We weren't sure what to expect with Ginger and the snow. She loved it last year, but last year she was a tyke, a tiny thing, so we did a lot of carrying and quick plays.

Yesterday we went out at 6:00 am for a family walk (it was my birthday, and on birthdays and holidays we always do family walks) and she was crazed. The deeper the snow, the deeper she plunged into it. She loves snowdrifts and likes to walk wherever it isn't plowed. We came home and she whined for an hour, needing to go back out. Having to go back out.

Today we spent an hour at a basketball court around the corner. It was her second walk - after the first she came home long enough to warm up, eat, nap and get a cookie. Right now she's behind me snoring, though she'll wake up any minute because the meatballs Joe are cooking are just about done. With the blizzard, my birthday continued into today and a perfect dinner is coming right up.

What to bring into the new year with me and what to leave behind:

In: Lately I've been fearing that I eat like a pig. I eat out a bit with friends, but mostly I'm home or out with Joe. The last month I've been having an exceptionally good time with food and there have been instances with Joe where I don't think twice about picking something out of my tooth, or grabbing the hunk of whatever fell off my fork and onto the table back up with my fingers and shoving it into my mouth. I'm talking the whole time, btw, not missing a beat. I haven't wiped something off my shirt and plopped it in my mouth, nor have I eaten anything that fell on the floor. These might simply be 'yet's.' HP, let me be a little more elegant while dining.

Out: Broken sleep. Ginger, we love you madly. I could list a million ways we love you here, but I'm too tired to make sense of them. No more wanting to go out at 3:00 or 4:00 to play. Sleep until 6:00. Give me a solid eight hours. I'll gladly take seven. Six, unbroken. I look like I'm eighty these days from lack of sleep.

In: Pretty much what my life already is. This year I moved into a new place with accepting what is and not getting too hung up on what isn't. I have my moments still, mostly with work, but they don't last long. This year I really got to see that I persevere, no matter what.

The happiest New Year to everyone I know. xoxo

The happiest holiday to all. It's been a while since I've posted and for a few days now I've been planning to, but goofing off has gotten in the way. I had to mutter and putter this way, then pat the Ginger that way. Then roam to the fridge and take a bite of everything in it, then get on the couch and ponder what to watch. In short it's been a perfect couple of days.

What's been going on is, I wrote a play. Last Saturday I did a closed read-through with an amazing cast and it was illuminating to hear the words and see kernels of what works and what might not. The reading was a chance for all of us to share the words on the page - it wasn't about performance - but it was a pro cast and they came prepared. This week and next I'm percolating, seeing what comes up.

Putting a reading together is a bit of work. I also directed it, which meant casting it, then meeting individually with each actor. I also got the physical space to hold the reading in and dealt with the numerous details that come up. for anyone considering doing the same, it's worth it. I can't yet see the changes I'll make to the play, but I can feel them. The play is almost ready.

There was also a lot of art business to deal with, most of it good. Most of it: I was on a really nice roll, then a dealer vanished with a painting. The dealer was someone I had never worked with, but she had been around for over twenty years and had a great reputation. It was a private show curated for a corporation, and when it was supposed to come down the dealer suddenly refused to return emails. I called her and she panicked when she heard my voice, then pretty much hung up. We had contracts - this wasn't the usual handshake deal - and after two months of trying to deal with her I reached out to the other artists in the show. They also weren't getting emails or calls returned, so together we wrote, then called the dealer. After another week of silence I'd had enough and called the dealer's client who had sponsored the show. That worked. The painting came back within the week.

Every part of life has been busy and this week and next is delightfully quiet. Purposefully quiet - I'm spur of the moment and not making plans. Anything good to watch that I may have missed?

Anything good to eat that I may have missed eating? I doubt it.

If I don't get off the couch between now and January 1st, the happiest New Year to everyone. I so appreciate all your comments and emails and love hearing your thoughts. May 2016 be golden.

(For those of you who don't live locally, that's a trash can on a subway platform.)

I'm always interested in why certain posts trigger a lot of emails. The last post certainly did, so I want to reiterate that as far as I know, our building is not for sale. Nor is there a buyout on the horizon.

We are finding money, however. I've hinted and more than hinted that Ginger is keeping off hours, and what this means is she's overwhelmed by all the construction and won't leave the block when the sun is up. She loves the workers and many love her, but the chaos is too much. She's a high energy dog, so she has to get out and run, and this means that Joe has been taking her to the dog run in the middle of the night. Anywhere from 1:00 to 3:00 in the morning she wakes us up, and out they go to play.

We've tried everything to change it and this is what it is right now. I take her out around 6:00 in the morning, sometimes a little later, and we might go to the river or stroll for a walk. Any day now we'll get rid of the middle of the night walk. Any day.

The city is very different at the hours Joe is out. He sees it all, yet he also sees quiet. What we both see, however, whether it's 2:00 in the morning or 6:00 in the morning, is what people lose.

Over a year ago, we were all out for an early morning family walk and there, on the quiet sidewalk, was a fifty, folded neatly in half. A few months later I found a twenty, then Joe found a twenty.

This winter, sitting neatly on the fresh snow, I found another twenty. A few months ago I was wrangling Ginger up Mercer Street and on the middle step of a stoop was a pretty gold elephant charm on a tangled thin gold chain. I could almost see the graceful girl who may have been wearing it, maybe sitting with a guy after their date. Maybe she was nervously playing with the elephant and didn't realize she loosened a loop on the chain.

I found an amazing pair of bisque lamps once with Ginger and after we came home I went back out to get them. We've met groups of twenty-somethings who were so well dressed and so high that when they bent over to pet Ginger, vials of white powder fell out of their top pockets.

Walking Ginger we pass keys, sweaters, scarfs, pants. I once found a pile of Manolo Blahnik shoes, right shoe only, size 11. Two months ago I found a wallet, and when I tracked down the owner he was so relieved to get it back he wanted to do a drawing of Ginger as a thank you. I didn't want a reward, but how could I say no to that?

We have a ceramic tray we put Ginger's money in and last year she bought herself a beautiful winter coat. This year she might buy herself a car harness or a flotation vest. If she finds another twenty, we might even monogram it.

Seven years ago a good friend lived on West Broadway, in a small studio. She lived there for over twenty years and then the building sold. She was rent stabilized, which basically means the landlord has to offer a new lease when the old lease is up, at an increase set annually by the city. Rent-stabilized apartments tend to have lower rents than market apartments, often much lower, since a landlord can up the rent any amount desired with the latter once a lease is up.

The general law with rent-stabilization is, once a rent hits $2700 a month, the apartment comes out of stabilization and goes to market rates. When a stabilized apartment becomes vacant, landlords usually renovate it or do enough work to the space to up the rent over $2700 a month and therefore free it from stabilization laws.

There's also rent-control, but rent-control laws went out years ago and these apartments are rare. Our building has two apartments that are still rent-controlled, and these tenants, who moved into the building in the 1950s, probably pay less than $900 a month for a one-bedroom. (Their neighbors pay around $3200 for the exact same apartment.) In addition to the two rent-controlled spaces there are maybe five rent-stabilized apartments left in our building and the rest are market.

Back to the friend who lived on West Broadway. When her building sold, she was offered $20,000 by the new owners to move out. They eventually settled on $50,000, and a month later she moved to Brooklyn. Around this same time a building on Thompson Street sold and one tenant, an elderly woman who had lived there forever, refused to take a buyout. She didn't care what the offer was. She wasn't moving. The new owners started construction around her with the hopes that the inconvenience would make her move, but she got an injunction against them. The building still stands as it was.

I've written about our neighborhood being a giant construction pit and over the last year some of the buyouts we're hearing about have been substantial. A guy with a Pomeranian at one end of the block had a big rent-stabilized apartment in a small townhouse and got $500,000 to move. Across the street, a woman with a Chihuahua inherited a townhouse from her auntie, who paid $50,000 for the building in the '50s. A builder paid her $12 million to move, and she's now in Tribeca.

Another townhouse owner just got $12 million to add his townhouse to the lot of buildings that got knocked down across the street. We watched it get razed this summer. The owner of the lot paid the owners of a nearby building $26 million for air rights, which allows for the new building to be taller than it could. We just heard that Renzo Piano will design the new building that's to rise here, and this ramps everything up a notch.

Renzo Piano designing a building is a big deal. The buyout chatter has risen and it's now moved to our end of the block. Will our owners sell? A mom and pop own our building and they bought it in the 1970s to leave to their kids. Their kids want nothing to do with complaining tenants and constant maintenance, but it's not their call to sell. A few buyers have made big offers to the owners and they've passed, so I don't think this building is going anywhere for a while.

The building next to ours is single-family, artist owned, that if anything may one day be converted to a museum. The building next to that is a small loft building converted to five co-ops. (One frequently rents for $24,000 a month and once the Piano building rises so will that rent.) The two buildings after this are owned by brothers and there's a lot of hopeful buyout chatter there. One of these buildings has rambling, mostly rent-stabilized apartments. The other building has small apartments with shared toilets in the hall and bathtubs in the kitchens. It's real old school New York, or what New York used to be. Our whole block is, really.

Our downstairs rent-stabilized neighbor loves to fantasize about how much he'll hold out for, should our building sell. His price is $250,000, a figure that started at half that amount then steadily ticked up with the rate of neighborhood construction. I don't really think about it, since I don't see it happening anytime soon. It's so easy to get tangled up in what might be, but then it becomes golden hand-cuffs. Ginger would love to move and would probably do so for a good cookie, since she's done with all the construction and the noise and the dust. I'm with her on that. Would you hold out and wait?

We heard rumors last year that this parking garage had sold. Behind it, where that little tree to the left is, lived a very beholden church. The church sold quite a few years ago, but once a year a vigil would be held and many wreaths would be laid on the steps.

Earlier this year the church finally came down. Next to it, a brownstone came down with it. That is now one building site.

This parking garage is a second building site. Rumors on the street are already flying over it. If you look at the bottom photo, you'll see a yellow building to the right of the garage. It's an old building, kind of sweet looking. Supposedly, the parking garage needed to use their roof for scaffolding and the yellow building said fine but that will cost you half a million dollars. The garage wasn't going to pay that, and then some deal was struck. Overnight scaffolding went up in the back of the building, out of eye shot, on the patio of a first floor tenant of the yellow building. We don't know if they plan to use the roof still, but we do know that the first floor tenant is none too happy about it.

That's the least of it, since all the tenants in the yellow building and even one of the top guys working on the garage are worried over what will happen to the yellow building once they start taking down the garage. The yellow building is old, so old they think some of the mortar might be sand. And the garage is as old if not older, so who knows what structure might be supporting the other.

Then there's the rumor that the church and brownstone site refused to let the garage people access the back of the garage through the church's site to put up that scaffolding on the patio, and a whole lot of ego got exchanged in that exchange.

We're curious why the garage people are erecting scaffold around the billboard, since that billboard has to come down. The scaffolding is going up fast - today is day three since the scaffolding truck pulled up.

To the left of the scaffolding, the red brick building with what looks like a grid of windows on its facade is brand new. As is everything on that block to the right of it. And to the left, though you can't see either of these directions because of new construction.

All the trucks and beeps and general cacophony of living in a construction pit has put Ginger on edge. She only wants to go out at three in the morning and that's when Joe takes her to the dog run. I take her to the river or for a long walk at six a.m., and once the sun is fully up and construction has kicked in she won't leave our patch of sidewalk. We're barely sleeping, but we're hoping things start to change once all the demolishing is finished. It's wishful thinking, but it's what I'm telling myself right now. The construction guys and occasional construction gal love her, so she's happy as can be.

I miss seeing the old punks around.

Up until maybe five years ago, I could walk through the East Village and see some elder wreck coming up the street, hair akimbo, make-up a mess. I loved it, since they were often the original squatters, the souls living in rotting apartments who brought an organized lawlessness to the East Village back when you could still be lawless in New York City.

That's when I came to NYC, in the '80s, when the East Village had a punk music and heroin and an established personality. Walking near Avenue A to get my hair cut back then I'd pass broken buildings with fronts covered in plywood. Junkies and crackheads would slip in and out from behind the plywood, which meant a shooting gallery or cop spot was back there.

At night I'd head east to visit friends, to see music or art, to find trouble, and I'd pass Keith Haring graffiti mixed with 'Die Yuppie Scum.' Galleries would open on blocks that were totally blown out, wastelands of broken glass, dead couches, an occasional torched car. Openings would be packed, people in the streets all through the night, the same faces showing up for whatever art thing was going on night after night.

The first apartment I ever looked at was a little south of there, just below East Houston Street. I got chased north by a crackhead with a machete. A homeless woman spit in my face on Avenue C. I didn't want to live in the East Village.

Then, like slow motion, Christodora House, on Avenue B near Thompson Square Park, was converted to high-end residential living. The Thompson Square Park riots came. Gentrification became real.

For a few months in the mid-90s I lived on First Street near Avenue A. Though east of me wasn't the safest place at night, change was coming swiftly from the west. Mostly in the form of bulldozers, since everything that surrounded me there is now gone.

I've almost always lived downtown and west, in places zoned more for commercial than residential. Once in a while I'll see a few old punks over here, maybe Patti Smith, maybe a Talking Head or two. My favorite is a tall, gaunt man, 60-ish, always in a black suit with a blue button-down shirt. He wears pancake make-up that's perfectly applied and has the face of a saint framed by long dark hair. He's quite stooped and now uses a cane, and he looks right out of an Edward Gorey cartoon. My heart always warms when I see him coming.

Change is inevitable and when it's from within it always takes me to a better place. I don't know what's next for this city given how now one neighborhood blends into the next with a bank on every corner, a chain restaurant mid-block and a new high rise residential complex that no one seems to live in. I'm glad I got to experience NYC as where you had to be if you wanted to do anything creative.

There is one change happening that's a throwback with a twist: when Joe takes Ginger out in the middle of the night they walk past a park in Soho. In it, nodding on benches are clean cut 20-something white men who, in the '80s, you'd say look like yuppies. Junkies? Homeless? Evicted from Christodora House?

I was downtown yesterday and revisited the construction pit at the World Trade Center. I had written about it in the past, citing how over budget it was. Now, those numbers sound quaint.

I think in the long haul, when all the construction has finished and the buildings have found their feet, it'll be worth it. The hub looks like a giant Brontosaurus, especially if you stand right in front of it. It is truly awesome.

My mother had three older brothers. The one closest in age to her was a poet, Malcolm Miller. I started to write this post last year, but trying to describe him with words felt like trapping smoke in a net.

When Malcolm was in high school he felt he wasn't learning anything and opened the window and jumped out. He then got a full scholarship to St. John's Prep, an interesting education for a Jewish boy. He went to college at McGill in Montreal, and in the '60's and '70's wrote three poetry books, 'The Summer of the True Gods', 'The Kings Have Donned Their Final Masks' and 'The Emperor of Massachusetts.' Tundra Books published them.

In the '60's he married Sandra, a Canadian Indian, and they rented a house in Rockport, Mass. Sandra had miles long black hair and wore suede, fringed, beaded clothes. I'd gaze up at her and wonder if she was Cher. They had a beagle, Joey, and one of my earliest memories ever is walking Joey with Mal while everyone else is back at their house. Sandra is there making a salad.

This memory then shifts to a horror wax museum in Salem. I'm looking at a woman suspended by a giant hook through her gut, arced backward over a stone slab covered with blood. I try to bury my eyes in his jacket pocket, but his pocket is too high. I only come up to his thigh. His told me there was beauty in everything and I had to learn to see it. He knew I'd be an artist.

Sandra got sick and went back to Montreal for the healthcare. She died and I remember being about 8, in the car with my mother, driving Malcolm to Boston, to get on a ship. He was headed for England, to get away. He traveled to Barcelona, through Europe, back to Spain. He'd send me matches and spare change from around the world. His postcard from Fez said, 'I must confez that Fez is fezinating.'

He went to Canada for a while and lived on Leonard Cohen's couch. He asked Leonard Cohen to write my grandmother letters and he would, the dryest things I've seen.

I turned 9, 10, 11 and in the summers my mother would drive me to the train station in Salem to meet Mal. He and I would train to Gloucester, we'd walk a few miles to Good Harbor Beach then walk back to town. I'd be tired, whining and he'd be talking, oblivious to me. Mal never talked about himself and he didn't tell stories, but he did all the talking. Beauty, sex, the world, in a New England drawl that had a rhythm and rumble like nothing I'd heard. I'd listen, most of it going over my head. In town we'd hit a fisherman's bar, his favorite, and he'd drink cognac and I'd drink fake coffee, lots of milk and a little caffeine. By his eighth cognac I'd be shaking, afraid to use the bathroom, the little bits of coffee adding up to a blood running jolt, and he'd still be talking. "There's a big difference between being bright and being smart," he'd say. My feet would throb. He'd check out the waitress and her ass, then any female ass that passed by the bar, talking, talking, talking.

He'd disappear again, back to Montreal, to Barcelona. He was always writing. Malcolm never stopped writing.

When I was 13 I came home from school and saw a tent pitched in the backyard. Mal was staying there with his new girlfriend. Two days later they were gone; a year later he was back in the tent with a new girlfriend. He wouldn't stay in the house, but would come in to eat. He was like a wild animal, never to be tamed by normal.

My mother and her brothers, they were all a little wacky. A little nuts. Maybe one or two could even be diagnosed as having a touch of mental illness. Each had their eccentricities, all contained under the umbrella of their equally eccentric mother, my grandmother. There were no father figures. All the husbands and fathers, including mine, died young.

When I was a full on teenager, sitting at a drive-in high with my friends, screaming my head off as Jason slashed his way down Elm Street, the ballet of blood flying two stories high, I remembered that woman with the hook through her gut and saw he was right.

I went away to college. His brothers and sister didn't see him that much. Malcolm now lived with his mother, on her couch, and if they came to visit he'd be sure to be gone. He was the favorite and I sensed they envied Mal. Their mother, my grandmother, was one of those women who you could never really know, her self-sufficiency was so thick. Maybe they thought he finally broke through her crust, but the way I saw it, there wasn't a crust to break through. It's hard for me to say this, why I'm not sure, but my mother, her brothers and mother had a narcissism so encompassing, so complete, that in time it became almost became endearing. Almost.

He loved that I went to art school. I knew this because he started stealing art books and sending them to me. About five years after I moved here he came to visit. It was another ten years before I saw him again.

All our family except me thought he was crazy. He didn't work, had no money, no phone number, and the few clothes he had were my father's, given to Mal after my father died. All Mal had was a typewriter, which he wrote on daily. He'd still travel now and then, moving through the world alone. He still lived at his mother's and was supposedly using a room at Salem State University to write in.

From the late '80s to mid '90s I called my grandmother every Sunday. Only once in a great while would Mal get on the phone. He didn't like talking on one, and instead he would sometimes loudly comment on whatever she said to me, then I'd comment back and she'd pass what I said to him. My grandmother would end up in the middle of this abstract phone call, her sense of practicality up in arms.

Mal was robust and his walk was an inch from swagger. When he wasn't writing, he was walking. Occasionally, people my mother knew would see him. A friend of her's saw him walking down Lafeyette Street in a lab coat with a doctor's name stitched on the pocket. He probably stole it out of a science lab at the college. Mal was handsome, doubly so in a crisp white lab jacket, and as women smiled hello he'd nod back, then gesture as if he had rounds to get to.

He was self publishing at this point, printing typed copies of books and selling them to libraries, universities, McGill. I think he was starting to feel troubled inside. I got a call that he disappeared from his mother's house, no one could find him. Two weeks later he showed up after living on the streets in Boston. My uncle Harvey drove down and put him in the Danvers State Hospital, an asylum in my hometown that was a Gothic terror, all spires and gargoyles. I knew it well; when my friends and I were teenagers we used to eat mescalin and sneak in at night to scare the shit out of ourselves.

He checked himself out of Danvers State after six weeks and told me he was doing research for a play. He seemed normal as sunshine, at least to me.

My grandmother eventually went into a nursing home and Mal would sleep in a chair in her room during the day. When they reno'd the nursing home and had to move her he was found living in the construction trailer. When she died he needed help and my mother and uncles wouldn't help him. Granted, he was so far off the grid it took chance to find him. Once when I was up there visiting from NY my mother and I drove around Salem looking everywhere, without luck.

I started Googling him, trying to find him. There'd be occasional sightings in Salem -- he'd be seen rolling up Essex Street or somewhere in Salem center. Supposedly he looked okay, like he was staying somewhere.

There was a rumor he had a girlfriend and lived with her.

The next few years my mother got sick, I started going up there a lot, she got sicker and in 2010 died. Shortly after, I resumed looking for him online, then started looking online in the local Salem papers. He was once donned the 'Poet of Salem' and maybe he'd be donned something else in print. Over the next couple of months I kept searching, and then I found a letter to the editor of the Salem News. It was signed Malcolm Miller:

February 28, 2011

To the Editor:

Salem's new motto, "still making history," is brilliantly puzzling. Opening a new yarn shop or restaurant is not exactly making history. While tourism dollars exist, so do people's sense of the mystery of being alive moment by moment without having to "make history."

Malcolm Miller Salem

There he was! I still couldn't find an address for him, but every few months there'd be a new letter published. It's how I tracked him. A few favorites:

February 20, 2013

To the Editor:

Is there anything sadder than talk shows? Is there anything more revealing of the banality of opinions? Silence, you are an improvement.

Malcolm Miller Salem

March 29, 2013

To the Editor:

Despite the media trying like anything to declare a great reckoning and powerful moment in church history, the truth is somewhat different and intrudes awkwardly as we pass closed churches. We have come to a historical crossroad at which the presence of God will rise in a new, greater way or disappear forever. The official church is not as alive as the sunlight tingling the late-winter air with gold. The poetry of being alive has won out over doctrine.

Malcolm Miller Salem

His letters also started showing up in the Jewish Journal, otherwise known as 'Your Community Newspaper.' My favorite of all, dated January 30, 2014:

MY COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER?

I have read the entire January 16 edition of the Journal and found no mention of me. Something is wrong. Please correct this shortcoming.

I got into a bi-monthly rhythm where I'd look for him and his letters. Reading his words I could hear his voice; he was as alive on the page as he had been in the flesh. He had such an influence on me; I'd be so excited to find a letter. I was looking for a clue to where he might be, I so wanted to see him. In November I did my usual search and instead I found his obituary. He had died in September.

Stunned, shocked - I was sure I'd see him again. Malcolm was invulnerable, to the world around him, to poverty, to what I imagined was a lack of love. I always thought Sandra dying made him eternally restless. He never spoke of it. I had hoped to sit with him with my own presence fully emerged, to be with Mal as Mal was, as I was. The enormity of his death also drove home that he was the last of my mother's immediate family. Now they were all gone.

A memorial was happening a few days after I found his obit, and I wasn't able to go. A week later I looked online for any record of it and found something written by a retired English professor from Salem State College, Rod Kessler. I found an address for him and reached out. Rod wrote back and we started writing.

Mal had been self-publishing books - hand writing poems and making copies of them, then dropping them off in mail slots to English professors at a local community college. He'd include a note: if you like the poems, please send $5 to a PO Box. Rod was one of the professors. He didn't read the poems, but over the years sent $5 whenever he received a booklet. Then Mal wrote a note to all that he was 80 (he was 83 when he died) and the booklet of poems they were receiving may be his last.

This spurred Rod to read them and when he did he was impressed. He started reading all of them, then asked Mal to come and speak at the college. Mal wouldn't, citing his health, but I imagine Mal wouldn't do this anyway. Rod visited him once, I believe they stayed in touch via letters, and then Rod got the call that Mal was found dead by his Meals on Wheels person. Rod was one of his emergency contacts.

Mal's other emergency contact, Peter Urkowitz, worked in the library at Salem State. Mal lived in public housing the last few years of his life (the same housing my grandmother lived in), but I learned that prior to this Mal would write all night in a coffee shop, then sleep in the library at Salem State. When Mal burned out his typewriter and couldn't afford a new one, Peter lent Mal his apartment every morning so Mal could go in and use his typewriter.

Two weeks ago there was a huge poetry festival in Salem and Rod wanted to do a panel on Malcolm. He asked me to come and speak, and I did. Joe and Ginger came with me and came to the panel, and it was so meaningful to see Mal celebrated, to hear people read his poetry, to see him loved. I don't know how he would have felt about it. Chances are he wouldn't have shown up.

Prior to the festival Joe and I and Ginger went to the cemetery and for the first time I saw my parents graves side by side. I have enough grief writing this one, so I'll save that story for another time.

A few of Mal's poems, from an anthology Rod Kessler put together for the panel:

dilemma

a lousy soul has just chucked

a stupid bottle that once held

a soft drink onto a perfect

beautiful grass lawn

I am at first startled

and angered by this and almost

blame the bottle

then I grow aware it is also

has a certain beautiful

shapely existence

I gaze at it with pleasure

strangely I can’t retain now

my rage at the piggish lout

who threw the bottle

I should and I am unsteadied

by this whole experience

        Your Life is Over, 2007, p. 12

---

crimes

a little old lady in Boston

town had her hand

bag torn away from her shoulder

the culprit made

off down back alleys

all she had in it was a small

new testament

the culprit out of curiosity

read it over and over

now he does more damage

as a preacher man

than he did on the streets

of Boston

robbing and hitting

how about that

Poems, July 2012, p. 31

---

the rice

I saw a just married couple emerging

from a church on a beautiful sunny day

and friends threw rice

you know

to ensure fertility or something

but the rice got in the groom's eye

he had to be rushed to the hospital

the honeymoon was called off

he was lucky not to lose the eye

now a year later the divorce is underway

I am plagued by thoughts

the rice did it

I want to find out

my curiosity is almost painful

how can I find out?

No Dust Can Gather on the Mouths of Women, 2009, p. 54

---

some things

are too

true to

be right

once it took meaning

to stop despair

now a tree will do

a flash of sun on water

at times nothing

is better than something

most people are not serious

only careful

instead of winning 8

straight why don't

the boston red sox

read my poetry

 No Dust Can Gather on the Mouths of Women, 2009, p.6

---

BUT

there is a speck

of gold in all

that sand

but you have to spend

so much of your life

failing grain

by grain to find it

the River of Muddied Water Bears Gold, 1994, p. 50

---

letter to the world

I am spending a day

of beautiful indolence

at home alone

the fan is whirring

I am in this heat bereft

of duds and duties

a beachcomber under a palm

tree who catches

a falling coconut

splits it neatly and drinks

the cool milky beverage

outside it is sun

struck and clammy

as I spend a day of beautiful

indolence gazing

at my little sky

I have removed the smoke

detector from the ceiling

a criminally expensive

cigar is being patiently

destroyed by a gentleman

within me who writes poems and hopes

you are well

The Good Rain of Canada, 1994, p.30

I never thought trying to find a house to buy would be this tough.

The most recent place we found was a barn that had been partially converted for living. It needed a lot of work, but it was affordable. Joe reached out to the broker, the work it needed wasn't daunting, and we started talking about going upstate to see it. Then, in an aerial view, I saw a large installation of buildings a quarter-mile up the road. Streetview revealed nothing, so I started researching what the buildings might be. It turned out to be a 'bionics' laboratory, which means lots of testing on rats and mice. We're leaving NY to get away from the rats, not to live amongst nuclear ones that may have escaped. The barn went off our list.

I fell in love with a late 1800's Italianate with a giant porch. It's in the middle of a charming village in the Catskills, in a quiet town an artist I know lives in. I called her and we spoke for almost an hour about how great the area is, how brutal the winters, hows it's easy to get to NYC, about the theatre and creative community. At the end of our conversation she casually mentioned how "the downtown area floods every five years or so and it's still a mess from the last flood." Poof went the Italianate.

In the same town was an amazing old Federal style brick commercial building. It sits where the floods roar in.

It's not that we're not aware of flooding. Our house hunting trip to Catskill made us very aware of flooding and we now check everything against FEMA floodmaps to see what's in the flood zone. What we're finding, though, is water doesn't always go where it has in the past. Even though new maps are being drawn up, not everything that floods shows up as being in the flood zone. (During Hurricane Sandy, the water came exactly to where the New York City flood map showed it would. We watched the whitecaps wave across Hudson Street from our living room.)

Over the last few months we found a house that had a massive power station hidden just up the road, and another house that turned out to be near land that may become a giant wind farm. I started reading the notes from the town council meetings and discovered projects for a pipeline and an even bigger power station that are in the works, though these could take years. Friends who bought a house in a town I love said they can hear farm turbines and other machinery from half a mile away. When the wind blows a certain way they can even smell it. They don't mind, though, and rack it up to country living.

NYC is loud and ripe and lately all I can hear are sirens and horns. When I ask friends upstate about quiet they laugh and say nothing's as noisy as the quiet. But it's a great quiet: the birds wake them at 4:30 and when the volunteer fire dept. horn blares at noon it's a unifiying sound, not an intrusion. We're getting to the point where we have to do our due diligence and then hope for the best. But I'm cutting and running at rats. Especially bionic ones.