You Could Kill Someone With My Grandmother's Matzoh Balls

I am successfully fighting off the urge to snoop. I am in the house of a man I would like to know more about, and I have oopsidentally spilled Guatemalan/Antiguan coffee beans all over his wood floor all by myself.

[Jeez, Leonard Lopate is having a hacking coughing fit. Horrible. “Once you get a tickle…,” he says. cough, cough. “I’m sure this is exciting radio…Let’s go to a break.” cough. Poor radio host.]

What keeps me from poking through drawers and around this computer is a strong sense of wrong…and, to be honest, karmic retribution: I do not want someone doing that to me. But more than that, to be happily honest, I have a calm, good feeling that I can know this man without invading his privacy. He is straightforward, one of my favorite human qualities. He shows me that past is not present, without putting that into words. He is one of those people who say goodnight to acquaintances with a sweetly honest well-wishing. He has crazy hair.

While sitting in this 1950s office chair (that is slightly broken, leans back too far) I was earlier listening to the Brian Lehrer show. He had on two participants in NY Soundmap (nysoundmap.org.)

(Their site description: “The NYSoundmap is a project of The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology (NYSAE), a New York metropolitan chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, an organization dedicated to exploring the role of sound in natural habitats and human societies, and promoting public dialog concerning the identification, preservation, and restoration of natural and cultural sound environments. The NYSAE's purpose is to explore and create an ongoing dialog regarding aural experience specific to New York City.”)

I was so interested in this idea when I first heard about it. Holy crap, I thought, I should pull my mic (Electrovoice RE-50 multidirectional) out of a drawer and start aiming it at the sewers! The sky! The cat on the corner! (Frank.) Then I listened.

It was semi-interesting. To be honest, I did and did not correctly identify the sounds in the samplings they played as a guessing game. What interested me were the sounds I recognized: a dog lapping at a pond in the park, children in swings in a Carroll Gardens playground. Some sounds are intrinsic in your body. What was not as interesting as I’d hoped was the single-layered, stop/start nature of listening to pieces of the map on a radio talk show. I love the idea of layering sound—as the speakers suggested they are considering doing a historical map of New York sounds. Layer it with the present, and we can begin to see this island as the dynamic, stratified, bedrock-deep city it is. THAT would be amazing. (I want to write a book/paint a painting/create something that is as multilayered. And I want to do it now.)

“It changes once you get within someone’s emotional blast radius.” This was from the mouth of Tom Bissell, on the radio right now discussing his new book, The Father of All Things. The book is about taking a trip to Vietnam with his war-vet father. I love this image: an “emotional blast radius.” It leaves me chilled, remembering that there is a particular emotional explosion zone you need to keep back from, can never really penetrate, never really should. [See: Not Snooping, Above. Kind of.]

I just turned in a newspaper piece on a woman who smuggled precious materials through the Middle East many moons ago. [See: Some Earlier Blog Post, In Which I Wrote About Meeting This Woman’s Son.] (Yes, I will be vague here. Stop stalking me.) This woman went through her journey in her 20s, but has not changed too much so many years later. She still is willing to take off and live outside her world—in strange places doing out-of-the-ordinary things (sorry for the lack of specifics. Truly, they are fascinating). She allowed me to do that these past few months by getting to know her, by allowing me to write about her.

As I finished up the story a couple days ago, I realized I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing in the world. Writing a story that interests me, hopefully interests others. I was working hard to get inside her past, to see her travels, her emotional self. I was consructing sentences, stringing together words like daisies on a chain, so happy. Like a child. A self-satisfied, self-important child.

Coming up on Leonard Lopate: “We want you to weigh in on the Great Matzoh Ball Debate—Firm or Fluffy?” If you were not raised a Jew in New York, you know not the importance of this argument. In my house it, was my grandmother’s “baseballs” versus my father’s fluffy ideal. I liked the baseballs, oddly.