51) Days of the Weak

travel, loss, random reminisces, culture

In a recent dispatch I mentioned a memorable and brutal turnaround flight in 2001, when the Go- Go’s arrived into Istanbul, played a concert for the forces stationed at Incirlik Air Base the next night, and returned to New York the following day for a Rosie O’Donnell TV show appearance. The travel was merciless but the magic of Istanbul had dusted my soul and I vowed to return one day with someone I loved. Some cities shamelessly ask to be discovered by travelers basking in love.

It took 23 years, but I return with the love of my life, and only child, Audrey.

Sunday May 5: I’m starting this dispatch on the eve of our last night in Istanbul, after six days of wandering, laughs, music, shopping and food. Trying not to let it become melancholy with the impending countdown to her homeward journey. She’s going back to her future, plans for summer and senior year. I’m certain I’ll be shattered. I’ve been rifling through resources in the back of my mind, wondering if there’s some sort of instant life adhesive I can preemptively use to hold myself together.

It was a revelation to travel with Audrey as a young woman. Our last major foreign trip was in 2018 to Spain. Six years later, she’s become the culturally aware traveler I always hoped to nurture, enhanced this spring by a half dozen low budget treks to cities across Europe, in classic college kid fashion. I found myself in the company of someone full of ideas and plans for our days and let her lead me around to offbeat neighborhoods where we mixed with locals in bookshops, coffee houses, record stores and vintage shops. I think we spent a total of two hours in the company of tourist hordes and lines and maybe 20 hours delighting over the multitude of cats who enjoy an equal citizen status as humans.

I recommend highly the stellar Michelin starred restaurants, Mikla and Arkestra. Arkestra’s dinner was followed by heading up the stairs to a listening room with a cheerful DJ playing the best music—sometimes I forget how a great DJ can elevate a room. Friday night I pushed us to the front of a Yasiin Bey concert—he is an extraordinary and poetic artist and rapper. At the concert, when he exhorted the audience of young and old Turks, “regardless of what governments and politicians do…be good to each other,” Audrey and I both cried. It was a simple, perfect message landing exactly right. Later that night in our hotel room I found this poem.

“So much beauty we forget then get reminded, that you can be anywhere, everywhere and find it.”

Here’s where I found some beauty, everywhere:

Mon, May 6: There is much packing going on here, duffel bags and tote bags and clothes strewn everywhere. I book us a table at the Wolseley for dinner so we can have one more evening in London. An older woman in a very British tailcoat, vest and bowler hat greets patrons at the door. We have a pricey dinner that I can barely eat. I feel physically bereft at this being our last night. I insist on Audrey trying a brandy Alexander for some inexplicable reason. (She doesn’t like it but sipped her way through a portion trying to appease me. She is kind.)

After I pay the bill, via a QR code at the table, we leave. The lady in the suit and bowler hat chases and catches up to us nearly two blocks away, saying we didn’t pay. I realize she is accusing us of a dine and dash, and show her the emailed receipt I have on my phone. She wants to show it to the restaurant, and asks me to forward it to her email. Her email address is a play on “Hellz Bellz” and I comment on it and ask if she has a wild past, because this is literally the last person in the world you’d expect to have any version of Hells Bells as an email address. She said it was her nickname in the police force. It was an odd encounter and last night together.

Tues, May 7: As expected, I’m experiencing a bleak and empty deep blue since Audrey left UK for the US. We moved here January 5th after spending a couple of weeks together in Texas during the Christmas/winter holidays. She would go on to live in London and have a study abroad semester, but for nearly five months we’ve enjoyed a proximity we hadn’t had since before college. Watching her confidence and maturity grow as she learned London and traveled was a special thing; often times those jumps happen out of the parent’s sight. Our closeness took on a new shape with the shared experience of being here and capping it off with the Istanbul adventure, which was so wonderful I can hardly believe it happened.

I keep reminding myself that the alternative to us being apart would mean me being a clingy, aging mom and her being a grown adult daughter and us being inseparable and living together forever and ever—and that alt scenario would indeed be weird and bad. (Sometimes the stuff I think up to make myself feel better is quite effective.)

Besides basic mom-love and pride and empty nesting again, much of my grieving is about losing the only person I had here in England who really gets me, knows me, can read every inch of my being and know what I’m thinking and feeling. It’s a mutual effect we have on each other, and the closeness always exists but time together amplifies every aspect.

Weds, May 8: I was texting and audio messaging with a friend about the unexpected and untimely death of producer/engineer Steve Albini who was not a friend of mine or someone I’d ever met, but whose death still affected me deeply. I can’t say I was into his own bands, but the recordings he brought to life and his entire ethos about making records made me a fan. It felt like I knew him, he was so completely himself on Twitter, and then Blue Sky, and I tended to agree with many of his controversial wild statements—getting a vicarious thrill that he’d actually articulate opinions about sacred cow artists I’d be too scared to ever say.

There are other reasons for the extra kick, far beyond the familiar sorrow I feel when someone in my range of awareness dies—always a sort of removed but necessary honoring and acknowledgement of a life that has come to an end—and it took a few conversations to understand. For one thing, he was 61, which is young as far as I’m concerned. By the accounts I’ve read, it was a heart attack, and this is also a bit close to my experience as I have beloved people in my life at various level of the same risk. For another, it came in the midst of activities and plans, scheduled stuff.

This aspect of dying while carrying on with whatever mundane or interesting daily tasks and obligations are being carried out has always haunted me. I trace this back to third grade when a school friend’s mother went out on an errand to pick up some dry cleaning and never returned. She was in a car accident instead, and died. It was the casual cruelty of a benign errand that embedded into my 9-year-old brain. It caused me untold nights of sobbing into my pillow—as if death in and of itself isn’t enough for a child to grapple with, the new and unwelcome idea that it lurks behind every breath, every step, every turn, every mundane task, was just too much.

As I hope you will, to honor his ethos, work, and life, I’ve been reading stories and interviews, listening to his records and perusing the reminisces of the amazing artists who got to work with Steve Albini. A good place to start: This perennial diatribe The Problem With Music and this Guardian profile from last year.

Thurs, May 9: The healing balm, as always, is music and writing. My guitar, my notebook, my Substack—they pull me out of loss and into life. No less powerful: community and gardening. I have no car here, but a neighbor took me to a garden center today and I spent hours planting and potting and making my terrace the envy of the rooftop denizens where I live. I’ve been plotting my escape from St Albans to London as soon as this sublet is up, but I’m starting to feel conflicted. As much as I want to be where the action is, and where the work is, and the networking is, and where the people who I’m trying to embed myself into their life are…I also need to feel a part of a community and it’s starting to happen here, where I live.

With the weather coming around, we throw open our doors and wander by for visits. I’m getting to know a couple of neighbors and like them. Of course I have my Anne, my mom’s sister, two doors down. Gingerman and Rocky are getting more brave about wandering the roof and less frightened by the sounds of the city, so close by. The ancient clock tower and cathedral clang their bells, everyone is excited about the peregrine falcons who live in the abbey tower and have laid four eggs (when I push for answers, I learn there is a camera in the tower to check on the falcon’s well-being)—presumably we will have young peregrines to watch out for soon—apparently, you can see them flying at high speed and preying upon fat pidgeons in the sky. The wild kingdom I never knew I needed. We send our spectacular sunset captures around in a group text, in real time. I love that this is happening for me here, but wonder how it will affect my semi-plans of spending the next year in the heart of the city. Will I want to go? Part of the whole deal of being here is being open, but I also want expansion. I started a song about these confusing pulls I’m starting to feel.

my rooftop sunset picture Thurs, May 9, 2024.

I can’t say “heart of the city” without listening to this favorite of Nick Lowe songs. This live version with Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner is just killer. I tell you, 1978 was a great time to be 19 years old.

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It’s Fri, May 10: The days of the weak have led me to a stronger place, writing about it. I’m going to sign off here and be back sooner than usual with another dispatch.

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