Sunday Memories - Cuz It's Your Birthday

'Cuz when there is no refuge except by an ocean there's only one person in the world to go with.

'Cuz you were brave enough to enter a car with me at the wheel knowing I didn't understand the concept "stay in between the lines."

'Cuz there was no one else in my life I could ask those questions and you answered them. (And I'm sure you NEVER repeated our conversation to anyone else.)

'Cuz you let me borrow it.

'Cuz you went forward and forward and forward again.


'Cuz you're the only person who could flip me the bird and still make great art.

'Cuz to shop like that takes talents guts and skill and you are the best argument for shopping to be in both summer and winter Olympics.

'Cuz of that day we walked through the old old neighborhood and we understood we are the ones left to remember.

'Cuz of every meal you shared with me.

'Cuz you trusted me with your kids. Even after we all took the 5th.

'Cuz the generosity was at a price and I hope I did right by you when I passed it forward.

'Cuz again you went forward and forward and forward again.

A Woman's Bed Where She Lies and Tells Poems*

It's rumored to be made of horse hair, this bed she has slept in since 1977.

Bought it with the girlfriend, the only one she ever lived with, and I think there was even a story of giggling like mad when they brought the queen-size mattress into the building because all the neighbors were watching and knew something different was happening behind closed doors in that apartment. (Or maybe that was the Christmas Tree story, another act of terrorism that only two middle aged Lesbians could do to a Jewish enclave.)

I have never laid down on this bed.

I have stripped it, cleaned it, made it.  I have sprayed it with Febreze.  I have sat on it, held Florence’s hand and comforted her on this bed.  I have dressed her, undressed her and clipped her nails on this bed.  And every time, thinking she was back in the tenement on Hester Street where sleepovers were common between friends, Florence would invited me to "lie down and go to sleep" in this bed.

Her bed.

The bed she bought to begin new life, new hope, new love. The bed where she told herself better futures and denied worst pasts. The bed no man ever slept in.

The bed she loved in, climaxed in, lost in, splintered peace with frightening dreams in, refused to cry in.

The bed she cradled herself through sleep, the radio playing all night NPR news shows.

Her bed.  A woman's bed. Filled with poems told fiercely as reality shattered and disappointment flooded in.

Tomorrow the new electric hospital bed rental will arrive.  Its hydraulic lift will make bed-bathing of Florence by Gabriella and Penny less back-breaking.  It will have bars to keep Florence from falling out in the middle of the night. It will have buttons that push Florence up to sitting and down to sleeping. And when it is no longer needed, it will be returned to Medicaid.

Tomorrow Gabriella and I will somehow coax Florence from her old bed.  I will lie, not in her bed, but to her face. I will say "we are putting you in a special bed just for a little while. Until you get better and can sit up without being dizzy. And when you do and when you are walking again, you'll go lay down in your own bed and then we will go to Coney."

And she will correct me and say "Coney ISLAND. And I will LIE down, not LAY down."

And I will nod and know my lie is forever.

*Dedicated to Florence's demand proper grammar be engaged: One does not LAY down. One LIES down.


FOLLOW-UP

Ray and Dennis set up the new stage of her life.

Pets of Our Lives: Part One - Pigeons

I mean besides the gunk filled eye rat-dogs that the not-so-religious ladies carried, there were the pigeons. Not exactly the most cuddly beast on the street, but there were lots of them, they were pretty friendly if you fed them and best of all, you didn't have to take them home or clean up after them.

Florence at 17 or 18



Often, going to the zoo or any other place outside, the pigeons were as important as what we were there for.

My father and my sister, age 3
at the South Seaport



By the time I came around, "rats on wings" had entered New York vocabulary. Besides, I was partial to sparrows and feral cats. Still, the peace of those old photos filled me today as I watched the homeless man share his food with his pets.

Small Plaza by
Penn Station

Sunday Memories - "Candy, Candy, Candy for a Penny"*

Until it moved two doors down, Economy Candy lived on the corner of Rivington and Essex. It was heaven but we were atheists and not permitted to enter.

Florence decreed No Candy Allowed with the One Exception of the piece of Bazooka Bubble Gum at Dr. Goldfarb's when we had to get a shot. What was Allowed: apples, steak, Mrs. Paul's fish sticks, Arnold's white bread, broccoli, more apples, milk and then apples.

So I stared. Pushing my nose into the glass to make staring enough. It was never enough. I always wanted more. I dreamt of money and freedom and having my own apartment where if I wanted to I could eat as much candy as I damn wanted to.

Now, two doors down from the corner, Economy pretty much looks the same except that the shelves are newer.

I notice I still stare, first through the window, then, after forcing myself to enter, at every single thing in the shop.  But I touch nothing because God, knowing I don't belong, might come down and send me back to apples.

Overwhelmed with choice, possibilities and a desire to avoid being smited, I end up buying something stupid. Like dates. And the little plastic wrapped hamburger made of sugar.

*Penny Candy - New Faces of 1952

A Surprising Epilogue to Deep Waters

Today was the last swimming class, this motley crew of young and old, fearful and eager each with a unique story of their own deep waters. Several had had near drowning experiences, several had refused to even enter any waters for years and instead sat on the sideline watching family play like dolphins. Several just knew they wanted to SWIM and were tired of not knowing how, and then there was me and Chett, both of us having taken many many classes and still not knowing the first thing to do when stepping into a pool.

But today, here, weeks later, we all could actually propel ourselves down the lanes of the pool. We were really swimming. Each one of us had that delightful look of astonished pride in our face, like when we were little and wrote our names for the first time. Before we couldn't. Now we could.

That left only one thing to do. Deep water. And so these intrepid classmates donned floating belts and gripped railings and entered, some for the first time in their lives, the diving well and water deeper than 4 feet. Slowly but surely, fingers were gently coaxed to let go of the wall (and I think in one case pried off) by the very patient instructor.

And soon they were swimming in their own deep waters.

with gratitude and thanks for being such warm, kind classmates and for letting me document this event.

A Final Snapshot from Deep Water Called My Home

It wasn't that I had forgotten to sit down. I had just been too busy.

But one morning the house empty and quiet, waiting for an exterminator who was actually scheduled for the following week, I sat. And remembered what I couldn't remember and remembered what I still didn't.

Always on the edge of the swimming pool's diving well, talking myself into taking my feline self into a world of complete dislike. And the constant sentences so familiar almost a radio station in my brain - "...what the hell was I thinking why am I doing this I hate this wet. cold. I must be crazy what the hell was I thinking and now for the news..."

But I would force a plunge feet first, or more recently a gently-sit-on-edge-slide -into-water-like-a-corpse but always with a muffled cry of horror at wet. cold. touching me and for the first five second feel just utterly miserable. Then regardless I would sally forth and get to work, practicing newly-learned swimming strokes or aqua-jogging about, all the while eying the clock and hoping for time travel.

Although complaining was allowed and misery accepted, there was no further discussion about my future in the water. I was getting old and this was now an essential part of my plan to stay unbedridden until I was dead. Whether I liked it or not from here on in swimming would be a thrice weekly event.

This very morning sitting on the bench, the bench bought years ago with grocery money from the 4th Avenue used odd furniture store, once a common business, now an anomaly in the midst of expensive gyms and exclusive doormen, I remembered.

Just as I sat on the edge of the diving pool, exhausted and waiting to buck up and get on with it, I sat here. A place to rest before plunging into unwanted jobs or a memory-filled home. A place where I could admit sorrow and misery and complete unhappiness at the next step. A place where I could prepare to return to a water of lost words and recover what I had always wanted to say.

Sunday Memories - "...A Little Rain Must Fall"*

When did I start hating the rain?

It was another playground Florence would send me to. A summer downpour and she'd throw me into galoshes and really not much else and I'd run full speed into outside and start dancing and stomping and jumping into puddles. The harder the rain the harder I played. The wet was part of a song inside me and nothing felt better.

The rule was that if it rained and you were wearing the good shoes from Mr. Kaplan's store on Clinton Street, you had to take them off and walk the rest of the way barefoot. Those shoes purchased yearly were more precious than our feet but New York sidewalks were actually pretty OK to walk on in those days so I never remember any of us getting cuts on our feet.

Sunny or cloudy, the gaggle of girls we were, me the least religious, them in yeshiva grabbing hands, racing around in a circle, screaming at the top of our lungs a rain dance in Hebrew "..Shav Te Maytim Vesasson, Mi Ma Ne Ha Yeshua Mayim, Mayim, Mayim, Mayim Hey Mayim Vesasson..."

A young summer, still amazed I didn't become something hard to recover later, always wearing this favorite hooded sweatshirt found some place like a park or movie house, or gotten at a church bazaar where we got all our clothes. And the rain that day when Bobby took something really really bad and we all huddled under the beat-up 1970's Washington Square Park Arch while he shook and it poured and even though many sweatshirts have since come and many sweatshirts have since gone, giving him that particular sweatshirt so he could last out the rain until he came down from whatever he climbed up on is something I still selfishly regret. Because I split to a spiritual community that night and he split to Minnesota or Baltimore before I got back and I never saw it again.

When I was briefly a bike messenger you worked or you didn't get paid. I hadn't saved up enough for the deluxe rain suit the better guys wore. I don't remember what it was I did wear but it was just part of the job and wet was part of the air I lived in. Perhaps it was there I stopped breathing as I plunged in and peddled as fast as I could so the day would finally end.

My nine-year commute to City College more often than not on a bike and sometimes with a violin strapped to my back, one night rain pouring so hard as I zipped down Broadway, then still completely deserted and no shops or theaters or people, just a shuttered fast avenue and what was I thinking when I started to sing "..In the Rain What a Glorious Feeling I'm Laughing Again..."? That an orchestra would well up behind me, joy would fill my heart and I suddenly dance like I felt inside?

Metamorphosing in ages that had to be a mistake where did the time go and noticing I hated umbrellas almost as much as liver, but would lug one around and refuse to walk home even if it was slightly drizzling.

But one solitary afternoon recently a rare nap suddenly hearing the storm that barreled horizontally through the city and also through windows left open, the pounding whipping wailing sounds of wet and wind almost the very moving picture of my life and I awoke into the ferocious rain laughing like the girl I once was.

*Led Zeppelin - Rain Song

When Does A House Becomes a Home?*

From my bubby's home, via my childhood's home.


From a friend's house no longer wanted.


From the street - placed carefully so that everyone passing would know it was up for grabs.


From an abandoned yeshiva summer camp.


From a long-lost cousin and painter in Moscow, smuggled to me in the late 1970s before Gorbachev and glasnost.


From a roommate who moved west in 1979.


From a neighbor. (The pillows were $2.50 each at a Church basement sale on 37th Street.)


From Florence's ex-girlfriend.


1. From Florence's other ex-girlfriend - a recipe from Florence's mother-in-law given to said ex-girlfriend one evening in 1947 at my parents' apartment in Knickerbocker Village. 2. From a temp job in 1978 - Mapplethorpe portraits of Lisa Lyon's biceps. 3. From a former boss in 1997, an internet joke of a meditation on killing someone to reduce stress. 4. Magnets from my roommate who lived here at 17 and has, in her forties, since returned.


*inspired by someone's Crate & Barrel's purchases as he re-emerges his home.

Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily Life Is But A Dream - Snapshots of Deep Waters Continue

There were only two boats in my lower east side life - The Staten Island Ferry and a Central Park rowboat. And the most time I spent out on Fire Island or the Hamptons I was of the domestic milieu - depending on the family: the teenage nanny, the teenage housekeeper, the young adult nanny, the young adult house helper. It's how I got my summer vacations. (Because there was no way we could afford for me to go out there otherwise, which is probably why in a recent drive to East Hampton for a weekend getaway my whole body cringed when we passed the South Fork Realty Sign.)

Three-plus decades later, this visit had no domestic demands other than join in on delicious cooking and high speed clean up so we could get back to Fun, another new possibility I had to figure out. And on the lone sunny day that included a boat.

Doc owned it. She owned like I own my thrift-store Prada kitten heels. Normal possession. And it was sleek and it went fast. (I always felt The Universe kept me too poor to own a motorcycle so that I wouldn't kill myself from sleek and fast.)

Scrambling on, I wondered if in fact reincarnation did exist. I had been here before. The water no longer looked like one of those nightmares where you find yourself naked in a social situation and they were about to give the mid-term you didn't study for.

No. The boat felt like a family reunion with people I was happy to see. A feeling that definitely did not come from anything in my life filled me like it had always been there. And the faster Doc went the happier I felt.

When we go to the part of the Fun that included crawling into a tiny air raft and being dragged around an inlet really fast, I thought nah, looks dumb and boring. But everyone else, including the non-swimmer, had gone and I wasn't good at turning down new experiences.

I crawled in, Doc revved up and when she hit 25 miles per hour, I didn't recognize the laughter roaring out of my body or these biceps easily holding on as I bounced up into the air and then surfed the raft into even more treacherous wake.

Then something odd happened. Looking down at my sturdy legs bracing against 4 feet of flying up and slamming down, and my arms grasping the handles, I looked like, just for a second, my grandfather the Ox.

A thug from Russia, he never lost a fistfight because the one punch was always his. And he punched anyone he deemed wrong - including all his family, the foreman of the rare Depression-era job, and the cop on the corner of Columbia and Grand. He taught himself to read and write English. He picked up whole pieces of big furniture without breaking a sweat and he worked, well, like an Ox. A short squat all muscled immigrant. Fearless.

As I bounced bigger and higher and roared louder and longer, I wondered how our family's heart and soul would have been if only the Ox had had my life and this moment.

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

The emotional amnesia of entering a pool doesn't mean I don't remember. It just means I don't know what it is I am remembering. Sort of like Nixon's famous 18 minutes or Florence knowing who I am but not knowing she's my mother, something essential disappeared from reality.

So it is still a mystery as to what possessed me to take my then less than two but not much more than one year old nephew, Baby Boy and dunk him into a swim class called Tadpoles for Tots (or some other God awful moniker to frilly up the fact a bunch of adults were going to forcibly plunge small barely verbal little itty-bitties into cold water and then coo at them as the kids went psychotic.)

Perhaps I was attempting to recover my lost youth through this non-Christian baptism or perhaps I was just trying to recover. Whatever it was this missing, a vacuum a dead spot in my internal universe, regardless every Saturday I traveled the errant 1, 2, or 3 to the Upper West Side to collect the unsuspecting trusting adoring nephew and then bring him down to baby hell at the 68th street Y.

Old wooden benches banged up rusted lockers and trying to figure out where to put down a fat baby without stepping on him, dragging up against unwilling flesh my swimsuit then his over a diaper that would weigh as much as him once it got saturated and finally stepping into that ancient box of clanging tiles, echoes and an old pool filled mostly with kiddie pee.

I cooed and cooed and cooed "oh here we are in the nice water..." and he screamed and screamed and screamed in baby language "GET ME OUT OF HERE YOU FUCKING WITCH YOU BETRAYER OF ALL GOOD YOU DECEITFUL HORROR SHOW I THOUGHT WE WERE RELATED."

Truly the scarring moment that 18 years later still crumbles my heart is when his mother stopped by to see the class and said toddler, making Christ look like a geriatric sloth, propelled himself screaming sobbing in a bee-line across the pool to her, begging her in every wail he could to "please Mommy please" care for him enough as her son and rescue him away from all this.

What was it that suddenly became different .... another freezing wet miserable moment and we gave him a play phone (he skipped the cars and trucks and went straight to the office equipment) I started cooing "scoop scoop scoop" cupping his hands with the phone and moving them through the water... "scoop scoop scoop" and Baby Boy oh like a delicious cake bloomed a delicious sweet smile and without any of us expecting a miracle cooed back to us "scoop scoop scoop" and even thought I still couldn't remember my own lost world Baby Boy began to swim.

Just a Song and a Prayer

My dream of a city where I have no memories yet still feels like home recently slipped through my heart's fingers and I have found myself once again back in New York treading through THEN as I go through NOW.

We never really went west of Macy's. Herald Square was 34th Street as much as the world was flat prior to Columbus's birth. But with a sudden need for a job to pay a sudden rent I incurred after a sudden invitation to leave my parents' home, I found myself at the age of 17 walking into the many 34th Street dusty offices of the many cheap clothes buyers, bulky men with pompoudors, tints of gray on the side, pinky rings who spoke more with their hands and the shrug of a shoulder than with words.

I, practically in bad drag with a cheap skirt, cheaper heels, and a too-bright smile would wait patiently on old aluminum chairs practicing enthusiasm for the Receptionist Position while fantasizing a future of being "the Girl" to all these men. Down on the street, windows poured out the very things these men sold and as I looked for work I felt at home. It was just like Delancey Street only a bit more expensive.

My dream of being "the Girl" never happened. I became other things in other offices. I went to school. I still paid my rent. I grew old and as I did, my city became some place I didn't grow up in.

Except for some small patches. Three decades later I now work west of Macy's. When saturated with cubicle walls I stroll down the street I recognize intimately. No longer on a now renovated Delancey, these 34th Street windows sing to me memories that don't make me wince or even cry. And as I walk by I say private prayers of gratitude to the place I still belong. Sometimes it looks like I'm talking to myself but nothing stops me from wishing all the store keepers well and praying they hold their leases until something happens and New York become a place to live and work again. It may be futile and perhaps I need to accept change but these small corners hold me as I heal.

Today's walk was no different. There was the window just like the one I had drooled in front of when there was no extra money for unnecessary toys.



I swear these are the same serious shoes my father looked at with great thought.



And these immortal pretty ladies still look like we never could.



I was offering up my prayer of gratitude "oh thank you for being here please stay and earn money enough to pay your rent..."

...when I saw this.

The Sweet Spot: More Snapshots from Deep Waters

Curve yourself onto that soft edge between your back and your belly.

Like Matisse’s paint brush pouring into a reclining woman, glide on that sweet spot toward home, home being the other side of the pool.



Or a home that only looks like the middle of the bed but is the beginning swim to some place buried in her heart where love buoys her to the other side of deep waters.

Sunday Memories: "Not Coney. Coney Island."

[Florence, 62, at her favorite Coney spot in the 1980’s]

Florence is not only refusing to get out of bed, she is refusing visitors everything but her back.

Kay, the recreational therapist managed to get Florence to turn to her by playing a sonatina really badly on her portable electric keyboard. Annoyed by sloppy playing, Florence rolled over, corrected Kay’s mistakes and then rolled back into her little corner. 

Kay didn't give up. She began mispronouncing composers' names, badly. Florence rolled back over and began a lesson in how one is required to speak and how De BUUUUSEEE is supposed to be pronounced.

A couple of days later, finished with my swimming lesson which actually went... swimmingly (in other words, I did not drown), I looked down from the glass balcony at the gym's pool filled with bodies going back and forth, and recalled a recent conversation with her former girlfriend who had loved her since they were teenagers.

“Your mother was a great swimmer, your mother could swim anywhere, your mother....".

Years ago before we knew her memory had begun step behind closed doors to hide her accidents and mistakes, I got her to talk into a microphone about the place she loved more than her piano.  Wondering if I too could coax Florence to roll back into life, I called.

"Hello Florence, I just finished another swimming lesson!"

"I used to go swimming. I swim," Florence said.

"I KNOW.  IN THE OCEAN.” (I had to shout this because she had forgotten how to hold the phone up to her ear and my cell phone in a cavernous gym wasn't helping.)

"Right. And then you sit on the boardwalk, watch the people and they see you alone and they try to strike up a conversation."

"Get out of bed and I'll take you to Coney."

"NOT Coney. It's Coney Island. Coney ISLAND."

"Get out of bed and I'll take you to Coney ISLAND."

"OK. Maybe tomorrow. Don't eat too much. And lie down."

And with that she clicked off to roll back into her sweet spot.

Ben's Birthday

I've carried his picture in every calendar book I've ever owned. It's a reminder to stand up straight and keep my nose clean.

In this picture he is the young prosecutor of evil politicians in Washington or Samoa or someplace like that. In this picture he is younger by almost several decades than I am now. Yet in this picture he is already a father to two kids and he has agreed to take in one more - his wife's teenage cousin (me). A thirty-something battling injustice with two small kids takes in a teenager? Man, crazy don't even cut it, but he and my cousin did just that.

And once there, he let me punch him as hard as I could, put make-up on him, come home late and, ok occasionally stoned (but only twice with the stone part - well, at least that I can remember), pour new friends into an already kid-filled house, and each time the phone rang, get out of my way as I ran down stairs and through rooms, screaming "IT'S FOR ME!" (It rarely was).

He's now a judge, black robe and everything. And he fights for the American Way - you know, the one we used to have. He's fair and he's smart and that's rare, so bad guys hate him and the rest of us get to breathe easier.

Years ago at another milestone birthday of his (and the one I now face), I thanked him for teaching me who Highly Salassie was, how to play cards without the threat of violence, and that I always had a home and a family. Such small unimportant things. Maybe for others as normal as dinner on the table or milk in the fridge. But they were enough to keep me off the streets and out of bad, bad things. I told him then and today I tell him again:

Because you were a stupid thirty-something taking in an insane teenager I am not dead.

So, Happy Birthday, Ben. Happy, Happy Birthday. Put on that black dress and go kick some bad booty. Me? I'm going to take a deep breathe and give gratitude I'm still around to watch.

Swimming Swimming In A Swimming Pool* - Snapshots From Deep Water

Florence said that after Gramma died, she started going to Coney “to make things right” and swim in honor of her mother.

Water was not a foreign entity on the Lower East Side. Not everybody swam but everybody got wet -  Coney or Pitt Street Pool or, in my aunts' and uncles' days, the East River.

I thought I had Pitt Street Pool conquered until one day the four feet of water wasn't four feet anymore and I found myself flailing.  Either one of the bigger kids or my big sister or a life guard pulled me out. The Educational Alliance day camp pool lessons taught me to float in case that happened again.

The 14th Street Y had a pool and a teen program. At the age of 13, in a rare fit of acting my age, I badgered Florence for a bikini.  It wasn’t just the money which was always tight; it was also her slow fade into private desires and secret regrets that made it risky to interrupt her.

But there was this boy and I was this girl and somehow I understood a bikini was part of the deal I wanted to happen.

She caved and with $20, I headed off to A&S in Brooklyn. I don't remember the color, the style, the stripes, the dots.  All I remember is rushing to the pool, seeing the boy I liked and jumping into the pool to say hello.

No one told me that, as I stood in freezing water trying to impress the object of my affection, the top of my bikini had slipped off my adolescent breasts.

Florence sewed the straps tighter but I never wore it again.  I also refused to return to the Y for years and years.  And when I did, this time as an over-sized overall-wearing tax-paying adult, even then, I shook with humiliation.

Then one day Gramma died and Florence got on the F train to Coney and dove into the ocean.  I continued to stay dry with only a couple of interruptions here and there, like at the 100 year old City College pool or the elite NYU pool or some tiny hotel pool or a rare ocean vacation (but only up to my knees for fear of sharks).

Not sure why, but as Florence began to swim in a haze of NPR and sheets of pee liner pads - occasionally coming up for air to say she hurt and was unhappy - I enrolled for maybe the fifth time in 25 years for beginner swimming lessons after work in a big indoor pool.  There was even a sauna waiting for me at the end of an hour of breathing water up my nose.

When I told her I was learning to swim, rare delight, passion and determination flooded her face. "Oh. You must."
*a little song we used to sing on the Lower East Side with accompanied hand dancing:

Swimming swimming
In a swimming pool
When it's hot and when it's cold
In a swimming pool
Right stroke
Breast stroke
Fancy diving too
Wouldn't you like to be in a swimming pool?

Sunday Memories - Jutta's Kitchen - Part Three

There are stories of Jutta's not mine to tell.

And in surviving there are things put aside, as one does after plane crashes and other sundry disasters.

But then one day she picked up her brushes again.

Early early days she relearned each stroke.

And then one day I began to sit for her.

Early early days she relearned to look and then to see.

Restart, relearn, rebirth, repeat. Again, again, again, repeat.

There in Jutta's Kitchen, sitting quietly for hours, often hung-over, anticipating my next cigarette and daydreaming of a life eventually never lived, I learned how "in action there is release from anguish of mind."*



*Frank Lloyd Wright

Jutta's Kitchen - Part Two

Even after Jutta's 16 year old son Marc and 14 year old me stopped dating (if you call listening to Sibelius's violin concerto while holding hands "dating") I still found my way to her kitchen several times a week for years after. Lots of times there was a gaggle around the small wooden table - me, Marc, the two Haitian brothers from down the street, the Korean prodigy alone in NY since he was like 12 and Chops the dog who had a blue eye and a brown eye. Whatever Jutta put on the table was a feast and the words and the laughter and the languages poured over meals and cigarettes and coffee and sometimes dessert.

I didn't know I was destined to live a life where nothing else matter except the attempt to tell a story with all my heart and soul. I didn't know until 35 years later that because her kitchen was a home for a bunch of motley baby artists, my surrender to my life was fueled by her example.

Jutta's Kitchen - Part One

She is now 82. I have been visiting her since I was 13. Now at almost 50 I realized I had the rare thing for a girl of my time. A role model who was a woman AND an artist.

Sunday Memories - WHAT WE DID ON OUR SUMMER VACATION

Vacations were for other people.  For us, summer was a stand-off between our need to have something to do during the day and our parents’ need to not have to think about it. Everything really worked much better when we were at school.  He was at work and she was at the piano.

Time stops for no man or pianist for that matter and neither do the seasons. Summer came. Repeatedly.

I am not sure when it started and when it ended - it didn’t last long - but for a couple of years, Atlantic City became our Riviera. And with the recent purchase of a car needed to get my father to his job out on Long Island, it was suddenly accessible.

The exotic motel we stayed at had an ice machine - the push of a lever and a cascade of perfectly formed ice cubes tumbled down - not the bitterly small, thin ones we made in aluminum trays.  And right below our small balcony was a real swimming pool -  not the huge ocean of Pitt Street Pool, but small and shallow enough to paddle across and splash about.  It even had a fancy swirling shape.   It was DESIGNED like from out of a Jacque Tati movie.

Those few days in such a luxurious setting - whatever was or wasn’t happening in this family didn’t matter -  there were things to delight in - the beautifulness of the old boarding houses and cheap motels pushing the battered boardwalk into the sea, all the salt-water taffy stands in every flavor in the world, all the magic peelers transforming radishes into flowers. 

The beaches were  clean like the Beatle’s movie HELP, not a cigarette or empty beer bottle in sight.  And the wonderful waves didn’t smell bad.  And the big seafood restaurant had fancy chowder crackers in beautiful little seashell shapes.  Beat the penny pretzel we got on Delancey Street any day, hands down.

The four of us in one room, two beds, no memory of how my sister and I negotiated sudden close space but we slept not missing the familiar rumble of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Time stops for no man and no family either.  We all moved out to other worlds, leaving Florence behind in the former home of the family.  Not sure what my sister or my father did for their summer vacation, but Florence’s became day trips to Coney and, in between shit jobs, I worked for room and board in a fancy commune upstate. 

And soon after, Atlantic City got torn down and shiny casino hotels we could have never afforded took the place of those old motels and boarding houses.

Still, there was an unexpected silver lining.  Searching for eager gamblers who didn’t drive, the casinos sent buses to the Lower East Side with an offer hard to refuse - take our free bus to our fancy shiny casino hotel and we’ll give you $10 to gamble.

Surrounded by shabby men of all sizes, religions, races and cigarette brands, Florence, bathing suit under her jeans, beach towel in hand, grabbed that free trip to Atlantic City  - $10 to splurge on a cold beer and a sandwich she didn’t have to cook?  Now that was a vacation.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

He lives above me. Has ever since he was born. He is a smart junior high schooler. Has always made music on my ceiling - running jumping rattling my dishes to his beat and one night, when he was tiny tiny tiny, with his wail of indignation because he was being sent to bed before something really really good was going to happen he didn't know what but he knew it was good. Now he plays bass. And I just laugh with delight when that familiar Led Zeppelin bass walks across my head during evening bill paying or writing this blog.


I, who grew up under a grand piano pounding Liszt and Chopin, live between them.


He lives below me. Has ever since I was younger younger younger 32 years ago. He is an important music critic. And unless they're on vacation, I listen to whatever he listens to through my floor. A recognizable beat during the 1980s when he was writing the history of rock and roll ("He's up to Motown now," said Joni, who lived with me in 1987). Or recently a night silence I really could have done without suddenly I put my ear to the crack on the living room floor, heard something completely new and felt my heart lift.


*thanks to Mukul for his suggestion about this post.