In His California, Handsome IsAs Handsome Does...

I took one look at that photo and blurted out, "Len, you were trouble!" 

Len just laughed.

But one look at that cocky stance and what else could you think?  All 18 proud years of him barely filling out his sailor uniform but bursting with vim and vigor, standing outside the house he grew up in, vegetable garden in the back, small town, one-room school house, and a ton of brothers who could make their own basketball team.

71 years later he still got that wicked dimple and that smart-alecky swagger. 

Stomping three times around the mall early in the morning, walking up the stairs, not down, down was the easy way, reroofing his house, clearing the gutters, terracing the backyard garden, laying down patio tiles (97 stones to be exact), tending the flowers, the fruit trees, the lawn, the kids, the home, my dad, the world...

I can't keep up.

But when I grow up I wanna be just like Len.

**
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Memories of Memories: "I'm Your Memory."

Sunday Memories of a Normal Day: We Fall in Four Languages

While recovering from a red-eye, the fragility of being here gets revisited.

Originally posted April 28, 2008

Rush hour, everybody rushing home.

Except for the nicely dressed lady lying on the ground by Greeley Square.  Between the serious men's clothing store and the Dunkin Donut.

There are a lot of people over her making sure her shopping bags and her purse are O.K. There is a cup of something by her and the security guy or police chief or whatever he is is talking into a walkie-talkie.

Me and two guys hang out on the curb by the flower pots and watch a skinny homeless guy shout at the crowd. He looks like the guy who kicked me in the ass when I bumped into him on a rainy day. Wouldn't be surprised if it were. This is his neighborhood.

The two guys said that she began to fall and the homeless guy caught her and was shouting GET HELP GET HELP and once non-homeless guys showed up and shooed him away he got upset. After all, he was there first and just because he was homeless didn't mean he was less of a hero.

The daily convoy of twenty-five blaring police cars roar up Sixth Avenue. None stop.

"She fell. Her heart, her blood pressure or diabetic. They give her an orange juice with some sugar. Look, she is fine."

A third man joins us. His patter sounds like poems made of rain on a roof. When I ask if it is Arabic, his friend nods. "I speak Danish too. And Spanish and English and Arabic."

We look across the street at the woman again. Two ambulances come as she sits up and talks on her cell phone.

One of the guys says to me, "We are nothing. A heart or something and we fall... we are nothing."

The Call of Nature

A friend can't even get me to visit some ducks she knows in Brooklyn.   There are too many trees around and honestly, it threatens to become sentimental.

The geese that I waited for every year at least lived in a recognizable landscape, that is until they disappeared.

But when the young woman keeping my dad safe and sound pointed out something I've only seen on TV or in children's books...

... well... how could I not run out, get a feeder and then home-make sugar water for the itty-bitty-smaller-than-a-manderin hummingbird and her little babies?

My father, hearing all the squealing and picture snapping, shrugged.  "If it isn't an eagle or mockingbird, the hell with it."


**
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You Got Your Nature, I Got Mine

In His California the Time is Now

The day is no longer a single unit.

It's been exploded into a billion slivers of seconds, each exactly the same as the one before and the one after.

The tough conversation that needs to be had about the future is had over and over and over again - a hundred new suns rising on a hundred new day...

 Except when we talk about New York.

Suddenly everything is crystal clear and he remembers how sweet my Now is these days.


**
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Sunday Memories: Lost in the Dangling Conversation

Look Back in Love at Home

Special Encore for Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day.  

In Her New York, it was not a day celebrated in a conventional manner.  That's because in Florence's mind everyone was a mother...

So.  Happy Mother..... Day.

Originally post Mother's Day 2011

**

Florence at her mother's apartment in Knickerbocker Village

These days, I am amused at the accolades on Mother's Day that often include the passing down of make-up tips and the special shopping trips for new clothes.

These were not the gifts Florence gave my sister or me. And although I inherited her love of lipstick, it's what is not found in a tube or a store that reminds me of my mother.

It is, instead, a ferocious, unending, tenacious, gut wrenching, miserable exhaustion, banging-head-against-wall, exhilarating 'til-death-do-us-part relationship with the work of an artist.

Personally, there are days I would have been just fine with a new dress or some blue eyeshadow.

An Encore of Sunday Memories -Return To The Promise Land

It was on Clinton Street between Rivington and Stanton. There was a cat clock that wagged its tail and rolled its eyes to each ticking second. The leather seats were burgundy and the lights were of course florescent. Only uptown stores where rich people shopped had real lights.

This was Kaplan's shoes. And we went there for our once-a-year-ugly-pair-of-oxfords that wouldn't become hip for another twenty years. In the interim, the meaner girls in their white go-go boots called me "baby shoes" which is devastating if you're only 8 and suddenly in the 4th grade with older kids.

Still, fashion exile or not, Florence's rule was whatever you picked at Kaplan's you had to wear out of the store. This showed commitment to the shoe you'd be with all year. And since it was the only items we always bought new, you had to really know if the shoe fit.

The pressure was tough. But those ugly oxfords were made so good, and Mr. Kaplan's measurements were so precise, somehow everything worked out, except for the part of looking like a dork from a-turn-of-the-century picture by Jacob Reis.

I spend the next forty years wearing shit that looks hot if only to avoid shoes and shoes stores like that. But there is a God and she does wear lots of shoes because ugly became even hipper than before, especially if the jeans were tight. It was time to wear something other than hot shit. It was time to find a place where the oxfords were made so good and the measuring so precise.

And when I walked in I felt Home.

**
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The Moulded Shoe

Words to Live By

 "Half the section was totally lost.

But I started with them and I ended with them so I can't complain."

 (photo: A. Joseph)

**
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Knock Down Seven

Philadelphia Story

Forty years ago, I got sent to Philadelphia.

It's not the first place that comes to mind when I think oh gee where should a 15 year old girl be sent for her last year of high school so she doesn't do any more running around 1970's New York night streets.

But Philadelphia it was, with family who must have been nuts to take in a teenager, but who also paid a lot of money for me to go to this Quaker school right down the street.

From a New York City public high school with a billion kids, no sports, lots of art and academics only pretending to teach us stuff...

...to this teeny tiny carpet-on-the-floors, full-length lockers CLEAN building with modern toilets that flushed.  And the bathroom stalls even had DOORS and the senior class was about maybe 32 kids - give or take.   It also had lots of sports and some arts and academics that you were actually expected to learn.

The thing about New York is everybody knows what street you're from and everybody knows what you know from that street.  So I assumed all these new kids knew what I knew.

The thing about kids who have been attending the same small Quaker school together for years and years and years is they all thought I knew what street they were from and what they knew from that street.

Lemme tell you we didn't know jack shit what the other was saying, including any word that had an 'R' in it.  I remember having to spell out 'furry'.  They swore I said 'fuhvrwee'.   I swore that I had to like dig a tunnel with my mouth in order to say 'ferrrrrrrreerrrrrreeeee'.

Learning to sound like an American was a skill that has paid off handsomely and I thank each and every one of them for that.  I do hope that the favor was returned by my teaching them the proper way to say fuck, fucking, fuck you and motherfucker and I do hope it helped them in their own endeavors

Still, across the abyss of language and culture something happened.  I became friends with people who may have not known anything about the lower east side, but they knew a lot about heart and soul.  And they became friends with me - not the girl who might have been maybe running a bit too wild on 1970's New York night streets but with the beginnings of a self that was preparing to go write the world a story.

It's forty years later. 

Let me rephrase that.  It's fucking forty years later.

And I swear looking into each face -  no matter some of us have more hair or less hair (mostly less hair),  or if we are bigger or smaller (maybe a little bit of both) - there still is this indomitable aliveness and I see the place I became my own beginning.

In fucking Philadelphia.

**
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Ben's Birthday

Sunday Memories: Please, Mr. Postman....

Robert joined the Post Office in 1982.

He started delivering our mail shortly after.

He watched our lives change through the names that joined us on our boxes and the names that disappeared from our boxes. 

He saw hundreds of beautiful decorated letters arrive and witnessed their dwindling numbers as computers became our envelopes.

He dropped off packages at our doors, said hello to us by name and always asked how things were doing.

And seconds after I decided to give up my dreams, he was the one who rang my bell with a registered letter telling me I had won a grant and to cash the big check enclosed therein.  It took all his diplomacy to get the letter back so he could scan it.

He was there at the boxes while it poured outside or when the sidewalk buckled with heat.  He showed up in snow and he showed up on beautiful days that were meant for playing hookey. 

And he often took his last brief break of the day in the vestibule, where Olga would join him after work.  They'd sit and talk about grandchildren, children, work and life.

When she died, he came to her funeral and paid his respects.

How many of you know your postal delivery person by name?  

If you died, would he or she pay their respects?

Tom sent an email around the other day.  Robert was retiring and his last day was the next day.

Emails flew around the building, plans were quickly made, hearts broke and almost every mailbox held a card to Robert.  Thanking him for a life he spent putting catalogs and flyers and bills and sometimes even beautifully decorated letters into small boxes that let him know the mundane and the magnificent, the heartbreaks and joys in this old building.

**
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...and Justice for All

People began gathering at Union Square in solidarity with Baltimore.

The sound of four or five helicopters hovering over the Square got louder and louder and the intermittent police sirens got more and more frequent.

But the one sound more important than any sound this evening - the flapping of the American flag -  never stopped. 

**
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Still Alive

I asked Carola what she wanted to say about turning 70.

The cake pretty much said it all, she emailed back.

"Still Alive."

That defiant stance at time is in the heartbeat of her new book, The Only Ones.  Which got published right before her birthday.

Carola will be reading from her new novel at the St. Marks Bookstore on May 5th at 7:00 p.m.

She will also be participating on two online book group discussions:

Lit Reactor on May 1st.

Moon Palace Books on May 17th at 2 p.m.

 There is no such thing as "too late".

You're Still Alive. 

Get inspired by a whole new brave world.

**
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The Stork Has Arrived

Sunday Memories: Soothing the Savage ... Pick Two

Didn't always have a television, but always had a record player.

When things got tough, slipping on a pair of headphones and putting on a beloved record became my own escape to better times, even if they only happened in my dreams.

Soothing the savage breast, as it were.

Times change, things get moved around and around and who knew how great T.V. was for getting lost.

And then they invented Netflix.

But old habits die hard and soon the record player had to have a home again.

So what if the savage breast didn't need any soothing and dreams were coming true more and more every day.  It was so nice to hear the old records again.

The cats, on the other hand, didn't think so.

There was only one thing to do: get up there to that big animal that kept running around and around...

...and then kill it.

But just like long ago, the music soothed the savage beasts.  At least until lunch.


**
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The Old Bag

Dude Is A Lady!!!

DEB!!!

a.k.a. DUDE OF THE EAST VILLAGE!!!

She tells Boston stories like they are from New York!

She tells New York stories because they are from New York!

She tells stories!!!

AND she's telling them Monday night - April 27th - at the Bowery Poetry Club Mono-a-Mono series!!

Come one! Come all!

And catch Her Real New York!!

Night Walk in the Land of Oz

Sunday Memories of Old Homes and Family from Long Ago

It was wonderful to be back.

Even though the bar stools were new and you could actually sit on them without sliding off the cracked vinyl and even though the beautiful lady wasn't living over the cash register anymore, the millions of cuts into the old wood tables of millions of initials hadn't been replaced with new shit looking old but clean.

Best of all, the ancient smell of tough drinkers and tenderhearted writers that I knew since I was a teenager drinking with Florence was still the same.

Even the bartender looked familiar.

"I've been coming here since 1975, 1976,"  I said.

"Me too," he said.

I laughed.   "What, since you were five?"

"Yeah," he said.  "My dad is J__."

One of the owners.

Those long-ago afternoons when no one was there, just us regulars drifting in late day sun, the Daily News, Post spread out on the bar, Frazier flipping through the gossip pages and the crimes that shouldn't have happened, maybe a late lunch, not even a drink, just the company we all needed to keep during those times.... occasionally, in the corner, were two little boys playing as their father checked out the beer pipes and the 100 year old wiring.

**
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The Writer Cat Revisited

It's in the rule book.

Chapter 5.  Or Chapter 3.

If you are not allergic, you have to have a cat in order to write.

It's to ensure that even when the page is full of shit and you hate everything you ever put to pen and really why didn't you become ANYTHING ELSE other than a writer... the cat reminds you life is sweet and happiness is just good company and since you're not typing at the moment get that spot behind the ear? And perhaps it's time for a snack... a bisseleh chicken might be nice...oh you're writing again it's O.K. I can wait.  In the dark. Starving.  As you write the Great American Novel... which is more important than feeding me...


**
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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 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.

This is David. He is the son of Dana ("If I Bring Forth What Is Inside Me, What I Bring Forth Will Save Me," March 2009) .

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.


**
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A Visit to Dana

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.

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 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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Dayenu

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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Passover

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 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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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.

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 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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Look Back in Love at Home

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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Blog with a View

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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