COTTON CANDY AND KITES
Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach and then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, or the El above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set for “Nightmare Alley.” Steeplechase Park was here, as well as the dizzying spire of the parachute jump which still stands like a frozen, rusted Transformer. I rode that aerial ride at 17 and it was frightening; in those days you “sat” on a skimpy wooden plank with a chain across your lap for safety. I could see all the way to Manhattan Beach. Steeplechase was a memorable park; all kinds of rides and with its very exciting and exquisite steeplechase ride about the park on varicolored and wild-maned horses, these carved wooden stallions ending up in antique stores throughout the U.S. The park had two monstrous indoor slides that tested any youngster’s mettle and personal grit. All gone now, except it was filmed in an early Clara Bow movie of the silents, It, 1927. The parachute ride, now inoperable, remains, like the Statue of Liberty in The Planet of the Apes.
I recall corns as thick as one’s arm, slathered in butter, hawked on the boardwalk. They were not a favorite of mine but I liked to watch as a vendor using a paper cone wrapped up the silken threads of cotton candy until it grew like a beard about the cone itself. I dimly remember that the process had something of static electricity to it as sugar fibers attached to the moving paper wand. It was much too sugary for my taste; however, Nathan’s franks and its great mustard and Hires root beer, always served in a disposable paper cup, were must-have food at Coney Island. The soft ice cream or custard was spectacular, vanilla my favorite. The breeze off the beach carried a tinge of salt to it, and the weathered boards were inlaid across the boardwalk like parquet. I mention all this in reverie, for my associations to the past, especially the cotton candy, make me reflect. I reflect how much of time is about us as we trek through life, wandering hither and thither like carousing sailors. It is as if I am a paper cone dipped into time and whirled about until I coalesce as a person in the passage of time. It is something done to me, nothing that I can do to it. All and everything is done to me.
I think. I consider. This comes and goes, but it is a common occurrence, for it is something I do, naturally now. I send “kites” into the air, mental ribbons tied to their bottoms. Each kite is a thought or a consideration. And what is it I consider or pose to myself as I spin like cotton candy to my end, the Grim Reaper, scythe in hand, sitting down, watching me patiently, until the spun cone is all wound up? I ask myself if, for example, I should draw up a list of books and read them, not as an attempt to get necessarily wiser, for books don’t make us wiser, but as an attempt to complete something in myself, perhaps a “should.” It is not a bucket list as the cliche has it. I don’t want attainments or achievements before I die. It is more thoughtful than that. Here I am, a miniscule human effort, given such and such amount of days and years, and what should I be doing at this time in my life when I have more time to reflect on the life I have led?
So, I ask myself what would be the purposeful thing to do given the limitations of my life, circumstance, health, family, a wifely companion. What should any human being do at 75 (pick your age) so as to round out his or her days in a way that has some inner purpose? What I come up with is not very satisfying, it all seems mundane. What I do observe is the grand amount of waste in my life: days unseen by the eyes, unfelt, unlived, thrown away at night without regard, reverence and experience. I ask if it is at all possible to bite deeply into my life like one bites deeply into a Carnegie pastrami on rye.
Recent medical issues, real threats to my way of living, recent diagnoses, unfavorable but sustainable, creating fears, of course create fears and make me more alert to issues I have wrestled with for years. The recent experience with the Rapture hints at latent issues, what if this were the last day of your life? What would you do? What are the rents in your relationships that need attending to? And so forth. For me the Rapture, as I interpret it, would be an epiphany of a kind, some kind of transcendent moment free of religiosity, but flinty spiritual stuff, if you will. To seek all this is a fool’s errand, I know. Many things in life come to us, wanted and unwanted, like the next spin around the cotton candy drum. Even if we imagine the list of pleasures we might have before we die: Maui, the Parthenon at sundown, rapturous spiritual lovemaking with one’s significant other, a cruise to a Greek island unknown to tourists. I stop here and observe that my bucket list has nothing to do with material possessions but more to do with sharing with one’s significant others. I spin off, away from the nagging “kite” at hand.
I get up in the mornings (mournings?) now, often resistant to doing anything, but I nag myself into trying to do something for my writing or my life, or my shared existence with my wife Jane. I try to make merry with or without money – and there are many rich things you can do without too much money. I struggle to sit down by my desk and to write an essay, to rewrite a story or to send out an article. All this makes me feel good, writing this essay about my personal feelings feels good. I try to be. Well, I have always had a philosophical cast to my feelings and self. Not good for an American, I know.
I have not answered the question I posed. What is to be done? At moments I feel I am a ventriloquist’s dummy without his master. I suppose if I come into it, if I wade into this ineffable “it,” I will have a way, a Tao, to bring my life to its final ends, not that I am in a rush. It is the old and ancient question broken down into the historic threes: Who am I? What am I do while I am here? Where am I going? The last one is for the believer; the second one is a savage master. The first question is forever. Will Durant remarked of “the patient pertinacity of death.”
Upon awakening tomorrow, I will face once more what I want to do in the days remaining. What intent can I give some congruency – or peace – to that inner directed self that queries life, not so much in search of an answer, but of posing a better question? And while all this goes on some mighty wind may simply come by and tatter all the kites aloft. Knowing this only makes me, at 75, feel more of the immediacy of my questions. And then I see you, any you, on the street and assume he or she may not even be awake to the questions that should be posed. But that’s a kite of a different color.
