Last night, there was a breeze off the river, the moon looked like a prop in a movie set.  Paul walked me to the bus stop and pointed it out. It’s a straight shot across town from my place to his. The 96 Street crosstown is my chariot.

We’re working on a couple of pieces for a DW project. I wrote the first one last Wednesday, and the second on Thursday, then spent the next four days getting piano performances I was happy with. In contrast, Paul sat down with his guitar and played his parts with ease. He is a better and better musician over the years and can play anything, but mostly what I think about when I look at him, is what a great person he is, and how lucky I am to have his friendship. He’s been my best friend for more than 30 years. It makes me happy to see him so happy these days. His life is full of love and work now, and he deserves every minute of it.

Part of the reason it was so hard to get the piano performances (other than the fact that the pieces are hard and I’m not a great piano player), is that the noise factor is a problem in my new place. I was getting the low frequencies of everyone’s air conditioner, even after I’d turned mine off. Also, there’s the sound of traffic on Third Avenue. It rarely gets quiet. I need to get some sort of baffling for my mic, which is very sensitive and picks up absolutely everything.

I hadn’t worked on music in a long time before working on this project, but I feel like a fish swimming. It’s natural and satisfying for me. I’m working on my novel every day now, and that process is much harder. But I’ve been writing songs since I was 11 years old. I’m sure my second novel will be easier. My goal with this one is to, number one: finish it, and number two: make it as great as I’m capable of at this time, (which may not be very great at all.)  It’s the challenge of learning that makes it an adventure, and I’m feeling  good about the story, which is titled, for the time being, “The Original 1982.”

I’ll work on it for an hour this morning before running a couple of errands. Then it’s back on the cross town bus to Paul’s house, where we’ll finish our mixes and get them off to DW’s editor at Chinagraph.

I’ve been working on my story every day. I wake up around 6:00, take Doe for her walk, come back and feed everybody. Make coffee and get started. Today I delay my usual start time of 7:00 a.m. to write this. Not that I’m so rigid about it, that’s just the way it’s been going. I’m a slow writer. I’ve been working for how long now? 2 months? No, not quite. Maybe 6 weeks. I’ve got just 50 pages, but it’s going well. I unravel a lot of what I write when I come back to it. My file of what’s been cut has another 40 pages. I’ve got a good premise, and a story that unfolds as it goes. I know some people use an outline to write, and there are lots of other methods as well. For me, the only tricks are: Don’t show it to anyone and keep working no matter what.

Actually, I did send it to one reader, the first 20 pages (Hi A.). I chose her carefully. I knew she would like it and would make her comments from a place that would only help and not hinder. A few weeks ago, I read a bit to my mother, and her comments threw me off for two days. I need to follow my own thread, emotionally and intellectually. I know workshops work well for some people, but I don’t find random criticism, or a general consensus, helpful. No one can know where it should go. Though I’m not sure either, I trust my writing enough to do my best every day, and hope it will add up to something, make better sense of itself than I could do consciously. Or perhaps, deliberately is a better word than “consciously.”

Meryl was in town yesterday. It was good to see her, and fun to show her the new apartment and neighborhood. We did a little thrift store shopping, and got some Indian food at my favorite neighborhood restaurant, Baluchi’s on 2nd Avenue. Coming back, there were a slew of fire trucks and ambulances on 91 Street. A ladder was extended from one truck up to the roof of a five or six story building. I wonder if there will be anything in the paper about it today. They had a square block closed off to traffic and Meryl said she saw a Con Ed truck, which would suggest a gas leak. There must have been twenty emergency vehicles on Lexington when I walked Meryl to her car an hour later.

Doe has climbed up into my lap and rests her head in the crook of my right arm, which makes writing difficult.  It will be another quiet day in a life of quiet days. I’ll take a yoga class at noon. I’ve joined a yoga studio. They have a variety of classes all day and evening. It’s wonderful to have the freedom to choose when I want to go, and how hard I want the class to be. You pay a membership fee, like a gym membership, and can go as much as you want. It’s been financed by Equinox, and they’ve made it as beautiful as a hotel spa. The place is called Pure. The other day I got a text from my friend Karen who also belongs to Pure. It just said “I love Pure!”  For a minute, I thought she had been listening to the Golden Palominos.

Was he the charming comedian of my youngest childhood? The Dad my siblings and I placed at the center of our world as he entertained with silly stories and laughter?

Was he the brilliant rocket scientist who helped write programs for the first ever computers and preferred to be left alone in his room?

Or was he the judgmental father I disappointed with my poor math skills and teenage rebellion, who punished me with silence and biting assessments of what the future would hold?

I could go on and on with this contradictory list of him as a man, and as my father. He’s gone now, but for me the conversation continues.

In therapy, I tell the stories of our life together as a family. Can it answer why? Is there a clue in the dynamics of these relationships long over, but still being acted out? I can’t ever present him accurately, though. I make him sound cruel when he was fair. Make him sound indifferent when I know he loved me. I admired him so. He was the smartest man I’ve ever known, and the best one, too. Moral and good. Maybe that’s why it hurt to feel his disapproval. But even that is only a perception I carry.  It may have been true to some extent, but certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.

My father never pretended anything. He didn’t lie or cheat or drink. You could ask him a question, and he would tell you the answer. Even if he didn’t know what it was. He would figure it out, or make up something that was just as good as the real answer. He said I was beautiful and that it wasn’t easy to be a beautiful woman. He told me if I had worked as hard as he’d seen me work (at music) at any other profession, I’d be head of the company by now. He told me to go back to school. He said I could do anything I set my mind to do. He told me I was no Barbra Streisand. Said his favorite singers were Streisand, Celine Dion, and Eva Cassidy. He walked out of the room sometimes while I was talking. He listened to my songs and didn’t say a word after. He answered the phone when I called and immediately said: “Let me get your mother.” He told me if I didn’t build anything, I wouldn’t have anything.  He wrote me a poem once, for my 6th grade graduation, that began: Her skirts so short/Her hair so long/Her parents always in the wrong… He said what I didn’t need was more animals.

It still hurts to think of him. I’m still angry at him, still want to please him. I’m still wounded by him and still don’t know why. I thought if I could be a good daughter when he was dying of cancer last year it might change something, heal us or something. It didn’t but I’m still thankful I was able to do that. Because I feel he did everything for me, and all he wanted in exchange was for me to be a little more like him. But I never could manage it.

Quiet this morning. Everyone is dozing. Sally has grown more comfortable being a part of our group. She’s no longer hiding in a closet. Right now, she’s stretched out on the new rug, almost  parallel to Target lying behind her. Bailey is nearest to me on the cool wood floor. Doe is sleeping in the hallway.

She’s still sick, although the steroid is managing her symptoms well. It’s a miracle drug. It does cause her to be tired and a little cranky, though. I worry about what else it’s doing. I give her a tiny dose every 36 hours right now. If I wait longer than that, she starts to feel sick to her stomach but I don’t want to give her any more than I have to. She’s still playful, loving and extremely beautiful. We get stopped on the street constantly. I’m going to take her to Mattituck to see her old doctor next week.

Does it sound as if my life is centered around her?  I suppose it is. You do what you have to for the ones you love.

Finally, got my studio set up and have been playing music. I’ve got a new song that I quite like. I’m still toying with the idea of putting a new record out, but I have to say, my interest is in writing the other thing now. Maybe, it’s because I’ve lost any desire to play in public and putting out a record just feels like a part of all that. I do know that songwriting is what I do best. Not just songwriting, but creating those songs that capture the quality of the way I experience life. It’s effortless in a way (compared to writing prose!).  I can’t imagine ever stopping. I’ve been doing it my whole life. But I lost interest in sustaining a career around recording and performing. It’s too hard to keep it going. The world is a bitch and makes even the most natural and beautiful things ugly and difficult. Better to keep the things you cherish close and private.

By the world I mean society, and not the natural world, of course. The natural world is sacred and perfect. How cavalier we human beings are with all its gifts. We seem determined to destroy every precious thing. It’s clear we’re meant to coexist with all living things, in a perfect environment, yet we’re compelled to destroy it. The caveat. If there’s a “why” I’m interested in, that’s the one. Human beings desperate to understand, to believe. So desperate that incredible stories, myths, fables are created and accepted. But who needs a story when reality is so magnificent? It’s all here! The sky, the earth, the oceans, the mysteries. Magnificent. We’re as clueless as ants building their hills. But a lot more dangerous.

I think of what Karen said the other night. How when you go to school you learn that everything you think, has been thought before and, not just thought, but developed into a philosophy.

Hasta luego, amigos.

Took Doe to the park this morning. Central Park is a big dog run before 9 am when they’re allowed to be off leash. We narrowly avoided an attack by a vicious bitch named Clem, and found our way to the fields off 97th Street and 5th. Doe was soon tearing around like a little greyhound. She looked truly happy for the first time since our move from Harlem. I think she misses her friends, dog and human, from 121 Street, or maybe it’s stress. She’s had a mild recurrence this month of pancreatitis or IBD, or whatever her illness is. I’ve got her on a low dose of prednisone and, hopefully, she’s on the mend. When she gets sick, the vet always reminds me that as she gets older, her episodes will happen more frequently, but she’s only two and was perfectly healthy for six months before this. I’m still hoping she’ll outgrow the whole thing.

My apartment is coming together and I’m loving it here. It feels so mine. In order to write, to gain access to myself, or that magical otherness that is maybe not so much myself, I need to feel entitled to my time and privacy and that can be a tricky state to get to. I had no idea this place would give me that and I’m very thankful.

I’ve been writing stories, playing and singing. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this spot and it’s good. Saw Jayne Anne Phillips read at BAM last night. I was with two of my favorite people, Paul and Leslie, and we had a wonderful time. It was fascinating to hear Jayne Anne discuss her process, also to see her avoid certain questions, protective of her privacy, or perhaps ignorant of aspects of how the work happens. It is a mystery, even to the writer, maybe especially to the writer, in many respects. I wanted to ask her how she views those first stories now, the ones in Black Tickets. I wanted to ask her what her relationship is to them now. But I didn’t ask. Two drunk people asked ridiculous rambling questions that were embarrassing to hear. One man wanted to know what her criteria was for accepting or denying anyone into the MFA program at Rutger’s (she heads that program). He got very belligerent. I think he may have had a dog in that race. Then a woman asked if she’d known any famous writers while she was at Iowa. K.M.S., as Jillian used to say (kill.my.self).

So, I didn’t ask my question. Although, I would have loved to know the answer, but questions, at these type of events, are asked mostly to confirm an idea you already think you know the answer to, and Jayne Anne Phillips wouldn’t have given me the answer I wanted, which was to recognize that the element of autobiography, of vulnerability, in Black Tickets, contributed as much power to those pieces as their rhythm and brevity. In the later work, she keeps her distance emotionally, so as successful as the novels are, and they are astounding achievements, especially Lark and Termite, they don’t compare to the pure perfection of the early stories. Ha! Not much chance I’d have heard her recognize that!

She did say two things I loved hearing. One: that the narrative of those stories was only implied (fantastic! it’s true, and yet the stories are so clearly told). Two: That she wanted her stories to burst with light at the end.

Anyway, it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. There’s nothing I find more interesting than hearing about the process of other writers and artists because as I said it’s a tricky place to get to..

Once I lent the table to a friend for awhile. She had a big house to furnish and I was living in a tiny studio, without a good spot for it. One day I discovered she had given it to an antique shop to sell. I walked into the shop and spotted it right away. It had a price tag around one leg.  My heart started pounding.

I said “That table over there, that’s my table.”

The proprietress of the store looked confused. She’d stumbled into a mess. It wasn’t easy but eventually I got it back. All of the old nails connecting the three boards to the base had been removed. I don’t know why.

Still its rough beauty remains. It’s a soulful table. I don’t talk to the friend anymore, the one who tried to sell it. She was the kind of friend you had to watch constantly but I adored her. She was fun, had the best parties, could make you feel you were the most important person in the world, but she was a liar and would involve you in her lies. She enjoyed the power play of pretending to be one thing and being another. I looked the other way a lot because I didn’t want to lose her. But eventually, I distanced myself. Then she tried to sell the table. After that, it was all over. Before I knew her, I remember, the first thing I ever heard about her was she liked to go to the funerals of strangers. Even knowing all that, sometimes I miss her. Crazy I know. But if anything is true it’s this: You love who you love. If love makes sense, it’s the kind of sense that isn’t easy to get to the bottom of.

Although, I sold most of my furnishings and other possessions to the woman who bought the Mattituck house, I have two chairs, a table and a bed. In the Harlem apartment, the walls of exposed brick, the fireplaces, the massive open kitchen, seemed to fill the space and I didn’t need anything more. I did buy a big couch on Craigslist which didn’t make it to this place. It was massive and the wrong style anyway. It was modern, a Knoll knock off.  It ended up on the curb on West 121 Street after Housing Works rejected it for being scratched on by cats.

The new apartment is a blank canvas. The walls have been primed but not painted. The lighting fixtures are the cheapest the builder could find. There isn’t much natural charm, although the kitchen and bathroom are newly renovated and clean. But I’m on a constant search to make it feel like home here. I’m a shopping maniac with a limited bank account. Eventually, I’ll make it into something nice. All my creative impulses are being sucked dry by it though. It’s taking my songwriting energy, my journal writing energy.  I’m going to paint it myself the way I do with a single brush. I don’t know when I’ll ever be done. Yesterday I bought two light fixtures at the new Conran’s beneath ABC. A few days before, a vertical bookstand from DWR. Ask me anything. I know every light, every lamp, every chair, every sofa, every dresser, every piece of furniture in this city. Some of it will be mine.

Illness, the death of a parent, money troubles, housing dilemmas, career disappointments, distractions and reprieves. All those you expected. But this. A heartbreak too big to shove down or to the side, a shocking, paralyzing pain from throat to gut. Sleeplessness. A general numbing dizziness covering a mountain of no, this is not happening. But it happens. Versions of it happen every day. To other people. Scandalous stories. Delicious in their awfulness. Because they’re happening to the characters on TV. Celebrity scandals. You imagine the woman’s pain for 10 minutes, than make dinner, walk the dog. They aren’t real people, so their problems aren’t real problems. Is it a comfort to share a problem with a beautiful celebrity? No, it’s no comfort. It means nothing at all.

You can’t breathe. You try to train your brain to think other thoughts.That works a little but the pain and shock are deeper than thoughts. Your body refuses to forget for a minute. Be careful. Watch where you’re going. You’d like to get into bed and stay there, but you don’t. No. You do what you know how to do. You distract yourself. You call friends who sympathize but also remind you, it’s only more of the same, and evidence of what you always knew and talked about. It won’t lead to happiness for anyone. People are who they are. You’re reminded. But the pain isn’t soothed, isn’t quieted, isn’t quelled, isn’t dulled, isn’t drowned out, by the talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. You wake up after a mostly sleepless night. You wake up and think about it first thing. Your brain tries to work around it. Okay. I have to find a way to not care about this. Should I take a trip? I know. I’ll call every man I know. Pick one. Marry him. Adopt a baby. I’ll do it all right away. This is the crazy shit you think about quickly and in a panic as if there was some crazy action you could take to stop yourself from going through this.

You walk outside. You’re dressed like a widow in dark glasses, black hood pulled up over your head. A chic widow. A hipster widow. Widow, willow, window, words. Words will save you. Words are the way out and you know it. Remember everything you see. The father on the subway. Daughter is wearing blue wings. Father says “I like your socks.” Fashion conscious father and daughter.

On 11th Street, the wind is blowing so hard, the door at French Roast swings open at high velocity. It smashes into the wall as you pass and you recoil. You feel as if anything could hit you at any time. You hold onto the hood as the wind tries to take it down. You clutch it beneath your chin. You hope your sunglasses make you invisible. Like a child with eyes closed. Child. The pain is searing.  You rush down the stairs. Hit buzzer one. You’re 15 minutes late since the D train stopped for traffic at every stop. But finally you are sitting across from her. The room is painted lavender. There is a built in bookcase behind her all across the wall, a fireplace. You reach for the box of Kleenex over and over again, but can’t quite absorb the outpouring. “Can you believe this shit?” you ask.  She is a comfort. She knows the whole story. She thinks you deserve better. She’s angry as hell. She wants you to be angry as hell. You are, too. You’re angry as hell. But, it feels like grief. It feels like sickness. Surely, it’s anger but who can identify its components accurately. It is blind agony.

She sits in her chair looking like Natalie Wood.  She’s lovely. You enjoy her loveliness, and also her awkward attempt at comforting you. It’s always a treat to see her. A treat you pay for. Which is cool. It makes it “productive” and not just conversation. It makes her someone other than a substitute for your mother who says the wrong thing, always says the wrong thing, despite the fact that she loves you.

After, you’re spent, depleted. You make your way back uptown. I should write all this down, you think. It will make something good out of it. Although, well meaning readers will post annoying attempts at comfort like “when one door closes another one opens.” Still, it will leave your body. That’s how it works. You write it and send it out into the world. You make something beautiful out of it. You get rid of it. Words escaping like birds off a roof, into the sky in formation.

The change of seasons is always a time when memories are awakened. I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s novel “The Museum of Innocence” and it’s themes, of obsessive love and the collecting of memories, are resonating. Today Doe and I climbed a hill in Morningside Park covered in daffodils. I was aware of how my own body is a museum of memories, although I close off the rooms. I’ve locked the doors to whole wings and forgotten they exist. But maybe their scent escapes through the windows or the floorboards in spring. As we climbed the hill, I felt happy and mournful, hopeful yet reconciled. Feelings mixed together.

I could sense the rooms in my museum of memories. I could feel their existence, as much as I mostly forget them. Bits of conversation came to me. D listening to me play “How to Save a Life.” He says “Why that song?” And without missing a beat, I lie and tell him I happened to hear it that day. Had he really forgotten the summer day we listened to that song over and over? Did he really not remember the convertible speeding along Deerfield Road with the top down, singing along with it, then playing the song again and again? How could the memory have so seared into me yet be lost to him?

Of course the day of the song and the convertible happened years ago, and even the conversation that followed is a year old. Still, this memory came to me today, climbing up the hill in Morningside Park with Doe. It took seconds to fill me, play itself, then pass. Then my attention was taken over by the brand new daffodils. Some were just poking through the dark soil, but some, in sunny spots, were already up and fully in bloom. How they lifted my heart. The world is so beautiful!

The museum of memories. The idea is capturing my imagination today. This knowledge that our bodies, our brains, contain everything we’ve experienced. No wonder we grow numb, no wonder we forget. How to live with it all at the same time? Impossible! Better to let the rooms gather dust. Better to live in the magnificent present where everything is immediate and available to appreciate and enjoy.

There is a delicious thrill, though, in the way memories mingle with the present. They float through us, giving the present depth and color. They shape our ability to go forward.

In “The Museum of Innocence,” the protagonist fills his museum with everything his former lover has touched. Her teacup, four thousand cigarette butts, endless mementos documented in page after page.

In my real life museum, I have collected no fewer items, although they are stored as haphazardly as paper stuffed in cabinets, and socks in drawers. There is no order to them. They are stored in a chaos of joy and hurt. Endless rooms of memories pressing against my heart in spring as Doe and I climb and climb.

Friends say, “Move to Brooklyn.”  But if I did, would I feel at home? I’ve looked in Brooklyn many times, when considering a move, and it’s very nice, but I don’t feel at home in Brooklyn. I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived in every neighborhood in Manhattan. I love Central Park and getting around by subway. I know all the lines. I know the whole city well. I don’t know Brooklyn. Would it feel like home if I moved to Brooklyn? Would I find all the hidden people who are like me? I like Queens. My parents were born in Queens. I was born in Queens, in fact. Would I find all the people like me in Queens? And who are the people like me? How much like anyone is anyone? How do I find this group to which I’d belong?

I might belong best to the group who feels they belong to no group. But even that group would probably seem too radical, or exclusive.

Love has made me feel like I belong. Briefly and on occasion to the “we” that love makes.

Certain friendships, long-lasting, with shared experiences make the world make sense. I belong to my friends and they to me.

Doe belongs to me. The cats are mine. We are a family of sorts. But, of course that makes me a crazy cat lady with a dog! I don’t want to belong to this maligned group.

I’m a musician. I have a special relationship to music and other people who make it. But we are spread out and washed away by the new economy and the demise of the music business. We teach in universities far away. We live in the woods. We make music for ourselves. Or we’ve stopped making music because it’s too hard.

Maybe I should have told the guy on the street this morning that I’m a musician and that Harlem has long been home to musicians like me, or maybe not so much like me, but musicians. Yes. Would he have backed down? Would he have seen me differently?

I had another impulse for some mysterious reason. I wanted to tell him that my father had died this year. Maybe because it’s true and I feel so affected by my father’s death, but also because maybe he could identify with having a father, with losing a loved one. Loss is something we all share.

After I had that thought, I thought about how dark my thoughts get. But then I noticed the way the sun was shining so brightly today. I looked down at the deep puddles and felt happy for my big waterproof boots.

Human feeling, of all kinds, is what we share, and puddles and snow and fathers and music.

The songs I’ve written in the past five years are mostly D songs. They tell a story of unrequited love and frustration.  I’m too close to them to have them take me anywhere. The rest are songs written for other projects, inspired by the suggestion of the films or ideas given to me by DW.  Those songs are more optimistic. Sunnier, sweeter.  I don’t know what to do with all these songs. I work on them, re-record them. Second-guess the recordings. I think these are the best songs of my life, but they remain in limbo. Not sure if it matters. What is their purpose anyway? What is their value beyond the pleasure they bring to me in writing them?

Last week, I worked on an advertising job. I wrote a melody and lyric for a Lee Jeans commercial. I sang it too, but was replaced by another singer. She sounds like Chan Marshall. Many of the songs in advertising lately are either sung by Cat Power or by a singer who kind of sounds like that. Music is as much fashion as music. In advertising especially. I don’t fight it. I don’t even feel compromised by it. I don’t need the world to see things my way. I do need to put food on the table, a roof over my head. I use my skills to accomplish that and feel fine about it, feel lucky for the opportunity.

It snowed last night. Doe, the cats and I, watched it fall through the big windows that face South. I love the view through these windows. The lovely painted brick and brownstones. The beautiful roof-line and sky. I feel so lucky to be alive and aware of the beauty around me. I’m open and ready for whatever comes next.

Doe and I have been taking long walks in Central Park. It’s so beautiful in every season. I love winter trees. I don’t miss the house or living in Mattituck. Not for a second. My memories are little side travels I take as I go forward, gently, peacefully.