Days Like This

photo by E. Lohninger

"One day at a time" is way too long.  I'm only capable of handling 20 minutes at any given moment and that's on a good day.

It is hard to carve and coax love out of one's failed past, broken-hearted role models, and Fred and Ginger movies.  Even An American In Paris offered only fantasy as a road map. (yeah show me a broke artist who picks the poor girl over the heiress....)

But, like time passing or a kid getting taller, its presence, during many twelve hour walks through the city, unfolded imperceptibly until one morning a note sent to a friend recounting the previous twenty-four hours was filled with words like "laughing" and "fun" and "good" and other similar happy descriptions.  There were no recognizable words like "struggle" or "fight" or "confused" or "frustration" or "despair" or "futile" or....

If I hadn't written that note, I would have never known how I had laughed all night (which is just like dancing all night only you get to sit down).   I would have never notice what once was foreign in my life was suddenly present.  I would have never have noticed my life was becoming different from what I had known for so long.

So, imagine my surprise 780,000 minutes later (which is approximately 39,000 20 minute segments) that what once was different now seemed normal. 

Happy Valentine's Day to the Mariner.

**
Related Posts:

In Case Of Emergency

The Untitled Store

Sunday Memories Encore: A Table of Thanks

Tales From A Hard Day's Night: Mieux La Chance, Que L'Address (Better Luck Than Skill)

In Honor Of Love That Blooms In Autumn

Winter Encore: Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

A Poem Becomes Her

The picture of her and Baby Boy, snapped quickly with an old Instamatic and real film, has been in each and every old Filofax lugged about in handbags and satchels.  A photo in a phone could never be this loved, bent from being taken out over and over again to show life and love, history and family.

When there is great beauty, there are fewer words.

I keep scooping up pens and cameras, attempting to tell a poem offered by fading light on a city street or a cat's heartbeat, or sorrow and loss, or the inevitable journey people I love take into the unknown.

"There needs to be another word for what we are to each other than family because it is so much better than that," she said recently.

Poem.  Poem works.

 **

Related Posts:

Letters At The Speed Of...
 

Tales From A Hard Day's Night: Mieux La Chance, Que L'Address (Better Luck Than Skill)

GUEST ARTIST: Sunday Memories: Joni's Coney

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part XII

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part XI

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part X

GUEST ARTIST: Sunday Memories: It Was Her New York - Part IX

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part VIII

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part VII

GUEST ARTIST: Sunday Memories: It Was Her New York - Part VI 

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part V

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part IV

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part III

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part II 

GUEST ARTIST: It Was Her New York - Part I

Was This Still Here?

Meat Fest 2009

Sunday Memories: Sunday Visits

Meat Fest 2008

Sunday Memories - One of the Happiest Days of My Life

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: MINDBENDERS 2 COMING ATTRACTIONS!!!!

 

Read the excerpt, The Man Who Didn't Die from Ted Krever's sequel MINDBENDERS2: UNDER THE RADAR


Ted Krever, author
Video by Adrian Garcia Gomez

Sunday Memories: On The Road

You can't quite see it, but my father, Seymour has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

And you may not recognize it, it now quite redone, but this was a stretch along the East River by the Williamsburg Bridge.

My parents always biked.  Not in any special lane, not with helmets or fancy spandex.  Regular shoes or sneakers.  They had sturdy Raleigh bikes, and an L.L. Bean saddle bag and they went places.

Just married, Seymour turned to Florence and said, let's go! Without gear or extra clothes, they traveled for days.  Later, Florence wrote excitedly to the woman she had always loved, telling her that after several days, their clothes had become unbearably dirty.  Seymour went and bought her an entire outfit of new clothes.  Both of them barely out of poverty, this was a big deal.  (Even after my father had a full time job, my sister and I could count on one hand the times we bought new clothes.)

They travel up and down the Jersey shore and all over the city.  They traveled uptown and across, and when I was 12 or 13, I too took to the road on one of their Raleighs, biking to babysitting and soon, on my own, to City College with my violin strapped to my back.  Occasionally, a cigarette dangling from my mouth.  No helmet, no fancy spandex. Regular shoes or sneakers.

Florence quit smoking in her fifties, but she continued to bike into her late sixties until I think the bike got stolen and she couldn't replace it.  That or we sold it or gave it away because she wasn't wearing a helmet and besides, if you walk, you get to eat along the way.

***
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories:  "Not Coney.  Coney Island."

Sunday Memories: A "Chuck Close" Portrait Of Florence

Following in Florence's Footsteps

Sunday Memories:  It Was His New York

Sunday Memories: A Tale of Two Brothers

Subway Rat

I think that boyfriend in 1977 was complimenting me when he called me that.

But here are the things that are normal:

• knowing which door to stand at so I could walk straight out to the street 

• the many ways to get from point A to point B, and if I didn't know, calling Baby Boy (until he was eight years old and got bored with it), because he knew the entire MTA system - buses and subways and could map you from anywhere to anywhere, usually in multiple routes.

• riding without holding on because it was too crowded and the pole was too far away, not realizing until recently that it was just like surfing, just without the cold water or the sharks

• hanging out in between cars in the summer because the Lexington IRT never had any air conditioning in the summer, only in the winter, and it had air conditioning in the winter because it never had heat in the winter (that was the 70's and 80's)

• walking from one car to another, and when the young kid cop stopped me and said "hey that's against the law - didn't you see the sign?" I said, "Oh?  I thought that was just for the tourists."

• NOT knowing which damn color goes with which line.  They're called the BMT, IND and IRT for fucks sake.

***
Related Posts:

Blood On The Tracks
 

Sunday Memories:  How Old Were You Your First Time?

A Day In The Life...

What I Stared At While Wondering ....

Sunday Memories - One of the Happiest Days of My Life

Sunday Memories - Baby Boy Tadpole and Other Snapshots from Deep Waters

Our Westerns

"He's a cowboy," Florence would hiss.

I'm not exactly sure where she got her terminology.  She was in her sixties the first time she went west of New Jersey.  Maybe, watching westerns as a girl in Bushwick or the Lower East Side, she got the idea that only a cowboy would drive a vehicle reckless and fast through millions of cow-like traffic.

It wasn't until Bucko's blog that it dawned on me that the world of the cowboy was a bit larger than Blazing Saddles and New York City bus drivers.  (I am purposely ignoring the two westerns I was dragged to see in 1981 at the St. Marks Movie theater because they were being screened with irony.)

So, as the M3 bus driver barreled down Fifth Avenue, zipping in and out of billions of cars and taxis and pedestrians and those bicycle rickshaws, imagine my surprise when I heard myself mutter, "Cowboy!" 

***
Related Posts:

CowboyLands

Sunday Memories: Girlfriends

The cat doesn't understand Dutch and only begrudgingly shares his couch corner with her.   He is tolerating our three decades plus ability to spite over 3000 miles of ocean and land in order to talk non-stop about every single person in our lives, whether we both know them or not.  It doesn't matter.  What we do know is the air and light and sound of each others' city, the laugh of the ex-lover and the cooking skills of the current one, the lilt of a family member's voice, the rubble left from a parent's failure at care. 

She is the one, who after Florence died, gently coaxed, "Don't chew," and each time I returned to that night and redid my actions like it would change history, I would hear her.  "Don't chew," I'd repeat and again let go of my delusion I could make the past different just by raging at it.

There is much to cover in her few days in New York.  In between rationing out dozen of pieces of licorice and taking one of our meandering walks that now illuminates another land than the one she visited in 1982, we re-become each other's diaries.  It is too dangerous to commit to any evidence, in Dutch or English, where we have buried the bodies of our many adventures, unless of course we write it as fiction.

So we recount to one another, relieved the memories will die along with us.  She does the remembering of events.   I do the remembering of emotional processes.  It had been a similar division of work when, as young women, we traveled together.  I could remember how, in the appropriate language, to ask where the auto bus was and she could understand the answer.

Now, we are the old ladies we once peered at when we were twenty-two.  We grumble about young people and their cell phones.   We discuss preparations necessary for illness and funerals.  We say, "Leave that for me in your will" or "I will leave that for you in my will".  We try on much different fashion than we did years ago, enjoying styles that only adults used to wear.   We no longer drink Southern Comfort or Jenever.  Although I'm still open to it.  We exchange, no matter what, breakable heavy objects to carry back to home. 

In the whirl of time, we hold each others' footsteps, the ones we took towards love, through loss and then back into unexpected life again, and we bear witness for one another of how amazing and surprising life turned out to be.

***
Related Posts:

What A Difference An Anniversary Makes... 

Sunday Memories: The Domino Effect

"Tonight I can write the saddest lines." - Neruda

Orchard Street

It was the only stoop on the block that still looked familiar.

The Old Normal

The sign on the door said "Careful - wet paint in hallway".   Clearly the work hadn't begun. 

The peeling paint off the wall and the cigarette butts and empty packs littering the stairs - it was just like home when home was anywhere me and my friends could be who or what we were or weren't. 

It makes sense in new nice neighborhoods rising from factories into tri-plex multi-million dollar lofts with triple pane windows and spectacular views that hallways get to change too. 

Before paint and work erased yet another haven, normal to us, a quick glimpse, remembering littering stairs, smoking, and glaring at the people, stepping over kids like me and my friends, as they trudged up and down heading from work to street to more work to life that didn't include multi-million dollar nothing.

Sunday Memories That Become Part of Now

The old chairs inherited from Florence, the beat-up table left by a old friend and roommate in 1979, the table clothes found at yard sales in 1998, the dishes collected over twenty-five years from different restaurant closings, the forks a moving neighbor left up for grabs in the lobby, the vase carried back from Spain in 1988, the serving spoons Florence got from Mrs. Applebaum's apartment when she died in 1981, wine glasses quickly purchased today from the thrift store across the street....

Then me and the Mariner opened the door and let the cat out to greet friends who over two or eight or twelve or 18 or 37 years joined in once again to welcome another birthday.

**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: When We Were Young

Birth

Winter Encore: Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Originally posted December 4, 2011


Although the date on the picture says "Aug 67" more likely than not my father took this picture in the winter but using the camera sparingly (after all, film was expensive and so was processing) he didn't finish the roll until the summer. So probably every season was recorded in one roll of film.

This was my winter coat for several years.  A couple of sizes bigger than me (of course) and grown into (of course), my father called this my Joseph Coat Of Many Colors.  When the musical came out I became very confused.  THAT coat didn't look like mine.

I also didn't realize that Joseph, as a son of the desert probably didn't need a hood on his.  But this was how I understood this coat, bought second hand or handed down but clearly a coat that that traveled through other lives before reaching me.  I wore it as the mantel of a man in the midst of sibling rivalry but destined to heal his family.  This of course led to many years of therapy.


And these were my parents' winter coats.  Judging from the angle, I must of taken this picture.

Florence was still wearing winter coats then.  I suspect she gave them up around the same time she gave up skirts and men.  Her coat was a Harris Tweed bought probably at Macys or A&S or B. Altmans or Gimbels.  It was expensive.  At some point she relined it.  Forty-four years later, it's still in great shape and I wear it.   Being shorter than Florence was then, I look like Little Red Riding Hood, only without the hood or the red.

My father's coat was, I believe, a Hudson Bay, also very expensive.  Or it  could have been an LL Bean.  It was his winter coat until he moved to  California in the 1980's.  It is still in his closet.  Just in case the  weather suddenly changes.  The last time I checked, it was dusty but  ready to go.  For a brief moment, he and I talked about giving it to my then boyfriend who was unprepared for the North American winters.  However, I suspect he clung to that coat the same way Florence discarded hers.  A reminder of other times and other weather.

The Long Road

I was too busy standing up and singing along and being proud to be an American, included in that word like never before, to take a picture of the television.  This is from the New York Times.

On days like this, remembering that the promise of the Constitution wasn't just for some but for all of us, I miss Florence a lot.  She would have heard that this land was her land too, not just parts of the Village or a couple of friends' living rooms.

And on days like this, I wish my gramma and my bubby were here to see this.  They fled from the Old Country to the New World because of the promise of the Constitution.  They would have heard that the promise wasn't just words, but real lives thriving.

Look! A woman justice swearing in the Vice President!

Look! Us and all our family and friends and neighbors and co-workers in the crowd, on the podium, everywhere.  It's not just that scumbag Republican who gets to be there.  We do too!

Listen!  That's Brooklyn up there, where our families lived before moving to the lower east side, and that's our anthem, sung like it was meant to be sung!

But most of all,  my gramma and my bubby would have heard "Thank you".

The long road of their flight from that Old Country to this New World had not been in vain, even with the brutal poverty and horrible violence and crazy-ass people hating them because of what they were, not who they were.

They took that long road and, because of that, their granddaughter, standing up proud in front of the television, gets to live in a country that allows her the freedom to vote, to protest against the government, to own property if she can ever afford it, to practice the religion of her choice, to fight for change so the promise of the Constitution continues to be for all, not just some, and to love who she damn well feels like loving.

Shona Tova, Shona Tova, a new year for all of us, a new year, indeed.

**
Related Posts:

Tales From A Hard Day's Night: The Light At The End Of The...

Mechanic's Alley

Sunday Memories - Over the Hills and Through the Woods to Grandmother's House We Go

Sunday Memories - Where We All Now Live

Sunday Memories - Our Version of "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay"

Sunday Memories: Along Came Bialy

Both sides of the family have a long relationship with bialies.

My dad's family came from or through Bialystok on their way to the new world.  My dad and his brother, Uncle George were bar mitzvah'ed at the Bialystok Synagogue on Willet between Grand and Columbia.  They all ate bialies.

Florence grew up over Kossar's, the bialy store when it was still on Hester Street.  It moved around the corner to Grand when Dana's husband, George convinced everyone to trade the tenements for nice high-rises that had hot water and plumbing inside the apartments.   They all ate bialies too.

Kossars always closed for Shabbos.  So, during summertime, me, Cindy and B. would wait until sunset and then some, and then stroll down to the store on Grand and Essex and get the first hot, fresh bialies straight from the ovens.  It was - pre-breasts and boys - the highlight of our Saturday nights.

Come to think of it, it was - post-breasts and boys - still the highlight of our Saturday nights .

The store changed hands but the bialies didn't.  Ok, maybe a bit more doughy but the one time I complained to the counter guy they weren't cooked as much as they used to be, he yelled at me to toast them if I wanted them crunchier.

Then one day someone suggested I give up gluten.  She said that everything ailing me sounded more like gluten was the problem rather than early dementia, laziness or inferior genes.  I reluctantly said goodbye to most of what I loved and ate and things improved. 

Bread, bread and butter, bread and gravy, bread and anything, pasta, more bread, cake, bagels and most of all, bialies became more and more relegated to the past.  However, so did all those annoying problems I thought were early dementia, laziness or inferior genes.

However, there are several ways to connect to one's well-being and one of them is the spiritual reunion with one's people and the past.  So, one night, late and tired, braving the cold, I took a trip to Kossar's and got a bialy.

And even though the next day was hell, that meal was the best of many, many meals over many, many months.

**
Related Post:

In Memory of Cindy: Land Of The Quartchyard

Sunday Memories:  From That Moment On The World Was Different

Guest Artist Dana:  The Gift That Kept On Giving

Sunday Memories: His New New York His California His Home-Part Three

The Eyes Have It

Three New Yorkers looked into the future.

All three included food.

**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: Adrian Leaves The Frame

They Came From Outta Town: Part Three

The Bridge to New Lands

Sunday Memories:  Days of Frostbite

Répétez, S'il Vous Plaît

When it comes to writing or music or painting or dance or any other hellish vocation you are condemned to do, there is no end.  The "going off into the sunset" of movies never happens.   Except when you die. Then there's a sunset, but you're dead so you don't know the sun is going down on you.

Beginning can feel futile, especially if finishing feels like death and not finishing feels like death that won't come.  Either way, the terror of sitting down to find out only makes those options worse.
When I was still imprisoned in music studies, Florence would order "Répétez!" and demand "Commence!"

When I escaped clef notes and bar lines into words and paragraphs, she'd say, "You know writing is really just rewriting", and "Sitting down is half the battle."

She also said, "Show me a dirty house and I'll show you a woman of character."

Thanks, Mom.

But,  I had to clean the house first.   

**
Related Posts:

The Aftermath Dedicated To Florence

Sunday Memories: Ode To The Village Voice Classifieds: Part Three

Sunday Memories: Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

 My sister and I never thought "oh that's art" as we passed it every day on our way to school or violin lessons or, in my case, jump rope.   Looking at those three women was  like looking at a family photo - as normal and intimate as maybe the way my friends with televisions looked at the Brady Bunch.

The only thought either of us had was "oh, is that Mommy?"  We were not talking the rich looking ladies there.

Later, after we stopped calling her Mommy, Florence would bitterly laugh as she recounted how we repeatedly asked her if that was her.  She also laughed bitterly about how people told her she looked like Katherine Hepburn.   Clearly, she had a couple of looks.

Finding out years later "The Critic" was, in fact, art was like finding out your favorite kindergarten teacher had found the cure for cancer (she didn't).   Or that your sweet, funny uncle was a brilliant rocket scientist (he actually was).  

And then after that, I found out Weegee had, in fact, given Florence that picture himself.  Hard to get the straight story on it - there were several.

• He gave out prints to pretty girls on the lower east side as a matter of course, so it was no big deal.  
• He was crazy for Florence and wrote her a love letter which got separated from the photo when she had it reframed.  
• The letter was sealed up when she got it framed, and if we unframed it, all would be revealed.

The only thing I ever really asked of Florence was to give me the picture when it was time to be given.  She was hiding decline, but knew something was up.

"Take it now," she said.

"No, it's yours and it belongs in your home.  Just put a note on the back of the picture."

On the untouched backing, still sealed as it had been when it was reframed probably in the 1950s, there's a pink stickie taped there that says 'This will belong to Claire'.  

**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: For My Sister's Birthday

Sunday Memories: The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Seven

Letters At The Speed Of...

I finally went through the two boxes of letters from Florence's life that I had hidden away years ago after I brought the rest of her estate home.

The first box was packed with a ton of handwritten mystery notes, both in her elegant penmanship, and in others. Pictures of people we clearly weren't related to, obits of girlhood friends, two 1934 post cards from an uncle hiding out in Ubekistan from the anti-semites in Kiev, poems and letters from the girl she grew up with the one she loved, my father who she never spoke to again after 1977, my sister's missives from age three into her 50's, and attempts from me to either be a good daughter or to break through to something akin to understanding.  It was a collage of her life.  Up to a point.

The second box was after that point.  Packed with greeting cards warbling love and pop-out hearts and cute animals professing forever-yours, piles of letters from her and from a lover twisting in desire and missing and sharing of the day, and notebook pages and pages scrawled by a furious spurned girlfriend sobbing, raging, pleading, demanding, begging, defending a relationship that suddenly didn't work anymore.  No matter what card was open, what letter unfolded, desire and pain opened and unfolded with it.

There are few, if any, such letters in any boxes I have tucked away.  Everything in the past decades have become more and more immediate and transient, allowing a history to be easily deleted into electronic garbage pails.  And the mysteries of love gone bad or good or just gone have been unraveled through modern versions of therapy and self-help and Oprah.

These days offer the zen of Now, a space between 'then' and 'soon'.  In that cradle of peace and with some clicks on a keyboard, a living letter appears in a friend's face, a letter that lasts as long as words are spoken.  That unshackled moment might be made at the price of a story constructed from colorful animal pictures that get piled into a box, but, staring at all those letters and cards and notes, I was left just as puzzled by the secrets that died with Florence as perhaps anyone, seeking answers about me. might be staring into blank screens and electronic garbage pails, only to find them empty.

**
Related Posts:

Letters From The Deep: Part One

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Six

Sunday Memories: The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Seven

When A House Become A Home

Tales From A Hard Day's Night: Mieux La Chance, Que L'Address (Better Luck Than Skill)

Becoming Beauty, Becoming Home

Jim Hendrix moved to New York when anyone not rich could.  He knew the East Village streets were where he would continue becoming who he was inside.

Uliana also moved to New York when anyone not rich could.  She knew the East Village streets were where she'd continue becoming who she was inside.

Before she headed east and village, a friend gave her this photo of Hendrix because he knew she loved Hendrix.  Where ever she lived in New York, it hung on her wall. 

She wasn't a musician, but just like Hendrix could make a guitar sing like never before, Uliana could make women's beauty (and a couple of men) sing like never before.

She was a sculptor, a painter and a magician when it came to hair.  She'd eye your head, pick up those scissors and brilliant music would pour out into the world.  Afterwards, you'd look in the mirror and see how you were always meant to look like.  It's just that before Uliana touched you, you had never seen it.

Real estate and life and years and the East Village changing, at some point Uliana needed to move her Hair Salon to a new location, but she didn't want to move off 9th Street.  A real estate agent showed her a basement space only a couple of doors down.

Uliana didn't know what it was, but something about the space felt just right. 

"Did you know Jimi Hendrix used to live here?", the real estate agent told her.

**

Uliana's Hair Studio

321 E 9th St
(between 2nd Ave & 1st Ave)
New York, NY 10003

(212) 475-4302
New York City Search
Yelp

Sunday Memories: Get On UP!

Tony Walker and Michael Apted

signing autographs at IFC

(photo by T. Krever)

Every seven years rushing to the movie house to find out what happened next.

Then last time - 49 UP - we noticed there was a lot of gray hair in line.   It was no longer a great series of documentaries.  It was us.

And seven years after that, counting the days, rewatching 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 during a week long marathon, getting in line almost as long as Les Miserable (but way more interesting), talking to two thirty-something, they were still just watching a documentary, but we were waiting to re-visit our heroes, peek into a mirror, see familiar touchstones of daily life in the fifth or sixth decade of life.

And, maybe even get an autograph after....


***

Related posts

The UP Series at First Run Features

 Joni's Coney

The Belated New Years

The Untitled Store

The piles of boxes, metal shelving units, the beat-up floors and every possible piece of merchandise made out of cloth packing every square inch - these were the stores we knew just like we knew Macy's or Kleins or Gimbels or, if you needed something really nice, B. Altman's.

This one is one of the very few left on Orchard Street. Surrounded by art galleries with incomprehsible crap in their windows and boutiques selling clothes that looked like what my grandparents wore, only a billion times more expensive.

This store has sheets.  Cotton sheets.  Last year, another walk down the stairs to the florescent-lit cavern, the sad-looking lady, old-time orthodox, younger than me, but looking like my Bubbie, sold me a great fitted one for just $10.

"You look like a nice couple, you need shirts? I got very good quality dress shirts?"

The Mariner got a great shirt for $25.  He couldn't say no to that lethal combination of sad-complimenting-Bubbie-looking lady.

A year later, I needed sheets. Cotten sheets.  I had splurged on a set at Marshalls during another Dad visit in my defensive-stress-busting-shopping activities.  The sheets sucked.  Clearly, if I wanted good ones I was going to have to go back to the old neighborhood to get them.

She hadn't changed a bit.  Younger than me, still looked like my Bubbie.   Pulling out piles of plastic bricks filled with matching sheets and pillow cases.  "This is a nice one, Bloomingdales."

"It's ugly."

"You like this one?"

"Sateen, don't want sateen."

"Sateen?  No.  Cotten.  What about these?  Wash beautiful, people tell me."

"They're ugly too.  I like this one."

"OK.  $30."

With the extra pillow cases, $40 and she wouldn't bargain.

Then, with a look at the Mariner, she said, "You look like a nice couple, you need shirts? I got very good quality..."

**

Related Posts

The Belated New Year

Sunday Memories:  How Lovely To Be A Woman

The Secret Of The Fruit Man

Sunday Memories - A Visit from Another Her New York: "It Looked Chaotic But It Was Quite Organized."

His New York His California His Home: Part One

His New York His California His Home: Part Two - "One Step At A Time Dammit"

The Belated New Years

Central Park 2013

The first real New Years had also been in Central Park. We were 13, or 14, or even 15 years old.  There was a party and not just any party but one with boys and after we all gathered at the 72nd Street apartment to shake hands and see who was cute, we headed off to the bandshell to dance to a rock and roll band.

The park was practically empty.  After all, it was 1973.  But who cared!  We jumped up and down in rain puddles, thrilled about the years to come.  Nothing felt as good as my very first kiss with that cute boy that night.  That quickly changed when my friend's mother caught me necking with that cute boy and let me know exactly what kind of girl I was.  New Years and kissing didn't feel that good for a long, long time.

Three decades later, the park way way less empty and much more busy on New Years Eve.  After all it was 1999.

A couple of hundred runners danced about in costumes ready for a 2-mile trot and fireworks.  Generous friends had invited me along, knowing my 39th year had been a high-speed fiery descent to bottom.  I remember standing in the crowd of healthy, tall runners who were all shouting happy wishes for the run-into-the-new-year and thinking "I must become the joy I want because I sure as hell am not going to be joy just standing here this depressed in a crowd of skinny tall healthy people shouting joy."

I barely made the two miles, jogging in practically last after the group of 95 year olds who were basically strolling along.   But,with each aching miserable plop of my feet I vowed through gritted teeth I'd never have that bad a year again.

A vow takes time.

It was fourteen years later than that joyless New Years and literally four decades after my first real New Years kiss. A New Year had come, the park now packed with billions of people, and trillions of runners,   After all, it was 2013.

The fireworks like zillions of umbrellas bursting colors above our heads, good friends, their children, the promise of a new year and the gratitude of a damn good past one, me and the Mariner danced and shouted joy and kissed with delight a new year, a new year, shona tova, a new year.

Sunday Memories: Loneliness

Over the olives before the dinner, she said, "wait say that again about loneliness..."

Loneliness wasn't like a top-40 song sung in the 60's by a waif-like boy walking along British puddles while every waif-like girl watching that little movie screeched forward profoundly sure she was the one who could make it all better, if only she could walk with him.  Besides, that boy was getting a lot of action being so forlorn, no way he'd give up that easy way to get laid.

No.   Loneliness was more like how Florence and I had both traversed our city the same way; walking through life, going from bed to job to dinner table to the familiar sidewalk towards the familiar brick apartment building, at each stop sparkling out charm and entertaining conversation, but in between visits all these tiny corners appearing out of darkness, offering space for everything we did not, could not say.

"Wait, explain that..." he said over meat and rice and salad and wine.

Well, breaking karmic chains was making sure Florence's grief would end, end with me and perhaps with the younger ones or maybe with anyone.  It didn't matter she was dead.  That never mattered.  So often we were just emotional sound loops of our parents' secrets.   Who were loops of theirs and theirs and theirs and...

It was like quitting smoking, quitting loneliness was.  Putting it down slowly, over and over again; each day, instead of a secret silence,  now filled with words said out loud in bed, at jobs, over dinner, on the familiar sidewalk towards the familiar brick apartment building until one day all those dark corners were just visual echos of everything we had not, could not have said and loneliness was just a memory.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

When a friend got knifed to death, I got off the messengering bike, put on a skirt, a real bra, clean shirt, snappy beret and hit the many employment agencies on Fifth Avenue in the forties.  It was too hard to pedal  in midtown traffic when everything hurt so much inside.

It was 1977 and entry-level jobs could be found if you showed up to plastic chaired florescent testing rooms with battered typewriters and sharpened pencils.  I found out I was good at adding and subtracting, but sloppy on accuracy when retyping the paragraph about the brown fox that was quick.

An index card with a company's name got pulled out, a call got made and I entered these doors to be interviewed by a man whose eyes never left my breasts.

Finally, off the housekeeping-housecleaning-bikemessengering-babysitting route, I got to sit down and sit still in order to make money.

The other night, Christmas in full bloom, wandering during a work recess of a job I sit down for, weaving in and out ice skating and cute shops, the Mariner and I bumped into these doors, barely unchanged from almost forty years ago.

So hard to remember one day to the next, the word winter, or the fact I had seen one of my favorite documentaries with a good friend.  But standing at these doors, I remembered the 8 a.m. hustle of many girls in many heels, much perfume, tons of makeup and me waiting to enter elevators that rode us to jobs we sat down for.

**
Related Posts:

Tales From A Hard Day's Night: Mieux La Chance, Que L'Address (Better Luck Than Skill)

Sunday Memories: God Is In The Dominoes

Holiday Rerun: COUNTING THE MIRACLE OF LIGHTS

While recovery begins from flus and jobs....originally posted December 19, 2010


On our side of the Williamsburg Bridge there were barely any electric menorahs in our windows.  Our menorahs, old brass or faux silver with blue inlays to represent Israel, lived on tables and had old melted candles of muted colors, candles bought in the same blue box made by the same company from any store on the Lower East Side.

So it was the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge that every year as it got colder and colder I would watch carefully.  There, the tall projects would burst, window by window, into brilliant colored lights rarely seen in the homes I knew.  I counted them, like counting flowers in a garden.

Encore-Sunday Memories: Visiting Santa

Originally posted on Sunday, December 26, 2010



Why my Jewish parents did this or what they were thinking will forever remain a mystery.

Every year when the blinking lights went up and the store windows filled with moving animals, toys and people, my mother and father, my sister and me would leave the lower east side where nary a Christmas tree could be found and head to Macy's to look at all the Christmas decorations.

In those days, the corner window squeezed in between the Nedicks doors had a special Santa throne. We would wait in the freezing cold and then he'd suddenly appear out of the chimney or a beautifully wrapped box and the crowd would go wild as he waved through thick glass that blocked the sound of our cheering or his 'ho ho ho's.

He also lived on the 8th or 9th floor in Santaland. We may have visited him on more than one occasion but I only remember this one time.

I was in fifth grade and it was not going well. Especially math. I was worried. My father, I think, brought me up to Santaland which for some strange reason was almost deserted. I didn't quite get the "ask Santa for presents" deal. I knew it was my dad or my mom who produced the eight days of Chanukah presents. And our God which we never discussed was busy with plagues and lion dens and Israel.

I was kinda big to be climbing onto Santa's lap, but desperate times call for desperate acts. There was only one thing I really wanted that couldn't be gotten anywhere except from someone who made happy dreams come true.

I perched my ten year old self on his knee, and when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told him. I want to pass math.

It recently occurred to me, 40 plus years later, that maybe he didn't hear many requests like that. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. Passing math was beyond my own abilities, asking my parents for help was beyond theirs and our God was busy with more important things. It was going to have to be up to Santa.

As if it had already happened, he decreed, "You'll pass math."

And so it came to pass that when fifth grade ended many months later, I had passed math.

Traces of Love

In the world we called our own, this is where we stood before heading off to Coney.

The Delancy Street stop is now all fancy and cleaned up.  But, East Broadway still looks like home.

Miracle on Grand Street

It wasn't just the miracle of the 8th day, when the oil surprised everyone and didn't run out.

It was also the miracle of family, friends, neighbors and strangers who ran up and down 11 or 21 flights of stairs, bringing food and water during storm days and making sure light stayed the course, just like the oil did, all those years ago.

**

Related Posts: 

Day of Miracles

Time Flies When...

Guest Artist Dana: Encore - "One Day I Wrote A Sentence"

Sunday Memories: In Between the Cracks...

... stories were told...

Like:

...the elegant 80-something asking the drunk Santa-boys why weren't they doing something more valuable than standing online to get into a bar and drink more?  There were children in the world who needed help why weren't they helping...  The bouncer called "next 10!' and the drunk Santa-boys rushed in.

She asked me if the pierogi ladies were still there and did I remember Leshkos?  Everyone went there she said, everyone.  Limousines, homeless, everybody.  Everybody was welcomed.  Leshkos was gone but the pierogi ladies were still there.  I told her when the ladies tried to raise their prices the  neighborhood revolted.  They don't care if they raise our rent, but get upset about pierogis? she said as she headed in to eat.

Like:

...the woman selling her belongings outside her apartment. "We are moving to Edinborough.  We can't bear what's happening to New Yor..."  A drunk Santa with a drunk Santa girl wearing barely any Santa clothes staggered by.  "More drunk Santas," the woman sighed.  "Not too drunk," the young barely dressed Santa slurred.   Quality of life was better in Scotland, better for children, the woman went on, speaking Portuguese to her daughter to not interrupt or where was her book or no no more computer games.  Better for artists, too, I said.  Are you an artist, I asked the daughter.  Yes. And then the mother said, She's a good one.

Like:

...all of us, gathering as we always do once a year, unfurling stories of once upon a normal life on the Avenue we lived in between painters and writers and journalists and shoemakers and daily lives that  then became stories unheard of in between the drunken noise of screaming santas.

**

Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future

Home for the Holidays

Sunday Memories: Home - Schnelle and Her Boys

Sunday Memories: Dead Shoes Walking

Due to Technical Difficulties....

... life still trudges on.

The Festival of Lights

If you can't find candles, the city can become a menorah 

 found in corners that witness small miracles

coaxed forward through darkness 

and those unbearable unknowns that often travels with struggles

so you can finally see home and the delight of

 clarity.

Sunday Memories Encore: A Table of Thanks

Originally post November 23, 2008, that dinner had been the first one given in years, those friends the first invited in after everything once considered permanent had left, either suddenly or very slowly or both.  

That November dinner heralded a personal spring - the beginning of new times and new adventures.  

Last night, still dancing through ideas and words at 2:30 a.m.,  even though the meal was almost identical, the delight of discovery was more wonderful than ever, as was the gratitude that, indeed, from the ashes, a flock of phoenixes always rise.

(Tonight's menu, besides the ubiquitous chicken, brown rice, salad and bread, included a spectacular guacamole, nuts, smoked mozzarella from Russo's, pastries from di Robertis, chips chips chips, and the Mariner's adventure, once again, into sweet potatoes.)


Over the last couple of decades the meal has pretty much stayed the same because I really can't cook anything else. Chicken, salad, bread, maybe some yams if I remember not to burn them, whatever dishes and dessert others contribute... (Tonight's menu: hard salami, cheese, ratatouille, fondue, snap peas, tiramisu, chocolate and better wine than the ones I got at Trader Joe's...)

But the saving grace of my bad cooking has been twenty-five years of the utter luck of having wonderful friends who come and sit and eat and laugh and talk and drink and share and argue and love and celebrate absolutely nothing except a rare night where all of the above can happen.



**

Related posts:

Not Just Any Port In A Storm

Thirty Years Of Pressing My Nose Up Against The Bakery Window

Art Is Where The Home Is

It was on top of the garbage bags in front of a Lexington apartment building.

Not the interesting brownstone-ish kind or the super modern luxury glass towers that got tax breaks to get built, but you had to be filthy rich to live in.

It was one of those maybe 1960s white brick 12 or 16-story boxes where very well-paid people, who offered very expensive services to very rich people on the upper east side, once lived in.  Maybe still did.  Hard to tell.

Seemed like now there were lots of designer outfits flitting in and out and perhaps a lot of them were sharing three to a one bedroom just for the chance to live in Manhattan and work a low-paying job at a glamous office, like a PR firm for exciting hot new restaurants or the Met Museum.

Carolyn, who maybe painted this for a high school art class, had printed her name on the back. The Chair and the little chair with the real piece of frame around it and inside that a picture of an even  littlier chair and inside that...

I wondered if somewhere in this bland building stuffed with thin, young women and buff-young men, there was an apartment where Carolyn got to grow up and tall in and got to, one day, paint the sunny corner that welcomed someone to sit down and be home.

***
Related Posts:

Labor of Love

Art Number One

Art Number Two

Art Number Three

When Does A House Become A Home

A Final Snapshot From Deep Water Called My Home

Returning To An Old Embrace, We Suddenly Gathered

Sharon Jane doesn't have a cell or a computer. 

No. She let us all know the old fashion way. She picked up her old landline and called all of our old landlines.

"Come celebrate Diana's life."

So, in the cool of a Monday evening - the night a theatre is dark - we gathered.

Faces still singing our selves from twenty-five, thirty years ago, we sat around pieces of the old willow tree from Avenue B and 6th Street, felled by Hurricane Sandy.

Took turns wearing chiffon arms from a beloved drag queen, and sent stories dancing around the circle, each one describing a part of the journey Diana - tall, strapping, big, strong, ferocious, independent - invited us on in brief moments and long months.

Mesmorizing us with wood chopping at a variety night,

Lending her truck, no questions asked.

Punching out the annoying wind chimes so she could hear a nature's night,

Dancing full out like she was the whole ballet. And she was.

That grin.

Then the accident and refusing refusing refusing her injuries she would push herself in that wheelchair backward down and up Second Avenue she would be who she was she would return the videos to Blockbusters on 9th Street she would.

And even though she wasn't supposed to, still driving her pickup, and even though she couldn't like she could before, driving her soul, her life, her story, her words, her determination and one night down 5th Street a big-ass truck, shouting to Sharon Jane I'm chucking my storage.

We gathered around the space she left in our heart.

Then, suddenly looking up, there she was, right in our midst.  Telling a story, driving her life, dancing full out.

That grin.


**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: Before the Days of Air and Conditioning

Sunday Memories: The Domino Effect

Thirty Years of Pressing My Nose Up Against the Bakery Window