(not) just another Monday

If you look at the front page of the New York Times, today is just some Monday with the world in its typical upside down and downside up moments. Here are all of the familiar itches, the low thrum of dread, the minor victory, the self-righteous rant. But there is no mention of today’s significance. There used to be an obligatory image of the two lights shining into a dark sky, but not even that seems to matter any more. It is just another Monday, the way that day was just another Tuesday.

At home, I have been looking for my good fountain pen for days and cannot find it. I crack open every box, wave my hand around the murky bottom of every bag and it just is not there. I cannot even find the ink bottle that let me write in the brightest blue, turquoise stains on my fingertips for days after I refilled it. They are here somewhere, I know they were part of the latest move but I’ll be damned if I know where they are hiding. Life has offered me a quiet Saturday afternoon, and there is no excuse left - it is time to get back up on the horse, and find my way back to the new book, the one I started years ago that sits in a neat pile, waiting for the next chapter to be written. But I have lost that pen, and it gives me a perfect excuse to shy away. I have written by hand, with various fountain pens since I was 21, on unlined paper. The pens could be cheap, or fancy, they were not there to be flashy or sign a contract, they were friendly tools like a good hammer, or a sharp knife - familiar, and comfortable. In the right moment they disappear completely and it is just me and the page, characters whispering their dialogue into my ears and I am just trying to get it down. The fresh ink gets typed up a few days later, like a janitor sweeping the floors - cleaning things up, deciphering the gum stuck under a desktop, and then there are pages that will be edited brutally, chewed up and spit out, scratched and violated, and what remains is what might be worth showing to people, but first, more editing.

The missing pen might sound like a trifling loss, but my wife bought it for me in Florence and I have had it for years. It was her first time in Italy, and our first big trip together. I know what we had for breakfast that day, and where. I know what we had for lunch, where we walked, where we stopped - that day is like a collection of photographs I can flip through any time I want to. She bought it in the evening, and the man in the store was funny and kind. He made me promise I would write a great book with it, all happy handshakes and boasting, his eyes bright and smiling. Maybe he says this to everyone, and means it - but I chose to take it personally, her arm tucked into my elbow as we walked off into the night, towards a magnificent dinner. She was in new boots, and they wobbled on the cobblestones. I remember it all.

But here it is Saturday, and the pile of pages is waiting and even the best ballpoint pen in the house is missing too. I start to understand it has been years since I wrote this book, so many years of interruption, years when I was just treading water trying to pay the bills and put dinner on the table. It is embarrassing, how long it has been - no wonder I can’t find the pen. I dig in the bag I take to meetings, and there are some dull pencils rolling around in the bottom and one cheap, black ballpoint that I used as a prop in a film some time ago. Scribbling on a receipt, I see that it works.

All at once, I sit at the dining room table, our new furniture that finally arrived from Poland. I stare out the front windows, just like I stared out the windows on East 1st Street at the World Trade Center, when I wrote on a radiator cover. A view and a good pen, maybe a lowball of whiskey, and anything was possible - that was always the big idea. Carl is running down some stairs, and it is snowing on the Bowery, and he needs to go somewhere. I made some notes last week, about some why’s and some where’s. They are a huge help, as his feet move beneath him while his thoughts dance like a pachinko game, about his fledgling divorce, about betrayal and loss, about his difficult teenage daughter.

He is wandering but also getting lost on the Lower East Side, a place he knew briefly as a young man, when the towers still stood. I write for a few hours and then lean back from the table, as if I just ate too much and need to loosen my belt a notch. Suddenly starving, I go out for a late lunch, leaving the cheap pen on the open notebook, a reminder that things worked out, even without my favorite one in hand, a reminder that we create our one obstacles so easily, and that they can be the hardest ones to get around.

And now, on Monday morning I realize that I was memorializing a little bit of pre-9/11 New York again, the salad days for so many, the days of rooftop parties and eating at Florent at 4AM, the lights bright on faces plastered with glitter, fabulous next to extra fabulous, thinking that the world would always be like this, that we would always be young Turks, that the buildings would always stand, unless they were terribly old, that we had plenty of time to get married and have kids, that everything would be like this or close to this for the rest of our lives.