DanielSonenberg.com

I am lying with Alex on an enormous king size bed in a Best Western, 100 miles south of Portland in some anonymous Massachusetts town. Now we are up. We had the pallid “continental breakfast” of saran-wrapped English muffins and apple jelly. Back up to the room, showering, using wi-fi, trying to bleed it of its $97 value. I’ve got a warm half coffee here, reminding me it’s time again to quit caffeine.

We buried Chris Hume’s ashes in The Falls yesterday. His folks and some relatives were up, and Mike Wacks and I, and Lisa and Alex – our respective better halves. We had a church service (unexpectedly very religious), an alumni brunch (it turns out actually to be our 15th reunion year), and then we trudged, in a golf cart or on foot, to that magical oasis where, 15 to 19 years previously, we celebrated many golden afternoons and shimmering evenings. We all approached the noisy drink, most of us ultimately on foot, with Chris a fine dust in a bag in a box. And before words were spoken, sentiments expressed, Chris’s folks stepped forward to the swirling, thirsty machine and emptied the contents of their bag-in-a-box. And the Falls turned gray and powdery, a cloud jolted forward toward the precipice and beyond, and I was still catching my breath and adjusting my ears to the thrashing. Next a fine bottle of white wine, a toast, back to the car, a suddenly teary farewell, and Chris’s people – with their heavy burden, in fact, only faintly lifted – commenced the long drive back to the future. The mo(u)rning went fast.

But the afternoon was a different story altogether. We piled into Wack’s black Saturn, followed our instincts to the venerable “Beverage Way” (never used to be open on Sundays), and returned to the Falls with two six packs of Genese Cream Ale (as if there were any other option).

And then we spent the remains of the day in and about the Falls, in a magical time lapsed swirl of inactivity. The Falls always had the power to eat whole days, but it was never waste, always nourishment. And yesterday was no exception. Near the stone stump that always served as our camp, we noticed some of the white boney dust that had been Chris Hume remained clustered, clinging to a rock and aglow with an other-worldly iridescence. Yes, it was the Big Chill, we were aware of it. But it was rewarding and painful and cleansing in a way that no other ritual could be. We celebrated amongst the naked post-commencement revelers, we old men, the class of ’92, dragging our creaking knees and graying heads through the slippery stones, conversing with the natives – our former selves – and taking absolution in the pounding waters, so furious and ecstatic. We passed around an ipod with Chris’s music and noise canceling headphones, and we felt, maybe ten percent of us did anyway, that no time had passed. The other ninety percent, which I’m sure included our brains, confirmed that everything had indeed changed. There was a time when ten thousand sunny sacrifices to the Falls lay before us, days offered up to the heavens in exchange for the soothing balm of timelessness and soundlessness, our barely used-up lives compact little balls of potential. Grazing that immortal feeling, ever so slightly and quickly, as we stood to remember and scatter our friend, was the bitterest of bittersweet tastes in the world. I felt remorseful for the loss of Hume, but also for the countless days I opted out of paradise, opted to study or practice or compose or just waste time in some less blissful pursuit. I felt remorse for my very oldness, for which I am in fact only partly to blame, and for every moment of my youth not spent celebrating God – this God of the sun and the smashing water and swaying leaves, that so surrounded us yesterday afternoon that it’s amazing life, in all its normalcy, goes on another day.

Ah dear Hume, we remembered you, celebrated you, bathed in you. You coursed through our veins and over our heads, massaged our backs, and gamboled forward in a violent, frenzied rush toward the beyond. Down to the basin, out to the Hudson, to the sea, the sea. We came together as friends, Wacks and I, and Kupietz, a guest by satellite, and felt the rush of your irreverent, scathing brilliance, now one with this miraculous corner of the world – this special boardroom where our lives in fact were planned – informing us of things past, and things to come. So tonight, when finally I reach my destination, as I’m sure Wacks has already reached his and you, hopefully, will reach yours soon, as Kupietz sits in Pacific contemplation and receives our digital imagery, I’ll head out to the Casco Bay and raise a plastic cup of Pernod, made white with cold water, as we did so long ago on the roof of Robbins. The past, the present, the future – all just existing at once, all of the time, in every one of us.

The City was filled with surprises and adventures for us, as always. Alex stormed into City Hall on my birthday, armed with a power point presentation, three foam core models, a mosaic sample, and 3 cast paper turtles, and walked out with a public art commission from the city of New York. This means we’ll be coming back often. We went to a foundry, practically right next door to the Steinway factory in Astoria, and saw how bronze sculptures are cast – a mind boggling process. Al will be jetting around to New York and to Montreal (where the mosaicists are – that’s probably not spelled correctly, but you try spelling mosaicist). There was ping pong on my birthday at Fat Cat Billiards, and a trip out to Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island – the greatest guitar shop I’ve ever seen (and maybe also the hardest to reach). We saw the Yankees clobber the Red Sox Monday night, waited on line with Bernadette Peters for a Broadway Musical Tuesday night (Lovemusik – about Kurt Weill. Decent show with great music); I caught some new opera by Eddy Ficklin on Wednesday eve; Thursday night we made it out to Sripraphai, the best Thai restaurant in the world (expanded, refinished, swanky now, but the food and prices remain as amazing as they always were), and Friday, after a walk on the Brooklyn Prom with some friends and family, we battled the masses leaving New York for Memorial Day Weekend and wound up in Connecticut.

Tomorrow it’s off to Bard for a Chris Hume memorial. You can bet I will report. Meantime, hit reload to see some different pics!

Alex and I are house sitting for our dear friends Jeff and Charlotte over on East 9th street. I'm sorry so sorry for not having written. What happens is you let a week get away from you, then another, and then life keeps happening and happening, and all the wonderful and terrible events that, pasted together, make up the life you all tune in for (every last one of you) pile up like old New Yorker issues. One day you just up and realize that you’re not going to get to all of them. So you – perhaps because your loving wife makes you – chuck them out on recycling Wednesday. Unless you’ve got foresight, in which case you rip off all the covers and stash them in a drawer to paper your bathroom wall, sometime down the road when you find yourself actually owning a bathroom (and maybe even a house to go with it).

Suffice to say that you simply won’t hear about everything. You won’t even see all the pictures. The big Merrill Auditorium concert from last month may end up being as ignored here as it was by that loathsome classical music critic at the Portland Press Herald. The glorious end of the semester, just a puff of vapor now. Even my last trip to New York, with all the pictures I took of Dom at DiFara, seem hopelessly dated now. Well that’s not entirely true – I bet I can dig one of those up.

But I’m back now and I’m going to try to shift the focus of my leisure hours a little bit more towards Argh-a-blog. I’ve been paralyzed by Fantasy Baseball, a pastime I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Avoid it like the plague, especially if you’ve an obsessive personality like I do. I won’t bore you with all the fantasy details, save to tell you that Carlos Delgado and Andruw Jones are KILLING me. They’re outright killing me – I’m losing sleep over it.

I’m in the City Bakery near Union Square contemplating if I should order an espresso drink as a follow-up to the half-iced-tea-half-lemonade I just drank. The kindly old man at the counter mistakenly gave me a large, so he charged me for a small which was bonus. Especially since the large isn’t as offensive and gut busting as, say, the one you get at 7-11. Oh, I also had a pretzel croissant, which has sprung up in a few locations since these folks started making them back in, oh, the early 90s? But no-one does them like City Bakery.

I’m also working on the opera treatment, still. I’m treating and working, except that I’m not. Since the madness of the last semester and all the accompanying activity subsided, I’ve been in a near state of catatonia. I accomplish nothing, and I’m really just taking up space on the planet that could probably be more profitably utilized by someone else. If this blog had a subtext, a motto, something, it might be: “I promise to try harder,” since I think that comes rolling off my fingers with some frequency.

I’m sitting next to some sort of person on the phone. She seems important, and I think she might be involved in theater. I look like shlub, wearing Good Humor colors and not looking at all local to Union Square. So I won’t say hello.

And this little mish mash is all I’ve got for you today. Just a little New York ramble. Sometimes the thing to do is just write something, so the pressure lets up a bit. The feeling that every utterance, spit out into cyber space for my adoring six readers, needs to be earth shattering in one way or another. That’s what leads to blogstipation, if you catch my meaning. So I’ve assembled these few paragraphs, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, just to stretch the old noodle into shape. I want to write more. It is time to start clicking Refresh on Argh-a-Blog once again. Yessiree.

Hi everybody...

Just a quick note to say I haven't forgotten about this blog - I just took about a month off from all worldly responsibilities....Oh I'll be in honest, I've been playing fantasy baseball basically non-stop. I'm a pathetic excuse for a person. But it's my birthday!

In NYC right now - and gonna write w/ updates and more.

even a pic coming soon - I swear it.