Nightmare

I guess I had a strange dream last night or early this morning that can be interpreted as a nightmare. It had just dawned on me, because I just remembered the event and began to reinterpret it as such. I can't remember much except for a moment where I was with my bubby and zaide and looked over at my bubby and listened to her talk, realized that her lips weren't moving, that she was wearing way too much makeup, and that she was in-fact dead. I think i woke up shortly after that.
I just got what I hope will prove to be an incredible purchase. It's a record by an Italian band called Jennifer Gentle, and it's very reminiscent of Syd Barret. It seems beautiful. I've been listening to M.Ward and Iron & Wine all the time.
Today I will spend my time alone. Internet and pangs of music, i expect.

Chains

My mother passed away early monday morning. I was at her bedside with her amazing friend Phyllis Koch; we stayed there all night until the snow fell and the sun rose, and with the new day my mother left her pained body.
The medical staff thought she died peacefully and free of pain, but to sit there near her and hear her breathing and heaving was to witness true agony and despair. I've never felt so helpless before in my life.

On the way out of the hospital a day earlier I took this picture, which I'm proud to say is my first decent black and white photo in years.

I wrote the following to tell folks that Ima had passed away, or Left, as Karyn would prefer to refer to it.

Dear Friends -
My mother, Bat-Ami Sofer, the amazing friend who introduced me to Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters, The Beatles' Abbey Road, and Bob Dylan (to name a few), passed away this morning at Brigham and Women's hospital.

She had been diagnosed with lung cancer in December of 2003 and had lived peacefully and fairly independently at home for the last 14 months. For the last 3 months she discontinued all treatments and enjoyed her family, many friends, and the bird feeders on her balcony which she could see from her favorite armchair. She had been treated at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute by two wonderful physicians. Surrounded by grandchildren, family, and friends we celebrated her birthday last Sunday: she turned 63 on February 16th. She was alert, active, and ornery until nearly the very end.

Her funeral will be held tomorrow, at 1 PM on Tuesday the 22 of February at her temple, Sha'aray Shalom in Hingham (1112 Main Street). My family will be sitting Shiva at my sisters' home in Framingham (36 Berkshire Road) beginning tomorrow evening.
Thank you for all your support throughout this past year.

I've also been working on a makeshift obituary that today, reads like this:

There are some things we don't expect to see and learn from our parents. My mother's strength and courage at the end of her days is one of those things; she was terrified of dying - she didn't deny that. But knowing that it was imminent rarely dulled her joy with the life she still had. She had an incredible and often times impossible to express love and devotion to her children and grandchildren. Her love of life's small surprises is another strength I will take with me from her teaching: at the end of her days the birds that visited her balcony to eat at her feeder caused her intense joy, as did a recent MFA exhibit of oriental pottery. She was easily pleased with simple things - a good Red Sox game, a bargain at J.Jill, a moving voice.
Let me give you a little history about my mother that may illuminate the most telling aspect of her life. In the 1960's my mother and father met on Kibbutz Orim in the Israeli Negev. I like to say they had a disease called Zionism - I am sure this might not be taken kindly by some, but I mean it most affectionately. They had incredible ideals and they were at the age where one's ideals can dictate one's destiny. Together they made Aliya to Israel and lived happily in the heady world of the Kibbutz. Eventually they wanted to take their passion and dedication to the Israeli dream to another level, and together with 9 other couples they founded and built from scratch Moshav Sde Nitzan in the Negev desert. It's in that beautiful and wonderful spot, in my parents' utopian oasis, that my sisters and I were raised as no other family I know (at this point!). The Moshav was one of my mother's proudest accomplishments, perhaps not often remembered since she left it almost twenty years ago, long before she ever thought of making the south shore of Massachusetts her home.
In 1986 she moved to Sde Bocker in southern Israel, partially so that I could attend a privileged private school, and partially to maintain proximity to my sister Tamar (at the time an officer in the Israeli air force, positioned in a nearby base.) Sde Bocker is only an hour or so away from the home she had built (and felt that she lost) at Moshav Sde Nitzan; it was at the beautiful and remote Sde Bocker that she made her and I another home. Two years later she moved again, but this time for a bigger, more monumental change. She reversed course and came back to Boston, to the United States, to the city she had lived in as an undergraduate and the country she had left nearly thirty years earlier as a wide eyed and youthful Zionist.
Again she made a home for me and herself, and was close by for my other sister, Nomi, who was studying in nearby Brandeis. She got a a degree in library science - again, since her Israeli degree wasn't valid. She worked a job while studying in the evenings, and it was through her job that her coworker, a kind and talented young man named Jonathan Rubel, would meet my sister while teaching me the most essential blues chords on the guitar. Soon the two would fall in love and start a family that my mother was so very proud of.
A few years later she'd move to the south shore of Boston to become a public library director. This choice echoes her idealism (not at all dampened after thirty years in the desert) and her belief in public works and Tzdaka. These are things it might be easy to forget as her children - that my mother never stopped being an idealist that continued to dedicate her very life to causes she so firmly believed in. She donated her life's prime to the Israeli Negev, and she was rewarded with a beautiful grandson of the same name who brought her intense joy in the last months of her life, in his first four and a half months on this beautiful and cruel planet. I think now that the Negev was her first love, and of her contributions to it she was very proud.
I want to remember my mother in ways I wasn't always keenly aware of when she was alive. She gave me Mao's Little Red Book and Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, along with mind-altering records by Lightning Hopkins; she was one of those rare people who lived as her heart dictated, and her heart dictated idealism. Even as recently as last month she fulfilled a dream and became a lifetime member of the Haddasah women's organization, right after making a donation to Rosie's Place, a women's shelter in Boston. She'd want us to remember her as someone who thought that good deeds are done by doing, everyday, all the time, for the long haul. She'd want us to remember her as someone who had an incredible love for her family, one that she couldn't always express in words but in retrospect I can see that she expressed in deeds.
Today my heart has a new pain I've never met. I want to call and tell her that I just lost one of my best friends, a subtle and old friend who was always there for me, a painfully honest friend. But she's gone - there's no one at her phone except an answering machine that plays what has become a special message. Recently I always listened to it when I couldn't reach her: it's my mother's voice before she lost it to the disease, telling the world that she couldn't come to the phone, but that she'd call back as soon as possible.

Eyes Wide Open

Naked as we came seems to be an Iron and Wine song about dying. It's kind of funny how everyone has a song about dying. What do we all know about it? Tamar came in last night. Picking her up was a minor fiasco - got lost getting to the airport and then we got lost finding the Pike. Tamar was having a fit over this situation, wishing she had taken a cab... Then I wished that too. She is so like our mother, I am pretty sure that's why they didn't get along. After we got to Nomi's place she seemed to calm down a tiny bit and Nomi got up and we talked, just the three of us, for a few minutes. We probably could have spoken for longer - but we were cut off by Karyn getting there to pick me up. We spoke of the mourning, and Ima's stuff. We also spoke about how people are perceived - Tamar mildly infuriated that Ima could be perceived as a sweet person (!), which is when it became clear to me that Tamar really had some deep schism with Ima. I am not denying that Ima could be very coarse to us, and I don't know what happened with Tamar's relationship that hurt her so. I think the key to dealing with Ima is to do it on her, on Ima's, terms - and that's probably hard for Tamar who is essentially a controlling person.

Ima's cleaning lady, Salvina, called me up, very sad to hear that Ima's health has deteriorated, and she told me that 4 years ago or so she lost her 13 year old daughter to cancer; she said she cried last night when she heard my message. Ima is too young to go this way - and Salvina's daughter at 13 was way too young to go. People are pretty resilient special things. Speaking of which, sounds like, from talking to Nomi this morning, that Sue is still waiting for a positive change to happen in Ima's health. But for me, the worst thing about this whole deal is when Ima becomes conscious; yesterday she was crying either in pain or sadness. That was an awful scene in the hospital when Ima was conscious and crying and there were piles of people visiting; it felt like a freak show. I don't really want to go back there for more of that; I know I'm a wimp. But what good are we doing? I don't want Ima to go alone and afraid by herself - and that's the real point of this all is: to be there for her in her time of need. Then it can all turn around, and we can start our healing out of this dark hole.

The State Of Things

So I posted some pictures last night because words aren't coming easily; I feel like this is turning into a photo journal of sorts, and that's kind of cool. I love my photographs. I had been in the hospital until 12:30 am or so, and we're on our way back there right now (as soon as Karyn has her coffee and gets dressed. I wish she'd hurry up.) I called Nomi and she says that no one has been able to rouse Ima yet today. Maybe this is really it (well i know this is really it, but the when of the now is still unknown). Maybe we don't have to pull out the stupid fucking tube and cause her nausea and vomiting. I feel like we're being cruel - can't they just give her a lethal fucking dose of something and let her go??? It's clear that she's not coming back. Modern medicine can feel so cruel. I wonder what the nurses know - or the doctors. I feel like there is a basic flaw in the way these hospitals work, there is too much changeover and too little follow through. That we should have had some resident or intern come in and tell us what they did yesterday about Ima's white blood cells is scary; I mean it really changed our perspective on the situation, but it wasn't true!

I'm listening to this Jolie Holland record; she's singing a song called ' I Wanna Die'. The joke being that she sounds kind of fake - and if you read about her you find that she's 29 and she has been looking for her voice for years; she's experimented with hip hop and what not and has settled on this fake hillbilly folksy thing that she does ok. But it rings strange. She's lifting from Guthrie, Dylan, Billie Holiday. It's funny that bluegrass is making such a big comeback - according to this weekends globe at least. I feel like I've been ahead of all the trends really. I'll just keep doing what I do. I also read in the globe about some italian duo that was making pop music using egg timers and helium balloons... On paper it sounded great - I love that people are making music with -ma she-ba la-yad -what ever comes in handy. It's such a gift to be able to listen to the world and hear music.

Brigham

I've spent two days now at the Brigham and Women's hospital with Ima. She's suffering from a blockage in her intestines, and is probably on her last legs - so to speak. We expect her not to live for very much longer. She's suffering and we're hoping that she won't have to suffer for long. Here are some pictures from the last two days.

Valentine's Day

Walk around the pond and environs with Karyn yielded these pictures this afternoon.



That above is simply the pond at dusk. This picture was taken a few minutes after the next picture - the light didn't change that much in those few minutes. I like to fool the camera when the flash is off. It's kind of a trick I learned from my analog canon camera, wherein you let the light meter in the camera adjust to a certain area and then move the camera to another target so that the picture comes out over or under exposed.




This was K's suggestion of a tree to look at. It was actually partially wrapped around another plainer tree. I like how you can kind of see the pond in the washed out background. Karyn was picking at the bark. It would be a little better if the majority of the bark was in focus instead of that little bit.




These are goose prints maybe?
It was valentine's day and we took a very long and pleasant walk around the muddy river.

Driving Home

I was coming home from Weymouth the other day and took this. I love the Black and white feature in iPhoto. Today we celebrated Ima's birthday and I took a bunch of photo's of the kids posing and hamming it up and the kitchen table. That was the most fun I've had with them - I took about 13 pictures quickly and we all looked at them as they came up, and thought about what we'd do next. I sent the pictures to their parents with explanations, and my middle sister wrote back and said this:

Thank god for digital. These would definitely qualify for the trash if they were prints. Your efforts are admirable, their behavior a little less.

Ha. No wonder she doesn't get along with my mother. They are exactly alike!


The pictures look like this:


In Safari there seems to be a huge white space before the table with the pictures appear. Any one know why?

Suggested Projects

Rings of Fire

Summertime

Winterlong

The L&N

A NY Minute and Other Stories

Two week ago before Karyn left for New Orleans with the Armband we went to Justin's opening in Manhattan - it was actually a good trip to NYC for me, but mostly because I got to walk around by myself for a while and later got to catch up with old friends Dan Hall and Andy in their neighborhood in Brooklyn.

I took this picture while waiting for the art opening to wind down. I was in a Starbucks on Canal in Chinatown, doing what coffee shops were invented for: watching the world go by and thinking.
I was thinking that it was hard existing without a way to record the world around me. The camera and cell phone are great ways to document, and sometimes that's all I want to do: Document. The beauty with constant documentation is that you can later put it in a context that changes perspective. I guess I've always been drawn to archiving in that sense. It also helps me from feeling useless or pointless - capturing and stopping time help create the illusion that there is some kind of meaning to my actions, or at least a greater motive. I spend so much time in silence and escaping people's companionship that my solace (if that word is appropriate) is in capturing and freezing time; even that of other people.

But I'd find more joy in it if I did in fact use it later. This past weekend has taught me an old lesson, that without living, you can't make things. I sat at home, hoping to make, but I haven't been living and with people, so my making was rather limited. I am moving forward and I'm excited, but the expectation that I'd just make some great shit over the weekend because I had some time to myself was misguided.

There is another picture I liked from the trip to NYC. I like the napkin above because if viewed in it's actual size (click on it) you can see the little pores in the paper and you can almost touch and feel the texture of that room. I like what my laptop does to the pictures i take - I often feel the digital images we take with that tank of an HP camera are best viewed on my laptop's screen. They often don't translate to paper pictures that well. But what is there for me to do with these pictures? I am thinking that "Into The Ground" is going to be my first real solo record - even though it's only 3 songs strong right now, but I want to go all out with the packaging and presentation. It's important to me, and I think it's worth doing...

Error Occured While Connecting

That pretty much sums up a few weeks now. Karyn is in New Orleans on a trip I just realized I had thought we had mentioned taking together. At home it's peaceful but boring. Even lonely. I don' t know how it would feel if this was permanent, or long term. Meanwhile both Banshee and Shadow have taken turns rooting around the paper bag placed atop the recycling bin. While I thought earlier that I had beaten Sally at her pee-cidental self, today I found a little puddle of moisture around the box - and I admit defeat.
For the last few hours I have tried against all odds and with the help of the low pass mooger foooger plug in to create magic where previously only radiators and jelly bellies dwelt. Several times I thought I was on the verge of genius when in fact all i had was common boredom. i think shadow would agree. I have had a chance to bond with nearly all the cats - except perhaps for shadow and sally. Shadow however is on the prowl, so I may hit it off with him yet.
This evening is indicative of a general problem: How am I to continue to captor inspiration? I had something going for a few weeks, but now I am merely chasing it. Part of it was the frustration born out by the refusal and inability of partners to collaborate, I should just say it like it is: the band wouldn't rehearse, so I had to make in the time allotted to making. This time I've been trying to use is time that may be alloted to other stuff, but I'm not managing it well. Hence the frustration.