Tag: Death

  • The Reason Why I Am Edgy This Week

    I had mentioned in my post on Friday that my family and I were going out this weekend for some apple picking, and I had joked about how silly the act of picking apples was, but deep down I really enjoy doing it. The place we went was Apple Dave’s Orchards in Warwick, NY, and we’ve gone there for several years and have always had a really enjoyable time. I recommend you head out there, and get the apple cider donuts while you’re at it.

    And after the apple picking, we ran a few errands in New Jersey before we headed home to Harlem. While we were running these errands, I felt myself getting edgy. I didn’t have an outbursts, or get mad at anyone, but I could feel this slight level of annoyance building in me. I know myself well enough to know that I needed to remind myself to relax, and not take anything serious.

    But for the rest of the weekend, this feeling of frustration never left me. It was also a feeling of stress and anxiety. My shoulders ached. I got a canker sore in my mouth. I had trouble sleeping. I was feeling like I was falling apart, but I could think why? I’m having the normal stresses in life, such as nothing has changed recently. We are plugging away, trying to get ahead like we have been trying for the past two years. Life’s normal.

    As I was taking our laundry to the laundromat this morning, I started thinking about my weekend, and how I might want to write a blog about apple picking. I took some pictures of our apple adventure on Saturday, and thought I might want to use them in the blog, which reminded me of the first time we went out to Dave’s Orchards with my parents, who had come to visit us in the fall of 2017. And the reason we go back to Dave’s every year because it is a place that we have fond memories with my mother, who passed away four years ago on October 14th.

    And then I knew.

    I had forgotten about the anniversary of my mother’s death. Well… consciously I had, but not sub-consciously.

    I know that my mother is dead. It’s not like I forgot that. I am at the point now that I can talk about my mother without an issue. I can even talk about her death and the awfulness of losing her. What does get to me is thinking about the things Ma isn’t here for; birthdays, holidays, and a simple phone call. It breaks my heart not being able to share things with her. Whether she wanted it or not, I did talk a lot to her.

    It will be a tough week, and I’ll be subdued while just feeling sad. It’s not like I won’t be able to function this week, or that I will be angry or something. What it’s like is having a blanket of melancholy around me, and all events will be filter through that feeling. And that will be manageable.

    I just miss my mom, still. That’s all.

    (Hey. Thanks for taking a second to read this. If you could, please take a moment to give a like, share, or comment, and follows are always welcomed.)

  • Short Story Review: “HOUYHNHNM” by André Alexis

    (The short story “HOUYHNHNM” by André Alexis, appeared in the June 20th, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Vanessa Winship

    (I’ll probably SPOIL it)

    Did you ever have a simple turkey sandwich but for whatever reason, was just amazing? Like, it’s made up of all the same simple ingredients that you have in your house, but somehow the person in the kitchen put it together in a way that somehow was spot on. Man, it’s just a turkey sandwich, but it’s great turkey sandwich.

    I mean no disrespect, but that is exactly what “HOUYHNHNM” by André Alexis was to me. The title of the story is taken from the name of a race of fictional intelligent horses from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is told by the adult son of a well to do but modest doctor who is all scientific logic, and buys a horse. This isn’t his first horse he’s owned, but soon a special bond is formed between the doctor and the horse, to the point where the doctor spends all of his free time with the horse; walking, reading to him, talking to him. It even gets to the point to where the doctor builds the horse a special barn to live in. Suddenly, the doctor passes, and the son takes on the responsibility of caring for the horse, only to find that the horse can speak. The son realizes why his father spent so much time with the animal, and also the son begins to do the same things that his father did when he was attending the horse.

    I used the metaphor of the simple ingredients here because nothing in this story took me by surprise. I knew where it was going, I saw all the pieces, I knew was Alexis was going to build. I knew that with the son now spending time with the horse, he was gaining a deeper understand of who his father was. And when the horse’s decline set in, I also knew that the story was alluding to having a parent who is succumbing to dementia, and the pain that can cause when the loved one soon no longer recognizes you. Even with that said, it was an effective story – honest and authentic. Not a word seemed false or forced. The title of the piece was clearly there to say to the reader that this horse was real, and not a figment of the narrator’s imagination, though, that was the only aspect of the story that I kept expecting to surface, but it never did. And I apricated that dedication to the premise – this is a talking horse story.

    Maybe it’s me. This is a story about losing a parent, and that subject still holds a soft spot in me. But I do think that there is more to this story. Though I did know where this story was going, I experienced a special catharsis in the son gaining a better understanding of his father. That might be a very basic desire of all children after their parents die, and though it might be basic, it is still a wish I hope comes true.

    (Say! If you like what you have read, please like, share, and leave a comment. It would help justify my existence.)

  • Small Country Cemetery

    This weekend, the family and I, including the dog, started up hiking again. This is our third year, and I have mentioned it before, I am really looking forward to it. As New Yorkers, getting to the location of our hikes is half the battle. On average, we have to dive about 45 minutes out of the City, before we can hit some more rugged nature trails, and if we want to try our hand at more moderately difficult paths that are less trafficked, then we have to go an hour to an hour and a half away.

    Such was the case this weekend. We had decided to hit up Mountain Lakes Park in Westchester County, right on the New York/Connecticut border. This was our first time out there, and Google Maps ended up failing us. The app said we had arrived, but we were in the middle of a country road, surrounded by horse farms and BMW’s. So, I pulled the car over to the first public parking space I could find, which ended up being a cemetery off of June Road and 116.

    After I had figured out that we were like five minutes away from our destination, the wife suggested that we stroll through the cemetery; see what we can see. As far as I could tell, people were buried there from the 1780 to the present day. Quite a few Revolutionary War Veterans were there, from the 4th New York Militia. My seven-year-old daughter, who is very curious and inquisitive, had lots of questions for us. Why were so many people with the same name buried together? Do you have to be buried together if you are married? And sadly, she observed that many of the graves were for children, and wanted to know why so many kids died long ago? All good and honest questions that I would expect her to ask.

    Because families used to always live near each other, and married people normally want to be with each other forever, and sadly, medicine wasn’t that advanced long ago, and kids who got sick would sometimes die.

    But the kid kept asking us if we, me and the wife, wanted to be buried together. “I guess,” was my answer, not because I’m unsure we should spend eternity together, but because we never talked about it.

    The wife wants to be eco-buried so she can be plant food for a tree. I can live with that.

    I want to be buried someplace quiet and just have a boulder for a headstone. Like Jackson Pollock did. Only my name on it.

    We decided that whomever dies first, that their wishes should be honored, and the other one has to do the same.

    Seems fair. Either a tree or a boulder.

    Very Taoist in a sense.

  • Short Story Review: “The Face in the Mirror” by Mohsin Hamid

    (The short story “The Face in the Mirror” by Mohsin Hamid appeared in the May 16th, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (This story will be Spoiled!)

    I didn’t know I had been waiting for a story, but “The Face in the Mirror” by Mohsin Hamid was the story I had been waiting for. I thought I knew what I was getting, then I was surprised, then I felt ashamed that I had judged it, only to again think I knew where this story was going, only to arrive at an ending that was conclusive, but also left me pleasantly wondering what all of this meant. I love that feeling. It reminds me of being in a college English class, and we have just finished reading a story that we are all jazzed up about, and we can’t wait to discuss it, to see if someone else saw it the same way that I did.

    The story is about a white man, Anders, who wakes up one day to find that his skin color has changed to brown. Right off the bat, I thought I was about to get a modern retelling of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Anders soon learns that this change is affecting other people in his city. Slowly, tensions start growing in this city. Anders goes to see his father, who has not changed and is still white. We learn that the father and Anders have a strained relationship, neither really coming to understand the other. Where the father was a construction foreman, a physically tough man, Anders never lived up to that standard. Though the father doesn’t understand or recognize his son, the father still loves and attempts to protect his child, by giving Anders a rifle to protect himself. Soon, society begins to break apart; militias form, people who have changed are now evicted, violence is everywhere. Anders has a confrontation at his apartment, an attempt to evict him, and though he stands his ground, he knows he has to leave. The only safe place is his father’s home, where he goes, and the two of them hole up together. Soon, it is clear that the father is dying, and Anders sees to it that he takes care of his father to the end. And at the funeral, the father is the only white person left, as all of the people attending are now brown skinned.

    First of all, much respect to Hamid for writing a story that was not easy to predict where it was going. Always a good sign. Second, there is so much to unpack. Was this a story about race? Clearly it was. Was this a story about how the paternal generation comes to not recognize and understand their children’s generation? Yes, that is also true. I think it was also about loving unconditionally. It was all of that, and it was great. I also like that after Anders goes through this change, society comes out on the other side, and everything starts to return back to normal. There was a menace in this story, a tension that I felt was going to explode, but the fact that it didn’t played well into the theme of the story. There were all of these things happening, which was bringing up questions in my mind, asking if this is how society would react to a change like that, or is our current society reacting this way because a great change is under way?

    I don’t know, but it is fun and challenging to ask and ponder these questions.

    But all of it was pulled together and held tightly by Hamid’s writing. His word choice, the flow of the sentences, and the use of repetition of a phrase in a sentence; it was enjoyable just to read this prose. I am now a fan of Mohsin Hamid. I feel like he was a friend, gently nudging me to ask questions, and look a little closer at the world around me.

    (Say, don’t forget to like this post, or share it, or leave a comment. I got bills to pay, you know.)

  • Short Story Review: “The Ukraine” by Artem Chapeye

    (The short story “The Ukraine,” by Artem Chapeye and translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins,, appeared in the April 4th, 2022 issue of “The New Yorker.)

    I feel that I am like most Americans, in the sense that I didn’t know a whole lot about Ukraine until about two months ago. I knew that a town in Texas was named after a city Ukraine, that the Crimea was in Ukraine, and that’s where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place. I knew that Chernobyl was in Ukraine, and that the country used to be a part of the Soviet Union. Let’s see, there was also that Trump/Biden impeachment thing that had a Ukraine connection. But, outside of that…

    I also think it is an incorrect belief that one writer can capture the whole spirit of a nation. Steinbeck’s America was different from Kerouac’s, as was Baldwin’s and Twain’s. Each is different, and was still correct. Artem Chapeye’s story, “The Ukraine” is about Ukraine, if you couldn’t put that together, and also about a relationship between the narrator and a woman. The cynical side of me, the judgmental side to be honest, was hesitant to read it because the title alone made it feel like The New Yorker was only publishing this story due to current events. As I started reading, and the narrator spoke of his travels across Ukraine with his girlfriend, I had the bad feeling that the author was going to try and capture all of Ukraine in one piece. And as I stated before, I find these encapsulations an act of folly.

    Like I said, I was being judgmental.

    “The Ukraine” is not an exercise of excessive nationalist propaganda, but a soft, quiet meditation on memories, life, death, acceptance, and travel that bonds people together. (In fact, the story has a great line against public displays of overt patriotism, that I won’t ruin.) Maybe part of the power of this story is the fact that as places and cities of Ukraine are named, in my mind, I can see the images of burnt out buildings, and bomb cratered streets. To hear that these places were once a destination that brought about joy to the couple in the story, created a palatable melancholy for all the things lost. About half way through the piece, it finally dawned on me that the fact the story took place in Ukraine was inconsequential. The act of experiencing places together with someone you love, sharing time, creating memories, these are the actions that make life valuable. I will say that the climax was not a total surprise, as it had been hinted, but it still held the needed weight to conclude the story.

    This was not a revolutionary work. It’s didn’t break new ground in literature, or change the landscape of fiction. No, it wasn’t that. What it was, was authentic, and honest. It pointed out a fault of mine, while also reminding me that this truth still exists, “People are beautiful, even if they don’t realize it.”