my hair-triggered intolerance for stupidity...or perhaps those less capable of displaying their intellect.

But as she moves into her days, in some way we are watching her teenage summer come to an end, a fall that begins her transition into the fully blessed and legal definition of an adult.

It's how you feel when you leave the beach. When you lock the door on a summer home. It's time to return to the chores, the jobs, the responsibilities...in this case, it is how I used to feel when I saw her baby shoes on the stairs. The speed of change fractures the heart of a parent, but the burgeoning adult that emerges is a wonderful event to behold.

It is not a single day event, but rather a transition. It is watching the beauty of something turn bright with color and emerge even more beautiful than when it started.

It is a tree on the cusp of autumn color. It is an afternoon, transitioning to evening in pastels. It is a daughter, on the cusp of a 20th birthday, born on the cusp of the seasons of summer and fall.

Home and Away

As many of us can poignantly recall, I remember where I was eight years ago. It was not in New York City, but in Virginia, where my co-workers and I gathered to watch the colossal destruction in numbing silence. From our building's sky porch we could see the blackened trails in the distance where the Pentagon lay smoldering.

For the last two years I have been in New York on an almost weekly basis. It is a beautiful place, even more so at night, and it is filled with characters and colors that are likely not seen any other place on earth.

The scar of the city lays downtown, a place overrun with construction barrels and wooden fencing. The Ground Zero location still brings many visitors, but at its essence it is a site of re-birth vs. a site memorialized. The city is moving on, it is healing a tremendous wound.

In the same way that the French National paper announced on September 12 "Today we are all Americans", I believe that many of us are all New Yorkers. I rarely find anybody who hasn't visited the city, even if only as a small child, and cannot honestly say that the city did not stay with them in some manner.

New York stays with me at night. In the eerie quiet of a night in Virginia, I can almost hear the subtle street noises of New York...the cars, the sirens, the constant movement of people. In the ability to stand in my backyard and see the North Star, I remember the blinding strobes of Times Square and the haze of white lights that obscure the night sky. There is a scent as you walk through the city, the street vendors and the meats they spread over high heat. The city is not so much a combination of living things as it is a living thing. It breathes, it exhales.

One of the greatest ironies of September 11th is how beautiful the actual day started. A high pressure system dominated over the East Coast and it was a picturesque day. Clearest of blue skies and mild temperatures from Washington DC to New England. I can remember clearly the contrails of fighter jets screaming through the skies in Northern Virginia, the only blemish against the blue.

I was not in New York on September 11th, but most of my team was in their offices, and they describe a day of chaos and non-communication that I cannot even fathom. What people who aren't in the city sometimes forget is that once you get outside a building in New York, you generally can't see further than a block. The only views that are worthwhile are high up, in a building. And people were evacuating in droves, walking through the city, swarming the streets and public transportation that was still working. Tunnels were closed, people were taking the bridges. But they couldn't see downtown, they couldn't see the towers during those few hours that they were burning because the other buildings blocked their view.

But they did see the dust plumes when they collapsed, and what the plumes hid was the altering forever of the landscape of New York.

New Yorkers take their mark from the streets. They oriented off the Towers, at least downtown because they were like the sun to a sundial. People orient off of the main avenues...west side, east side. Near certain landmarks like the Chrysler building.

Without the towers, the compass of the city was lost. New York was unbalanced, its people both figuratively and literally lost.

I don't think that the city became disoriented for too long. They regained their footing, their direction. They persevered.

But some folks decided to leave. Some felt they were no longer safe. They felt that it was too risky, too much a target.

I never felt that way.

I work in one of the tallest buildings in Mid-Town, a rapidly growing area with increasingly higher and higher buildings being erected. I can look south and see all the way to the ocean.

I like to think the city is healing, that it has regained its strength and frankly that it defies any conventional wisdom that it has changed. Yes, the landscape has been altered and permanently etched in our minds.

But more buildings continue to go up. More continue to serve as monuments to the growth and resiliency. More continue to block lovely views unobstructed before and now provide shade to whole swaths of concrete and sidewalks.

At night, particularly at night, it is still beautiful. And I think when I'm at home, I sometimes miss it.

More Than Words

I could be dangerous. I could exploit the shallow depths of fragile egos, crystalline-like, reed-thin, the delicacy of the nuance of language, gestures...freaking emoticons.

Where was this technology shit when I was zooming girls in high school?

I have always had the writer's preferred stance of hiding behind the ink, usually, or at least particularly early in a relationship. I could be frank, charming. I could be descriptive, flowing, alliterative. I could align with Billy Shakespeare, Faulkner. I could even throw in random T.S. Eliot if I felt probing some uncharted depths.

Firing away in my clutches, my brain screaming "No wonder you got a D+ in handwriting in 3rd grade"...I first had to make sure my thoughts were even legible. Let alone grasped. But if I could craft the right phrases, capture the way a girl burst like an embolism inside my brain, then I at least got a thank you. A smile. Victory for me was in the smallest gesture of thanks because frankly the writings never got past the 10th or 11th grade athletes. Words are one thing in the quiet of an evening, but they don't drive cars or score touchdowns.

Many times they were scribbled extemporaneously, my favorite kind...the way somebody looked as they sat in front of me; a color of eyes, or something unique that was nearby and could frame a reference. Passed hastily, the 3x5 card looked like so many scratches from some ink-taloned bird, but every once in awhile they would get me a glance that indicated I had perforated the veneer.

Forget the phone.

God, how long was it before somebody discovered "Call Waiting?". Way past my youth. Hours, or so it seemed, hearing the busy signal as I only grew more and more distraught. My sister, younger than me by two years and fourteen times more popular monopolized calls like a charity phone drive.

"Get off the phone!" I was likely expecting a call. As if she would call. But she might. And if not, I would call her.

And what would await me? Busy tones.

Christ.

So, let's just say I had a cell phone. Forget instant messaging. Forget webcams. Forget a live conversation. Give me a text message and I would have dominated my youth. Domination.

In a world where my Facebook status is my clothing, positioned for the world to see, I wonder where the notes have fallen. Where the whispered hushes of small snippets of conversation occur? Where the original love poem was scribed? Why we say more with our thumbs than stealing a few moments to write it down?

I would own teenage boyhood, if I had all these damn tools that they have today.

But I guess in having the ability to communicate on every detail (why didn't you IM back in three nano-seconds), we've created even higher expectations and cannot allow the tenuous roots of budding emotions to be absorbed.

Maybe there will be a backlash of sorts, of girls wanting to have those gaps in communications, those delays in discussions. Time to sort things out. Time to respond. I can only imagine the days like those in "Pride and Prejudice" (a pretty damn good movie who's star character is the language expressed between actors) when days and weeks would fall between those in love. Maddening. Exciting. Unknowing.

Perhaps I don't regret growing up in an age where my emotions were on display all the time. Perhaps I learned some things along the way about how people fall in love, over time, over distance, and not online.

Forgive me eHarmony.

Proper writing, full sentences, no abbreviations. Words poured onto a page as though pricked direct from a heart thumping in anticipation of their effect. Words meant only for another's eyes. And nobody else.

And thus, as I write this for hopefully a few people to see, I become the full hypocrite, for without today's technology I'd be merely thinking this in my head.

And wondering why my teenage boy would sit staring at the phone that might never ring.

An Actual Story...or rather, the first pages of something I've written to hopefully be published

The Christmas Ships
“Now that the salt of their blood stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea…”-Allen Tate
-I-
They came before the first snowfall, before the first ice, when the ground had hardened in its shell and would not yield beneath the steel of a pick nor the weight of a man; the graves would not be dug, the bodies would lay strewn amidst leaves and they would form the brown crust that littered the late days of November. In the crystalline air that had become suddenly silent after days of skirmishes and infantry, there were few cries from the soldiers who had the misfortune of dying too far from home.

These ships. Brown as the dirt, and nearly as wide as the river, pulling up alongside the scaffolds of the town still recovering from the trauma of another lost battle. Sidling up alongside wooden docks, pushed by poles in the narrows of the Rappahannock, the boats glided silent. They would arrive in the late of the afternoon, when color was draining from the sky and men would sling ropes along metal stays anchoring the docks. Most of the crew would wait below, waiting for the first lanterns to arrive and then would they ascend the short stairs to the surface.
At night, when the candles and oils burnt slow yellow glaze and the breath of moving men hung heavy, the sounds of wooden wheels and metal barrows came slightly. The sound of a faint roll of wood over crushed stone, moving slowly down towards the gathered lights at the river. Only in the clarity of two or more lanterns could one see the movement of limbs, gathering dark branches and laying them on the dockside. Sprawling timber it seemed, stiff, wooden, straight lines against the yellow light. And as one moved closer, to almost hear the tug of cloth and the meeting of bone and earth, one could discern a hand, extended outward, with fingers spread. There was no timber in the wagons; rather, the stiff and the dead, the heavy and awkward weight of a man frozen stiff in the wind and frozen stiff for the grave.

Yet they were not being buried here, near the shallow waters where the boats where pulled tight against the wood. Men in boats gathered them as husks, bound and measured and tugged in to the slippery deck to the hole down beneath. There they were stacked, laid, pushed and turned until they fit almost up to the ceiling. And then lanterns, now almost white as wicks found little to cling to, swung with the walk of men hurrying away in the night. The sound of a pole pushing into narrow waters, moving the boat slowly away from the lights that signaled another visit from the Christmas ships.

The Man with the Softest Hands

I have tried them all. The salons, the specialty stores, the chains, the exclusives. I've tried stylists, hair entrepreneurs, burgeoning sculptors...I've paid a lot and I've paid a little.

In the end, the same result: the same haircut that I've had since I've been able to part the left side in the same way that I was taught.

For one long year of my life I received a haircut every week beginning in the hazy hot humidity of August until a wonderful day in March when the long freshman year of Virginia Military Institute officially ended.

I know a barber, and I know a good one, and those two terms are usually mutually exclusive.

Growing up in the 70s in Southern California, your hair was your wavy badge. Mine was exceptionally long, and when I look at pictures from back then I am amazed at what my parents allowed. In the 6th grade it was so long it hit my shoulder and then deflected slightly upward.

I was quite proud of my hair, letting it grow long as a senior in high school, feathered, blown dry and fastidious.

I can remember an inner-dialogue I had with myself in the Ft Benning Barber Shop in Georgia at the advent of Jump School. I had literally been growing my hair for about 3 months since the Ratline ended (VMI reference above) and it was to the point where I could actually comb it.

And in order to start the Airborne School I had to have my head shaved. Not cut; not shorn. Shaved. Stubbled.

Literally, I debated. Silver wings or sweet locks. It didn't take a lot to push me back into reality...I had had my head shaved before, so what the hell.

So yeah, I know barbers.

And I think I found my nirvana, my Grail of the Grizzled men wielding scissors.

Somewhere deep in Northern Virginia, in the tiny Washington DC suburb of Haymarket, VA, there is a barber shop run by a man named Larry.

Larry is a little on the redneck side, probably about 50, white wavy hair, raspy voice crafted by hours of Marlboros, and a drawl that borders on a conspiratorial whisper. He employs mostly Koreans and Asians to help him out, but his prime chair is near the front, and he is normally three-deep in people waiting for him to cut their hair.

Or give them a shave.

You see, Larry is old school. None of this crap like the Grooming Room or some other Male-only salon dripping with faux-leather and charging you $50 bucks to shave you.

Larry's cuts are $13.00. Shears, snipping scissors, maybe an electrical razor for the sides. He whispers hello, spreads the black shear sheet across you and asks what you'd like. He may or may not remember me, but we barely converse. His hands smell slightly of tobacco. His fingers smell of Clubman talc. His hands pale and plump, slightly inflated as if with air. Soft as kittens. Creased and weathered, but smooth and almost dainty.

To me there is an art to shaving, a process we all have gone through and we all likely avoid. If I get lucky enough to go three or four days without shaving, I head on down to Larry and as he likes to say, "get to see the baby's butt."

He lopes on back to the rear of his store for the heated towels, always inquiring if I'm ready, and while I believe I am it is almost always hotter than expected. He spreads it across my face in front of me, twists it slightly and lays it across my neck and then layers it in circles until only my nose is showing. Hot, humid warmth pulsates on my skin, commanding the whiskers to full attention.

After a few minutes, he spreads warm cream on my face, with those bulbous padded hands. Only to return with another hot towel to combine with the cream to create a viscosity against my face, warm, soothing.

While I lay with the heat emanating on me, I hear him preparing. (I've seen him shave others so I know this is what happens while I'm underneath the towels).

Usually taking out the sling blade scalpels, antique single bladed bits of steel. He rubs them on his leather strap, honing to a fine blade.

When he removes the hot towel, he spreads more cream and then hunches close to my face, his eyes focused and his hands touching my skin, pulling the skin taut as the razor glides easily over it. He pauses, scraping the blade across barber paper to clean it.

He takes his time, a shave taking 15 minutes minimally. Hot towels not included.

His studies the angles of my face, the growth lines of my whiskers. With the grain, against the grain. Careful around the nose, the corners of my mouth.

After a few passes, he starts to comment on the smoothness. The Baby's Butt.

I usually sit back, close my eyes, and try not to wonder too much about the man who holds a razor against my throat.

Rather, I luxuriate in the talent and the skill. The slowness and the steadiness. The scent of tobacco and of barber shops, of creams and green potions.

And I always leave with a slight chuckle, knowing that I have a lot of vices in my life, but I cannot help but get genuinely energized when I get to spend twenty minutes in the chair with the man with the softest hands.

Beggars and Choosers

Travel enough to any city and the ever-presence of folks who live on just the flimsiest sheen of existence become part of the never-changing landscape.

A trip through such public domains as New York City's Pennsylvania Station, a hub that connects Amtrak trains, Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey PATH and MTA, is a nexus of travelers, commuters and visitors. Yet sprinkled amongst the colors of those in transit are the small gray sights of those who are not there to travel at all.

I have seen the people approaching visitors as they stream through the large open spaces in the train station. Usually just a whisper, or a gesture. No hands being extended, just an approach.

"Can you spare something?"

Obviously it's money. But sometimes it's just a remark. A response. And usually, because of what I feel is my sometimes glaring blindspot for compassion, I give neither. No response. No money. No glare, no stare.

Merely looking ahead, to the turnstiles and steps that take me away from this subterranean space and back out into the daylight.

The hardening shell around me. I see my fellow travelers in the same vein, hurried, never stopping, never participating. In some way my excuse is that they have shown me how to deal with these small intrusions...the same way one might deal with a slight spitting rain. Indifference. Just get me to my destination. I've traveled long enough.

And frankly the people soliciting know this as well. There isn't a follow up question. There isn't a raising of the voice just in case you didn't hear. They're fishing, with only their appearance or our compassion to attract us to each other, and in the sea of crushing commuters there is a pretty good chance they'll not leave empty-handed. So they expect the brush-by, and merely wait for the next person.

I say that as back-drop into the usual situations where I find myself approached. But I recently had a different experience, and frankly while my actions didn't differ, my reactions did.

As I was coming up the part of Penn Station that opens up to 7th Avenue, a lady actually put herself in my path. She was normally dressed, that is, she didn't appear to be grossly impoverished, and she was carrying a couple of bags. Just as I was walking towards her, I saw a man fishing a dollar out of his wallet to give to an entirely different elderly lady. A lady who looked like she had left poverty years ago and was in full blown disaster mode. Disheveled, dirty, barely intelligible. I saw the well-dressed man hold out the dollar like a sacrament, and she accepted it as such.

So this was my last view before this other lady popped up in front of me.

"Sir", she started, which caused me a bit of a pause, because she clearly wanted my attention. I looked at her briefly.

"could you help me and..."

She had lost me, and she knew it, her voice trailing off, broken off against me. She had seen enough people passing by that my slight pause and then readjustment of my sightline well past her indicated that I was in fact, not going to stop.

But I did. About 50 feet past her. I didn't stop next to her, but continued walking until almost to the escalator. And then I turned around.

I didn't take any steps back. I didn't do anything else. My luggage, stupidly spread out in three separate bages, tugged heavily at me.

I looked to see if I could see her among the onslaught of commuters, and of course I couldn't.

And I felt like I had stolen something. Felt like I had taken a piece of her. Something she had offered up, a complete stranger, and I had batted it out of her hands.

I didn't do anything else, these emotions pinpricking in my head and a slight spill of disgust pooling. I saw nobody else stopping.

I emerged from the stairs and into the loveliness of a dusk in the city. The sidewalk was set up with a table, with an empty water jug collecting coins for the homeless.

I joined the rest of the people, walking by. Not stopping. Glaring at the faces of strangers who I didn't know, didn't care to know. Hoping they wouldn't sense my shame...or the copper-taste of disappoint that suddenly filled my mouth in how I had behaved.