Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Free-Range Playgrounds

















 Of course we had a real playground to play in.  In fact, we had three.  It's just that two of them were kinda small, didn't have much stuff to climb or play on, were sometimes locked and the big kids often played in the other one.

But it didn't matter.  The whole neighborhood was our playground and we had the run of it.  Including corners like this which in those days didn't have video surveillance because there was no such thing as video.  These hidden spots became our castles and battlegrounds, our field for jacks and dodge ball.

I don't ever remember not running around the streets of the lower east side.  From the time I was four or five until I left for higher ground, I ventured forth in rain and shine, every season there was.  As long as I had finished my violin practicing and homework, the world was my oyster.

Of course there were terrible things and bad people out there.  But, last time I checked, there are terrible things and people inside too.  My stories of those moments were pretty much the same as those who spent their childhoods behind closed doors and iron wrought fences.

I learned to dodge and to survive.  It paid off when the streets got filled with crack addicts, my home got filled with idiot boyfriends, and jobs were treacherous.

Frankly, today's sidewalks filled with people texting or shouting highly personal information into their cell phones may be much less dangerous but they are much more annoying. And I wonder if, when they were kids, they ever went outside by themselves to go play in a city.

**
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 Sunday Memories In the Park with Mom

Maryland Free-Range Parenting Couple Under Fire Again

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Sunday Memories Encore: The Boy Next Door

Today is David's 59th birthday. All those years ago, he and Dana finally met face-to-face.   I had to wait a couple of years myself to meet him.  

What a perfect time to remember a first love.

Originally posted April 12, 2009 and revised for 2015.



He was my second love, Allan who lived in the building on Broome Street with the Fedder Air Conditioning being my first.

All that was a long time ago.  Today David is 59.

Still, the heart of my inner four-year-old always jumps up and down when I see him, either on the street or at his mom's or even at Florence's memorial.

He was the boy who could make me laugh so hard that many liquids poured out of many places on me. I was never sure what exactly we were laughing about. I just knew it was rare laughter and I wanted to drown in it, it made me so happy.

He was the boy who could swing upside down on the ladder to his bunk bed and watch Hitchcock's THE BIRDS without crawling under available big pieces of furniture like I did.

And right before the Paper Bag Players began their show at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse and I wanted to rush outside to see if my friend was waiting for me on Grand Street, he was the boy who explained what would happen if, per chance, I tripped on the stairs in the dark just as the curtain rose.  And to this day I am not sure how he did it, but my last minute foray clearly was going to lead to the destruction of Planet Earth. Needless to say, I stayed put in my seat, terrified.

Oh, but most of all, he was the boy who played Conrad Birdie in BYE BYE BIRDIE at P.S. 110 on Broome Street. When I saw him sing and dance, I almost forgot who the Beatles were.


**

Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: The First Supper

A Visit to Dana

Thursday, April 9, 2015

The Lesson


He was so proud of his daughter and how he was teaching her the intricate science of cutting a man's hair, he stopped and waited until I snapped the picture.

The picture haunted me for months until it dawned on me how, in so many ways, it was a subversive act in certain places, at certain times,  to teach his daughter anything that brought her into her own independence.

I wondered if he knew he was making revolution that truly insisted on a better world, or if he was just being a great dad.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Untitled Real Jobs


I had a lot of jobs that felt like this.

Middle of the night, in a field of empty cubicles, punching numbers into computers.  Law office at 3 am wandering corridors because they needed someone there in case the phone rang.  Getting on an immigration line at 9 pm, huddling all night in the cold until official doors opened at 830 am and the well-rested and richer person took my place.

Florence, only qualified to play or to teach, once did supermarket inventory in the middle of the night.  Hands trained to wring out the nuances of the saddest music in the world, placing Del Monte cans neatly on a shelf.  It paid the bills as she put her life back together.

And my father, neatly charting the 162 jobs he applied to after being given the shaft by a company he had shown up to for 25 years, rain, shine, grim, broken, bereft, lost, still providing for a family that was slowly disappearing…

He finally got a job with the city through blind testing and worked until it was time to retire and get a bit of a pension. 

She finally got enough paying piano students that paid the bills and allowed her to dance with the girls she liked.

And after all the too-many decades I trundled through, I looked at that wide open barren space and decided to fill it with story. 




Sunday, April 5, 2015

Sunday Memories: The First Supper


Passover Sedar may have been Christ's last supper, but it was my first.


We didn't go every year to Dana and George.  Maybe we only went a couple of times total.  But, however many they were, those evenings became oases.

Why was that night different than all other nights?

It surpassed any joy I saw in movies or the rare TV shows.

Grampa Ray pulling quarters out of our ears, a table with a real tablecloth, all the expensive light bulbs on, the house filled with smells as good as restaurants or what I imagined reading fairy tales with feasts in them, David dazzling me into gales of laughter and fits of love.  It was even wonderful the one year I was the youngest and had to ask the Four Questions in Hebrew, a language I didn't know, couldn't read or even speak.

I waited for Passover as eagerly as I did my birthday.  

Tradition has it that during Passover, a wandering Jew must be welcomed to any table she appears at.  In my own exodus to new lands and new apartments that turned into old homes, I visited many tables with gratitude and hope I'd once again experience that utter joy I had at Dana and George's.

But recent years got busier and busier and soon it was just another night neither the Mariner or I could leave work early or a rare weekend we could stay home and write.

Why was this year different than all other years?

No work interrupted the day.  We had a little bit more time.  A Rabbi friend said she could come with us and bring a whole bunch of Haggadahs.  And Trader Joe's had decent kosher wine.


Because Dana could not wander to all the welcomes of a Sedar table, we all brought the Sedar to her.  and lo' and behold.... old joy revisited.

Dayenu.

**
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Leaving Egypt on Maundy Thursday

Dayenu

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Exit Laughing


I don't know about the other two.



But the one all the way on the right, standing proud by her Passover dish, survived brutal poverty, hunger, beatings, molestation, death of her baby brother, denial of education and the responsibility from the age of eight on of raising her surviving siblings.

She went on to survive 7-day weeks, 12-hour days working side by side with her husband until at some point they got to what we all considered wealthy:  comfortable middle class with the freedom to stand over a table of a lot of food commemorating the departure from hardship.

When you are running for your life, you sometimes gotta leave a lot behind: happiness, hope, the joy of skipping because the sun is out.  Giggling. 

And yet....


... somehow, as my aunt fled to promises of better days, the girl she once was before a war broke out on her body and soul,  a girl who could giggle with delight, came with her.

**
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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

A Visit to Dana



How are you, I asked Dana.

"It's a slanting period between 'then' and 'now'", she answered.  "Reality is not easy for me and this is a real shot in the arm of reality."

A real shot in the arm.  That was something Florence always used to say.  I don't hear it very often anymore.  It seems we use less and less words every day, leaving our sentences less and less beautiful.

Dana looks at me like I'm a beautiful sentence.  She always has.  It's why I used to run down Grand Street shouting her name when I saw her and why I sang Beatle love songs under my breath as we waited on Broome Street for her and George.  

"I'm looking at you as if I just met my past and my future and they hugged," she says.

If ever a way to reconcile the past with dreams still yearned for that would be it.

I tell her about the pre-elopement honeymoon the Mariner and I just took.

"It's nice you had a honeymoon.  To hell with marriage," she exclaims.  "He has to give a little! Take a little!  Have his heart breaaaaak a little...."

David and I join in.  "That's the storeeee.... that's the gloreeee.... of LUUUUUUVVVVVVV!"

Then she digs into her favorite soup.  Mushroom barley from Veselkas.

**
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Sunday, March 29, 2015

Sunday Memories of Fire and Smoke


Down at Dana's, facing the bridge I grew up across the street from, the Empire State Building kept disappearing and reappearing as the smoke from the fire grew and the winds changed. 

Florence had watched that bridge become an escape route not so long ago from other events that broke our city's heart.  This time no one had to cross the bridge to safety.



Walking back to Second Avenue, most of the side streets closed to folks, it was the smell that was familiar.  Been a while, but I recognized it immediately.  More so when I stepped into the lobby where a haze had settled.


Outside, the Avenue once again became a sad corridor.

**
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Thursday, March 26, 2015

This Is What a Warrior Looks Like

I decided to try a new yoga class. Stepping into the room, I saw only one other young woman and she looked at least 35. Everyone else looked like 80. 

This 9:00 a.m. class is going to be a snap, I thought to myself. Especially after the teacher said in her best kindergarten voice, "Class is starting. Class is starting," and everyone kept on gossiping and catching up on all the health problems they were all having.

Things began slow and easy enough. And I was feeling all smug and stuff when suddenly, like an army rising out of invisibility, thirty-odd women became a fierceness that only comes with the decades they earned.


The Warrior Pose

These were warriors who fought battles never seen in Hollywood blockbusters or comic books.  I was barely keeping up.

Finally, the end of class was near.  The teacher, in her best kindergarten voice, asked, "Is there any pose you'd like to do?"

"Side plank," someone called out.

Are you fucking kidding me I quietly thought to myself? Side plank was what I watched skinny healthy 18-year-old girls straight out of athletic wear catalogs do on yoga DVDs.

A woman near me said, “Oh I can't do that."

"Me neither" I told her.

"Knee operation," she said.

"Me too!" (Yeah, so what if it was a year ago.)

The teacher, in her best kindergarten voice, began instructing.


And once again, an army of warriors, including that woman who just had a knee operation, emerged from my disbelief.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Bad Girls of the Gym

I knew they were trouble the minute I saw them in the back.

The entire basketball court was packed with 60-odd ladies and a few gents of all ages - or at least the ages that remembered the lyrics of songs younger people call 'oldies'.

There was no room anywhere but by them, so I joined them.

We were all marching in place and stepping and toeing and heeling when "Peggy Sue" came on and these back-of-the-room ladies started singing and dancing their own steps.

They had that sparkle in their eyes and I swear if we were all in high school together, I'd do anything to go smoke with them in the girls bathroom.

Then the teacher said, "O.K. I'm changing the music, so NO CHIT-CHATTING!  O.K? NO CHIT-CHATTING."

The minute she said that, all three were off to visit with other friends in the far-flung corners of the huge basketball court.

Aretha came on and well, what the hell why not... while everyone was doing triceps and bicep and shoulder presses, the four of us started dancing and singing "Rescue me! Take me in your arms! Rescue me..."

Just as good as the girls' bathroom and well, much healthier than smoking.

However, getting them to stand still for a picture?

Like herding cats.  






You want me to use your names, I asked them, or should I just call you the Bad Girls of the Gym?

"BAD GIRLS OF THE GYM!" they shouted and went off laughing and joking with all their friends.

**
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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Sunday Memories: Look Back in Love
At a Dream

The honeymoon trip over and the elopement still an unplanned surprise, cliches rattle about in the haze of jetlag.

"It was the trip of a lifetime."

"It was like a dream."

"It went by in a flash."

"It felt like ages ago."

"It felt like just yesterday...."


What better time then to look back and remember the delight of falling in love with a new world.











**
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Thursday, March 19, 2015

Look Back in Love at Home

Under the category, "Eat Dessert First!" the Mariner and I have come to the end of our pre-elopement honeymoon. What better time than to look back in love at home.


A friend told me about a new documentary on homelessness.  The film revealed that homelessness became profoundly difficult to change when community and relationships were severed or lost.

That stayed with me for a long time.


Home was many things.

It was where Florence began to fade. 

It was the city that still trumpeted her spirit.

It was a meal with good friends, regardless of where we were or how old we had gotten.

It was the intimacy of familiar things and normal moments.

It was what we left and what we sought.

In recent days spent wandering from one place to another,  the Mariner and I had each other and, because of that, home was always there - be it the walls of an apartment in Spain or the stern of a houseboat in Amsterdam. 

Now familiar walls beckon.  It is time to go home.  But in many ways, we had never left.

**
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Home is Where the Heart is and the Heart is Always Home

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Six - Home, Where My Love Lies Waiting

Sunday Memories of the Future of Love

Rare Friendships: Coming Home

Blog with a View

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Look Back In Love: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a Couple of Other Places Too

















 This used to be the sea.

Now it's farmland, built slowly over decades. 

The Dutch reclaimed it from the waters that surrounded them.  They needed to transform and reshape their world so they could eat food and not drown.

If they could reclaim land from sea, then what could possibly stop any of us?

**
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Look Back in Love 200 Miles an Hour

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

Look Back in Love
at Sunday Memories of Old Friends


Us in Paris

photo: Ted Krever

I would have never left my apartment to go visit a foreign city, which in my book also included New Jersey.   But accidentally meeting Dutchie when I thought I was really old but only just a kid, I found myself crossing the Atlantic for the first time to see how she lived.  For someone who didn't visit Brooklyn at that time, I am not sure how that came about, but go I did. 

And then it was as if we could not stop traveling.  In cars to farms or trains to parades and on several planes to parties or really good food, and once to a pig race.

Maybe when you are traveling so much you finally get to where you are going.   Who knew in all our adventures we were also going home.

Years ago I wrote: 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. 

Not seen in the picture are the two  patient, good humor partners who somehow, in their own journeys to an amazing and surprising life, built a doorstep to a beautiful home that always welcomed us in, no matter where we were, no matter what. 

**

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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Look Back in Love, 200 Miles an Hour

the high-speed train between Barcelona and Paris

After her marriage and familial responsibilities ended and she stepped into her own life, late 50's maybe 60, Florence kept saying "I was asleep all my life.  I was asleep."  The fury and regret that fueled those words were palpable.

Who the hell wanted to grow old like that?  I did everything I could to stay awake to what was actually happening.  Coffee helped.

The thing is when you are really and truly awake, the horrible stuff becomes something wonderful and the wonderful stuff flies by.  I wasn't waiting for things to begin.  I wasn't dreaming of something that would never happen.  I wasn't holding my breath.

From the beginning, it felt like the Mariner had always been here.  From the beginning it felt like we just met.

Every once in a while I'd glanced back just before the horrible and the wonderful became a memory but unless I was reminded or reread my diary I was sure to forget.  Like being on the high speed train, attempting a picture of things so beautiful became almost impossible because they were gone before I could snap a photo.

There was nothing left to do except sit back, enjoy the beauty and stay awake.

**
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Sunday Memories of the Future of Love

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Look Back in Love
With Some Really Good Food

Under the category, "Eat Dessert First!"  the Mariner and I are off to our pre-elopement honeymoon.  What better time than to look back in love.  With food.  Which is also love.

In this city where modern means 1897 because old means 1305, there are a billion more small shops than there are supermarkets.


And there are a trillion more candy shops. Like this one where the streets are paved not with gold, but with chocolate.  Looking at it I wondered how the diaspora would have turned out if that's what my grandparents had heard.

In this old city that feels as sprightly as New York, there are restaurants where the house wine comes out of a sprocket in the wall...


....bottled in a whiskey bottle and chilled.

And dinner is so beautiful, even the soccer player had to take a picture of it...

...with a real camera, not a cell phone.

The meal disappeared in half the time it took to cook it.


And in quiet corners by monuments of love and prayer to the angels still unfinished after 100 years....


...sweet, warm drinks are there to remind us love feeds us just like a good meal.

And to start thinking about where we are going to eat dinner.

**

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Sunday Memories of the Future of Love

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Sunday Memories: Look Back In Love: Dancing in the Streets


Visiting a continent neither Florence or my father had ever gone to, there, in a small square built from stones older than the Bible, barely noticeable on the map but huge as we stood looking around it, were hundreds of people and a live brass band.  

The minutes they started playing this traditional music everyone, young, old, middle-aged, grabbed hands to make a dozen circles and began dancing in ancient steps the love they felt for their city.

**
Placa Nova

My Mama Done Told Me

Reruns of Sunday Memories: Lost in The Dangling Conversation, A Childhood Joy Found

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Look Back In Love: The Not-On-TV Office: Episode Two - Work Is Where The Heart Is


Under the category, "Eat Dessert First!"  the Mariner and I are off to our pre-elopement honeymoon.  What better time than to look back in love. This time in the Office.  Where love blooms in many different ways.

Originally posted August 19, 2008.



This is Nick. He's to my left.


He talks to me over the "hedges."



Sometimes I hear him giggling in shock while he listens on his headphones to Wendy Williams on BLS. We lend each other books and because of him I'm trapped in the middle of an adolescent vampire series where I am reliving the worst of every crush I ever had only these book characters have better luck than me even when they want to suck the blood of the one they love. I lent him a book about a woman's spiritual journey. I'm not sure if that's an even exchange, especially after he told me he reads two pages and falls dead asleep, even on the train. He also makes coffee every day. I supply popcorn. He's the go-to man for pop culture. I supply the moral advice.

This is me.



Thirty-hours a week I get a break from Florence-stuff (except when I have to get on the phone with the insurance company, Medicaid, CASA II, the doctor’s office, the home attendant agency…)

This is Adriene. She's to my right.


This is what I see when we talk.



If it's not Monday we talk quite a bit. She listens to Michael Baisden on her radio which, unlike my radio, doesn't get static. This is an actual exchange:

A: Oh he's so nauseating.
C: Why do you listen to him?
A: Because he's an idiot.

Sometimes we sing together, and when Kiss FM plays Rock Steady by Aretha, I turn on my radio and hug it so it doesn't get static and then me and Adriene get to chair-dance in stereo. She's the go-to woman for basic information like the seizures and video game connection, best methods to kill mice, and the 70's. I supply the cheerful morning greetings and once a gluten-free loaf of bread which turned out to be inedible to humans and mice. When she really wants to upset me she offers to hug me. When I really want to upset her I talk about foods with wheat.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Look Back In Love: My Mama Done Told Me


Under the category, "Eat Dessert First!"  the Mariner and I are off to our pre-elopement honeymoon.  What better time than to look back in love.

Originally posted on May 8, 2008:





Florence is refusing to do much but lie in bed.

I say, "Fine. You don't want to get out of bed, then go lay down and die."

She yells, "Lie down! Lie down!"

I say, "You can't get out of bed, but you can still correct my grammar?"

She yells, "Yes! It matters!"

I yell, "THEN GET OUT OF BED!"

She doesn't.

The Jonathan Schwartz show starts.

We settle in to listen.

I look at her butchered hair. That's because the week before I took the household scissors and chopped off big chunks of it. I did that because it was a huge halo of wildness, so thick and silver sparkling. Now it was a huge halo of wildness that got caught in a buzz saw.

Sinatra comes on. She sings along.

"My mama done told me... a woman is two faced... cry in the night..."

Knowing something of her dating history, I ask her if that's true.

She says, "I didn't make it up. That's what's written.

I start laughing. She asks why.

"You're singing with heart.”

Shrugs, "I'm just trying to get the words."

And then she - who broke many hearts of many old girls and garnered many angry love letters and hurtful looks across crowded dances put on by the local gay senior citizen group - she looks up and asks, "Is it true? A woman is two faced?"

**
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Sunday, March 1, 2015

Reruns of Sunday Memories: Lost in The Dangling Conversation, A Childhood Joy Found

Technical difficulties and medical happenings welcomes in rerun of technical difficulties and medical happenings.

Originally posted  April 28, 2013

A tense moment in The Rifleman


He had waited until 6:30 for HIS show to come on - The Rifleman.

I had never seen it.  I had never heard of it, my understanding of Westerns gleaned from Florence's critiques of bus driving styles and Bucko's Cowboy Lands.

But my father pulled up his chair close to the new flat screen TV that my sister had managed to incorporate into his life from 3,000 miles away, and watched with the rapture of a little boy

And then I remembered something.  A conversation had when he was speaking in more sentences than the few dozen he now repeated over and over again.  

Amidst the poverty and the brutal unhappiness, both  at home and on the streets of the Lower East Side, every once in a while, an extra nickel would be found and the kids would race off to the Saturday matinee, probably on Delancey Street.

There, beloved heroes fought favorite villains, the cheers and boos of hundreds of exhausted, usually hungry, tough little kids filling the beat-up old theater.  My father told me that every time the bad guy started sneaking up on their cowboy, they'd all shout, "Look behind you, Cowboy Hoot!!"

I telephoned him, seeing if I could shake loose from the mind slowly fading away, more of those days.  But, other than the names of the cowboys he loved and the cost of admission, there wasn't much left.

Before ringing off, his growing impatience and panic for Meals-On-Wheels to arrive now crowding our conversation, I told him I had never seen The Rifleman until I came to visit him.

"I'm wondering when they are going to run out of plot.  Awful lot of activity in that quiet little town," he said and then hung up to wait for lunch to be delivered.

**
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Hoot Gibson


Thursday, February 26, 2015

Reruns! Of Dad And Lawrence And The Memories He Never Got To Have

Technical difficulties and medical happenings welcome in reruns of technical difficulties and medical happenings.
 

Originally posted June 14, 2014



Ok. Let's get something straight on this day of fathers.  We never had a television in the house.

So, there was no gathering around the TV to watch Ed or Johnny or Lawrence.

And, while we're at it, we never lived in those guys' America.

There was no clean-cut nothing going on on the Lower East Side.  We didn't speak with that bell-like crystal clear accent or with syntax that lined up as it was supposed to.

Our voices were loud or coarse, and our words came out like they had just been beaten up, vowels all open and wide and tired from centuries of running that never stopped even after sitting down at a table of food not always guaranteed.

Those beat-up words lined up in the formation of a language my father called a "slave tongue" which is why he never spoke Yiddish to us, his desperate wish, like God's for Moses' people, we grow in a world free and unknowing of those chains.

Our clothes were proudly gotten from friends, outgrown yet still good, or church bazaars where tables overflowed with proof of other peoples' abilities to buy what they needed new, now no longer useful or wanted.  We wore those clothes proudly.

How we spoke and what we wore looked nothing like what I saw that recent night in California, Dad's chair pulled up as close as he could get, his hearing so gone and the volume so loud.

I wondered when he fell in love with Lawrence Welk.

I wondered when he even got the chance to dream of a life where words were crystal clear and all the pretty girls' dresses had nary a stain or mend on them and looked like they were not three year-old fashion but just off the pages of some smart happy magazine, like Good Housekeeping.

I wondered when he got a chance to sit before a TV screen we never had and stare at the bubbles and watch skits that had utterly no irony, wit or depth or the synchronized swaying of a big band that looked like they just came out of the washing machine.

Lawrence's world looked so happy and there was none of that where we grew up.

And when the hell did my father get a chance to peek into that America?  He was too busy supporting us, his own dreams paying for our care.

He wasn't an awful father, but he dreamt of being a dad that could have lived in Lawrence Welk's America.

Sometimes, when it gets late, sometimes late in the evening, sometimes late in life, you dream of memories you wish you had.  And sometimes, that's good enough.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.  And thank you for the microscope and engraving pen and the painting kits and the stuffed basset hound dog and the...

**
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Dust To Dust And Then New Cities Rose





Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Reruns! One Year's Meat Is Another Year's Poison. Or Piggybank.

Technical difficulties and medical happenings welcome in reruns of technical difficulties and medical happenings.

Originally posted March 21, 2013



Seymour smoked.  Florence smoked.  In those days it was like drinking coffee or putting ketchup on your burger.

When they got married in 1947 or 48, someone gave them a bubble-glass ashtray for a wedding present.

It did its job like the rest of the stuff in the house. 

But then smoking got definitely bad for you, not just kinda a lousy habit, but really really bad.

Florence offered me and Louise $100 or maybe it was more if we didn't smoke until we were old.  Like twenty-one.  Louise made her pay up.

The rest of us quit here and there.  And then finally.

So the ashtray, along with all the other accoutrements of lighting up, had to find a new job.

**

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Sunday, February 22, 2015

Memories of Memories: "I'm Your Memory"

Technical difficulties and medical happenings welcome in reruns of technical difficulties and medical happenings.

Originally posted May 25, 2014



That's what Len says every time Seymour says he can't remember.

Not stuff like the thousand of jokes or remnants of Marx Brothers songs or ditties from the lower east side my father can rattle off for hours on end.

No.  Just the next five minutes.  If he and Len are going to the bank or the supermarket. If it was lunch or time to sit the couch.

"I don't remember."

"Don't worry about it.  I'm your memory."

Len is.  He remembers the schedule of each hour and every day.  He know every doctor and every check up.  He knows what meals are incoming and what medicines are running out.  

But I wonder who holds the other memories.  Not the joke or that the supermarket is next.  But the other ones....

...like the smell of the cake his mother used to bake in coffee cans when they lived at Knickerbocker Village.


**
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Friday, February 20, 2015

Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
And Is Practicing Detente

Two adopted cats
after 18 months,
have accomplished
what some Governments
around the world
have not.




Learned to live together.  
And when the need arises, 
attack only the shadows...


You too can have 
international peace in your home!!!!
PERFECT PAIR OF LOVELY LADIES
NEEDS A HOME!!!


Meowsers, this girl is a stunner! Molly and her sleepy sister are very cuddly and affectionate. They rub themselves against the bars of their cage asking for attention and swoon at the gentlest touch. They are 8 years old and need a home together because they've lived their entire lives as a dynamic duo. They will make wonderful pets for a very lucky cat lover! Come visit them during Social Tees' regular hours (see below!).

ANYONE HAVE DOG CLOTHES 
TO DONATE  TO 
SOCIAL TEES' RESCUES?


It's freezing out there and all the rescue puppies and dogs need some extra layers! Social Tees will more than happily take used sweaters, coats, shirts, etc.

Please email samantha@socialteesnyc.org if you have questions.  Donations accepted anytime during regular hours! Thank you!! (This well dressed boy was adopted last week!)


EMERGENCY!! 
THIS POODLE NEEDS A FOSTER HOME 
NOW!!!


His foster parent just canceled and Social Tees doesn't want him stuck in a cage!

Coco is amazingly friendly and playful, awesome with other dogs and all people he meets. Loves to cuddle, 8 yrs old, only 12 lbs, just groomed.

Email samantha@socialteesnyc.org NOW if you can help! Pickup is ASAP at Social Tees



SOCIAL TEES IN THE EAST VILLAGE



COME VISIT!



COME VOLUTEER!!!



COME ON OVER!!!

Mon to Fri 5pm-7pm
Sat & Sun 12pm-4pm


Social Tees
325 East 5th Street
New York, NY  10003
socialteesnyc.org
https://www.facebook.com/SocialTeesAnimalRescue