Holding On

I'm back again after a hiatus (I love that word) that included a brief sojourn into the Southeastern U.S., in particular Atlanta, Savannah, and Charleston. The main reason for choosing Atlanta as a destination was to visit my brother, his wife, and my ten-year-old niece Rose. It was especially fun to have time in Rose's world again. I enjoyed reading stories with her in her room, hearing her play the guitar, and meeting her dogs Luna and Otto, not to mention Shelly, her pet hermit crab.

"Wouldn't you like to hold him?" she asked. "Don't you want to feel him walking up your arm? It tickles."

No to both. I respect Shelly's integrity and admire the ingenuity of her design and mobility but I don't care to get too intimate with crustaceans. Although I did order crab cake in a restaurant in South Carolina. (It wasn't very good.)I thought while I was traveling I would be inspired to write all sorts of rich detail about the places I visited and the reflections they inspired. But the thing about writing is that the less you write, the harder it is to write, and thus the less you write, and so it goes. Even now I'm still somewhere in that less-writing stage of the cycle, needing to get over the hump of how hard it is, and then hunker down and stick with it.

Many insights (at least I thought they were insights at the time) came to me in the course of our wanderings, but that's the other thing about writing: if you don't immediately jot down those insights and impressions, they tend to fly away and vanish from view, perhaps lighting like butterflies of inspiration on someone far more diligent who will not only write them down but turn them into provocative essays and stories of heartbreaking genius.

I did send out a tweet now and then, hoping that those 140-character compositions might collectively comprise a kind of journal, but although I am beginning to understand Twitter a little better, it is still not coming naturally to me. At one point I tweeted, "To whom am I commenting, and why?" and I actually received a helpful response from one of my daughter's hip friends, a young musician named Ben who actually "follows" me (along with a thousand or so other souls, but still...it's flattering). Ben tweeted this: "You’re commenting to anyone who might be listening. And why? Hmm. I guess it’s just what people do when people might be listening."

Not unlike blogging, I suppose. (Hence the term micro-blogging? Ah ha.)

Monte tells me that what I need to do is curate my tweets and be more selective about whom I follow. For me it has so far been mostly a random barrage of noise, but he relies on his Twitter stream to keep him informed of all sorts of events and developments, far more than the usual media outlets. I'm beginning to get it. I do want to selectively listen in and participate.I'm trying hard, you see, not to become any more irrelevant and obsolete than I already am. I want to use web space, including this one, to communicate in a manner that is real and potentially interactive. There's been a whole lot of hand-wringing about Facebook and the internet lately. Well, it's neither a cure for loneliness or a substitute for real life; that's not much of a revelation. And I do find it discouraging that so much of these vast and remarkable capacities are used for self-promotion, selling stuff, and the shallowest of banter.

But on the other hand, there's a lot of amazing and thoughtful conversation happening as well...such as this....and this.

Anyway, I may be an aging Boomer but I'm thrilled by the frontiers that technology has opened up. All of which is a major digression, but this is the kind of stuff I've been thinking about lately. Instead of writing.

That's not all. I've also been thinking about the mythologies of families and how much the earliest lore continues to color our viewpoints for the rest of our lives. I guess that's pretty obvious, but I experienced it anew while visiting family members in Georgia last week. I note, for example, the amusing way I view and refer to my brother––a 45-year-old father, husband, respected professional, and Ph.D. to boot––as my "little" brother.

And I ponder the initial awkwardness I felt upon seeing a cousin in Atlanta for the first time since our grandfather's funeral in 1966, when she'd been a glamorous teenager three years older than me, and conversing with her mother, whose name for years evoked some vaguely adversarial stance for reasons that pre-dated my existence, and who was now just an elderly, white-haired lady in a robe and bare feet sitting at a table heaped with old magazines and things.

There were snippets of ancient stories, usually about hurts and betrayals, told with unexpired indignation: "I'll never forget how she tore out his tomato plants!" or "Can you believe he never once paid a visit?" and each carrying a warning, a lesson, or rule of behavior. There were quick-fire characterizations: apparently my grandfather was a ladies' man; my mother was mysterious; my father was imperious, and oh, could he talk fancy...and tales in three basic varieties: boastful, bitter, or infused with heartbreak.

"This is how to view the world," the mythology instructs. Or in Monte's words, "You really did grow up in a 19th century Italian village."

I thought, too, about the air...the oddly heavy, humid jasmine-scented air. My friend Dan, in an email, described it as an embrace, recalling how in Key West it was hard to know "where you leave off the air and the air begins". An embrace, he said, but also oppressive.

To me, just a tourist wandering through, it seemed luxuriant, fragrant, lazy. Particularly in Savannah, where oaks dripped with Spanish moss, and people paused in leafy parks enjoying the cool spray of a fountain, and I listened to a blue grass tune flung into the air by a musician practicing in the shade of a magnolia tree. There were monuments and markers in remembrance of soldiers and luminary citizens, bumpy cobble-stoned streets, ivy-covered houses with gated gardens. It might be a place of decadence, secrets, and painful history too, but it was in no hurry. It held onto its ghosts.

As do I. Or they hold onto me.

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