And now for something completely different, a bit of whiplash and detour, lest I lull everyone into slumber with all that sweetness and light. I’m going to test drive one of my Long Island pieces, part of a collection I have been revisiting and expanding lately…all of them what I would describe as fictionalized memoir. It’s a strange term, I guess, and hopefully not too evocative of Mike Daisey’s now infamous “I am not a journalist” defense of the lies he presented on This American Life…but I’m talking about my own personal recollections, and although names and details have been changed, the essential truths remain intact, or at least they are the truth as I experienced it.
I’ve been writing about Long Island for a long time…not just any Long Island, but the Suffolk County of the 1960s, when my family became part of the great exodus into the suburbs from New York’s metropolitan area. Actually, where we moved wasn’t even exactly suburbs at the time; it was, as my mother bitterly proclaimed, The Sticks. It wouldn’t be long before the woods came down, housing developments proliferated, and the usual shopping malls, traffic, and suburban infrastructure took hold in all its predictable tackiness, but for the moment this place was strangely new, isolated from what we had known, and still wild at the edges. The following fictionalized (“I am not a journalist”) portrait of a neighbor contains plenty of fact, and maybe it conveys something about the loneliness that was sometimes the price of moving from the city to one’s own Long Island house.
It’s called Come Back, You Son-of-A-Bitch:
Οurs was a wide, well-trafficked street interspersed with patches of woods that hadn’t yet been cleared for new houses, and there were no sidewalks, a fact that my mother, who actually liked to walk, grumbled about constantly. This was not a cookie-cut housing development: the homes were older, bore no resemblance to one another, and were set back at varying distances from the street. About a quarter of a mile away, just beyond an adjacent clump of pine trees, Audrey and Sal Bruno inhabited a ranch-style house on a large unkempt lot––until one day Sal left her, and Audrey became its sole occupant. She placed a large painted sign in her front yard:
DRIVER OF GREEN DODGE: LIC# 3GF9662 COME BACK YOU SON OF A BITCH
She watched and listened for his car in vain and took to walking along the avenue at all hours, our own brooding Heathcliff, though female and unmoored. She dyed her already wild and massive hair a disturbing shade of red, muttered to herself as she strode along the street, and according to one story, purchased buckshot for her grandfather’s old deer-hunting rifle. I pictured her sitting at her window on rainy days, gun at the ready. It was worrisome.
She also acquired cats, many cats. You could see them curled up in the sunlight, wandering around the yard, or leaping from a shopping cart piled high with soggy newspapers. And she knitted hats, scarves, and potholders that she set out for sale, despite a conspicuous lack of customers, at a little roadside table with an honor box, in odd contrast to the son-of-a-bitch sign a few feet behind it. Mostly she just walked, head down, red hair exploding from one of her own hand-knitted caps, with no apparent destination.
Even without having been officially deserted, a lot of wives on Long Island were feeling stranded or abandoned in the 1950s and 60s. Women who had spent their lives in the city walking to stores and parks or handily taking buses and subways to further destinations had in many cases never even learned to drive––what would be the point? There had been plenty to see, and places to go, all within amble or transit. Streets were noisy with the sounds of kids playing, while nosy old crones rested their elbows on the windowsills watching it all, ready to meddle if needed. Now the wives had been deposited in residential blocks of single-family dwellings. But husbands’ jobs might still be in the city, and commerce took place at supermarket shopping centers several miles away. The strange suburban isolation could come as a shock.
As for Audrey, perhaps she too had relocated from the city, who can say? In any case, her current address was certainly not an easy one from which to wander and forget. Her usual route was south along our street to Sunrise Highway, then north all the way to Veteran’s Highway and back, and the mileage she put in was quite impressive. Even early in the mornings, I might see her lurching along as I passed by on the school bus: gait heaving and hurried, long hair not quite contained by the odd little hat, a lumpy orange scarf wrapped around her neck and trailing like a flame. There was something tragic and pitiable about her, and I honestly thought about saying hello, leaving cookies on her doorstep, saving up my babysitting money to buy some hats or potholders. But I was, after all, only 12, and I had to admit she was creepy. She seemed the embodiment of misery, a reminder that all was not well in this bright new place to which we’d fled.
Then of course there came a day I didn’t see her, or the day after that, or the day after that. And one night, two policemen came up the long walkway to our house. It was a school night, and I was sitting in the kitchen doing homework. I remember the knock at our door, a loud authoritative rap.
Audrey Bruno had been lying dead for days in her house, no sign of foul play, autopsy pending. When had we last seen the lady? Did we know of any relatives? What could we tell them about her life?
We knew nothing but what we had glimpsed in passing. She went for long walks, she knitted things, she kept at least a dozen cats around…and she missed her husband Sal. She had sprung up here with no history or future. I’d never even heard the sound of her voice.
The little roadside table was dragged back inside and the sign was taken down, silencing the broadcast of her pain. Humane society volunteers coaxed cats into carriers and took them away, a clean-up crew arrived and filled three dumpsters, windows were boarded up with blank slabs of wood. Many green cars passed but not a one stopped.
That’s just another New Yorker cartoon that’s been on my refrigerator forever..but it gives a good idea of what it’s been like around here all week. Those infamous Gaviota winds have been blowing relentlessly. It’s kind of a springtime phenomenon, and we should be used to it by now, but it always wears me down. My limited understanding of wind is that air flows from high to low pressure, and as it does that in our part of the world, it pushes through the passes and canyons of the Santa Ynez Range, particularly through the Gaviota Pass, San Marcos Pass, Montecito foothills and some of the smaller canyons. This funneling effect makes for an especially strong wind.
On Travel, Technology, Kindness: An Evening with Pico Iyer
Although I’ve had the privilege of hearing him before, Iyer was even more eloquent and insightful than I’d remembered. Conversation? Well, Don George is surely an impressive man in his own right, but all he had to do is send a spark now and then and step aside while Iyer illuminated the room. I took a few notes, and you’ll see words from Iyer in quotes below, even though I may not have captured them exactly or typed them in the precise order in which they were spoken. Delve into one of his many books if this whets your appetite for more.
Having lived in Oxford and Santa Barbara, Iyer discovered his true home in Japan, specifically Narita, where he was delayed at the airport and impulsively decided to head into town for a few hours: “The most unconsidered moment can change the course of your life.”
He expected it to be like the area outside of LAX or JFK…instead, he found a place that enchanted him: “But it pierced me with a sense of familiarity. It was more home to me than Oxford, more home than the house in Santa Barbara where I keep my things.”
He’s been living there for 28 years now. “Technology enables us to live in the places that make sense to us.”
A few more random bits and pieces…on travel, technology, writing, and other important things:
“I majored in English literature. I was learning to read the world.”
“Every person has a key to perception that would be locked to the rest of us.”
“The longer you know a person or a place, the less you are able to say about it.”
“The beauty of travel is not that it gives you knowledge, but that it reminds you of all that you cannot know.”
“When I began, the world had too little information. Now we have too much information. The role of the writer has changed.”
“The uncharted places–0f memory and spirit–are not online.”
“Writing is more important than ever. Take the reader somewhere inside herself.”
On his newest book The Man Within My Head about his obsession with Graham Greene: “It is nonlinear, not resolved, and full of long sentences…intentionally the opposite of the experience you get watching a screen.”
“We have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say.”
“The joy of quiet. It is essential to disconnect sometimes.”
“Traveling and taking a holiday are two different things. Travel is a perceptual exercise. You choose to ask questions, you choose what you will bring to it.”
“Travel is an exchange. You must open yourself up to it, and cultivate the art of vulnerability.”
“Travel is a moral examination (that Graham Greene always failed). It’s about the riddle of kindness.”
“I have the illusion of knowing Paris. I know nothing of Yemen. But you can’t make simple assumptions. People I met in Yemen were kind. Nothing bad happened to me in Yemen. Santa Barbara is where your house burns down.”
“The most charismatic cities: Havana, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut.”
“Jerusalem: a confounding and compelling place where man’s aspirations and human-ness are in constant conflict.”
“What would I advise young people? Dont’ listen to me, your parents, or your teachers. Take two years off to get to know the world. Or look through the eyes of someone radically different from your self and see what she’d say.”
“The first imperative is to dream your way into another’s perspective. How does the world look to my neighbor? (As a Hindu, how does the world look to my Muslim neighbor?)”
“To quote Thoreau, it matters not how far you go, but how alive you are.”
“A good place is one that never leaves you.”
“I want to keep finding the places that challenge me, seeing the world through fresh eyes. Or as Proust said, not new sights, but new eyes.”
“Kindness is more important than doctrine. What you do is more important than what you believe.”
“Travel is like falling in love. You surrender to something beyond your control; you don’t know where it’s going to take you, but you know you will be transformed.”