Foreshortening

This video could have been so much better if it were about 10 seconds longer... emblematic of many of my artistic endeavors, I guess. This poem could have been better if it were about a stanza longer. If you'd only held on to the last note of that Chopin Nocturne for another moment. If only you'd stayed in relevé longer.

March 29, 2006. A farewell to the old woman across the alley, about whom I wrote this in an email to a friend:

The old woman across the alley from me reappeared. I haven’t seen her in what seems like months, and I always worry that one day I’ll come to the window to find her windowsill stripped of its empty bottles and plants, her strangely hung curtains torn down, and I will only be able to infer that she has died or moved on to a nursing home.

Her hair seems a bit more unkempt now. And she just spent a good 20 minutes looking at her hands in the light, sticking them out the window and pondering them as though they were brand-new to her. Then she fussed with the curtains for a few minutes, checked the leaves on the plants, and now she has disappeared into the small, black triangular gap in the curtains.

I’m trying not to make too much of this. Trying to view it as a performance piece, rather than what I know it is all too well – senility in progress. I watched my grandmother decline in the same way, and I can’t bear to watch it happen again. She lived with us for a while and at night I had to lock my door, because she’d become lost in her wanderings and open the wrong door trying to get back to her room. I remember that once when I came out in the middle of the night to help her back to her bed, she was so happy to see me, smiled her dentureless smile which was the most adorable thing, and gave me a big hug.

In my old building there was a very aged man who took a liking to me, we were pals and he even once came to my apartment to try out my piano (he had been a pianist and composer). Then I moved from the building. I kept seeing him, and then I stopped, and then his wife told me he’d moved to a nursing home. I didn’t see her for a while. Then about a month ago, I saw her on the street and she told me he’d died. She said, “Mr. S... died.” Mr. S... – as though he had not been her husband for fifty years. Perhaps, being old herself, this is a convention, but to me it sounded so anachronistic. His obit in the New York Times indicated that he had been a major in the Persian Army of the Shah, before leaving Iran to come to the U.S.

She’s back now, running her fingers along the metal bars of the child guard that fits over her window (these are everywhere in NYC, and apparently required in order to prevent kids from falling out, though God knows there are other hazards more dire around here). Now she is back in the black space behind the curtains and... oh, no, she is back to tugging the curtains in such a way that I see only her hand. She is checking for rain now. She appears to be chewing something, so I hope she is feeding herself. I know that if I see her in distress, I will probably call 311, the city’s non-emergency number, to see whether they will send someone around to check on her. But I don’t even know what apartment she’s in!

I received my wedding dress today. So I came home from work, tried it on (needs taking in on top, of course), rehearsing my role as a bride. And now I look out the window and see this woman playing her own role so intensely (elderly shut-in). It is heartbreaking to imagine what her non-window-gazing time in there is like. I always see the TV flashing abstractly against the frosted window in her living room.