Rome Diary Diaries I: Late 1973 - Arrival and Settling In

George Edwards on Squirrel Island, Maine, in 1968.  

George's early entries, starting in October 1973, are pithy, almost written in short-hand, with incomplete punctuation and fragments of sentences.  What was to become an at-times obsessively comprehensive record of his time in Italy and of his mental-emotional life begins much more haphazardly, and its pithiness gives an impression of non-chalance.  There must be so much to say upon arrival in a new place, but all we get is scattered notes, probably scribbled down in a minute or two before bed.  Evidently he's too busy getting his feet under him to reflect on it much, at first--or is pouring that reflective energy more into letters.  Thus the main impression that emerges from the first weeks of the journal is that George is adapting remarkably fast to his new circumstances, even as he does occasionally marvel at the new world he finds himself in:

Couldn’t find cambio (wrong address).  Bus + train strikes.  Italian life is crazy.  Street numbering! (wrap-around)

A few other typically concise entries, detailing the progress of his composing and exploring his new environs, from his first few weeks in country:

Compose early AM, go with Jean Michel + Jacqueline to Subraco, incredible hills, hill towns, autumn colors + monastery of St. Benedict, 13th Century, very beautiful, simple, wild situation overlooking a gorge.  

Then drive thru almost lunar hills to Alatri -- ancient walled town (walls 4th cent. BC), Romanesque church -- too bad we didn’t have more time.  

Party after at Kircheners.  Cold still going strong.

To Eurocambio, walk most way back.  Dislike the way I am known for an American (the scarf?), + the sense of the foreign domination of the city.  Back for rather distressing meeting with Millan.  “Toilet paper shortage” in U.S. gets big play in the papers.  After lunch tennis + coffee with Sharon, work a little.  Beautiful cold day.

To 'Pat Garett + Billy the Kid' with Sharon, then to dinner.  Get tired of these films of lyrical violence, but at least it's better than Clint Eastwood.

From the start, whether it comes to music or art or film, or the personalities of all the new people in his life, George's critical mind is up and functioning.  The work of a photographer fellow of his at the American Academy is "extremely proficient, deadly," while a colleague's concert is rife with "bad music, virtuoso stuff."  At a concert at the Foro Italiano: 


Leo Smit - cutesy pie marches alla Stravinsky; Hellerman - rather simple, Ligeti-like, not too much to listen to, clear     shape; lousy Italian piece badly played; Leon’s piece not well paced in the performance; more disturbed than on the tape by its incessant lushness, touching all bases - still, much better than the rest. Very tepid audience.


His sharp mind can be double-edged: he has no difficulty earning his colleague's respect, but less success forming personal bonds with people whose music he has reservations about.  Quick to judge, he can be scathing and abrasive.  [Ann recalls that the key quality he lacked during his grad school years was warmth.] If my own personality is any indication, he probably found it nearly impossible to pay anyone a compliment if he didn't really mean it.  And since his standards for artistic maturity (in composition in particular) were so high, such compliments were probably few and far between. It's easy to imagine he earned a reputation amongst his American Academy fellows for brilliance, a sharp wit and sharp tongue, and narrowly exacting aesthetic standards bordering on elitism. 

Compared with what comes later, there are few really substantive entries from the early months. One can imagine how busy he is adjusting to life in Italy, and probably his literary energies go more into correspondence with the friends he's only recently left in the States.  Some descriptive tidbits in December: so-and-so is "a red-bearded, disgusting little gnome." And, he writes, the Italian expression for "to make a bridge" refers to how to avoid working at all between a Thursday holiday and the following Sunday--I see the twinkle in his eye as he writes down this little gem of an Italianism.


As it went to some degree throughout his life, how his composing is going is a source of constant pre-occupation in the diary.  When the music is flowing through him, George is high on life. When work isn't going well, he loses heart, sometimes plummeting into depression.  “there is definitely something wrong here...” “much of the day pleasant, but still very intense periods of loneliness--desire to be alone.”  He will later refer to these depressive states as periods of "nothingness" or "non-existence," times when he feels outside of the flow of life,  waiting on the sidelines.  At their worst, he likens them to the period of his "nervous crisis" at Princeton--a psychological breakdown of some sort that he experienced around age 27.  



Is his mood a response to his work, or the quality of his work a result of his mental state? It's hard to say which way the causality runs, and it's probably not as simple as one way or the other. Realizing this, George makes a point of tracking his cycles of creative energy and high spirits.  Indeed, at one point he writes that "if this record has any value, it will be to chart my manic-depressive cycles and perhaps eventually indicate their causes." 


But that's getting ahead of ourselves; in December 1973 his highest highs and lowest lows in Italy were yet to come.  We'll pick up next time with George's account of his memorable trip to Naples, source of a number of anecdotes I grew up with, and the point his life in Italy starts to hits its stride.  

The Rome Diaries Overture: The Early Years

The project of getting to know my father, George Harrison Edwards, continues to open up before me.  From the fertile ground of his 1973-5 Rome fellowship and its journals, tendrils stretch out in both directions.  Closer to my own 1984 entrance onto the scene, my mother has been unearthing the letters my father wrote her, starting early in their relationship in 1976; and on the other end, I have an unexpected lead on the period of his mid-to-late twenties -- my age now.  This last has been a tremendous blessing, as I had known little about this formative period in his life until I received an email from his ex-girlfriend, Ann.  He and Ann went out when when he was 25 to 29, which sets their relationship against the backdrop of the late 1960's and early 70's.  Ann heard about George's death and the devastating illness that led up to it through mutual friends, found this blog, and ended up contacting me.  After a few emails back and forth and a bit of phone tag, we finally spoke recently, in what I hope will be the first of a number of conversations illuminating my father's early years.

One theme apparent from talking to Ann was George's unmitigated bitterness and resentment towards his own family of origin. This is an emotional orientation foreign to me, and difficult in some ways to come to grips with. Difficulties are compounded by how challenging it is to put together a coherent picture of my father's childhood given the scanty source material.  But even the rough strokes gleaned from Ann, my mother, and George's younger sister Eleanor paint a striking picture. George grew up hating his older brother, Ross, who was perhaps cruel to him, or simply insensitive.  They certainly had little enough in common, George an intellectual musician-in-the-making, Ross a dyslexic tinkerer.  (Did George turn to music and literature in part as a response to his jock brother's interest in cars and sports?)  George resented his younger sister, Eleanor, too, perhaps simply for her status as an attention-stealing younger sibling.  His feelings about his father, Arthur Edwards, are difficult to discern, given a lack of attention to the subject in later letters and diaries and Arthur's death when George was only 16 or 17.  Ann remembers Arthur as an "interesting character," a stifled creative type in a square job.  At 6'6" he was an imposing figure; in the one photo I have of him his shoes look preposterously long. He was almost certainly the force responsible for introducing my father to music, and perhaps for galvanizing him towards far-left politics with his own pronounced conservatism.  That's about all I know about him; he was tall, and musical, and angry.  Perhaps the most puzzling bitterness, however, is that towards George's mother, Constance or Connie Edwards.  By all accounts George was her favorite child and she spoiled him, never failing to cook lavishly for him, buy and wash his clothes, etc.  But the man who was to become my father seems to have taken these blandishments for granted and developed a bitterness born, perhaps, of a feeling that his mother "domesticated" him (as Ann suggests).  There are suggestions in later journals that she was the source of much anguish, and he may resent his dependence on her.  Was he a momma's boy, the less robust brother favored by a doting mother? If he was bullied by his brother and by schoolmates, did he blame this on her?  We know he resented the fact that as a sickly, premature infant he was put in an incubator; this fact is perhaps a telling one, suggesting as it does early childhood trauma and issues around dependence and nurture.  We know too that George's frailty continued through early childhood with a wide range of food and environmental allergies, and that during this period Connie was having mental issues, probably anxiety-related, and even spent some time at some sort of "rest home" when George was little. My mother recalls that he never forgot an episode in which Connie forgot to pick up a young George from a dentist's appointment--and never forgave, either?  In any case, we know that he felt precious little solidarity with his family of origin and was probably only too happy to escape their clutches and to escape the dull, uninspired suburbia of his childhood in favor of a life lived on his own terms.

By the time Ann met him, George was living in Boston, teaching music theory and composition at the New England Conservatory.  Intense, passionate, critical, and angry, he'd left his suburban past well behind and taken to an unselfconsciously bohemian lifestyle centered around music.
Ann remembers him in his apartment in Boston's back bay, a place he didn't do much to keep up.  He didn't do much to keep himself up, either: according to Ann he lived on cigarettes, black coffee and bourbon. He was rail thin and his clothes had holes in them.  He lived and breathed music: despite a strongly frugal nature, his one major possession was a decent Yamaha upright piano.  "He'd wake up, light a Camel, drink his coffee, and start playing Chopin," Ann recalls.  Who had time for breakfast when there was music to be played, and more importantly, to be composed? Composition was his consuming passion, and also a continual trial.  Evidently the preoccupation with his work that figures so prominently in the Rome diaries took hold early; apparently George complained that he couldn't do anything else if he was going to compose that day.

Growing up, I didn't hear much about my father's twenties; it's almost as if his adult life started in Italy in 1973.  The one pre-Rome story from that I did grow up with concerns the Vietnam draft.  In the light-hearted version I heard, George was told at his draft board physical that he was a little too skinny and should gain a few pounds and come back--which prompted him to quit drinking beer, lose a few pounds, and get off the hook altogether.  Ann remembers this episode in more detail, and paints a picture that rings truer than this too-pat family version.  She describes him as fervently anti-war and critical of the U.S. government's motivation in Vietnam; he refused on principle to serve in the military.  He was also scared shitless. But he didn't claim conscientious objector status or head for Canada.  Instead, after being called in to his army physical, and once he realized his weight was an issue, he went to great lengths to make sure he'd never be considered fit for active duty.  He didn't just quit drinking beer; he actually went on a drastic diet and dropped his nearly 6'3" frame down to 109 pounds.

It's difficult for me not to wonder what consequences his choices had on his health decades later.  How much did his poor nutrition, heavy smoking and drinking, and this period of what can only be described as near starvation contribute to his eventual cognitive decline? How much of it is genetic? How much karmic, or how much miasmic, when one considers that his mother lived the last 20+ years of her lost her own life with marginal mental capacity (though through an entirely different patho-mechanism)?  Hard questions, and no answers forthcoming.

But even if the beginning and end of George's life were fraught with health issues and adversity, he managed largely to escape these specters for most of his prime.  The Italian diaries I'll delve into next time represent him at his complicated, intense, brilliant best.

Preface to the "Rome Diary" Diaries

Volume one. Oct 1973 - Oct 1974

I can't put a date to when I lost my father; when he finally died this past fall I had been effectively fatherless for well over a decade already.  He spent the last few years of his life trapped like a caged animal in a series of institutional homes, mostly silent, pacing around, alternately charming and frightening his aids and fellow residents.  While he was living out this farce--and he of all people would have hated that sort of existence--as far as I was concerned, my father was gone.

I said goodbye to him one chilly April night in Northern Illinois. I was sitting a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, an experience I wrote about here on this site.  It was 10 long, cold, lonely days of self-confrontation.  Deprived of all comforts--adequate sleep and food and all social interaction I sat hour after hour, trying to watch my breath or monitor all bodily sensations without reacting to them.  At the end of the day, I'd sit on my bed and turn my headlamp to its red light setting.  This was a small luxury--it was about the closest I got to warmth until Day 10 (unless you count Day 6, when I made a minor jailbreak and took an illicit stroll down a country road on one of the first days of Spring).  A few days in, I reached a sort of breaking point.  I thought myself unable to continue, until a brief interchange with a compassionate volunteer staff person gave me the strength I needed.  I had a moment of catharsis standing in a grove of bare trees in the mud, tears running down my face.  It must have been that night or the next that I dreamt of my father, who hadn't been on my mind at all as far I can remember.  The dream is faded now; I'm not sure if I ever wrote it down, even pen and paper being on the list of forbidden items during Vipassana.  But I remember the important part.  My father was lying in a hospital bed, in a gown.  I was sitting by his side, holding his hand.  It was clear that he was dying, and I told him "I love you." I told him "goodbye." That was all.  He passed away quietly.  I awoke, and knew with perfect lucidity that my father was gone.  Not from the physical plane; but for me there was no longer any last trace of the man I was already struggling to remember.  He was gone.

It took some time, I suppose to integrate this dreamt insight into my conscious life.  Once it happened, it opened up a new possibility: that of recovering my father.  If I'd been deprived of an adult relationship with my father, now was the time to start getting to know him.  If he was really gone, if his story was over, it was time to start telling it.  And I was a lot more interested in the good parts than the tragic ending.     

Since his decline began before my adolescence, I had to delve a fair ways into the past to make much headway.  Reading his old diary from the two years he spent in Italy in the 70's had once felt like an illicit, guilty pleasure; now it felt almost like a duty.  The serious, articulate, adventurous, sharp-tongued thirty year old man in its pages was instantly sympathetic; I was both surprised and unsurprised to recognize so much of myself in him, or him in myself.

After my father actually died, another volume of his Rome diary appeared.  I guess my mother had known about it all along, but for me seeing it was like being given another piece of him.  I've been reading my way through it, and it's sparked some more dreams that feel like they're continuing the process of recovering my father and healing our relationship, abused as it was by the cruelty of disease and the callousness of teenage-dom.

I don't know how much is going to be forthcoming, but I've got at least one or two posts to come that will be centered around my father's journals and my own experience of reading them and getting to know him at my age.  Here we have it: the Rome Diary diaries.

Family History

I've recently gotten my hands on some digitized versions of old family photos, and I can't resist putting them up here.  It seems that my mother was the photographer of the family throughout the seventies and eighties, judging by how few shots she's in.  

For anyone who knew my father, George Edwards, and hasn't seen it, I wrote an essay in memoriam that's currently up here on my mother's website.  

A shot of George dating back to his American Academy in Rome (1973-4)

My parents, George Edwards and Rachel Hadas, in Vermont, late seventies

Mom and Dad do American Gothic at the Vermont house.  Early 1980's

 

Infant me with father and maternal grandma, Riverside Park, Manhattan, 1984

The Edwards clan: snake handlers since 1642

George at work at the composition desk in Vermont, early Nineties.   

Crackers, cheese, pipe, baby.  

I've always had good taste in union suits (and long relied on my father for hand-me-down sweaters). 

George Edwards (right) with family friend and Vermont neighbor Harold Holden, circa 1996

George at Prospero's Island, central Vermont, 2007.  George's weeks "up the hill" were his last spent outside an institutional care facility.

Central American Deja Vu

Guatemala.  Bumping along in a packed bus, immersed in dust and burning garbage fumes and thumping bass, it almost felt like I'd come home.  Home, that is, to that other home, the one in the Eastern Himalayan foothills.  So much in this new place reminded me of Nepal and North India, from the decorations on the buses to the features of the people.  (This last is less surprising when you consider that the indigenous population of the Americas probably crossed a land bridge at some point from Asia.)  So many details of life that hadn't crossed my mind since my last trip to the Subcontinent turned out to carry over to this other small, diverse, developing, and deeply politically troubled subtropical nation: bright political slogans painted on buildings and rocks by the roadside; women in traditional dress talking putting a few cents at a time on their cell phones in areas which have never seen landline service; corrugated tin roofed houses with dark, smoky kitchens; terraced fields of maize and potatoes.  At first, immersed in this new but deeply familiar place, I found Nepali syllables spilling from my lips whenever I tried to exercise my fledgling Spanish, and, worse, I kept slipping into the characteristic Southasian head waggle.

But despite or perhaps because of the many and obvious similarities between Nepal and Guatemala, the differences soon began to stand out.  The bus soundtrack was Reggaeton and merengue instead of Bollywood film music and Nepali lok git, and the buses themselves, though comparable to Indian-made Tatas, were decommissioned Bluebird school buses.  On the streets, women bared their arms and (gasp!) shoulders.  And other, more sinister differences, too, ones that speak of the appalling violence that has swept this country over the last decades: bus conductors carrying pump action shotguns slung across their chests, country roads unsafe to wander even at mid-day thanks to the armed plantation guards and to bands of roving thugs.

Coffee ripe and ready for harvest

Or maybe this violence isn't so different after all.  Both Guatemala and Nepal are rich in natural and human resources, but this wealth gets divided up incredibly inequitably so that they are effectively some of the poorest places on earth.  In both cases, cash crops and particularly stimulants are a major cog in this economic machine.  In Eastern Nepal and neighboring Darjeeling, of course, it's tea: plantations blanket the hillsides all around the famous former British hill station and employ a substantial number of locals at pitiful wages. In Nepal, inequity has been severe enough to give the Maoists a firm foothold across the country; I never got the inside scoop on labor conditions on Darjeeling plantations, Pitzer in Nepal being fairly politically apathetic.  But thanks to the terrific left-wing non-profit language school PLQE/La Escuela de la Montana, I learned substantially more about the realities of life on a coffee finca (plantation) in Guatemala.  The basic living arrangements at La Escuela spoke volumes on the subject: the entire founding populations of the two villages where our host families lived had migrated from a nearby finca  some twenty years earlier after their efforts to organize resulted in them being blacklisted from the farm.  Instead of the poor wages, housing, and lack of access to medical care of the plantation, they are now on their own.  This means subsisting on what day labor they can piece together.  But since the coffee crisis of the early 00's, day wages on plantations are hardly worth the effort.  Women and children sometimes do some picking; the men in the two communities of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima board an early morning pick-up when they can to work construction or dig potatoes in Xela or somewhere.  The work is far from steady, however, and most of the families seem to live day to day, hand to mouth.  

For a wealthy Westerner--and anyone on vacation in another country is wealthy by these standards--rural poverty can seem romantic at first glance: cue images of honest hard work and its wholesome fruits; vigorous health, fresh air, etc.  Of course the illusion falls apart upon closer inspection; poverty is never pretty, nor does it smell very good.  But in other poor rural parts of the world I've been to--Sikkim, say--there is at least some grain of truth to this myth.  People have a plot of land to sew and reap as they see fit and access to wild jungle beyond for foraging and hunting.  If nothing else, people are at least close to their food sources and able to eat simply but reasonably well.  Not so in Guatemala, where most of the fertile land is owned by coffee and cardamom fincas.  The villagers of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima own only the land their shacks sit on.  The food they buy is whatever their meager wages allow.  During the week I was there, this meant a lot of cheap pasta, carrots, eggs, a little rice, a little beans.  Not rice and beans--rice OR beans.  And for spices: not the traditional achiote, cassia cinnamon, thyme and laurel but artificial chicken bouillon, full of MSG and hydrogenated palm oil.  One of the few remnants of their traditional Mam Maya diet was the fresh corn tortillas at every meal.  Of course the women still know how to cook all the traditional delicacies--rich pepian, festive tamales, hot ponche de frutas, complex jocon--they just can't afford to make them except for big holidays. Strange to think that, while the poor majority can't afford to eat well, the helicopter-riding upper crust mostly doesn't want to: or rather, to them and to the slice of urban middle class, "eating well" means lots of fast food.  In Xela, the country's second city and the unofficial capital of the predominantly Maya Western highlands region, fried chicken joints were ubiquitous.

That city, somehow both gritty and picturesque, pulsed with life in a way that few of the more touristy sites manage to.  Here, amongst a thicket of fried chicken joints and a sprinkling of touristy restaurants, comida tipica was available from street vendors and comedores: thick stuffed corn pupusas, hot punches of milk and of fruit, thick and creamy atol de elote from the street, and richer tipica dishes like pepian and jocon from the restaurants. Christmas programs blared on loudspeakers from the Parque Central, and Catholic processions filled quiet streets with festive color and sound in the evening.  In the thin stark high elevation air, the pastel colors of old colonial buildings stood out starkly, almost glowed.  Though only an hour and a half by bus, it seemed a world away from little Fatima and Nuevo San Jose. Indeed, some of the villagers I spoke with had never visited Xela and certainly not the next stop on our itinerary, idyllic Lake Atitlan. A sobering thought as we headed off a little sheepishly to party at the lake, which Aldous Huxley called "too much of a good thing."

Our trip spiraled more or less into debauchery from that point.  In the bizarre Lake Atitlan hippie bubble of San Marcos, we discovered that 12 year old rum cost only 50 quetzales.  I have lots photos of sun on the water and tropical foliage.  Fighting briefly against the hedonistic tide, I did manage to take a morning class at IXIIM on some fundamentals of Mayan Medicine, adding to the modest knowledge I'd gleaned in the town of Colomba outside La Escuela de La Montana when my wonderful Spanish teacher Anny took me to visit the town's herbal farmacia.  Alex and I felt good to be supporting a Mayan youth organization when we hired on of their guides for a half day hike around the lake to Santa Cruz instead of piping our tourist loot straight back into the expat community.  But it was hard to escape the sense of privilege that comes with travel to poor countries, especially after the hard left perspective of La Escuela.

All resistance gave out when we reached our penultimate destination.  Actually the Bacchanalian spirit took hold of us even en route to Monterrico, Guatemala's only real beach party town.  It was getting to be Christmas, after all, and the reggaeton beats on our fourth or fifth second-class bus of the day stirred up a deep lust for beer and sunburns.  The following four days provided those pleasures in abundance, along with seafood at every meal and black volcanic sand in every bodily crevice.  I'm not proud to say it, but it was sweet oblivion.  It was, at least a multi-cultural oblivion: we befriended a motley crew of American Peace Corps volunteers; an itinerant, very drunk Polish photographer; and a miner-turned-millionaire from the Yukon and his 18 year old son.

Vacation definitely accomplished, it was time to make a brief stop in obligatory Antigua and head home.  A couple weeks later, all the traveling and sunbathing blurs together into one gesture.  It's the grit that stands out starkly in memory: kids playing in the dust in the villages where we ate our meals at La Escuela; the commercial town of Colomba with its fancy new evangelical churches and sublime giant Ceiba tree; the authenticity of Xela with its graffiti and bustling market.

      

Porch at La Escuela de La Montana

At La Escuela

Colomba street

Central American-style sink called a Pila

Resting and Digesting in Xela

Xela graffiti

Spices and Chiles for traditional dishes like Pepian

A bounty of comida tipica in Antigua

Lake Atitlan

Genuine artifact or otherwise: Mayan flute found while digging potatoes

Cathedral in Xela

Beautiful tree in San Marcos

Happy Pizza Tacos.  

Alex anointing himself with a little help from his friends

chocolate

various magical aguas

we caught the tail end of the Last Supper

Original artwork at Guatemala's only comic shop

Death by Seafood

Monterrico

the author keeping it comforable

Home Again, Same Day

So my parents used to say, sing-song fashion, when we'd arrive back from a trip to the playground or the museum.

It's a chilly Friday afternoon on the Upper West Side, my childhood home.  I haven't been back for a while, and every time I am I'm amazed at how little things have changed.  A different set of paperbacks up for informal exchange on the table in the lobby of 838 West End, maybe.  New scaffolding up across the street.  A new resident on the 6th floor, or an old one who's died.  Same old neighborhood. Same old synagogue next door, same Sal and Carmine's slice (best pizza in the world) around the corner on Broadway.  Same old Ilya, the Russian doorman who seemed elderly when I was fourteen but who now impresses me with his keen-eyed vitality.  I shouldn't be surprised, as this is the same ageless Russian who ran marathons up into his sixties.  Ahh, Ilya, they don't make them like they used to.  I remember in the winter it was (and surely still is) his habit to move his desk set-up inside the lobby's inner doors where he's safely out of range of the chill.  When building residents would come in, Ilya would bark at them in his rough English to please shut the outer door.  "Shut door, shut door! Please!"  "He's the doorman," a friend once marveled. "Amazing."

At some point during my college years, Ilya and I became aware of one another's interest in chess (maybe I saw him looking at the chess section of the paper, or maybe, fiending for a game, I figured he was Russian so there's a good chance).  I'd grown up with a healthy hunger for the game, after many frustrating afternoons of my dad mercilessly thrashing me even when starting down a rook (or maybe he went a little easy, but I don't remember him ever letting me win).  He'd show me positions out of the world championship Fischer-Spassky match and tell me a little of the lore of the great game.  Anyway, fast-forwarding back to the less distant past, this all resulted eventually in a few games with Ilya at the big table in the lobby on my father's beautiful old Czech or Hungarian board.  Ilya would sit so that he could vaguely face the entrance, but in our 10 and 15 minute blitz games I doubt he had time to do much of his trademark doorkeeping.  I'd put up a fight, but he beat me most of the time--a little less often as I got used to his steely confidence and Russian interjections.

This time as I re-enter the building and spy old Ilya with his winter coat and bright, ice-blue eyes, we give each other a warm handshake. After the usual enquiries as to the location of my chess clock (for the record: location unknown, but possibly somewhere in Vermont) Ilya makes a further foray into English-language conversation.  This surprises me, because over the last years he's seemed to slip more and more into Russian, as if our warm regard and shared interest in chess obliterated the language barrier. But this time, just when I've started to think he's given up on English altogether, he opens his conversational gambit in my mother tongue: "Not married," he asks?  (Or maybe it was "where is wife?") Sensing his disappointment in my continued a-nuptial state, I try to meet him halfway: "too old," I reply? Two or three syllables is pretty safe and less likely to engender spurts of rapid-fire Russian.  Ilya's eye twinkles as he delivers the line I've unwittingly set him up for.  "Too young!" he says warmly, wistfully.  We all laugh, me and him and my mother who's there with us in the lobby.

Ahh, youth.  I'm twenty-seven, an age that feels just old enough to be no longer really young.  How many people have families, mortgages, bald spots, ulcers at my age? Any ten year old could tell you I'm a grown-up. But, on the cusp of the full maturity that our society seems to grant only to those over thirty, I'm also old enough to see myself as very young in relation to the average grown-up.  And yet again, old enough to know how it accelerates as it goes, how if I make it to Ilya's age (70? 80?) I'll look back and autumn 2011 will seem accessible, just a string of days and nights back along the line like so many dashes in the rearview mirror.

I told my mother recently that even ancient history doesn't feel that remote to me anymore.  It used to take a herculean effort of the imagination to picture the nineteen fifties as a real time, when real people made real decisions.  Those haircuts!  Those cars!  Those exclamations!  They can't be serious!  But I lived through the nineties, I've seen photos of myself in middle school, and I am forced to admit none of us is entirely above the fickle winds of fashion.  Once I was able to entertain the fifties as genuine, the ages fell like a row of dominoes.  No TV and airplanes, check.  No cars, no telephone, OK.  I mean, I've been to places where the cell phone is the only one of the four to be a major fact of life, and from there I figure it's only a hop skip and a jump to ancient Mesopotamia.  Hunter-gatherers sheltering in a cave ten thousand years ago were probably telling variations of the same dirty jokes that I heard in a Portland bar last week (even their "paleo" diet is back in style).  Hell, the cutting edge Chinese herbal formulas I'm learning in school date back almost 2,000 years.  People don't change all that much, though their attention spans get shorter.  I admit, this did make me feel old: our twenty year old neighbor stopped by on Halloween while my roommate and I were watching Rosemary's Baby and got up complaining that everyone in the movie was old and nothing was happening. Only the son of Beelzebub, girl!  Sans special effects, it was a tough sell.

Yeah, time is an awful weird animal.  The same friends I once played Super Mario and rode skateboards with are now lawyers and med students and ninth grade teachers.  The father I grew up with as a punning, pipe-smoking, intense but playful presence is being autopsied, his brain for research on fronto-temporal dementia.  Few traces of his last five years remain in the apartment; as I remarked to someone in the week or so after his sudden death, it's as if (what I imagine to be) the normal death process took place in reverse.  While we were losing him, imperceptibly and gradually but inexorably, we de-accessioned many of his belongings: scores to the Columbia music library; boxes of CD's to friends, clothes to the salvation army.  He traveled lightly on earth, didn't leave a whole lot behind.  Not  a lot of material stuff, that is.

Before the post-mortem gathering I've flown back to the City for, I find myself tromping the familiar avenue blocks down to his favorite neighborhood wine and liquor shop, perusing the aisles and picking up the wines he was partial to (Rhone and Southern Italian reds, Alsatian whites).  I've inherited or at any rate acquired much of his expensive taste but less of his frugal nature, and this seems like an occasion to splurge a little.  It feels like a while since I've walked this stretch of Broadway, perused the wine racks at Gotham, passed the 96th street taco cart with its meaty aromas and the scarf and pashmina vendors gearing up for the holiday season.  Overheard the patented NYC hustle and bustle in three or five languages in as many blocks.  On the way home, sun glaring against the two newish skyscrapers here on Broadway, I take a moment of vicarious pleasure in the street chess two South American booksellers are engaged in, and I think once again of Ilya, whom I'll disappoint again this visit by not making time to stop in the lobby for a game.  Next time, I tell myself, I'll dig out that clock, I'll bring down some tea (which Ilya will refuse) from the apartment and we'll make an afternoon of it.  My dad, I think, would approve.

The Guru Who Almost Was

A few days ago, during my sporadic Ill Wind housecleaning, I stumbled upon an orphan post from July 2010, never published.  The post, re-printed below, begins to spin a yarn about what seemed a serendipitous encounter with just the sort of ritual practitioner of Ayurveda that I was hoping to connect with during my Fulbright year in Kathmandu.  Events played out a little differently than I was expecting when I began composing, however, and the piece lay there unfinished.  Without further ado, then, an artifact from the archives:

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A rainy morning in Kathmandu, finally proper monsoon downpour.  I've been up since dawn, squatted on the toilet for a while in the grey light, taken a bracing cold shower, and meditated a scant, distracted few minutes before sweeping out the door with a Chinese umbrella and a plastic bag of fruit, down the alley and up the street through fresh rivulets and growing pools.  At the next alley I turn right and duck into a little doorway next to a neighborhood Ganesh temple, a simple aniconic stone decked with flower garlands and vermilion.  On the wall next to the doorway is an old handwritten poster with a mantra to Hanuman, the brave monkey king largely responsible for the rescue of Sita from the clutches of Ravana and purveyor of courage and strength.  Under the mantra is a simple descriptive advertisement printed out in Nepali for the services of a baidya, or healer, named Padamnath Agasti.  It lists cures for "gastric," "sugar," and "pressure," as well infertility, jaundice, and a host of other ailments extending beyond what Americans consider the role of a doctor.  Remedies are achieved with herbs or by  tantra and mantra and the shamanistic technique of jharphuk (brushing and blowing).  The baidya here is a Hanuman bhakta (devotee), and his cures are by the grace of the monkey king (who, Padamnath-ji will soon insist, can be found living in a cave in South India).  It is this man I am here to see.  He has offered himself as my teacher.   

Life is funny like this.  In 10 months here I wanted nothing more than to meet an embodiment of the living tradition of Ayureda who was willing to pour some of that nectar into my vessel.  Perhaps my vessel wasn't empty enough; it seemed at the time that no one was willing to teach.  The hoped-for doors weren't opening.  When I met Keshab Kavi Baidya, one of the lasta rasa shastra alchemist-pharmacists in Nepal, it was too late.  He was already sick and no longer had any laboratory space in which to make the important bhasma medicines.  I found out after I left, almost exactly a year ago, that he died shortly after my last visit.  All in all, circumstances conspired against my delving deep into that particular ocean.  My 10 months here accomplished plenty else, if I recall that at the beginning I had ideas about pursuing anthropology.  I'm no longer interested in objectivity, if indeed I ever was, nor in theory divorced from practice.  Which is to say, I now fancy that I'll eventually transform myself into some sort of baidya myself.  That gets ahead of me, however: I don't think I had realized a year ago how much of a transformation it would be.

A year later, I return to find Kathmandu much the same as ever, except maybe for larger private vehicles on the street (VW SUV's?!) and infinitesimal progress on the Japanese-funded road project connecting Bhaktapur and Kathmandu across the width of the Valley.  The place hasn't changed much, but I find that I have.  A reaction has been set in motion, the result of time ripening and of a catalyst.  Old paths through the city, literal and figurative, no longer hold the allure they did, and new doors are ajar and ripe for exploration.

This particular passageway between Ganesh and Hanuman I stumbled onto through what Michael Gruber calls (in referring to god's work) a "conspiracy of accidents." A poster in a tea shop down the street from our guest house, a whim.  Following the directions on the poster I found the baidya seated in his room with a client (though that word, along with "patient," rings false here), rubbing her down with a mala of rudraksha beads.  I explained quickly that my companion and myself were well and had come to chat, and he beckoned warmly for us to sit.  Soon, to my surprise, he was telling me what he could teach me...

different paths.  crossroads.  I ching omens.  Hanuman and indications of the need for a warrior spirit.  strength for what is to come.  paths leading to paths...highway?  patience.
paths or windtrails on the sea?  paths we make

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11/29/11

So that's what I found in the bowels of this blog's archives, and that's how it shall stand; perhaps reading my recently deceased father's old journal has instilled in me a reticence to alter the historical record, even in such a trifling way as this.  I didn't finish the original post, I think, because the story I was spinning took a couple further left turns and ended up petering out--no mystical apprenticeship or Ayurvedic secrets forthcoming from this charismatic ritualistic physician.  I can't remember the content of the "I Ching omens" referred to in the last fragment; Hanuman and the warrior spirit are clear enough (who doesn't need some of that? Especially given the turbulent times that were to follows.) Anyway, what ended up happening in those early monsoon season weeks in Nepal the summer before last was this:

I met with the baidya in question a couple times but balked slightly when it became clear his teaching was to consist primarily of spiritual practices and pursuits.  I was most interested in techniques, quick and dirty, from the toolbox of esoteric Ayurveda; he wanted to whisper a secret mantra in my ear, to have me adopt a particular set of mantra and visualization, to take me on as spiritual son. He was a compelling man, dedicated, and pure in his intentions as far as I could tell.  I was mighty tempted to jump what seemed a fortuitous opportunity with both feet; after all, an awakened interest in spiritual pursuits was in large part what had brought me back to Southasia less than a year after I'd left.  It was partly the fact that I was expecting to deepen my engagement with Buddhism, not Hinduism, that held me back--all roads may lead to the mountain, as I've heard Indians say about comparative religious practice, but it helps to stick with one path at least 'til you know where you're going.  Moreover, I had the sense that in gleefully adopting a sexy new practice from my very own, private, Kathmandu-back-alley guru, I would be turning my back on the less glamorous but honest meditative work I'd been cultivating for the previous several months.  And much as I would have loved to learn how this guy treated people, just what the mysterious, shamanic brushing-and-blowing of the jharphuke baidya was all about, I was prepared neither to commit to the pre-requisite devotional practices nor to try and bluff my way through them in the hope of catching a glimpse of something either therapeutically or intellectually interesting.  So I met with Padamnath Agasti one last time and mumbled to him (my rusty Nepali feeling especially inadequate in contrast with his highly Sanskritized, thik speech) about my hesitation.  He must have let me off the hook.  I remember telling him that I was leaving for India but would be back in Nepal in a few months to show my mother around; he replied with a hitherto unseen fierceness that people who didn't treat their own mothers well were the lowest of the low.  I agreed with as much vehemence as I could muster. Then he asked me if I could spare some money for some sort of temple building project he was involved in.  I gave him, I believe, 1000 Nepali rupees--neither enough to make any substantial contribution nor little enough for me to forget about this intrusion of business into the spiritual realm (as if they were ever separate to begin with). I left him with a slightly funny taste in my mouth, a taste which only got funkier during my subsequent months of travel, and when I met my mother in Kathmandu I never did take her to that back alley in Pakhnajol to meet my once-upon-a-time would-be Nepali guru.   

The Art of the Drunk Sandwich

The roots of the Drunk Sandwich concept lie somewhere in the murk of late college nights. I was living in a Swarthmore student tenement called the Barn, for years the off-campus home of myself and a shifting horde of shiftless, shirtless compatriots.  The combination of deadbeat landlord, liberal paint policy, and spacious porch made for a deeply congeni(t)al undergraduate lodging experience.  The dust in the basement made for a lot of black snot on days after parties.  Lest I paint a picture of complete and utter debauchery, though, a lot of good old-fashioned home cooking was done in the sooty kitchens of that condemned building

Granted, many nights as the festive momentum was winding down and the midnight hunger pangs set in, Renato's pizza would get a late-night call.  But then as now being of a fiendish, scheming culinary bent, I would just as often break out the cast iron skillet, the one whose greasiness I so jealously maintained.  Out with it would come butter, bread, eggs, chcese, and whatever leftovers and condiments were to hand.  Commence to frying of all of the above ingredients, first in sequence and then together.  The results, which loosely resembled a spicy grilled cheese that an egg had fallen into, may have been sloppy, but they were hot and deeply gratifying.  This until we began pushing the envelope over the proverbial line in the sand, and for a short string of masochistic weekends the Disgusting Sandwich reigned supreme.  (The ultimate in disgusting sandwich, for the perverse or the curious: congealed bacon fat, globs of strawberry jam, and ice cubes on whole wheat.  Gloriously inedible.  Its only contender: canned smoked oysters and pelletized hops on rye.)

Well, living situations and scholastic settings may change, but late night appetites are pretty much a constant.  As long as there's at least one ravenous co-conspirator in the house, drunk sandwiches are apt to occur.  Indeed, at a recent, almost entirely civilized soiree here at the house--at no point did a gin bucket even make an appearance--I advertised a couple of special-order items: lard fries, turkish coffee, and drunk sandwiches.

But this is grad school, where the qualities of substances is a full time study, and this is Portland, where food carts like Lardo make high-class fatty excess into a fine art.  Yes, standards have risen in the late-night snackagawea department, and no spongy whole wheat loaf is fit for the job; no Red Devil sauce, Heinz ketchup or Helman's plasticine glop.  There's a new caliber of inebriated meal on the scene.  And like everything in this epicurean wonderland, it involves artisan meat, fresh bread, hand-made sauces, naturally fermented pickles, and heirloom produce named for someone's Dutch great aunt.  Same old tried-and-true everything-gets-fried technique, though, and same old black cast iron skillet.

I'm never one for recipes per se, but I did sit down to type tonight to mark the recent creation of what may be the ultimate drunk sandwich.  Meet the Cubano Borracho.  It is, if not the Sandwich king of Southeast Portland, then at the very least the Sandwich for its time and place.  Quite simply, it consists of fine ham, tart apples thinly sliced, shaved dill pickle, caramelized onion, dijon mustard, mayonnaise (home-made if possible), black pepper, and an over-easy egg, all meticulously layered on finest not-too-porous bread, the whole thing thoroughly fried in a combination of butter and the bacon grease that was left in the skillet and that you conscientiously pre-fried the ham in.  No cheese necessary in this case, though some gruyere wouldn't be altogether amiss.  Cut diagonal and served dripping.

Half of one of these is more than enough even for a late night hunger; first thing in the morning, which was perversely when this mongrel was born, a whole one will send you straight back to bed groaning.  Such is the dark power of this, the final evolution of the Drunk Sandwich.  Enjoy!

Boom.