Fortune’s Pawn

Pawn had dinner tonight with sister HG and an unexpectedly large number of book titles were spontaneously birthed as a result.  Here are three of them (copyright © 2008, all rights reserved):

Luminary Misfits

A Nasty Tussle in June

Jesus Has Two Mommies

I won’t go into all of the back stories or plot lines of these titles.  But there you have it.

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It’s four o’clock in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. That is probably not the best way to start a story, so let’s back up a little bit and start over.

I first met Nell a few days ago. I have just moved house, to a large and rambling apartment building near the railroad tracks in that part of town, they call it the Fifth Ward, where the Bohemian artists and the down and out of society mix freely. It’s a part of town whose real pulse is best taken at night, late at night, but seemingly quiet at, say, 10:30 in the morning. I have just lost my job at the paper, and picked up a few classes to teach at university. The apartment is cheap, and I will be able to get by on that salary and this rent.

The building is a four story walk-up, my unit is one of four on the second floor. Most of the buildings in this neighborhood are industrial, but this one was actually built as apartments. “The Hawthorne” is the name over the main entrance, but I, as most of the tenants, use the side door, off the litter strewn parking lot.

David calls shortly before my move. He’ll be in town for Father’s Day and asks if he can stay with me. You can stay in my apartment, I tell him, my new apartment, but it will be empty – I’m in the process of moving right now. That works for him, and he even helps me move a few of my things over. There isn’t much, really. I’ve been shedding possessions of late, part of an abortive plan to move overseas. I still may move, but that was the impetus to get rid of much of the accumulated material cruft with which one surrounds oneself over time. I still kept many books, an old typewriter of my mother’s, and my laptop. An old leather easy chair, in which I like to write, and a wonky footstool are what we are moving the night I first meet Nell.

The first thing that strikes me about this diminutive figure is her large head. Not large in and of itself, but large for her small, slender body. She has close-cropped black hair, almost spiky, with little elfin locks curling down before her ears. Her close-set dark eyes often peer out from under her brow, her face tilted down towards her feet, as though heavy. That brow carries thin, but not plucked, eyebrows, with a few hairs on the bridge of her upturned nose, revealing the eastern European heritage which most surely lay in her past. She has a slight frame, and her shoulders hunch forward when she thinks no one is looking, but she has a proud carriage otherwise. About 50 years old, maybe a bit less, but I can’t really be sure. Her face has a way of lighting up when she thinks she has impressed you, but can turn dark and cloudy with her mood. A black sweatshirt, with arms so long that they shroud her hands like a monk’s cowl, overlap the waist of her maroon jeans, themselves belted with an old tie.

She shuffles towards us in her slippers, looking through some mail, and almost absentmindedly holds the door open for us. She looks up, though, as we carry the chair and footstool through the door. Her eyes have an almost mischievous cast to them as she introduces herself in a voice weighted with years of smoking but still lyrical, “I’m Nell – 4A. What a gloriously disheveled chair you have there. I’m sure he has an interesting story in him.” A few, I assure her. “I’d shake your hand and properly introduce myself, but this glorious chair would tumble. I’m Nic, just moving into 2C.” She smiles and I get the first whiff of her subtly beguiling nature as she tilts her head down in that way and peers up at me from under her brow. She holds the door, and we, David and I, finish getting the chair through. As the door closes behind me David says he thinks she is hitting on me. I don’t know if that’s so, but there is something, that’s for sure.

Moving boxes with David the next day we run into Nell again. She offers to serve us tea in her rooms. “I’ve got the fourth floor to myself, I do my work here as well,” she says, as we climb the creaky back stairs behind her. She has an odd way of climbing stairs: she takes a step with one foot then brings the other up to meet it, then takes the next step with that other foot. In this way, right foot up, left foot follows, then left foot up, right foot following. This makes for an odd rhythm as the three of us ascend those old stairs.

Unlike the other floors, the fourth floor has no hallway or lobby, the stairs just empty out at her back door. She fumbles with a key chain which has a large number of keys on it, a pink feather for a fob and one of those stretchy plastic bands which some women use to hang keys from their arm when they don’t have a purse with them. She could never hang this key chain from her arm though, it would take all of the stretch out of that band.

The door opens into an almost empty room. There is an old green love seat, almost looks as though from an airport with its strongly geometrical style. A matching side chair and a low coffee table complete the grouping. That’s it; three small pieces in a room which many would consider a large living room. It echoes it is so spare. I comment on the sparseness and the echoes. “An empty room inspires an active mind to rest, I find.” she replies. “Sometimes I need that, with what I do.”

“What do you do?” David asks.

“I’m an artist,” says Nell, and offers him a business card pulled from her pocket, that key chain rattling and jingling the whole time. He looks it over and slips it into his own pocket.

“How many units are on this floor?” I ask. “Just mine.” she replies. “I don’t know why, but the building was built this way, with one large apartment on the top. I love it though, for my studio space.” This last is said as we make our way through another room and into a long hallway. There are many doors along that hallway, some with several locks on them. We are approaching the front of the building and the hallway leads us to her studio space, a long room which must span the entire width of the building and has several tall windows along the western wall which look out over the tops of the mostly lower manufacturing concerns and parking lots around us. The sodium-vapor lights from the lots down below cast an eerie dull-orange glow which comes up through those tall windows and illuminates the ceiling more brightly than the rest of the room.

“Let me show you my latest work,” she says, and she must have flicked a switch somewhere, for the room suddenly has more lights on. It is still dark, but there are pools of light in the otherwise shadowy room. I can make out a couple of figures in the shadows. They are almost in silhouette when, with another switch, more lights. I can now clearly see a pair of statues, one of a man seated on a tall stool, another a man placing a box upon a tall shelf which isn’t there, almost like mime. They are wonderfully lifelike, as I view them from the distance. As I approach one, however, I sense some movement. Then it strikes me, these are living! Surely, they are men, they hold poses, and have been carefully dressed and made up, as for a photo shoot or to sit for an artist, but they are now living statues.

I cannot say for sure how it developed, I am a little foggy on the details, but Nell took on a different demeanor once we crossed the threshold into her apartment. She becomes stronger willed, almost imperious. She doesn’t ask, she tells. She veritably orders us around, and no longer peers out from under her brow, but rather holds her head up and looks down her nose. She is strong, and we comply. Shortly after we enter the studio a young woman enters the room. “Bring tea, Hilda. Three cups.” orders Nell. “Bring the pot, and some honey. That new Earl Grey, that’s what we’ll have, for Mr. Nic and Mr. David.” “Get a move on it, girl.” she snaps. Looking quite frightened, Hilda even curtsies as she leaves the room.

“I was wondering if you would be so kind,” she starts, addressing me. “I’ve needed to rearrange this furniture a bit for the longest time.” We are standing near one end of the long narrow studio space with our tea. David is perusing the bookshelf and trying not to look at the stoic, seated figure near him – that statue on the stool. Hilda hovers, nervously, near the periphery. There is a long, low couch with a gray woven throw over it, and many neutral colored pillows. Next to it are a couple of tables and a large white upholstered ottoman. The corner and fully one third of the ottoman are under one of these tables. “I’d like that ottoman over in front of the couch here,” said Nell. “We moved it when I was working on a piece recently and I just can’t seem to move it back myself.”

I feel something, as she says those words, which tells me that she would never have even tried to move it herself. She isn’t given to acts of toil, there are other people to do work. She just directs. I take that direction, however, without even a thought of will. I put down my tea cup and move towards the ottoman. It is one of those large square pieces, about four feet across. It’s not too large for me to heft it alone, but it is awkward. As I pick it up I have to slide it out from under one of the tables. I hear a mew, and notice a kitten, as white as the ottoman itself, sitting on the corner which had been under the table. Where a cat would have jumped off of the now moving ottoman, the kitten just hunches down and cries in fear. Hilda sweeps in and grabs it. As she just as swiftly moves away I see that she has dropped a note before my eyes.

“Help, we’re prisoners.” is all it says.

I’m not thinking as I read it, aloud, but once I realize the meaning of those words I look up and see a hard look in Nell’s face. “What is the meaning of this?” exclaims David. I, still with that ottoman in my hands move towards Nell. The hard look in her eyes changes to fear, that fear of a cornered criminal, and she drops her tea upon the sofa and darts out of the room. “You foolish girl,” she hisses as she runs.

I hear a door slam as I drop the ottoman and head after her, David and Hilda hot on my heels. “You won’t catch her,” cries Hilda behind me, “they never do.” Nell is nowhere to be found. Most of the doors are locked, and quite sound. “Well, I don’t know that we care about her,” I say to David. “You’re welcome to come with us if you’re scared,” I tell Hilda. “I’m sure she can’t hurt you.” I confidently stroll towards the door to the back stairs. I hadn’t noticed, as we came in, just how sturdy it was, nor how many locks were on it.

“Nell, unlock this door!” I must have hollered that a hundred times that night as David and I tried to bust our way out of apartment 4A. Hilda didn’t even struggle, she just watched us, a mix of pity and fear, and defeat, upon her face.

As I said, it is four in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. I do not know when it was that I gave up. I don’t remember laying down with Hilda, but I awoke with her alongside me, her head firmly pressed into my left shoulder. “Where’s Nell?” I ask as I wipe the sleep from my eye with my right hand. I then look down at Hilda but she isn’t there. It was a nightmare, I realize, just a nightmare.

I push back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, both hands reaching back to rub my sore lower back.

You’d be surprised just how stiff you can get from holding a pose all day long.

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Pawn has moved this past weekend, and just wants to share a few words about that.

Here they are:

That night. That cold crisp night that he watched the comet streak overhead. That night was the last that he could be said to have been responsible for his own actions. Not that he had exercised any great care in living his life up until this point. It’s just that in that strange and generous calculus which we apply to the decision making powers of the artistic class, he had been cut a lot of slack. Up until the night that comet cut a gash in the night sky and everything changed.

She wasn’t with him then, not sharing his appreciation for late night walks in the less than safe neighborhood in which they dwelt. She was back in the flat starting another novel and finishing another bottle of merlot. That is how it was, in those days; she, his erstwhile muse, had no muse of her own save bottle and book, while he, numb and tired of losing her every night to those twins, he strode away each night to find some peace within.

There was no peace without, it was all traffic noise and loud conversation in the immigrant heavy district. It was a symphony in rare parts - the low hum of the sodium-vapor lights, the rich indecipherable patois emanating from the myriad open windows, the staccato rhythm of the tram wheels as they teased and taunted the edges of the cobblestone that still poked up in several sections of the aging pavement. On top of all of that was the static crackle of the power arcing from the overhead lines to the commutators of the trams themselves. A festival of sounds spanning a century converged in his little part of creation and drew him out of himself and away from the tempestuous storm which was brewing in the synapses of his drunken muse back home, back at the flat, steeping herself in cheap reds and that special sense of betrayal which age visits upon those whose ambition has been left behind.

The comet, he did not know, was early. He was no student of these things, of astronomy, nor did he have any special interest in the facts behind it. He knew only that as he walked east there was a smudgy line arcing across the sky which he could not recall having seen before. Comets are known for their punctuality, they are the timekeepers of the heavens, in the sense of the apito; that whistle blown to keep the Amazonian rivers of musicians in Carnivalé parade on tempo. Much as the leader toots the apito as he runs up and down the length of the bataria to keep all those drummers in sync, the comets race around the firmament keeping all of the celestial watches synchronized. Until that night.

All of the best minds in science agreed that comet Shinberg-Takie was not due until 21:13 Zulu Time on 3 February. Shinberg-Takie had other plans it seemed. He did not understand this, nor would he come to appreciate the peculiar effects it was to have on his life as he entered into the gravitational tug of the comet that night. It was 10:45 on the 2^nd of February when he left for his stroll, and Shinberg-Takie was already making a show in the eastern sky.

At 6:35 that evening, the large dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was trained towards the eastern heavens. It operated in concert with much smaller optical telescopes from Yerkes to Griffith Park and points all over the globe as astronomers and astrophysicists struggled to understand how their eagerly awaited guest could possibly have arrived a full day early. One young graduate student in Berkeley’s sleepy astronomy department was watching the screens that night and before anyone else had noticed, he was already aware of the odd pull of ST-2008. He could no longer be held accountable either. He was already looking eastward, and waiting.

It was 8:35 in Rio and the stout yet fearsome bataria leader could not find his apito. How, he worried, would his beloved bataria sound without the steadying rhythmic guidance of his apito? The light in the eastern sky barely even registered as he, too, entered into its metaphysical orbit.

Shinberg-Takie had captured three souls by 21:45 Zulu. They all looked to the east and waited.

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The following is a piece I originally wrote on September 11, 1990. I was sitting on the foredeck of a houseboat, going upstream on the Mississippi River with my friend X, and about 15 other close friends. That was a very important weekend to me, as I learned a lot on that trip. I have a wonderful photo that either X or F took of me that trp. I will append this post with that photo if I am able to find it soon.

In any event, the reason I am posting such an old piece of prose is that while I was away in London and Prague recently, I kept thinking about the sentiment, contained herein, of documentary living. Everything recounted in this story happened to me during that very long Labor Day weekend in 1990.

Here it is, make of it what you may…

Whenever I see you, you’re reading. How many stories have you lived? How many words are in your soul? Do you digest all of these expressions and prose, make them part of you, or are they like bath water, washing over you and then rinsed away. These words, these souls, these lives which you consume like so many hors-devours at a nickel buffet, do they satiate you in some way? Some way that your own life does not?

A character in a book I once read escaped, ran for miles to be free. Does this happen to you? Escape? Or is it a grounding experience? When I was a child, my mother would read to me. I escaped, I left my own life and entered that of the character in the story of the moment. It was freeing - listening to the sound of my mother’s voice, closing my eyes and realizing another life. As I grow older, I sometimes find escape again in the pages of a book, imagine her voice, but it lacks - I cannot close my eyes or the story ends.

Does your story end? Is that why you read so much, like a chain smoker who won’t allow for a moment without a lit cigarette in their hand, you put down one story and take up another. Are you afraid of your own, or are you so comfortable with it - having crafted it from all that you have read from others?

As life races past me at freeway speeds, I try to capture some of my reflections in the written word. Like the mirror I face in the morning, they remind me of how much I’ve already died. Every day they have made me a prisoner, held me for a handsome reward. Since the first time I recounted my experiences on a piece of paper, I find myself writing those words in my mind as I experience - Documentary Living.

A light fog lies in the valleys at night. The full moon paints it an eerie blue. I’ve traveled these roads sometime before. I know the curves, the signs, the lines which twist beside me as I drive. The road rises and falls before my eyes, like your chest as you sleep beside me.

The night sky closes around me like the coat clutched tight on a winter day. The only sound I hear is my own scream lost in the wind blown past my window, the road passed under my wheels, the tree lines lost from view, the cigarette which now is ash. A voice on the radio tells me the time, announces a song, reads the news.

I’ve put eight hundred miles of rattles on these bones in the last two days. Eight hundred miles of driving through other people’s realities, other people’s homes and villages, other people’s pathos. The midnight sky outside hides the cold of fall under a veil of summer stars. I cannot close the window although I keep the heater on. The radio plays loud.

A verse turns over, again and again in my mind, as I drive. The steady rhythm of the road provides a frame for me to fill, the night - a canvas to place there. The words seem to flow in and out of my thoughts as if from nowhere - I know not the inspiration for their presence, nor the excuse for their leave.

I once read that dreaming is just what part of our brain does to occupy time as the rest of it carefully files our day’s experience into the deeper cubby holes of our minds. People can die from lack of sleep. Is it sleep they lack, or dreams? Is it that our brains get snowed under from all of these experiences, and forget how to make us breath?

As I drive, I feel as though that part of my brain which handles these menial filing chores has decided that this is as good a time as any to get the job done, and does so. I am not dreaming though, I am wide awake and driving a car, as the odd snippets of the past several days’ experiences drift across my consciousness on their way to permanent storage.

One of them goes like this:

I saw the astronauts sleeping, tucked tight in their little sacks and Velcro-ed to the wall, their hands floating before them in space like unnecessary appendages. I felt like an interloper, a peeping Tom, invading their space-bound womb, to see them all drift as fetuses in the amniotic fluid of a deep sleep. Over their heads, through the windows, I saw the earth. A patchwork quilt of cloud and clear. I felt very very small, and floated, like their hands, like an unnecessary appendage.

And another, like this:

I am sitting in a fiberglass car, an old fashioned Hupmobile, being dragged along a track, serenaded by the rantings and ravings of a maniacal horse on a tinny loudspeaker. The buggy turns, first one way and then the other, revealing to me a view of the world I would never have expected existed. Pathetic statuettes, animated and gesticulating wildly, enact various moving tableau, recreating a sickening history of mankind’s foibles with his cars.

Children cry and their mothers sob with frustration as the derelict plants and factories, long since abandoned for some capitalist cause, stand as testament to their hardships and suffering. But me, I’m trapped in this buggy, with this ranting horse, watching as a plaster of Paris American eagle fans its wings at me, declaring the importance of the car in creating a united country, its tattered wingtips threatening to fall off at any moment.

As I ride, I ponder whose nightmare is this? What mind conceived of this, and are they getting therapy? Later, having a drink by the ferris wheel, it leaves me numb.

I did not intend to drive this far, this long. I took a wrong turn right out of the parking lot. I don’t know if it was pride or a sense of adventure which led me to continue and not turn back earlier. I crossed the state line about ten miles out, and that was over half an hour ago. As I drive now I try to convince myself that I am just skirting the border. I have no way of knowing if that is true - I have no map, there is no sun to guide me, I cannot even see the Northern star through my windshield. As the signs proclaim “Chicago - 58 miles,” I just trust.

At first I screamed at every intersection with a road I did not know. Now, however, I enjoy it. It is a lovely night for a drive: the road is new, the weather brisk, the radio adequate. The sky is pitch dark, except for a crisp, full moon. My heart is full with possibility and my head is soft with the smooth flow of a dreamy consciousness. I know I will be home in time for work tomorrow, that is not even a question, and beyond that I do not care. For now, I am drunk with the drive and the night and the memory of your smile.

That is enough.

These are all words which have been written across the blackboard of my mind, waiting patiently in a queue, ’til now, to be moved to paper.

I guess the day will come when I will write my life before it happens. Will you read it then? Will you tell me what my experiences will be like, warning me of those which lack literary merit? Or is my destiny more like that of the bath water.

Ther you have it. X, what do you think?

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Two people, each a giant in his field, and true pioneers, both passed away recently. Pawn was deeply influenced by both. Joseph Weizenbaum, pioneer in artificial intelligence and skeptic of technology’s role in human affairs passed away on March 5th, and Gus Giordano, pioneer in jazz dance and an extraordinarily gifted correographer passed away on March 9th.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times obituary of Weizenbaum:

Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1965 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines.

The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client’s statements as questions.

In fact, the responsiveness of the conversation was an illusion, because Eliza was programmed simply to respond to certain key words and phrases. That would lead to wild non sequiturs and bizarre detours, but Mr. Weizenbaum later said that he was stunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details.
Joseph Weizenbaum, Famed Programmer, Is Dead at 85 - New York Times

A friend and mentor introduced me to Eliza in 1976, about a decade after its conception, and it opened my eyes to what could be done with what are now called human machine interface facilities (commonly referred to as UI). Much of my professional work with technology, whether in computer fields or in exhibit development have been influenced by those early lessons.

In 1980 I had the honor to work on several dance performances with Gus Giordano Dance Chicago, when they came to the humble Metropole Theater in Milwaukee where I did lighting and tech work at the time. Here is an excerpt from the Times’ obituary of Giordano:

Mr. Giordano was best known through the performing of his company, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, founded in 1962 and based in Evanston, and through his teaching at dance conventions throughout the United States.

The company, now directed by Nan Giordano, his daughter, is said to have been the first dance troupe to dedicate itself solely to jazz dance. The company’s programs featured pieces by Mr. Giordano and later, as he grew older, included dances by guest choreographers including Mia Michaels and Davis Robertson. The performers became known for their strong training, energy and hard-driving, precise way of moving.

“Their sleek lines and high, silent jumps had the feel of a well-oiled 1958 Chevrolet Impala, a pure expression of another era and something we remember as historically sexy,” Erika Kinetz wrote in 2005 in The New York Times, reviewing “Giordano Moves,” a tribute presented at the 14th annual Jazz Dance World Congress in Chicago.
Gus Giordano, 84, Innovator of Modern Jazz Dance, Is Dead - New York Times

Pawn remembers Gus as friendly and open, and very respectful. He had already won his Emmy award by the time I met him, but was gracious and down to earth. His company loved him, and it showed in the enthusiasm of their performances. I always looked forward to their arrival at the theater, and learned a lot about lighting design working on those shows.

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I imagine myself to be a simple enough man. I am not given to epiphany with great regularity, nor am I given to cypher. I am probably plain to a fault, and tend to expose too much of my inner world. I do not often have dreams which move me. I had one last night, and it is still resting heavy in my chest.

I will, no I must, try to record what I dreamed in order to lighten this weight. I am on an airplane right now, flying somewhere over Canada on my way home from a month in London. I went to try to find myself, and in some ways I have. I have a better sense of who I am right now than I long have. I once again feel a level of confidence which I once carried like a shield but which has been missing for too long now. But this dream.

Before I left on my trip I wrote my ex-wife a letter about an essay I had read. No, not really about the essay, but about how my own experiences have left me in a different place than that author. That essay was by a woman who had lost her father when she herself was already an adult. In her map of the universe there were places which she associated with her father, places from which she had stayed away, as though they were off limits to her. There was his Brooklyn, and there was hers. Only after he passed had she allowed herself to venture too far into his Brooklyn.

I wrote that I had a very different map than she. In my map of the universe my father occupies times and not places. I do not think of a place and say “That’s my fathers” (fill in the blank). I think of times, “When my father was alive we…” I can no more venture into those times than could H. G. Wells without his time machine. I could not understand, I couldn’t relate to what this woman wrote, but she wrote it beautifully and it did make me think to recount in writing an event of which I had never written before - my father’s death in my 13th year. This I did in painful detail, and I cried while I wrote it. I suspect she cried when she read it. Later, when I cleaned up the letter and put it on my website, I suspect that other people cried when they read it. I did not intend to make people cry, I just had to get that account out of my system, and I had.

This was all in prelude to my month-long trip to London, and it served as a sort of cathartic warm up. In London I took a day to go and try to find my father’s London, and ended up finding how much the world changes in 60 years. Instead I found myself, or part of myself, and had a new catharsis. That prelude piece had ended in my admission that in a way I had always blamed my mother and her pack-rat tendencies for his death. I don’t know how aware I have ever been of this, but it must have been there and it came out full force as I wrote that memoir. I shudder to think of my siblings reading that and what they may now think of me.

But my dream really startled me, for in my dream I found myself confronting those demons directly in way I have never imagined one could in a dream. Here then is that dream, make of it what you will.

I am 45 years old now, middle aged. My marriage of 12 years failed, though there were many good years and much happiness, there was an unhappy period which came over me and by annex my marriage, commencing a few years ago, roughly coinciding with my mother’s final illness and ultimate death. After her illness, death and the administering of her estate I never really get back to enjoying my life as it was. Too much has changed. I cannot even see what is different or what is wrong, I am just sublimely unhappy.

But now I am a teenager again, I am in my mother’s living room and the room is clean, something it had not been since my father passed away. This in part is how I place my own age, as I cannot see myself. I am in a clean living room so I must be a teenager. The doorbell rings and someone answers. My father is at the door. He has been dead for five years now, and has come to talk about that. My mother comes out from the kitchen and they have the same little kiss on the lips with which they would greet each other every time he came home. My mother wore an apron and tea was soon served. We sat and chatted; my father, a neighbor, some other people. I was there, but I cannot recall any of my four siblings being in the room.

Dad asks for a glass of water. Oh my god, I cannot explain, but his voice is just the same, that thin reedy voice with the palest of English accents, the almost singsong lilt. My heart jumps as I offer to go get him one.

The kitchen is a mess, it is not clean like when dad was alive, it is a horrid, unlivable mess as I remember it from visits to mom 10 or so years after dads death. I am caught in a Sisyphean struggle to find a clean cup, or a cup I can clean, or something to clean a cup with, or …

My mother comes into the kitchen. She is still wearing her apron but is now as she was in the era of the kitchen looking like this, she is as she was at 60, not the 47 she was when dad died. I look at her with contempt and frustration. Dad is out there, in the other room, and if only she could keep house I would be there with him instead of trapped in this kitchen trying in vein to get him a cup of water. How long have I got, will he still be there when I get back? She is old now, will he be gone? Is the dream over? The dream, the dream

Yes, the dream. It slips away as I realize that I have been dreaming. I try to fetch it back, but I will never go back into the living room with a glass of water. I have failed. All I have done is find contempt for my mother, who certainly didn’t deserve it.

That is how I awoke at 4:00 this morning. I never really did get back to sleep properly, and a couple hours later was getting up to go to the airport and fly home. We will land shortly, so I must power down and stow my computer. Much to think about I guess.

Maybe I’ll sleep on it.

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A funny thing happened to me today.  Let me tell you about it.

I had my last full day in London today.  I leave tomorrow on an 11:something flight, which means I must be on the westbound train to Paddington by a little after 8:00.  So, what to do for my last day?  I came here in part to have some business meetings, and I had finally managed to nail one down for midday.  In preparation I slept well, having gotten to bed early last night after the whole Sister Wendy Chow Mein disaster.

I started off the day with a prepared breakfast at DÎN, around the corner.  This was a Halal take on a “Full English Breakfast”, a normally repugnant affair made better here by an utter lack of sausage (English sausage is best avoided) and no pitiful fried tomato.  It was rather good.  I spoiled myself by requesting a croissant rather than toast (75p extra) and by getting to both read The Independent and watch the BBC with sound, the first time I have enjoyed that on this trip.

It was a good day to have all this news. Last night saw the worst storm of the season hit, with 80mph winds, huge waves fed by Spring tides, and some major upsets in both the FA Cup soccer matches and the 6 Nations rugby tourney.  There was lots of news.

I have an Oyster Card, a magical RFID device which I just wave over a turnstile to let me on any train or bus in the capital, charged up for a full month of travel in zones one and two (central London and the immediate outskirts) but I opted to walk down to my meeting.  The weather was very strange; sunny one moment and raining the next - or both at the same time.  I kept taking out my brolly and stowing it again.

I stopped in at La Frommagerie to get some mints, and generally just ambled slowly through the crowds down towards my meeting spot in Soho.  A rather nice stroll, and the perfect way to spend my last day — no galleries, no ticket booths, just a nice walk.

Soon I was sitting in a Soho coffee shop, and then, when it went well, in a very nice Indian restaurant just a block off of Piccadilly Circus.  What was to have been a 30 minute get acquainted session turned into 2½ hours of rollicking good discussion, which I won’t go into here.  But I made a good friend, let’s leave it at that.

After leaving the restaurant and parting ways, I was left wondering how to complete my day, still young at only 2:40 pm or so.  Soon I had my answer when in a bracing wind I realised I had left my scarf behind at the restaurant.  A walk back yielded no scarf, much to the consternation of my hosts.  They were beside themselves trying to find it (It is cold sir, you need scarf, no?).  I waved off their concern.  I was feeling pretty good about things, and that was a really cheap scarf I had bought down in Petticoat Lane.  I deserve better, and since my dinner companion paid for my meal and tea, I decided I had some money to spend on a scarf.  I leave tomorrow, and I have more pounds in my pocket than I need to see me through.  Off to Saville Row I went.

Okay, Saville Row is intimidating.  This is where “Bespoke Suits” rule.  These are custom made suits which cost around £2,500 each.  This is not the place to buy a scarf even if you are feeling flush.  Their idea of flush has at least a couple more 0’s tucked onto the right hand side of the price tag.  I went a block over to Regent street where I found a lovely cashmere number for the right price.  Quite posh all the same.

I could have just walked back up towards home, or a closer tube station, but I thought I would like one more turn around Piccadilly Circus.  I am glad I did.  As I emerged from Soho into the Circus I saw an American couple pouring over their map.  “Welcome to my London” I thought, and thought to help them find what they needed.  I stopped myself, though.  Piccadilly Circus is one of those places that is typically filled with either tourists or hucksters.  If you get directions here they are likely to be tainted in some way, and most guides will tell you as much.  I realised that as well intended, any advice I gave may well be treated with suspicion.  Besides, I had made this very same map inspection several times — they will figure it out, and having done so once, will be better set to do so again.

I walked on by, and then it struck me: My London.  “Welcome to My London” I had thought.  Suddenly I stopped in my tracks, which in the middle of the Circus is not advised, and realised that I’d had an epiphany: my unspoken comment “Welcome to my London” put me squarely in camp with Alexandra Styron and her sensation, reported in her essay (which preceded my trip here and which I wrote about in my preamble over a month ago).  “My London;” I’ve realised that I have a London, I have my London; my view of the place, my streets I know backward and forward, my own internal map of the place, of the layout, the tube, the neighbourhoods.  It is limited, my London, but it is mine.  My father had his and now I have mine.  Just like Ms Styron and her father, they are not the same, and now I understand the sense of disconnectedness that she expressed between her Brooklyn and her father’s Brooklyn.

In my preamble I saw a gulf between her experience and my own, I now see that was myopic.  I just hadn’t gone far enough down the line to understand.

I spent the next hour or two walking my London.  I navigated effortlessly to Covent Garden where I shopped the antique stands.  I strolled The Strand and found a place that would actually make me a Martini (no small feat here, believe me).  I finally ducked into Charing Cross station and caught the Bakerloo home.  The last time on this trip I will take that line, that trusty train which is so much a part of My London.

Early back home, I settled in to take care of some updates to the blog, a nice cold supper to polish off my last bits of grocery, packing my bags.  And a nice relaxed night with myself and my new found comfort in my original hometown.  Fluent? I don’t know yet.  Comfortable? Most certainly.

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“My name is Aleck Bernstein and I am 46 years old. I was born in the borough of Stepney, London, England on June 19, 1922. My father, Harry, was a furrier, self employed, and some of my earliest recollections are of wandering through the workroom and seeing skins being stretched, cut and sewn. The workroom was situated on the 1st floor of the house in which we lived till l940. The house was a massive brick built 4 story row house. The house and most of its neighbours had been built in the late l9th century as residences for clipper ship captains.”

So begins an autobiographical folio my father wrote in 1969, when he was roughly my age, and it serves as my guide today as I leave the Whitechapel tube station and wander back in time.

First I need to navigate the present, and it is a very different one than my father ever knew. The district around Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Stepney, Bethnel Green and Mile End — in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets — is now mostly populated by immigrant families from the Near and Middle East. Going east from Whitechapel one sees Moroccan, Egyptian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, etc., almost like a map of that region shrunk down small and splayed over the Tower Hamlets, each ethnicity seems to have carved out a distinct area for themselves. I know it is not that cut and dry, but it appears so to an outsider, which I decidedly am.

A marketplace spills onto the pavement by the station in brightly coloured scarves and pashmina, vegetables and fruit, toys and appliances. Stalls are ill defined and the vendors are all touting their wares in so many tongues that it all blends together to my ears. Just a street market lullaby lolling the tots in prams to sleep while their mothers haggle over the goods.

I pass an ancient facade, an alms house for aged sailors and their widows and orphans, built in 1695. It stands in stark contrast to the market place I have just passed.

I spy a sign across the street which sums things up to me, “Halal Chinese Buffet Opening Soon” it declares:

Just past the restaurant I see a sign for Stepney Green Road, and that takes me closer backwards in time. I veer to the right.

I will not find my father’s birthplace here:

“In June, 1940 I returned to London having graduated from school, and it was while waiting to enter Medical School that the Battle of Britain air war started. Just before I was due to start school the house was badly damaged during a heavy night bombing attack concentrated on the London Docks. None of us were hurt but we had to be evacuated from the house and spent the remainder of the night in a shelter.”

They had survived by hiding under the basement stairway, escaping with a wheel barrow of their most important possessions, and never really lived in the house again. So I won’t find that house, but there are some survived the raids, and I can get a sense of what it looked like. Here’s one now:

The other thing I can do is explore his old haunts:

“I was the youngest of three brothers and indulged in the usual boyish pranks in my free time from school and Hebrew classes. As a boy, one of my favorite pastimes was to explore London. We lived on the outskirts of Chinatown and close to the London Docks. We were also not far from the Tower of London (within the boundaries of the borough) and The City. All of these, then, provided many sites to visit and explore, usually on foot.”

The City, the historic city limits of London defined by the old siege walls, is today’s financial district, and I have already been there to shop on Petticoat Lane and such. The Tower of London I have already seen. That leaves the docks (that Chinatown being long gone, subsumed into Whitechaple). Off I go, then, to the docks.

My experience of the docks is necessarily limited to those I can explore in today’s security context, which means the very public docks at Limehouse. Here are views from Narrow Street, a tow way along the banks of the Limehouse Cut and northern embankment of the river Thames. This is all posh shops and diners now, but is still a working tow way (see sign):

The Limehouse basin is now a hot district for condo style development, which spreads all the way down the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf. Quite a change from even a decade ago. Here are some of those developments:

After taking a few snaps of the visage of St. Elmo atop Our Lady Immaculate Catholic church I am ready to take my leave of this cathartic venture and traipse off towards Mile End station.

This is where the stumbling part comes in. I am doing a frightfully poor job of finding my way to the station. My handy pocket maps don’t cover this area, it not being “Central London” after all, so I read maps at bus stops and try to figure it all out. I take far longer than I should but this is some sort of penance, I am sure, and I soldier on and I do persevere and I have gotten home!

So, did I find my father? Of course not. I knew I wouldn’t, and that was hardly the point any more. I know where he is, all I was looking for was to get a sense of where he was. What was his world like, what were the things and places that shaped him into who he was and that, in a generational trickle down, had helped to shape me. Did I find that? I think I may have, but I will not know for a while. I found my stubbornness, I got that from him, when I insisted that I would find my way home. I found my inquisitiveness as I explored his old sites of exploration. I found my sentimentality, not from him, as a shell of a building could bring a tear to my eye or a simple view of the Thames could transport me back over seventy years to when he gazed across that same expanse and dreamt the dreams that would one day culminate in…me.

See there, I have found me, which is really why I am here. All of the rest is just trappings and excuse. I have come here to find myself and I am beginning to feel that for the first time in a long long time I am hard on the track for that.

When I look at a well trimmed rosebush I will see my father. When I recall Ohm’s Law, which he taught me over the phone over three decades ago, I will recall his patience. When I hear a light and lilting English accent I will hear him. He is with me always, and now I have been to at least part of his London.

There, I have written what I must for the night. I have reports on tonight’s theatre which will wait for morning. Today started with an earthquake which I didn’t even feel, and it ends with a recognition that one can be moved and shaken up from within as well, perhaps more profoundly even. That’s a quake I most certainly felt.

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“Apart from the tragedies,it is fucking marvellous.”

My Secret Life: Felicity Kendal, actress, 61

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