Rainy Days and Fridays

It's raining again. Oh no, it's raining again. Not that I'm unhappy about it. I know I am sturdily in the minority in this one, but damn, I love this weather. This June is probably going to go down as the rainiest on record, but for me it's been a delicious reprieve from the typical sun and heat. As a committed summer-hater, I think back with despair and disdain on the insufferable mornings spent sweating on the platform at Larchmont, already overheated at 8:30 in the morning. Or forced jaunts out to the beach, where my skin was subjected to lobster-ification no matter how high the SPF number on the sunscreen bottle. Yeah, I'm just not a summer person. Give me a walk in the rain, with the smell of wet grass rising and fat saturated blossoms bowed with raindrops, a hike through the green-grey mist of Manor Park where the chocolate-colored waves churn darkly toward the shoreline, and the Whitestone bridge disappears like the shadow of a cat into the fog, and I'm as happy as a yak. In spite of my Italianate/Sephardi blood, in spite of my love for sun-ripened summer fruit and the heavy coconut aroma of suntan oil, I find the summer sun itself way more destructive than delicious. This is definitely where my melancholy Scottish neshama comes out to play.

So it's five o'clock, three hours from the very first lay-led Shabbat services of the season, and I'm in the office alone (everyone else is either off or done for the day) digging on this new tune from the Plain White T's (1, 2, 3, 4), listening to the thunder and considering Michael Jackson's legacy. On Facebook today, I've seen everything from crude humor (which I won't repeat) to out and out mourning for the alleged King of Pop. I don't know how I feel about it. I remember getting Thriller (my own copy, as my sister's was sacrosanct) even though I think Off the Wall is a way better album, and at the time thinking really badly of Paul McCartney for recording Say Say Say and that eternal affront to the Beatles' legacy, The Girl is Mine. Love Me Do was one thing, but he should have known better. (Oooh, did I just make a pun?) I can see where the Jackson 5 made some damn good pop, but MJ's later behavior - especially silencing alleged molestation victims with huge amounts of cash - does put that legacy into a different league.

There is also something just so undignified about a WORLDWIDE, all caps, front page slide presentation, the failure to realize that this is life and death, kids, and instead let's quote the lawyers and doctors and police officers, all jockeying for the sound bites amidst this insanely personal outpouring of grief for a person that no one knew in person, like when Princess Diana died and everyone went a little batshit. When John Lennon was murdered, when George Harrison died two months after the towers fell, I understood it, maybe because I love the Beatles so intensely and I took their deaths to heart in a way that I'm not doing today. I was ten when Lennon died, and I remember feeling like a zombie, absolutely shocked and horrified at what occurred that December night. But there was something so fragile and vulnerable and yet bold and invincible as the silence of the vigil that was held for him in Central Park that Sunday. Twenty nine years later I'm not sure we know how to grieve as a human community anymore, thanks to the twenty four hour news cycle and the intense need for attention and spotlight so many people seem to have. Which is ironic, as Jackson's music at its peak really did touch so many people, much as the Beatles did at theirs. But I remember the communal aspect of mourning for Lennon, and that is what struck me as being the most absent factor in the mourning for Michael Jackson. Hard to say how each man's individual legacy (or manner of death) accounts for that difference.

So, back to the rain. There's some pretty nasty thunder going on right now, which I can hear even in my windowless office. Even with the celebrity madness this week it's been a good one; on Monday we held the last of my company's events for the spring, at which I got to hang out with one of my best friends. On Thursday I had the chance to reconnect with an old friend from grad school, and talk literary theory (which I hadn't had the opportunity to do in years). This morning I woke up with the first RA flare I've had in months, but even that seems to be a bit milder than usual - and I'm knocking wood that it doesn't worsen. I even made a Rain Songs mix CD to celebrate this amazing weather, which my mom says makes me even weirder than she suspected. I can't help it. First, there are just so many good rain songs (Here Comes the Rain Again, Kentucky Rain, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, The Rain King - the list goes on). And second, it's an abundance, a gift from the heavens (to be fair, I don't call the tsunami or Katrina a gift - just to clarify). But this rain is wonderful, refreshing and delicious and we'd be whining if we were in a drought. So what if we had a couple of extra weeks of mashiv ha-ruach u'morid hagashem - and maybe a little more morid hatal than we felt like getting. I, for one, am carrying an umbrella, and counting my blessings.

Sinai at Sea

In honor of my favorite holiday, Shavuot, which begins at sundown tonight, I offer a link this lovely column that I wrote about celebrating the holiday on vacation with my Mom back in 2006.

The irony of this year's celebration is that as much as I adore this holiday, because of its relationship to conversion - reading from the Book of Ruth in particular - is that this is the first year I just don't feel like a convert anymore. That being said, a dear friend of mine who is in the process reached out to me this morning to ask me questions about what she is about to experience. I'm more grateful for her questions than I can say, because they were a timely - and timeless - reminder of what it means to stand at that holy mountain and receive wisdom and wonder.

Chag shavuot sameach!

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/holidays/shabbat_and_other_holidays/Sinai_At_Sea.shtml

O Captain, my Captain

Any time I emailed Frank, my salutation was those timeless words from Uncle Walt: O Captain, my Captain. I found out later that this was what many of Frank's students called him, perhaps using the honorific from Dead Poet's Society, or acknowledging Frank's pitch-perfect Jean-Luc Picard impersonation. But I would like to think that I was the first to address him thusly, even though I'm sure I wasn't.

Since grad school, the two years we spent in the creative writing graduate program at Temple University (known to this day as Temple Writers), we were buddies. Even though I was in the Poetry department and he was in Fiction, something drew us to one another from the first day. We didn't even have that many classes together, but he was pretty much my strongest influence, my greatest supporter. I think that we bonded over the fact that unlike so many of our colleagues, neither of us really cared about what we called "the trappings" or "the uniform." Frank was a solid, splendid writer who cared about language and its relationship to the world of science and reason, thought and image. Like me, he wasn't interested in wearing dreadlocks or dressing in Doc Martens or flea-bitten bohemian outfits from the thrift shop on South Street. He was about substance, not costume. Quality, not farce or fashion.

When things started breaking down for me as a poetry student - when my professors, in their so-called wisdom, started praising such eternal works as my colleague Elena's poem (which consisted of the word "icicles" written nine times), and when my faculty advisor informed me that I'd never be taken seriously as a writer unless I changed my name ("Andi is nothing more than a perky little sorority girl nickname."), Frank urged me to get out. I can remember the conversation as if it happened last week. "There is only one choice," he said in a mock-Russian accent. "Please: to defect. We in fiction offer you asylum in our country."

And that's exactly what happened. Frank convinced me to get away from the poets ("All of your poems have characters - you do realize that, right?") and I went gladly to inhabit his country, leaving behind icicles and all manner of nonsense. But Frank was more than a mere comrade. He convinced me that I could not only catch up to the other fiction writers, but that my talent would be enough to raise the bar for the entire class.

Because of his confidence in me, I managed to achieve in the space of one year what everyone else had two years to accomplish. He was the peer advisor on my thesis and offered critiques that outshone those of every other student. He was the friend who, upon hearing my work overwhelmingly praised by the Fiction faculty, drily whispered the question in my ear: "So, which one of them are you sleeping with?" He kept my ego in check while simultaneously giving me the confidence to do better, be better, write better. Above all, he conferred upon me a special nickname, derived from Fletch, one of his favorite movies. To Frank, I was always and forever Dr. Rosenpenis - which he upgraded to Rabbi Rosenpenis after I converted to Judaism. Of all the nicknames I've been called in my life, that one, perhaps, was the best. Because once Frank gave you a nickname, you knew you belonged to a very special circle.

Yesterday, I found out that he died about three weeks ago. From all accounts, he had been going through some health problems, and his heart simply gave out. His sister, on Facebook, wrote that his heart was enlarged. Of course it was. Frank was a big-hearted, opinionated, soulful, talented person. I loved how he was never willing to compete in a class that was sorely competitive. I loved that he could be a total prick to what he quietly termed "people posing as writers," but those he loved, he loved deeply and was loyal to beyond words, time, distance, and geography. I loved that, like me, he was always homesick in Philadelphia for his family and the suburb where he grew up. I loved that he hated organized religion in general but didn't think I was crazy for embracing religion in my own life. I loved that he demanded respect for both science AND fiction - he knew that the right words and a fertile imagination and a demand for high standards could combine to create a work that could transcend genres. And I loved that he was just out and out funny and smart and kind and possessed a very sensitive and gentle soul beneath all the snark and bluster.

The last time I saw Frank, I was in Chicago traveling on business. The fates had also conspired to set me up on a blind date on the Saturday night I was there. It was not a good night. I didn't hit it off with the date, and a combination of stress, despair and boredom caused me to drink more than I ever have in my life. When Frank came to get me at the hotel on Sunday morning, to take me out to lunch and then to the airport, he accepted the situation (I was throwing up, disoriented, headachy and light-sensitive, unable to even carry my own luggage) with total equanimity. "That's my Andi," he simply said, taking the suitcase out of my hands and making me sit in the lobby sipping a glass of ice water while he went to get the car. After I was able to recover a little with a bowl of pho bo at a local Vietnamese noodle shop, he drove me back to O'Hare with A Hard Day's Night in the tape player. As we harmonized on the song "If I Fell," he simultaneously corrected the song's bad grammar. "And I," he sang, "would be sad if our new love WERE in vain."

I've sung it that way ever since.

Life never took me back to Chicago. But I was always confident that he was there, in the flip side of an email, in the songs we both loved, in the writing philosophy we both shared. And every couple of years, a package would arrive in the mail from Frank - a travel guide to Chicago. There would always be a bright yellow Post It note inside, on which he had written a simple message: "Rosenpenis - come visit. Love, FAL." Every year the new guide would join the others on the shelf. I wish I had made it back out there.

I went back and read Walt Whitman this morning as I was trying to get ready to smile and look pretty for a press conference. It was not an easy read.

"O Captain, my Captain,
"Rise up and hear the bells!
Rise up--for you the flag is flung -- for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths-- for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
- You've fallen cold and dead."

Hard to believe that this is how the poem ends.

To say that I will miss Frank is a marvelous understatement. To say that I owe him my identity as a writer of fiction is an irrefutable fact. But that's not as important as saying that I will miss my friend. I have missed him all these many years, and will miss him until I have no years left.