And Under The Category of "Life Goes On..."

I asked Sissy when she knew she was beautiful. I thought it was when she had her children, her being like the mom everyone dreams of having and goes to therapy to get over the fact they didn't.



So that's why I said, when you had kids, right? She said no. It was when she was only 35, divorcing, raising two boys on her own, working a heartbreaking job saving little babies from bad events and dealing with an aggressive breast cancer that refused to cooperate with some of the treatments. That's when she, every day, pulled it up, that something, that knowing, that grabbing onto the incredibleness of who she knew she was, what she was really made of and how strong she had always been, so that she could live and love those kids and make sure they had a safe home with a great mom in it, the one everyone dreams of having....

Shona Tova

I go to Little Gdynia to meet Doc for a meal.

Faye is there with her grandson. Her husband, Leslie is now gone a year at least. That means she'll be able to say kaddish at the services next week for him. All I see is that day he boasted how she was the smartest math teacher in the world as she gently put his arm into his jacket. They both survived the war and the camps but met each other here in New York when they came to start a new life, a new year.

Faye is now drained, her eyes watery. She may be facing 90 but she can't quite see it. Her grandson talks animatedly to her, like he is trying to live six lives for her so she isn't so damn lonely dieing without the man she loves.

I go over to say Good Yontiv. The grandson tells me he now is in Los Angeles. No, not the TV business. His girlfriend got into rabbinical school. Thank G-d, I say. Faye beams.

Five men yell and laugh in the back. The Right this, the Left that, Stalinism and....

Doc skips in. Pierogis and kielbasi and little cups of soup. Sour cream, sauteed onions, I have a chocolate egg cream. Talk pours out faster than delicious rain from another season, mothers and lovers and hopes and grief and hunger and peace and dreams. Desire.

For a new year for a new year for a new year.

The men all laugh and voices rise into chords from a Schoenberg symphony. Suddenly a glass breaks on the tile floor.

"Mazel Tov!" we shout to them.

"What!? Now you're married!?" one shouts back.

"No! You're married." we retort.

Faye's grandson is waving to me from the door. I jump up, a kiss on Faye's cheek. She says, pointing to him, kvelling like crazy, "This is my grandson." I don't say I know you told me. I just grin a billion smiles for her so maybe the joy evaporates her permanent tears. I feel my own eyes soften with age each second.

Doc makes me laugh just when I'm swallowing mushroom barley. We talk about all the meals we ate on Yom Kippur. I win. Two years ago from the 35th Street Chinese bakery a pork bun for breakfast before I realized I was eating tref on the holiest of the holies. She's runner up because she made dinner reservations this year for right after the fasting begins.

Since it's between Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur, we don't count the kielbasi.

The men, windbreakser, comfy shoes, relaxed pants, those faces we know in our fathers our uncles our neighbors our lives.

One says, "you sure we're not married?"

"You are," we say. "But to him..." pointing to his old friend.

"Oy! him!?"

"What? You thought you were going to be happy?"

"Wasn't the first two times...."

"Good night, girls," they call to us, leaving with little bags of dessert or dinner.

"Good night, Good Yontiv, shona tova, a happy new year..."

A new year a new year a new year...

Sunday Memories - The Bar

Florence took me here I guess in 1976 for a drink. What I remember, so vaguely through exhaustion and booze, was, so that we could have an enjoyable time, I got her a bit drunk on scotch - that being her drink of choice outside the house (the house drink being watered down sherry). I probably had scotch too. We stood leaning against the bar all the way in the back.

I think, again through the haze of exhaustion and booze, that at that time having been recently invited out of her home, I was living up the street and new to the neighborhood. And one night after a screaming match on the phone with my sister about how one would identify the sexuality of our mother, I stormed down to this bar and ordered the second drink I knew about. Rye. Doubles. And got very very drunk. A very very nice man made sure I got home without being killed along the way. After all this was Second Avenue in the mid 70's. When New York was New York and filmmakers were in school preparing to make films about it.

My two visits to this bar gave me a place to go in the neighborhood. I knew no one else, nothing else, was so alone, working as a housekeeper, baby taker-carer, cleaning girl. But now I knew this bar. So I started walking in a lot. And soon the guys behind the bar knew my name and soon I knew the names of their friends and soon we hung out outside the bar and one bartender was my roommate for a while and everyone who lived with me those years were regulars at the bar and when I finally figured out how to not be a domestic but be a college student I did my homework at that bar and if I wanted to introduce my hope for love to my family, I didn't take them to my parents. I took them to the bar because that bar was home.

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

IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

The call from Penny at 2:13 am. Something is more wrong than the usual wrong.

I scramble for clothes….no, not that tee-shirt! I like that one.  I’ll always remember I wore it this night.

I throw on a shirt I hate.

The cab driver doesn’t realize Columbia stops going two-ways at Delancey. He tries to speed on the East River Drive service road but hits all the red lights on Grand.

Does running fast through an empty courtyard in the middle of the night - past the fountain I sat by, down the same stone walkway I played on as a child - does running fast slow down bad things?

Two years of opening Florence’s front door to a constantly changing, always different "normal" - from a woman who could walk to the supermarket on her own - to this moment, a fragile sparrow held together by ancient skin struggling to breathe, her only seeing eye already traveling to other places.

When I ask her “can I take you to the doctor” the sound "no" shoot out, not from parched lips unable to close for fear of suffocation, but from a gut clinging to home.

So I sing the sutras.  She sips some water.

There is still too much distress, I tell Penny.  Penny is silent.  She knows she can’t say anything.  It’s not her job, it never was.

I pull out the the wishes made ten years ago. What decision can I live with, what decision can I not, old papers, words scratched out, other neatly typed….I read them again….what decision can I live with, what decision can I not? 

Penny listens, tilts her head, raises her eyebrows, nods, listens, tilts her head, raises her eyebrows, nods...

It is near 3am. Doctor Russia calls back immediately. He assures me if it is another flare-up then the hospital can treat it. He assures me if it is the end I can get her home.  He assures me I can refuse intubations. He assures me.

It's win-win I say to Penny. I’m calling 911.

I turn back and murmur to Florence “you are in so much distress I want to take you to the doctor I promise you I'll bring you home I promise you I'll bring you back home I promise you I promise…

“O.K.” whispered back - her trust in me, her trust she raised me not to lie.

EMT appear suddenly.  HE is tall huge like a redwood. SHE is officious. They both stomp around with many big FDNY emergency bags. Two more show up. Such heavy boots. The neighbors below must know something is happening. SHE orders everyone around.

Suddenly Florence, my mother, my mother is suddenly no longer mine. She is THEIRS and I cannot stop THEM or the massive amount of medical equipments flying out of boxes and bags or the law that says the form we didn't fill out means THEY get to do everything.

When I hear my mother cry out I snap "no more" or "stop that" or something that attempts to get back my mother back to me.  One of THEM steps in front of me and keeps me from stopping THEM.

The stretcher doesn't fit in the elevator so THEY tip her up. If THEY went a bit higher she'd be on her own two feet for the first time in months.

SHE tries to put me in the second ambulance.

"No! I'm riding with my mother."

HE points to the front seat - I can only ride shotgun, not in the back holding my mother’s hand.

SHE says, "Stop taking pictures please."

"I'm not taking any of you, just my mother."

SHE says, ”It's breaking HIPAA patient confidentiality."

"She's my mother. I am her HIPAA person."

SHE says, “Ma'am, it's breaking confidentiality."

I mutter under my breath, "I'll take a picture of my mother if I want to." But I'm too tired, too tired, too tired. "I'll take a picture of the coffee cups instead."

HE grins. My camera malfunctions.

I hear a siren from a distance and then realize it is ours.

THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS APPLY 
AS TIME GOES BY

In March, when Florence and I spent 10 hours in the ER (The ER Visit-Part Two: The Walls of Jericho) there was a doctor there some addict was screaming at. I remembered him. Tonight he became Florence's ER doctor.

"Do you understand what that means if we do that?"

"Yes."

"Ok honey, ok sweetheart, I'm sorry, we're almost done, it's a bit uncomfortable, we're almost done..."

"Your mother was biting the tubes.”

"Biting?"

"Yes. She didn't want them."

"I'm glad she was biting them."

"Let's make her as comfortable as possible now."

"I want her home."

"This is Dr. Palliative Care."

"What seems to be happening is..."

"Should I call my sister or can we wait..."

"Call your sister, now. Tell her to get here as soon as she can."

"The lab result just came back. It looks like she had had a heart attack and that's why..."

"I'm on the train platform. I couldn't find any cash for a car service."

"Mom, she’s is on the train platform. You have to hang in there until she gets here. You have to. I know you can do it. Hang in there."

"You're looking at the machine to tell you how your mother is doing. I'm going to turn off the machines so that you can just be with her."

"I can't remember the Cole Porter song, You're the Top. I didn't bring her cassette player to play her old songs..."

"Do you know when your sister might get here?"

"My mother will wait. She's going to wait until my sister gets here."

"Here. I just downloaded Pandora on my I-Phone. It's not all Cole Porter but similar. Here, put it by her ear..."

"Mom! She’s is here!"

"Hi Mom."

thank you thank you I love you thank you so much for giving me I'm so grateful for I love you music is the most important thing in my life I got so much from thank you for my passion I'm so sorry so grateful for this I love you thank you so much I love you I'm so sorry I love you thank you

THEN SOFTER THAN A PIPER MAN 

ONE DAY IT CALLED TO YOU  

AND I LOST YOU

TO THE SUMMER WIND

Near 6:25am, on the first day of Rosh Hoshanna, while my sister and I were taking turns holding her hand, the two of us talking to each other in that allegro molto staccato of words that we've always done, Fred Astaire, Ela and Sinatra playing into her ear from of the I-Phone of Dr. ER, in some brief second of some brief exhale, Florence (Frances) Deutsch Moed died.

My sister and I offer profound gratitude to Pearline Edwards, Ghislaine Carrington, Dr. Portnoi, Nurse Peters, Dr. Pool, Dr. DeSandre and the incredible staff of Beth Israel on both the 5th Floor and in the ER, the many FDNY EMT we rode with, and our incredible friends and her students and neighbors and beloved family who loved, supported, and travel this road with Florence and with us these past two years.

In Lieu of Flowers...

Tell the truth.

Tell yourself the truth.

Don't let your bullshit compromise either of the above.

Don't lie. Unless you're drunk. Then really don't lie.

Don't steal.

Accept hand-me-downs.

Look fabulous in your own clothes. They may have started out as hand-me-downs but they're yours now. Proudly recount their lineage. Never feel ashamed about that.

Never take a taxi.

Walk everywhere.

Don't wear a coat in winter.

Carry your own weight to the point of pathology. Better to err on independence than not.

Refuse to lose at the hands of cowardliness, mediocrity, stupidity, and the need to blend in.

Suffer aloneness at the risk of fitting in with any of the above.

Refuse to feel fear. If you do, ignore it and keep going. Just like Florence did that night during a World War II blackout under the Manhattan Bridge by the movie theater (now a Chinese market).

Always put your work first.
Always do your work.
Always put your work first.
Always do your work.

Rage against the Machine. Even when it looks like it's related to you.

Risk being laughed at by morons when you do something no one else is doing. Just like when Florence put on those roller skates in 1972 and skated up and down Grand Street and all those people laughed at her and then a couple of years every one had disco skates.

Start your entire life over at 60 like you were a 14 year old. Because on some level, you still are.

Fight back just like Florence did all the times someone mugged her or tried to mug her during the 1970's.

Don't EVER quit.

Know that that beer, that sandwich, those shoes, that jacket, those pants, that avenue, that movie house, that proper grammar, that street, that bar, that woman, that dance, that etude, that sonata, that scale, that subway, that bus, that hotdog, that boardwalk, that beach, that ocean is Your New York.

It Was Hers.

"Louise is the Smart and Good One." - Florence's description of my sister two weeks ago. (I was "the Nice One.")

From Louise:

"My mother, Florence Moed, died on Tuesday, September 30, at age 84. She had dementia and had been failing for a while. The immediate cause of death was a silent heart attack and her death was quick. My sister and I are relieved. She was quite uncomfortable and no longer herself.

My mother had a difficult and often unhappy life. She had little love or support growing up from her extremely dysfunctional parents. She dealt with that, in large measure, by focusing intensely on being a serious pianist and piano teacher. Parallel to her devotion to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was her love of the popular music of her era, sometimes referred to as the Great American Songbook. It drove her nuts that she was so emotionally attached to these songs whose lyrics she sometimes found insufferably sexist. She was a lifelong progressive and a contrarian, especially regarding anything she viewed as bourgeois, such as marriage, sleepaway camp, taxis, and boasting about the accomplishments of one's children or grandchildren. She was very hard-working, honest, both very thrifty and extremely generous, and humble to a fault. She could be extremely irrational and volatile about personal emotional issues that she couldn't handle. Childhood with her and my father was not easy. Nonetheless, despite her quirky and difficult characteristics, she was a great mother. My sister and I were very devoted to her and tried as hard as we could to make her feel better about the life she had lived."

Louise Moed

When the Red Shoes Lost Their Color

It doesn't matter, after deciding somewhere deep inside to never stand on her own two feet again, that Florence hasn’t walked in months.  We kept all her shoes.

Maybe, just maybe one day, after all the massages and physical therapy and coaxing, just maybe a breeze will come through the window cracked open just a tiny bit, dance around her and remind her of the outside wonderfulness she used to stride through.

And maybe, just maybe she’ll put her shoes on again and return to her own two feet.

Florence used to say denial wasn't to be sniffed at.

Sunday Memories and Secrets: I Want To Hold Your Hand

This is the last secret a man told me in a car.

It was the early 1990s when New York was still New York City and I still belonged here.

Unless it was life saving - like going to work to pay the rent - I had stopped leaving my apartment.

Every morning a desire to die would slammed into me and leave me unable to pull on the latex body suit of chirpy-supportive-sister-sledge-we're-all-family-let-me-support-you-with-your-dreams-girl bullshit personality I had worn for quite some time. I knew I had been me at my birth, before I became what everyone needed. But I didn't have a clue how to get back to her. So I lived in that bleak despair. Every day. Every night. Very little relief. Not even eating helped.

Then a friend's husband started leaving messages and sending letters and then leaving more messages. He was giving her a surprise birthday party at their suburban mansion. She was turning some big age like forty and no expense would be spared. He would even arrange for a car service because I just had to be there.

And he was right. I did have to be there. This woman had saved my life many years ago. Not by pulling me out of some ocean or taking a bullet for me. She had just made sure I got taught to protect myself. I owed her my life and I owed her my presence and that meant leaving my house.

It was the first time in a long time I was around people and I not only got through the night without a psychotic break, I even gave a warm birthday toast. Something about licking stamps and making a siddach.

True to his word, the husband had hired a car service to take a bunch of us back into the city. A gaggle of self-important women filled the back of the car. So I took shot-gun. I listened to conversations that seemed vapid and cruel and clanging and wondered if leaving my house had been worth it. One by one the driver dropped them off in neighborhoods I would never be able to afford to live in.

To be polite, or to counteract the unpleasantness of the other passengers, I asked the driver if he enjoyed driving for a living.

He answered that driving his own taxi in the town he lived in allowed him to always know what size shoe his kid wore. I probably exclaimed something like wow or brave or huh.

And then he said, "Well, I died once. And when I came back I decided to change things."

He had been working security at one of the fanciest hotels in mid-town. There was a jewelry store in the basement promenade. One day in the afternoon an alarm sounded. Someone was robbing the jewelry store. He raced down to the promenade and ran smack into the robber who then shot him point blank.

At that moment he looked down and saw his body and the frantic efforts to save him. Then he saw the corridor and the light.

He rushed towards it because it felt really good and he could hear all his relatives on the other side of the light and he couldn't wait to see them, his favorite aunt, his grandmother, her grandmother, his entire family from the beginning of time. But just as he was about to go through they all said, "No." It wasn't his time. He had to go back. He'd see them again when it was right.

That was the moment his heart began to beat again and EMS shouted many things and he was rushed off to the hospital.

By this time, we were parked at the corner hydrant by my building. I suddenly had this great hope that if I took his hand, touched him, somehow his life would pour into mine and I'd be able to return to the land of the living.

The second I thought that he said, "I don't know why I told you that story. I rarely tell anyone. When I do, they always want to touch me."

I sat on my hands.

For the first time since I fell apart I thought about what, if anything I might have to offer another person that was uniquely mine to give, but wouldn't kill me if I gave it.

He started talking about his wife's brother. The brother had just died. In those days it was still called the "gay cancer" and rumors ran rampant - you could catch it from toilet seats or using the same plate or standing next to...

No one but the driver's wife and and the driver had been willing to love and care for the brother as he got sicker and sicker. Now the lover of the brother was sick.

The driver spoke heartbreak and he spoke alone and he spoke my days in and out. The journey through despair. I knew what I had to give and I knew giving it would begin my life again.

I reached over and offered my hand.

And What Did My Sister Do On Her Birthday!

An actual exchange:

Me: how's your birthday week going?

Her: I have to read through material from 2 cemeteries and decide with [our father] which he should sign up for.

Me: Nothing says happy birthday like helping Dad pick a place to be dead in.

Secret Passages

The hope was that there was some place to hide - either from sudden Nazis or one's family. Both reasons brokered the same search. Where could I quickly disappear into if threatened? What would offer a fast way out to freedom? Where was the magic door to a happier and more magical world?

Perhaps it was too many fairy tale books from the Seward Park Library or the real life Anne Franks living in our neighborhood that infused my gullible heart, but it took many years into adulthood to not seek another road out.

Sunday Memories and Secrets: Baby You Can Drive My Car

One day in my late thirties I decided to learn to drive. Again. For the third time in 25 years.

As with most developmental issues I was several decades behind the majority of Americans. I blamed it on the MTA and student loans. However, at some point your injury is your injury no matter whose fault it is and the fact I couldn't drive a car was no one's fault but my own. All other attempts to capture a license hadn't got well but this time I was highly motivated.

Love being the most powerful fuel with which one takes risks, there was of course a man involved. I had a fantasy of picking him up from the airport in a car after one of his movie shoots or trips home to Puerto Rico. Somehow if this little movie in my head came to fruition our relationship would be cemented in adult forever after. In the haze of hindsight, I see now I understood that he was about to leave me and that I would need to drive away from that life under my own steam.

Still, with great hope, I walked into the driving school that had always been on 10th Street for as long as I had always been on 2nd Avenue. There were a couple of instructors but the one I got was the owner. He somehow taught me to drive forward, turn left, turn right and understand red and green without vehicle murder. And as most people do when tootling around in a moving vehicle we got to talking. Life, liberty, love. Married, he had a daughter he was worried about. She wasn't growing.

Finally my $278.63 learn-to-drive packet was depleted and it was time to take the test (a story all on its own). I drove us both out through tunnels to the hills of Staten Island for the test. Somehow, still not quite getting parallel parking and managing to negotiate a sudden suburban setting surrounded by my city's skyline, I finished the route and was given my license.

The owner/teacher drove us back to the city. Our relationship was over. I wouldn't have to see him again and the little bubble inside his beat-up datsun would be no longer filled with our wonderings and hopes and dreams and questions.

Perhaps it was the intimacy within a moving vehicle or perhaps it was the knowing I was forever leaving and never to be seen again, or perhaps it's just the combination of both that engender men to confess something never before confessed. Sissy says it's the perfect storm - with their visceral attachment to cars, they don't have to look at you while they're talking - they get to do this manly thing at the same time they're doing this girly thing of breaking open a heart exhausted from carrying a secret no one knew was there.

We were suddenly hurtling down a very fast highway in rush hour traffic in I think Brooklyn when out of the blue he reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out a photo.

There he was in the same parka he was wearing now. A tall blond woman stood next to him. He loved her. He loved her like he never loved anyone. They were together for years and years and years. They traveled and skied and loved and redecorated and ate well and were and then one day he came home and she was packing up. She said to him, "It's over."

The owner/teacher turned to me and said, "I had to go teach a five hour safety course after she told me that. I had to park the car and go into my school and teach."

Still driving very fast, he put the picture back in the glove compartment and began talking about his daughter. She wasn't growing.

A couple of months later I walked down 10th street. The school was gone. The store front was for rent. Shortly after that, the man I was with left me.

A Visit to the Hospital: Part Two

All I Need is the Air that I Breathe and to Love You

It's 10:30 at night.

Something is wrong.

Even after they give her medicine from a mask that comes pouring out into her face, Florence can't stop coughing it hurts it hurts and afterwards she is too wiped out to even breathe she begs me make it better make it better I keep wetting paper towels beg her to keep the mask with all the medicine pouring out into her face she keeps taking the mask off it hurts it hurts she can't breathe it's wiping her out make it better make it better I keep wetting paper towels beg her to keep the mask with all the medicine pouring out into her face she keeps taking off the mask off it hurts it hurts make it better....

Finally at 11:30 at night it is better.



Finally at 11:30 at night it's better...

Maria!
Say it loud and there's music playing,
Say it soft and it's almost like praying.


Maria is all of teeny tiny.

SShe lives near Florence - Delancey and Essex or maybe that's where she shops, the Essex Street Market.  It’s hard to tell.  My rudimentary Spanish picks up about half of what she says.  The nurse assistant waves it off saying oh she blabs a lot so don't worry if you don't catch it all.

But this night I come in and she starts talking too fast even after I beg in Spanish "Dispacio, porfavor, dispacio”.  Because this doesn’t feel like blabbing.  This feels important and I need to understand.

The other roommate - the 95 year-old  - sharp as a tack, used to live on Suffolk and Houston but now is in Brooklyn near Coney Island because her son has a house - she translates what I miss, not because she understands Spanish, but because she saw what happened.

Florence hadn't been eating for days. Nothing tasted good, everything made her cough, she didn't feel like it. The nurses or the assistant nurses tried to coax a few things down and the other day I got her to gum a piece of chicken or a piece of carrot before she spit it out.  I tried the Ensure but it made her cough.  I just couldn't insist.  So mostly the food trays stayed untouched.

This particular night had been extra busy.  I am not sure why.  Maybe more beds got filled or dinners were arriving all at once and the healthy people in charge of the unhealthy people suddenly had their hands full.  Whatever the reason, there just wasn't enough hands to go around or enough time to make sure everyone got fed. So no one was around to coax Florence to take a second bite or another sip.

Maria got up out of bed, went over to Florence and fed her.



If dreams there be....

In her later years, whenever Florence said goodbye to anyone she’d give a jaunty wave and sing out, “See you in my dreams!”



This is the picture I take after getting a message that Florence is being sent home once she is assessed for palliative care.

A Visit to the Hospital: Part One

The Long and Winding Road

We all had great hope it would go away. But it didn't.

I was still putting back together small pieces of a recently and sudden broken life - I just wanted a bit more time before another 10 hours in the ER.

I kept asking Gabriella (with great hope), "Maybe it's a cold?"
Gabriella kept saying "I don't know".

I couldn’t ask Penny who had opinions on these kinds of things.  She was on vacation.

Then Penny’s substitute home attendant and the recreational therapist both said something.

I finally asked Doctor Russia  (with great hope), "Maybe it's a cold?"
He said, "No, it's not cold. Bring her to ER.  It is best.  They’ll do X-Rays…”

Then Gabriella said (with great hope), "She seems better!"

But the next morning it was still there.  And when I got down to her apartment I knew it was not a cold. Her chest heaved up and down like Signory Weaver in Ghost Busters when Weaver got possessed.

So we began the long and winding…



"You're doing great," I told her.

"You're just saying that. I'm a mess,” she said.

I couldn’t stop laughing. "You're right. You're a mess."

"It's all your fault,” she reminded me.




When the ER nurse asked her, "Do you know where you are?", Florence answered, "I'm not home." 


Time, Time, Time, See What's Become of Me

What to bring to a day at the ER:


Crackers
Ensure
Cups
Straws
Water bottle
Yogurt
Your own spoon
Writing
Pens and highlighter case
Filofax with all the numbers to contact in case of...
Prayer bag with sutra book and beads
Extra camera
Knitting
LL Bean catalog to distract Florence
Swimming to Antarctic by Lynne Cox to distract me
Journal to write everything down

You Can Hear the Ocean Roar In The Dangling Conversation

"I'm not going to say no in this place."

"Did you think a little nothing in the morning could keep me here all day?"

"I have unsettled things in my body."



"Claire. Are you Claire or Louise?"

"When do I get up in the morning?"
Me: When you wake up in the morning.
"Oh fuck."

"I swear if I ever get past here I'll shoot you."

Doctor: Where are we? What kind of building is it?
"Oh, it's a swell building."

"Help me."
Me: What do you need?"
"Somebody's hand."

"I love you.
Me: I love you.
"I never said that to anybody."
Me: I know
"How do you know?"

"Everything will be alright."

Sunday Memories and Secrets: Tunnel of Love

One night, in the early 1980's, I left New York for a brief funeral.

In those days there were only three ways to get to Philadelphia - Greyhound, Amtrak and NJ Transit. Because death had come suddenly, I needed to leave within hours of getting the rare long-distance phone call telling me to come. Greyhound left every two hours.

I sat up front so I wouldn't get car sick. The bus was empty, the night was bleak and the roads leaving New York were fast. I am not sure how it began but the driver and I began to talk. It would not be the last time a man turned to me to confess.

He had just gotten back from World War II and out of boredom and mild curiosity started dating a young woman. One day he showed up at her house to find her and her mother busy addressing envelopes. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Sending out invitations to our wedding," the young woman replied.

So he got married to someone because of proximity and minor distraction and maybe postage already spent.

And he did all the right things. Brought home the bacon, raised their daughter, showed up at the functions husbands were supposed to show up at. And he stayed married. For decades, was still married and now his own daughter was married, he had a granddaughter, apple of his eye, told me if a pedophile ever came near her he'd kill him, just kill him didn't care what would happen next.

But. All these years with the woman he married. He hated the way she breathed when she slept. Hated it. Hated being in the bed with her listening to her breathe. The sound of her life.

He now slept in the other bedroom.

The Big Questions Game!

Link up the Real Person to the Real Question Really Asked in the Last Couple of Days!

A. Should we go to the ER?
B. Do you think she has pneumonia or is it just a cold?
C. What are you going to do if you get sick or injured?
D. Do you want extra time off for your birthday?
E. Where is our house?
F. Is your father still alive?


1. G., the Home Attendant
2. Me
3. Former boss
4. Florence
5. Old friend
6. Me


ANSWERS: Does it really matter?

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Especially when....

... there is cake.












And cooperative friends....














...who finally cooperated












Unlike these friends who were just fine because......












there was more cake















And after presents were opened...

(the shock of what it was FINALLY shutting me up after six years of talking non-stop)





...we gossiped about everyone who wasn't there.














See you at Thanksgiving. I'm bringing the string beans.

Sunday Memories - my private coney

At 9pm tonight, Coney died. Condos will be built in its stead.

The place my mother, a teenager, went to in the middle of the night to swim naked, the place my aunt met her future husband, both barely teenagers, she wearing a swimsuit and telling me 60 years later "he liked me even after seeing my thighs," the place my grandmother took herself alone, no one really knowing what she thought or who she missed, the place said grandmother took me, dragging me into the ocean for the first time, feeding me Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies that forever after tasted like sand and salt to me, the place my mother, no one knowing what she thought or who she missed, took my sister and me early mornings so that we could get a good swim in and eat a hotdog for breakfast before returning to responsibilities, the place every New Years Day, our family went to, frozen on the boardwalk, but knowing nowhere else to to be, the place I could, in desperate twenties, needing to feel like I had someone beyond my own skin, go to and find my mother sitting in the same spot as she had for years - in front of the Aquarium,


The place I knew more than I knew the thoughts of my grandmother or my mother or even my own. The place I knew more than I knew what my grandmother or mother or even I missed.

Like Calvino's Invisible Cities and my mother, Florence's life, my private coney has become just a place within memory.




Daughter of Coney (under Audio)

my private coney (under Media)

When Duty Calls and Daughters Answer

Tee just got a call from her son. Seems her father, Daddy just fired the third home aide in two months. Hired another one, recommended by one of his friends - either the one who can't walk or the one who can't see. This new home attendant arrived by Access-A-Ride in her scooter. The scooter couldn't get in the house so Daddy sent her for coffee.

"Oh shit," Daddy told the son. "I fucked up."

He's still flushing food down the toilet, won't take off his woolen hat no matter how hot it gets, says mean mean stuff, and keeps telling everyone Tee is either not helping him at all or trying to kill him, depending on the day and which company is visiting. He refuses to be evaluated for anything because he's not crazy, everyone else is.

Daddy is a Vet. World War II. So that means the VA will pay for a nursing home. And sometimes the visiting nurse service for a couple of weeks. That's it. Nothing else. No home aide, no housekeeper, no food stamps. No nothing. Everything outside of the nursing home is out of pocket. His pocket. Tee's pocket.

Tee and her sister write down everything Daddy does that lets them know something is wrong. But just like me and Louise with Florence, how do you prove something is wrong when that's how they've always acted? I tell Tee, well sometimes you got to wait until they start peeing on themselves and can't wipe anymore.

Tee takes care of his part of the house, her part of the house, the kids, the grandkids, her husband, her father. Tee is tired. Real tired. But just like me and Louise before we fought with Medicaid and won, what does it mean to be a good daughter? Where do You stop and Daughter begin? Where does Daughter stop and You begin? I tell Tee you kick out the rage on a wall and every day swear to take nothing personal just keep saying if it was cancer I wouldn't take the tumor personal so why am I taking personal familiar words coming out of a brain eating itself alive?

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!

Thanks to Elizabeth Smith and Joni Wong's emails to the New York Times City Room Blog, MY PRIVATE CONEY is now on their blogroll under PEOPLE AND NEIGHBORHOODS!

Elizabeth's blog COWBOYLANDS (see "Other Writers and Artists You Should be Reading") is dashing, funny, witty, insightful and completely confusing to this New Yorker who only heard the term "Cowboy!" when Florence felt the bus driver was driving too fast. I HIGHLY recommend the list of what makes a cowboy. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to date one.

Joni Wong could be writing a blog but instead makes beautiful things that she sells, along with vintage things, on LifeInAGlassHouse.etsy.com.

Check them both out and enjoy!

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Andrew, the Pharmacist, at the store where we get Florence's drugs.

Sometimes he is the only person someone will talk to all day, that someone being an elderly person who doesn't have any kids or doesn't have any kids like me and my sister, Louise. He's it -- the guy behind the counter trying to make sure medicine is taken right and instructions are understood before that senior citizen hobbles back into a home no longer shared and a life no longer visible.