Time’s Bent Arrow

Today is my friend Gisele’s birthday. She’s French, was born in Lyon, but moved to Paris in high school to become a first-class photographer, and now lives in a small French village called Sardy, where she still photographs and runs an art store and gets government grants to continue her own work.

She turns 53 today.

I am 85 and will turn 86 in June.

But when we first met, Gigi was 31 and I was 63. We met in Paris. But we had communicated by email before that. I had attended a photography show in New Haven and the person who was showing the photos said I might be interested in the work of her friend, Gisele Didi. I checked her out, did like her work, got in touch with her, and we agreed to meet in Paris in September of 2001.

But then 9/11 happened and the skies went empty. So I had to wait a couple of weeks before I was allowed to fly to Paris. But when I did and we met, the relationship was like a merging of spirits and a marriage of personalities. Age did not matter. We took to each other instantly.

And so for the next four years, I traveled to Paris 16 times, staying each time for two to three weeks in the same room in the same small hotel around the Place de Bastille. It was through Gigi that I got to know Paris intimately and grew to love the city and at one point considered moving there. But in the end, my French never was good enough for me to live there permanently.

And Gisele came to New Haven three times and got to know my city and the coastline and the sea. But we each preferred our own home-grown countries.

And our lives evolved separately and together. She married a Ukrainian and had a son by him. She would bring baby Yanko to my room and the three of us would sit on the floor and Yanko would make baby noises and crawl around. Now he is 17 and about to graduate from high school and hopes to go on to study at a film school.

I began writing my blog on a French site at that time and kept at it daily from 2002 to 2010. But then the site starting having technical problems and I grew fed up with it and ended my connection to it in June 2010.

My good American friend, Robert, built me my current site, which I switched to the same month in 2010 and have maintained it more or less weekly ever since.

Robert, by the way, has left New Haven and moved permanently, with his wonderful dog, Sonny, to Spain. So my two close friends — Gisele and Robert — are now far out of sight and I will probably never see them again. It is one of the painful consequences of time and of growing too old to want to travel to distant foreign countries.

Gisele eventually divorced the Ukrainian and a few years later married a very talented French photographer and after awhile they left Paris and moved into the country and built a house for themselves and Yanko and a dog and a cat and a couple of chickens.

But then they divorced but remained friends and still live near each other. The dog, Luz, remained with Thierry.

And so here we are — all these many years and thousands of miles later. I have pretty much stayed put. I am a kind of stay-put kind of person. My drama is always interior more than geographical.

But in staying put, I have found myself marooned in time. I am growing older to the point of genuine old age. But I am also feeling slightly out-of-sync, as if my timing doesn’t feel quite in step with everyone else’s around me.

My memory for names is withering. My respect for contemporary American life, as it is currently expressing itself, has bottomed out. I feel a stranger in this strange land. I feel more and more distant from America than I ever did from Paris during those golden years with Gisele.

Meanwhile, she is 53 now and I am 85. And I am still having trouble figuring out how that happened.

When did I lose the rhythm? When did I stop believing that tomorrow would be brand new?

When did the neighborhood dogs take over my affection for life?

Drowning in Bad News

I don’t know why I keep up with the news — the news from inside the U.S. and from around the world. It all just makes me sad and angry.

I read and hear and watch terrible stories and feel rotten about I, but there’s nothing I can do to make the situation better.

I read this morning in the New York Times about Russia’s Vladimir Putin continuing to direct the abduction of Ukrainian children who are then relocated to Russia and adopted by Russian families or put into Russian nurseries never to return to their Ukrainian homeland.

Many of the children were in Ukrainian orphanages because their parents were killed in the fighting or because of other reasons. And now the Russians have stolen them and moved them to Russia and will bring them up as Russians.

It’s hard to know how many children are involved. But Russia admits to 2,000 children abducted. Ukrainian officials say the number is closer to 16,000. But exact numbers are hard to come by.

This is one of the reasons Putin was just declared a criminal by the International Court of Justice and is subject to immediate arrest for crimes against humanity.

But there’s no way he’s going to be arrested. He is safe behind the Russian border, even when he visits a part of Ukraine that Russians invaded, as he did this weekend. Ukrainian children will continue to be stolen by Russian soldiers and transported to Russia.

God-damn it to hell !

And then there are the earthquakes in Turkey and parts of Syria, in which tens of thousands of men, woman and children were killed and millions more left homeless and food-less and hopeless.

God-damn it to hell ! Except there is no god and there is no hell. So what’s the point?

Any decent god would be in charge of earthquakes. But either he doesn’t exist to control the rumblings of the Earth. Or he doesn’t give a damn how many lives he destroys.

And yet, stupid me has the New York Times and New Haven Register delivered to my front porch every morning so I can read even more stories about cruel, painful abductions and death.

And I listen to National Public Radio each morning and evening on the radio and to the BBC news hour on WNYC FM at 10 o’clock in the morning and then again on AM at 3 o’clock. And I watch the BBC news channel on cable TV and the news on MSNBC.

And the question is why? Why do I put myself through this painful orgy? Why do I listen and watch and read about all this anguish? Am I a masochist? Am I a glutton for bad news?

Not all news is bad, of course. Occasionally, I’ll read a story about an animal that’s been rescued or a doughnut shop that’s just opened or a former president that’s been impeached and some day soon will probably be arrested.

But the bad news always dwarfs the puny good news.

‘If it bleeds, it leads.’

Fortunately, there are two classical music stations within my radio’s range. And so I listen to them a lot, especially when I need to pull away from the death and abduction of children and the abuse of animals and the efforts by politicians to destroy democracy and the cynical madness of people addicted to the lies and demented conspiracies on social media.

Everything is going too fast, and much of it is cruel and deranged.

I have to let it go. Not that I can change anything important. But just knowing how bad things are is bad for my morale and hopeless for my sense of being and is not great for my heart issues.

The human race is Nature’s biggest mistake. I turn 86 in June. So I will be leaving this increasingly toxic atmosphere in a little while. But I’m sad to go and to leave people I love and dogs I love and the black cherry tree at Lighthouse Point.

Within my tight circle of friends and relatives, there is pleasure and meaning. And they help me feel what I used to feel when life was slower and you could define happiness in small, irregular ways and we had the privilege that comes with modest expectations.

It’s too bad the way things turned out. But humans just couldn’t handle the stress, and so they turned crazy and lethal.

And although there were plenty of dogs in the world, there just weren’t enough to save us from ourselves.

The Hawk Stare-Down

Birds of prey have to eat too. That’s the thing about life on Earth. Everybody has to eat something and often. And many animals — including humans — eat other animals for sustenance. .

No one on Earth eats food from outer space. Everything we eat comes exclusively from the Earth. There are no Moon burgers, no Venus filets.

Hawks, vultures, dogs, cats, lions and tigers, whales and sharks eat other animals. Their biology requires it.

Most humans also eat animals — great quantities of animals — even though their biology does not require it.

In fact, humans — who are animals, after all — may be the only animal that can make a rational and moral choice whether to eat or not eat another animal.

I have not eaten an animal in 50 years. Donald Trump eats an animal every day. So does Vladimir Putin. The Dalai Lama never eats an animal.

So not all animals eat other animals. Cows and horses and elephants eat grass and shrubs. Monkeys eat fruit and seeds. Most land birds eat seeds and nuts. Of course, robins eat worms and seagulls eat fish.

But vultures only eat animals that have died by other means. Vultures don’t kill. They just feed on the meat once the animal dies by other means.

Meat processing factories are torture chambers. Cows and pigs and lambs and sheep scream in pain and terror as they are led to slaughter. It is perhaps the most extreme form of torture and death we have created on Earth.

Dante’s Inferno is literary make-believe. Slaughterhouses are the real Hell on Earth. The next time you bite into a burger or a steak, you may want to recall the agony of the animal that died for your meal.

Yesterday, as I went to feed the birds at the two locations here in the city, I saw a hawk sitting on top of the building that houses the Yale hockey rink. I feed the birds peanut pieces and seeds every morning alongside the rink, and the hawk knew it. That’s why he was there. He was waiting for me to lay out a generous feed for the dozens and sometimes a hundred sparrows, pigeons, doves, grackles, starlings, cardinals, chipmunks, squirrels, and the one blue jay that come for breakfast.

But no one was there. The feeding area was empty and there were no other birds nearby. That always happens. When a hawk is in the neighborhood, the birds disappear. And they stay away until the hawk gives up and leaves.

But this time, he wasn’t giving up and he wasn’t ready to leave. And so it was just him and me. All the birds he had come to choose from were hiding elsewhere.

He watched me stand and stare at him, and he stared back. I held up the plastic bag of seeds and peanuts and said, “Not this time. I’m not going to betray my friends so you can kill ‘em. So there will be no breakfast this morning.”

I turned to leave and he walked down the seam of the roof to follow me toward my car. As I passed in front of the rink, he flew to the top of the sculptural overhang that serves as a light for night games, and he watched me cross the street.

I turned to look at him one last time. He was clearly drawing the connection between me and the food and the birds that were not showing up for breakfast.

He knew that I was the problem, but there was nothing he could do about it. I wondered if he would suddenly fly down and claw me in retribution. But he stayed put on the top of the architectural outcropping.

I drove away frustrated that I hadn’t been able to lay out the food for my regular birds. But I also respected the hawk for his savvy calculations and his elegant demeanor.

For me, it was theater. For him, it was a meal sabotaged. I would go home and eat my bowl of cheerios and drink a pot of tea. But he had no such warm and comfortable home to go to and no freshly-killed breakfast to eat.

He would have to recalculate his strategy and fly someplace else to find food. Which is to say, a new hunting ground to create a new approach to someone else’s death.

I had ruined his morning, and now he had to re-image his next kill.