Summer Reruns: a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 2

Originally posted August 12, 2010





Laurel and Joyce’s Uncle Joe and my Uncle George were friends.  They both played trombone. This was taken at the picture studio on Rivington Street.  Wittmyers. 157 Rivington. 

But after the war, both of them left New York and that was that. The only thing Uncle Joe wanted from New York was his trombone.  His mother mailed it to him.

Summer Reruns: a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 1

Originally posted August 10, 2010

Another on-going series of New York stories




Joyce and Laurel’s father and his family grew up next door to my father and his family in the tenements on Henry Street. Not the hip, over-priced, badly renovated, tons of cache, faux-street-cred tenements of today but the rat-filled, roach-saturated, filthy, over-crowded tenements of yesterday.

Their great-grandfather and grandfather had the stables down the street. They were the blacksmiths.  Laurel and Joyce say it like it is, no bullshit.  Maybe that came from the horses because you know you can’t bullshit a horse.

My grandfather taught himself English, showed up to whatever work he could get, despite suspected depression and was pro-union (although there's speculation it was just an excuse to be self-righteous and punch other people besides his wife and kids).  I think workers should be fairly paid for their work and I’ve shown up to every job I could get despite suspected depression.  Yeah, I got a temper but unlike my grandfather I keep it in check.

After the co-ops were built and the tenements disappeared, our families all got new fancy apartments near one another.  In our world fancy meant elevators, hot water, toilets inside the apartment, no rats and less roaches. Trees too.

(Dana's husband, George was one of the couple of men who got those co-ops built.)

Every once in a while, Dolly their mother would say "Let's go visit Florence" and they would come over and sit at the kitchen table, watching the trains going back and forth. Both of them knew the plaid "lumberjack" jacket from LL Bean and the Kedd sneakers Florence always wore.  No one in the neighborhood looked like her.  So it made sense they would remember.

They also knew we all walked everywhere.  Spending carfare was a very serious decision and if it wasn’t necessary then we didn’t.  And by necessary, I mean if the destination was less than an hour away by foot, the answer was no.  Even if it wasn’t, like Gramma’s, we had to walk back. 

Laurel and Joyce still live in the old neighborhood that was built on top of the old-old neighborhood.  I come downtown for tea and talk.  As I walked in the door, Laurel said, "Betcha walked here."  Of course I did. And although I’m not wearing plaid, it’s clear to see from my sneakers to my jacket, I got Florence’s fashion sense.

Both of them point out the window to a new, ugly, blue high-rise rising on the other side of Delancey.  “Blue Smurf dick,” they both chortle.  Like I said, no bullshit.

Joyce reminds me they played with my hair during those visits.  I don’t remember.  But something inside me remembers more than what they did with my braids.  I will probably get details wrong and forget about dates and lose track of which family did what, but I don't get wrong the neighborhood.   Because, sitting at Laurel’s kitchen table, my lower east side accent returns full force and I talk like I was six and home again.

Inheritance. Neighborhood. Heritage.  All of the above.

Sunday Memories: My First Date With Bond. James Bond.

Baby Jupiter watches a James Bond car chase

Although he went to public school, he was a good Jewish boy, which is why we had to wait until after Shabbos to go to the movies.

It was my first date ever and I suspect his too.  

There was a double feature of James Bond movies playing at the Grand Street Loews (pronounced LO-EASES).   Having been schooled in Gene Kelly musicals, the height of my relationship to action flicks stopped at In Like Flint and the Pink Panther movies.

I don't remember which Bond ones we saw.  I do remember B. and Cindy following me and the good Jewish boy down Grand Street, shouting-singing "the closer you get, the better you look!"  That was from a Clairol Hair Dye TV commercial and the sexiest song they knew.  After "we must, we must, we must increase our bust, the bigger the better, the tighter the...".

I also remember the good Jewish boy feeding me Certs during intermission and me accepting as many as he offered because Certs was considered candy and candy was hard to come by until I figured out how to steal dollar bills from my dad.

Our post date reunion happened at the doorway of 7th grade homeroom where he presented me his baby teeth.  We went our separate ways after that.

But it didn't matter.  Bond movies weren't in my immediate future in those days.  Florence had other plans and sent me off to the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue when Eighth was the refuge for hookers not good enough for Times Square.  The Elgin was on its way to becoming a porn palace before transforming into the Joyce, but in the brief moment of still being an art house, I became one with Fellini and Truffaut.  Their movies unfolded a picture of the constant world inside my brain - a world I did not know how to say out loud in English, let alone Italian or French, but a world I so desperately wanted to live in.

James Bond's adventures movies were watched in between the Naked Gun movies - something to marvel at and get lost in wild stunts and other locales.  It wasn't until today that I found out those old Bond movies meant as much to little boys as Guido in 8 1/2 meant to me.  The Mariner, sitting me through Goldfinger, glowed and delighted with every gadget and "technological" advancement Bond used to thwart the bad guys and girls.  It was the unfolding of the world inside his brain, one any boy would so desperately want to live in and certainly one that would inspire a gift of baby teeth.

**
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The Delight Of Being The Shoe On The Other Foot

There was once a contest series in New York Magazine or the Daily News or maybe it was the Village Voice when it still had a voice.

Because the internet wouldn't be invented for another twenty or thirty years, each week you mailed your answers in on an index card.

One week the question was:  What could New York use more of?

I wrote in:  Less tourists.

Little did I know what the future would bring.  I also did not win.

In the rare travels away from home - home now defined as a few blocks' radius and an apartment as rare as the dodo bird - activities have been kept to family care and visits.  And the amazing Goodwill store near my father's garden apartment.

But love is impossible to say no to and after a plane ride to a city, often considered in the same breath as New York and one of the only two places Florence ever flew to, we joined the crowds of tourists tromping from one pretty attraction to another.

And as rickety old cable cars threw themselves down hills that were straight out of ancient video games or some prehistoric comic book we all screamed and cheered and interrupted the peace and quiet of neighborhoods sick of people like us.

More Encore Memories: A River Runs Through It

While Her New York is on the road, a memory about a memory.

Originally posted Sunday, June 1, 2008

Starting at the door and ending up at the back wall the counter swirled like waterways you see on picture maps taken from far away ... like the moon. I sat there for years.

Open twenty-four hours a day, it was my refuge into illusion I belonged to a world outside my door. Today Starbucks and myspace does that for my predecessors. But then, no internet, just real living space offering real living bodies I recognized, a favorite spot where I could write or read or stare out the window hoping "he'd" see me, and come in to renew love (he did several times). That counter kept me going.

The two old ladies (the counter guy called them Jurassic Park) fed me coffee which is all I ever bought and once Zina even patted my hand when, staring at a finished love poem that didn't have a happy ending, I started to cry. At 3am, when I couldn't sleep or after a night of futile socializing was afraid to go back to an empty apartment, I was almost always the rare female there, surrounded by men talking non-stop into a personal darkness from the florescent safety of the formica counter -

*** the 4 foot 9 inches cop who insisted the Thompkin Square Park Riots was the fault of only one or two corrupt cops and the guys at the 5th Street Precinct were straight up and honest

*** the Robert Redford look-alike who loved astrology and whose daughter didn't talk to him and in five minutes you could tell why

*** the unshaven, slightly slovenly, plump "theater-something-or-other" with papers sticking out of his beat up portfolio who talked in ferocious whispers to the Robert Redford look-alike

*** the famous artist who sat and looked for who would be his next subjects in his next famous murals (never me even after 17 years of us facing each other)

*** the short-order cook who announced his marital problems while flipping late night food onto the grill and demanding explanation from the counter guy about why his new bride would get so upset after he locked her out by accident. Again. For the third time. And did any of us think he was trying to tell her something because he didn't think he was HE JUST FORGOT!?

Then the owner's son went to restaurant college, renovation came, light fixtures changed, new murals were put up and the counter was amputated into a brief moment of not worth sitting down. The Jurassic Park ladies insisted it would be the same, hugging me on the street, urging me to come back, and I did, briefly. But it wasn't same. The borscht was served in smaller more expensive bowls, the pierogis became Northern California inventions filled with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes and soon Jurassic Park was gone and in their stead were new waitresses who were young and tight and pretty and impatient to the many new diners who thought they had found an authentic East Village eatery because they were treated so rudely.

And soon after that I recognized only one face in the new Christmas mural - a tiny memorial to an old drinking buddy who died of a heart attack on the corner of 7th and B in 1979.

Sunday Memories Encore: The Corners Of My Mind

While Her New York is on the road, a memory about a memory.

Originally posted Sunday, June 8, 2008

The corner between our buildings and the barrel park had a special secret passage way wide enough for all of us to slip under until one day we were suddenly almost too big. And then shortly after that it was cemented up and we had to walk around to the gate like all the adults.



Before lobby doors were locked and kids were imprisoned inside their apartments for all their play dates, we ran wild from building to building a hide-n-seek game that spanned the entire housing project, almost peed on ourselves giggling as we hid under all the stairs.



And then one day this corner stopped us all when jumping rope B. called "leaders allowed!" and jumped in backwards on a Spay and I followed, not going to let her get the best of me I catapulted myself through the air to jump in on the "J" and when I hit the bricks they all thought I was laughing but the sound didn't stop and people came running from the other end of the courtyard and someone ran up to tell my parents who never ever got interrupted ever about our playing outside unless of course we did something really really wrong like go on the roof or make fun of A. until she cried. Even though Florence thought an ice pack would make my left arm better, finally my father realized it was serious enough not to take the bus but actually take a rare taxi ride to Beth Israel where they put my arm in a sling, and which I quickly slipped out of because I didn't want to ask anyone else to tie my shoes. So the following week they put me in a sling wrapped to my body and I spent the next two months looking like a one-armed lady with a big lopsided tit, being forced by Florence to practice all the right hand parts of my piano lessons, and made to learn cymbals for the stupid student orchestra performance of "Love of Three Oranges" which of course at the big concert I screwed up and just slammed the right cymbal into the left crash crash crash because I didn't know where we were but I knew it was the end and there were many cymbal crashes at the end and Mrs. K the conductor couldn't stop me for all the glaring she did.

Guest Artist: Gabriela - Every Time I Visit Granny

Gabriela lives in the only other city that feels as home as New York.   

Welcome to Her Buenos Aires

Every time I visit Granny, I visit not only her, but her past and all her  memories... when she was young and when I was a little girl.

There's a quote from Pasolini that says that the editing of a person's life (like a movie montage) never happens until that person is dead. Of course, others do that editing.   

So, every time I visit Granny, every story about me, heard a thousand times, changes every final cut of my own self and I find myself doing a tiny rough cut of my life.

I love that moment.  The Past is a big sea where the tide always changes, where pains and fears come up to the surface, but where hidden treasures emerge too.

Yet, like the sea, memory needs to rest so it can continue remembering.  Let the memory rest, let the memory be calm, so I can sail into present seas.  It's in there, when I allow myself to forget, that a feeling of freedom rises, a safe optimism about the future, where anything and everything is possible.


That lets me stay right here, right now, sailing through a sea that I cannot edit, as it transforms itself into the air of this present moment.

Guest Artist: Paula - "My Pinano"

A old Jacob Brothers Piano Upright Grand

Paula had it shipped from her Grandma Emma & Great-Aunt Lee's in Philadelphia to Nassau County and then, finally, to her home in Suffolk County.  

After reading an article in the New York Times about the dumping of pianos into the trash, she sent this picture and some history.  

The Jacob Brothers Piano Company was established in 1878 as a large retailer in New York and Boston.   They described themselves as "one of the most progressive and successful concerns in the piano industry, with several retail stores in the city of New York and in other important cities of the east."   They also stated their pianos and player-pianos "durable instruments, their finish being exceptionally fine and the tone quality satisfying".

There is no mention of Jacob Brothers after about 1955.   And I wonder what shift and change in New York led to their disappearance.

However, Paula's "pinano" is still here.   "It is very damp here", she wrote me, "and it doesn’t stay in tune long but I love it dearly."
 

**

Paula, an old, dear friend is the twinkle in a witty observance and the soft of a breeze.  Born in New York City Sloane Hospital for Women, as it was called then, she lived in the Bronx until she was 12. Then she was dragged away to Nassau County - "very annoyed".  She has repeatedly dazzled and inspired me with emails filled with poems and photos from her life that sing the secret heart of soul, cat or others. 

Sunday Memories: Television, Old School

Someone once told me my sister and I were part of the less than 1% of Americans, born after a certain year, who grew up without a TV.

Even with my sneaking into friends' houses to watch the Addams Family or other forbidden shows broadcasting on days not Friday, the bottom line was that there was so much more to look at in our city life and with way fewer interruptions. 

**

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... by nook and by crook and by any way that gets you there...

Sunday Memories Of A Guest Artist: To Love To Be Loved

  Paula and Mr. Ishmael, a.k.a, the baby boy cat

Photo by Shelley Glick

Untitled 

[I know now the beloved]

by  Gregory Orr

I know now the beloved

Has no fixed abode,

That each body

She inhabits

Is only a temporary

Home.

That she

Casts off forms

As eagerly

As lovers shed clothes.

I accept that he's

Just passing through

That flower

Or that stone.

And yet, it makes

Me dizzy-

The way he hides

In the flow of it,

The way she shifts

In fluid motions,

Becoming other things.

I want to stop him-

If only briefly.

I want to lure her

To the surface

And catch her

In this net of words.

**

Paula, an old, dear friend is the twinkle in a witty observance and the soft of a breeze.  She has repeatedly dazzled and inspired me with emails filled with poems and photos from her life that sing the secret heart of soul, cat or others. 

Madeline's Lawn

I thought Madeline lived in a neighborhood somewhere near me.  That's because the ubiquitous fields of ivy covered both our landscapes.   Took me a little while to figure out Paris was not in Brooklyn or above 14th Street.

In later years,  an explosion of potato plants and coleuses and lots of lawn-like patches appeared as the city transformed into a manicured and remodeled visiting destination and/or exclusive enclave.  Or whatever kind of locale needed constant landscaping. 

I didn't realize what I had missed all these years until yesterday, when I opened my eyes and saw a rolling stretch of ivy.  I was back in the soft, cool shade of wishing I could visit Madeline.

Signs Of Times No Longer Welcomed

Photo by Jacques

I saw the sign hanging on the Bellevue psych building iron fence from a moving bus.

I thought under "No Loitering" someone had scrawled "NO HOME". That made sense to me.  You're asking me not to "loiter" but I have no home so what do you want me to do?

This was the kind of picture Jacques (former guest artist) would take.  A Frenchman in New York reinterpreting and rediscovery this city's heart and soul for us all. 

So, I told him where to find the hanging sign, even drawing him a map since I couldn't remember the exact street.

After lunch, Jacques flew into the office on his way to some meeting and said, "I found the picture, but it was not home..."

There in his photo a different story appeared.  Instead of the heartbreak of having no home, it was the never-ending story that sought to crush love and soul and another human being. 

The question that popped into my head about the person who had scrawled that was a question Florence always asked me.

"Don't you have anything better to do?"

**

The work of Jacques is posted from April 24th, 2012 to May 6th, 2012.

Sunday Memories: The Truth And Nothing But...

On Delancey, right next door to Frank's hair salon, there was a little newspaper-candy-cigarette stand.  The  old man owner never really shaved or if he did it was a couple of days ago.

On the visits to Frank's a couple of times a year or returning from the weekly shop at the Essex Street Market, that candy shop beckoned like a mini-Ali Baba's cave, promising magical and spectacular candies.  But the firm rule of no sweets, rare gum and a once-a-week hostess cupcake/ cola at Grammas held.  That, however, didn't stop my six year-old heart from longingly dreaming of having my way with every delight in that shop.

And then one day...

Florence, fresh from a cut, nothing much else - she was one of the rare ladies in the neighborhood who didn't dye or tease - was buying a New York Times or maybe a pack of cigarettes and, in the brief second she looked the other way, my hand zipped up to the window counter and quickly slipped a penny stick of gum into my pocket.

Perhaps I took it out and started chewing it or was admiring it or transferring it to a safer pocket, but somehow Florence saw that stick of gum in my sweaty little palm and, and knowing SHE'D never allow an unauthorized piece of gum onto my daily menu and that I had no obvious means of income to buy anything, demanded to know where I had gotten that piece of gum.

She had taught me never to tell a lie.

I was marched right back to the candy store and there I apologized to the candy story owner and then, shamed but with great reluctance, returned that single stick of penny gum. 

**

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A New Year Encore: In Lieu of Flowers...

Encore: "Let the rain kiss you... Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops..." Langston Hughes

Originally post on Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Even the homeless man wheeled his hand truck under the awning. But I threw myself forward hoping the clouds growing dark were lying or at least not telling me the truth for a few more blocks.

...and then it rained and the two old ladies cared tenderly for one another as they prepared to step into the storm.



Their love.  

I cried later after the storm had finished.

Going Up The Country Got To Get Away

I had high school and college friends who lived there, but it was an island of incomprehensible circles that really didn't quite reach 360 degrees, so if I went there, it could have only been a couple of times and I think we needed someone to guide us in.

Then one night in the 80's someone I really shouldn't have been kissing took me there to kiss.  It was the only place in the city where you could go to in the middle of the night and kiss and because nobody was there nobody saw you.  And the mugging risk was only medium-high

After that fiasco ended, I found myself returning during the day and then other nights and then more days and then soon, if I wanted to get away from the city but not suffer a long commute, I came here.  And soon I took friends and family and the people I got to love, not just kiss under cover of darkness.

These days, the fountain is fixed up, there are tons more plants and flowers and birds and dogs.  And sitting in cool night on an old bench, also fixed up or maybe a new bench that was made to just look old, there are tons of people kissing. 

**

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Everyone sat outside during hot summer, air conditioning still only used for special times and fans not as strong as the occasional breeze.

Lining Broome on benches, beat-up lawn chairs facing Grand, covering stoops all over, everthing got watched, everyone got noticed, nothing got missed.

Coming back from someplace not often ventured to from the Lower East Side, maybe a concert or a walk to Chinatown or even 'uptown', we'd walked the normal gamut of sidewalks lined with neighbors and strangers alike.

Now, bars line nearby streets and nobody looks out.  They're looking at TVs or each other or their cell phone, seeing nothing, noticing no one, missing everything.

The Constant Tearing Down

Rostropovich, with a full sweep of his bow, poured out Bach in front of this wall that, before the world's eyes, was being dissolved by hammers and picks and the words of thousands of angry people, fed up with borders that broke or crushed or killed.  Friends told me I stayed glued to the TV, insisting we should all be there to support this moment of history. 

Years later, that wall disappeared into tourist souvenirs pieces, sold at flea markets and fairs and I even bought some as gifts for a few dear friends.  

But it didn't die.  That wall reappeared in other lands and in many hearts.  And the endless efforts  to bring it down happens day after day and night after night, maybe not with hammers and picks, but always with words.

 **

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While Everyone Else Was Having A Good Time...

....we wandered empty streets and forgotten alleys, and remembered a city unadorned and unconditionally embracing.