Birth

I wondered where she was at this age. My sister, doing the math, figured out Florence had just begun the life she had always wanted to live - on her own, practicing her art and dancing with girls.

There was nothing left to do but thank Florence for her labor 52 years ago, give gratitude for the day, and in the evening enjoy the company of friends and family who had witness my own journey to living as I had always wanted to.

Photo by E. Smith

Happy Meal

It had been a long while since this dinner had been attempted. More than time had to pass. The space for joy had to be carved out again and serenity and love had to be invited back in.

Along with the chicken, wine and cupcakes, a friend's cheese rice casserole was a new addition, perfect to herald in this next new year which, as the night flew by, was punctuated by a puzzled cat and talk around the table of Christianity in teen literature, the elections in Sudan, the eccentricities of certain writers, and the bravery of family who, during Jim Crow days, sat at Woolworth lunch counters to claim the right to eat at a table of their choosing.

Sunday Memories: Tranformation

This is a room at the 14th Street Emanuel Y. Once it was the room we teenagers ruled just as the Vietnam War was ending and we were singing protest songs while shooting pool. The table was tilted and I ruled my advantage while eying the boy I liked.

Now on Friday nights, forty years later, a warm and intimate congregation does Shabbat services where, through the God of their understanding they call forth the spirits of justice.

The Little Men's Store on 14th Street That Could

It's the size of one of the bathrooms at the huge chains further west. But nobody carries what this store carries. Suave shirts, sharp pants, jewel colored sweaters and elegant shoes for clubs not listed in Time Out or websites catering to the hunt of hidden New York.

Light In The Darkness On A Federal Holiday

Chamber Street, New York City at 10:30 p.m.

Sunday Memories: More Traces of Love

Her chair for watching Her New York.

Mi Butsadan Es Su Butsadan

It means the home of the Buddha.

And where else do any of us live but in a butsadan, for we are all a Buddha in our own way and right.

The Aftermath of Revolution

Florence had once said of working one's art, "You have to train for that."

So today my comrade and my friend, Josslyn and I, as we have every year for 15 years, sat down to prepare another year of daily training.

One pot of espresso, one pot of drip coffee, two pots of tea, a huge salad, two chicken breasts, four kinds of dressing, one box of cookies, one orange, a bag of barbecue soy chips, and many glasses of water later, we chose new language never before used to describe our journey ahead.

We are, not will be.

We do now, not someday.

We demonstrate "I am" right here.

The revolution will not be televised. It happens with each breath we take.

***
The Disciples of Soul

The First Step

Metamorphosis

Sunday Memories: Traces of Love

The Delegate's counter until recently.

It Was Her New York: The Angel of 14th Street

This is the Angel of 14th Street.



Her family came from Sicily to the East Village a long time ago. This was before it was the East Village.


Then it was just 14th Street or 12th Street or Avenue A. Then it was just the new home. But when they got finished with it, it was a neighborhood.

This is in the back of the building on 12th Street. This is her great great-grandmother holding her grand-uncle.


The great-grandfather owned the butcher shop on 11th and A. The great-grandmother worked in a dress factory on the lower east side. His money went to support the family. Her money went to savings. Soon they had enough to buy the butcher shop. And then after that, they bought 173 Avenue A (now a hip restaurant), moved the butcher shop there, expanded it into a little grocery store and opened a pizzeria next door. Everyone in the family worked in those and lived upstairs on the first floor.

Her uncle behind the counter at the butcher-grocery shop.


When he was five, the Angel's dad was put in the window of the pizzeria to toss the dough. Everybody knew everybody.

Her grandfather and her dad in front of the Automat when it was still on 14th Street.


Another great-grandfather, the cobbler on 13th Street also owned his own building. He went to all the other building owners and said "We need a church for our Sicilian order."


You know that church on Avenue A and 12th Street? Mary Help of Christians. That was the doings of the great-grandfathers of the Angel of 14th Street. Every uncle, aunt, parents, kids got baptized, married, everything there. Here her grandmother and grandfather are getting married.

But things change and the A&P came in and small grocery stores stores went out. The rents at 173 Avenue A didn't cover the expenses and soon the family sold, moved, disbursed. The Angel's family moved up and out. To Stuyvesant Town. She lives there still.

I asked, one New Yorker to another, what's one thing in this apartment you have lived in almost as long as I have lived in mine, that to you is New York?

"The step stool," and she pulled it out to show the life it had lived along side of her.

And then I asked, one New Yorker to another, where she'd go if she could go anywhere. "Get me off 14th Street! Life has got to be bigger than 14th Street."

And then we laughed because we knew we lived where the rest of the world wished it did.

Radical Acceptance

37th Street at 2:00 A.M.



What if, the book asked, you accepted life, right now, just as it is?

In all its emptiness and stillness, aloneness, and solitary rests, dark corners and brief pockets of light...

What if...

Sunday Memories: It Was...

City Hall R Train Stop, 2:00 A.M. New Years Day



After sidestepping puddles of proof teenagers shouldn't drink and avoiding the belligerent couple who, in their very un-New York style, complained there were no cabs to Astoria, we stood quietly on the platform, relieved that, just two hours ago, the last twelve months were finally a thing of the past and a history we could now leave behind.

It was the best of times, it was the worse of time...

It was now just memories.

"Good-bye Old Girl..."*

It started before Aunt Ruth died.

The Laundrymat on 13th Street, now an expensive dessert place of cereal flavored milk, was packed with cheap, big machines in a small crowded concrete storefront. It was run mostly by the Russian wife, and occasionally by her husband but never by her son who looked like her in sideburns. Tons of quarters were poured into plastic dishes for the machines and little boxes of soap were for sale under the always-on TV.

Just like an old bar, it was packed every day with its regulars. All the Chinese extended families from 12th Street, the differently-able adults from the residence on 2nd Avenue, a couple of former drinking buddies of mine from 13th Street, and the growing post NYU market-rate tenants who more often than not dropped their bags of dirty clothes off to be done for them.

Keeping my clothes clean and pristine hid the fact they were old or third-hand or that I couldn't afford new ones. So that laundrymat was important to me. I nodded to the same folks every week, jockeyed with frenemies for a dryer or a washer, caught up on my People Magazine reading and commended my favorite young man from the residence on his detergent pouring technique. (He was most proud he could do his own laundry.)

And then disaster struck. Someone's ballpoint pen stuck in a machine ruined most of my carefully preserved clothes. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. But when I complained to the son he told me it hadn't happened, even while staring at Jasper John-like streaks on a beige windbreaker.

Then almost immediately after that, Aunt Ruth died and left me some money - just enough to buy my own washer-dryer unit.

Suddenly, like a few of my better off neighbors, I had the means to put myself in the realm of utter rich luxury. I was going to be able to cross over into a comfort of living I never could have imagined ever.

The minute my washer-dryer combo unit was installed I immediately started doing all the laundry I could gather, load after load after load. I forced myself to stop only because a friend was doing a reading at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble, now a luxury, upscale gym. The minute the reading was over I rushed back to do more laundry.

In the next 15 years, I loved that combo washer-dryer more than I loved several boyfriends. There was only one I loved as much and we happily did each others' laundry until the day he left.

Then some years ago, something broke and the washer tub tilted and groaned and scarcely swirled.

The repair guy, warning me never to leave the house while doing a load, quoted a number that was beyond my budget. Still, even half turned on its side and barely rotating, the washer kept my still modest collection of clothes pristine for a couple of more years. I thought it, like laundry with that man I had loved, would go on forever, regardless of broken pieces and limited abilities.

Until tonight. A simple load thrown in produced a flood from the insides. There was no more denying. My beloved little washer was tired. I coaxed another load on a gentler cycle but I could tell there was nothing left it could do.

For friends who grew up with such an appliance in their homes, my attachment to this has been a bit odd. But perhaps it is similar to say a kid in the suburbs getting his or her driver's license or their first car. It is a mark of coming of age. For other than that time of laundry and love, it has been my greatest success at bringing comfort and care into my home.


Damn Yankees

Goodbyr old friend
My old friend
There's somethin' I must let you know
I haven't said it much
I guess I've lost my touch
But, my old girl, I love you so

Knockin' On Heaven's....

These were the doors of childhood walks, parents meandering behind, sister somewhere and me running ahead seeking ways that led to hope.

Sunday Memories: Visiting Santa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's Leaving Home"

The West Side Train Yards - soon to be luxury high rises.

Before the rare purchase of that car, it used to be trains, subways or a Greyhound were the only way out, that is if we had to leave.

Airplanes were as exotic as suddenly living in a Hollywood movie. Beyond imagination. So we didn't imagine. Unless there was a death in the family in a very far away place like California and then only one of us got to go only once.

But besides death, the annual trip to Philadelphia to see aunts, uncles and cousins was about it.

After reading that Bach had lived and died within 60 miles of his birthplace I swore to my mother or my sister or my dad that I would never do that. I was going to go far and away and die some place that proved I had left.

Those train yards and those trains look like what my feet could do if I had kept my promise.

A Day In the Life...

That section of the subway had always been a tunnel, rough concrete, bleak light and often empty except for those not lucky to have a home or another way to make the connection between the BMT and the IRT or IND. If you could get to the Port Authority another way you usually did.

Then they made Times Square pretty and that meant the subway too. Beautiful tile and picturesque murals. Even the bands got upgraded.

Saturday night, I had heard the strains of a band banging out Beatles drift down to the platform on my way uptown to another attempt of joviality.

On the way back down, I found myself in the now pretty tiled and brightly lit tunnel. There at the mouth was a motley crew of men and one woman crowded together, her in a Santa hat doing bass lines like nobody's business as the Beatles' A Day In The Life poured into space once too dismal to walk.

The words of suicide and desire and then that last chord never ending of both feelings followed all of us rushing to the BMT line.

SUNDAY MEMORIES: COUNTING THE MIRACLE OF LIGHTS

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

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

Mechanic's Alley

Near where Gramma, Bubbie, Aunts, Uncles, Mom, Dad and many friends lived



The roar of the trains on the bridge is so constant it becomes the sound of silence. Whoever lives on this block truly lives in this city for there's no space for anything but Her New York.

Same City Different Camera: Increments on Night Stairs

A friend from the neighborhood said, "When it comes to healing, there are no elevators. You just gotta take it one step at a time."