Sunday Memories: It Takes A City To Build A Village

Over the last couple of weekends, Bill began the gentle process of emptying The Flower Stall. Any reasonable donation offered for any plant would be given to Seneca Village, a project Cornell loved and supported. A steady stream of neighbors and strangers came stopped by the beloved old shop, as plants were adopted and checks were written.

Other offerings were made as well. Memories, copies of blog postings, and this photo, taken December 23, 1967.

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The Flower Stall is usually open on Saturday, but Bill is there on and off during the week as well. Please stop by with your checkbook or money order made out to The Seneca Village and take home one of Cornell's beautiful plants.

THE FLOWER STALL
143 East 13th Street
NYC

Mishpocheh Across Time And Place

Antiquity in the Metropolitan Museum, 2011



Mimi's hair is like that on the Roman lady statutes she teaches us about and Leilani easily gets cute young men to take pictures of us together. We wander through centuries of worlds, from China to Africa, from Rome to many parts of America.

Later, over hot dogs and pretzels in Central Park, we wander through now and then, musing about our younger days, pondering our present lives, and cooing over adorable dogs rescued by now-adoring owners.

If We Dug A Hole Deep Enough, Would We Be Able To Return To Our Twenties?

It had been 25 years since we all met in China.

Guangzhou 1986



Mimi and me from New York City with attitude to match, and Leilani from Hawaii and England and Australia and Indonesia and other places who floated through each country with a graceful elegance any New York girl would have killed for.

Coney 2011


And now each one of us searches the other's face, wondering where the hell the proof of those 25 years hides. Maybe we are more mature, happier, kinder, smarter, confident, but we look exactly the same to one another.

Sunday Memories: On The Cusp Of Marilyn

China
1986



Nixon went to China in 1972.

The City College Study Exchange went in 1986.

When we left the Guangzhou University Campus for a sight-seeing excursion, we were stared at, touched, followed and talked about (in Chinese) because we were often the first Westerns ever seen. I decided at some point it was just practice for when I was a superstar. (The internet hadn't been invented yet so writers were still revered.)

The streets were still filled with bicycles and very few cars and taxis that went even too fast for me. Crates of dogs were for sale, snakes were killed and cooked and served right then and there, and road side late dinner got served while sitting on wooden benches or crates. Hand holding between males and females was frowned upon until the sun came down. So during the day, it was normal to see men soldiers walking hand in hand.

If there was more than one western-like hotel in the city, I don't remember. The White Swan, an understated Vegas-like explosion on the idea of fancy luxury, had a waterfall or big fountain in the lobby. More importantly it had a western style all-you-can-eat brunch buffet on the weekends. We would bring big bags on the couple of occasions we'd splurge on homesickness and food.

On Halloween, we watched the university students dance in circles, the boys with the boys holding hands and the girls with the girls holding hands. I don't remember the music one of the exchange students had brought, but the Chinese students were lit up, liberated by a rock and roll beat. I had come as Marilyn Monroe and when I asked one of the students if he recognized who I was dressed as, he said, "Yourself?"

Of course, these days China is not like that at all. And now anything you see here in the United States that looks like Marilyn Monroe probably has been made in China.

New York Underground: Millenium Style

14th Street
11:20 pm

Another Monday Night With Eighth Avenue

10:48 pm

Sunday Memories: Fast Food in Fast Times

It was really late the other night when I passed the series of fast food joints on 14th Street. And that's when I noticed all the teenagers hanging out. Hanging out in their tribes of multi-faceted fashion statements talking laughing milling being.

For us in those early years of the 1970's when vestiges of hippie land began the slow turn into serious drug use it was Nedicks on the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue which still wasn't called the Avenue of Americas and if it was we never called it that anyway.

There, 13 or 14 years old, we gathered in our multi-faceted fashion statements, sending word like the Pony Express of who was looking for who and when would everyone be headed to the park or did anyone go to the therapy group at The Door which lived on 12th Street then - free meds but no free meals - The Door didn't have a kitchen until 18th Street. We all bummed cheap cigarettes from one another and the richer kids sprung for hot dogs and orange drinks from triangle cups.

It was on this corner we all said goodbye to Cowboy. Cowboy was a legend in our tribe. He walked about with a guitar on his back like a troubadour. A black kid from somewhere else, to us he was the coolest, nicest, hottest, hunkiest older man of 16 or 17 we knew. That afternoon he told us he was headed across the country or something like that and we all melted goodbyes in the hippie hugs everyone gave everyone, man, woman, gay, straight, sober or stoned.

Weeks later, one of the kids came running to the corner, telling us Cowboy was dead. He had taken acid and tried to swim across a Great Lake in some other state, I think it was Michigan.

It's like almost 40 years later, but every time I walk that corner I always think of Cowboy. And when I passed those kids on 14th Street the other night I thought of all of us.

Thursday Morning with Second Avenue

12:33 am

Monday Night With Eighth Avenue

10:45 pm

Sunday Memories: Mother's Day

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.

Stranger In A Strange Land

When one's therapist suggests that one walk along the Hudson because the day is so beautiful, one walks along the Hudson.

Roller skaters roll, kids play, there's grass and people lying on it and lots and lots of trees and bushes and benches. It's lovely. A welcoming respite with all this space and breeze and green and water. I feel like I'm in another city, like maybe Seattle.

In the middle of this rustic setting are the remains from a former respite.

A derelict wharf closed for years by concrete barriers that didn't stop anyone from scampered over them and then carefully navigated out to the very edge of the water, stepping or leaping over huge gaps between wooden planks that if missed would have landed some unlucky soul in the river.

Tricks were tricked, preening abound and it was the closest thing to heaven I had when I didn't have the time to get on the F train and go to Coney.

Only The Light Fixtures Are Different

There used to be tons of florescent lit places to go to in the middle of the night for a quick bite only a couple of dollars. Now even the 24-hour post office closes at 10 and the all night diner on 34th is really expensive.

Luckily for us, the pizza joint down the street - "one of the top ten!" David points out - is still open and in the lovely faux brick and marble, we eat our slices and pour talk of putting on plays in kindergarten, whether UPS is hotter than FedEx, the necessity of therapy to keep sane in an artist's life, concrete verse trees - discuss, the fact that Devil in Miss Jones is the only porn film in existence with a plot, and the pressing need of a support group for cats of writers.

Sunday Memories: Being Sick

Juggling a soup bowl or a cup of tea, Florence would point her finger at me and say, "Well, you know it's all your fault."

After that statement of fact, the rest of the day would be spent curled with a pile of my favorite books and the radio tuned to the New York City radio station that broadcast children shows for all the sick kids stuck at home. On special days, I even got to spend the day in my parents' bed. Naps would sneak up on me and when the radio was tuned to WABC AM, music like 'These Boots Are Made For Walking' would transform my dreams to music videos before video had even been invented.

These days, books and a mini-tv and the cat keep me company as I drift in and out of naps. Every once in a while I tell myself "Well, you know it's all your fault."

In The Eye Of The Storm

In the morning, everyone rushed in and in the evening everyone rushed out.

Then this guy quietly cleaned up for today which promises wild storms and more rushing.

An Encore To Celebrate Exodus and Resurrection

In 2009, as I cleared out Florence's apartment in preparation for new tenants, a seven part series on Diaspora was created. Below is a post on that clearing's last day.

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

"The Exhaustion of Diaspora" is a week long series of what it means to leave home and seek home and sometimes even find home, but not necessarily in any particular order.

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It is time.

There is nothing much left to do.

Outside it pours cold rain.  Inside all the boxes filled with stuff offering the illusion of home to paying inhabitants have been tucked into our childhood bedroom - the bedroom Mom moved into after shaking off an unhappy marriage and suffocating life.

Once she settled into our old bedroom, Florence never slept anywhere else with the exception of two occasions - a brief period in 1976 when she camped out on the living room couch after one of us daughters accidentally returned home.   And one late night, a year ago.

For some reason I was still in the house, fixing something or other.  Penny came in.  “Florence is in my bed and won’t leave.”

Sure enough, there was Florence, back in her old marital bedroom, curled up in one of our childhood single beds that Penny and Gabriella now took turns sleeping on.

“This is my home," Florence stated, refusing to budge.

Penny looked exhausted.  And we both knew forcing anything wouldn’t work.

I started gently cooing,“This is where you slept when you were very unhappy. This was a very unhappy place for you. But let's go back to the bed where you are happy. Your happy bed."

And holding hands, she and I walked back to her own bed where, after that unhappy marriage, her joys and her sorrows were her own.

Now what is left of my mother’s joys and sorrows - her ashes and her dust - lie in a canister in my big satchel, nestled between left-over sandwich bags and her old mirror that she used to scrutinize her hand technique at her piano.

There are numbers on the lid of the can and like any good Jew I think of the concentration camps. The distillation of a person into a number.

Buried under armfuls of full bags and a huge knapsack packed to the gills, I rush into hard rain and get to the corner of Columbia and Grand.  Only to watch a rare Avenue A bus fly by.  Looking down under the Bridge, there’s no Avenue D bus waiting to go.  At 11 pm, there won’t be any more buses for a long, long while. 

Until gentrification, there were no cabs on Grand Street, ever. Never, ever, ever.  Yet there is a silver lining to  the influx of the new residents buying at market value, because suddenly - right in front of me - there is a shiny empty taxicab.

As we barrel up Essex Street, I look at the name of the driver. Mr. A. is from Togo. He hasn't been home in five years. It is very difficult being so far away from his family, he tells me. But things aren't good there. And here he is studying mathematics at Columbia University. But yes it is hard. He misses home.

The way he says home and miss and family shreds what's left of my heart.

As Mom packed up her ability to walk and her will to live, I lost the man I loved, the one I believed I would build a  home with, share his family with, the man I thought I would live with until death do us part.

After his sudden good-bye, I’d crawl through those bad weekday nights and brutal weekend afternoons and I'd make myself think of my grandmother who,  at 17, got on a ship and fled to America, never to see her mother or her favorite brother ever again.  And I’d remind myself, "Who the hell am I to think I am excused from Diaspora? Who the hell am I?"

We leave our homes in boats and planes and taxis and cardboard cans with a bunch of numbers on the top. We leave with hope or in terror. We leave with our hearts broken or our hearts bursting.

But we leave.

The rain pours down. Light skitters across wet streets. Traffic signals change.  

Diaspora begins.



*Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel)

Homeward bound
I wish I was
Homeward bound
Home, where my thoughts escaping
Home, where my musics playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me


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Sunday Memories - The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part One

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Two- The Ladies of the Pizza

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Three - Even The Baby Chair Is A Transient Moment

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Four - Hyman Comes To Visit

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Five - " It's The Pebble, Not The Stream"*

Sunday Memories - The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Seven - Try to Remember The Kind of September*

Sunday Memories: Once We Didn't Even Have An Internet

Coney Island (photo by J.L. Wong)



Due to technical difficulties which Verizon is attempting to address, posts may not appear on their regular schedule this week.

Long Night Journey Into Day

Going to Brooklyn To Leave Egypt

There is a reason it took the Hebrews forty years to make their way across the desert and it wasn't because Moses refused to ask for directions. It is said God wanted the Hebrews to birth a generation that was born, not into a slave mentality, but into freedom.



Leaving the Egypt of a dangerous neighborhood called my mind is a daily event that often unfolds in solitude and privacy. How wonderful was it, then, to sit down at a friend's table on this auspicious night, along with millions of others around the world, to begin an exodus into a better life and more loving heart.

We were many things at many moments - family, friend, Brooklyn Italian Roman Catholic, neighbor, husband, Jesuit, comrade, mother, brother, sister-in-law, guest, teacher, student, Gay, straight, wandering Jew... mishpocheh.



This evening's journey was the same taken those thousands of years ago and called us to walk its walk. So when a request for the youngest to ask the Four Questions it was someone about to turn 50 who stepped forward.


As in any journey, dishes were filled...



... hands flew with ideas and thoughts...



...until Exodus was done, dessert was served...



...and more talk filled the table, including a Robert Frost poem sung to the tune of 'Hernando's Hideaway' from Pajama Game



It was during this particular exodus and in the midst of my own private and solitary questions that a line misread in Psalm 118 reminded me that as I shed my slave mentality, my journey would bring me to freedom and a new promise land.



And so I walk, calling art to become my deliverance.

Sunday Memories: Lessons Learned At My Mother's Knee

"Show me a messy house and I'll show you a woman of character." - Florence

What my home looked like after finally completing a new book.

Spring Has Sprung Across America!

In Illinois, they know it's Spring when the baby goats arrive and bounce and jump...



... while looking adorable for the camera. AWWWWW.. look at that adorable little baby goat!



In California, they know it's Spring when the almost eighty year old tortoise emerges, after his winter hibernation, from his garage box ...



...to chomp on his lettuce while the new puppy wonders if that's a ball or a snack. Inter-species love!



And here in New York, we know it's Spring when those flowers on the trees obscure the view of the long line down the block of all the kids who spent the entire night out on the sidewalk screaming wooo wooo and singing that fucking Queen song over and over and over again while waiting on line for the premiere of the new DR. WHO.




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With thanks to J.L. Wong for the Illinois and California.