Going Where Its Warm

 Albert is blind.  But he can find love in three seconds flat.

We had just stopped by Social Tees Animal Rescue's new home on 5th Street ("Right by the Police Station" the sign at the old place said).  The Mariner sat down, interested in patting the adorable French Bulldog hopping about.

He never got the chance.  Before anyone knew what was happening, Albert jumped up and made a home in cozy spaces only I had gotten to visit before.

Obviously Albert had never read a romantic novel or seen a romantic movie where if it was Hollywood, after much loss and anguish there was a happy ending you knew didn't exist, and if it was French, after much loss and anguish there was a miserable ending that only made sense to the French or those committed to misery.

No.  Albert knew that love was warm and always three seconds away.  All he had to do was go forward.  And sometimes, that's all you gotta know - with love, with art, with heart, with life.  Go forward to where it's warm. 

Albert isn't up for foster care or adoption, but there's a bunch of kittens, cats, and dogs who are.  Ready if you are for love being warm and only three seconds away.

**
Jupiter, my three seconds away from love.  That, and any chicken he can get from me.

**

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Clayton's been documenting the lower east side since like forever.  Because when you can prove it happened, nobody can erase you.

Clayton Patterson at the

Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street 

There's no one Jewish story from below 14th Street.   There are hundreds and thousands.  

I am not, as someone once suggested, just like the people on Seinfeld or from that movie about my neighborhood.  Nor were any of the people I grew up with.   My mother, my friends' mothers, were complex people, striving beyond the bad jokes about us.

And now, because of Clayton, there's not just one book proving it.  There are three.

**
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Days Like This

photo by E. Lohninger

"One day at a time" is way too long.  I'm only capable of handling 20 minutes at any given moment and that's on a good day.

It is hard to carve and coax love out of one's failed past, broken-hearted role models, and Fred and Ginger movies.  Even An American In Paris offered only fantasy as a road map. (yeah show me a broke artist who picks the poor girl over the heiress....)

But, like time passing or a kid getting taller, its presence, during many twelve hour walks through the city, unfolded imperceptibly until one morning a note sent to a friend recounting the previous twenty-four hours was filled with words like "laughing" and "fun" and "good" and other similar happy descriptions.  There were no recognizable words like "struggle" or "fight" or "confused" or "frustration" or "despair" or "futile" or....

If I hadn't written that note, I would have never known how I had laughed all night (which is just like dancing all night only you get to sit down).   I would have never notice what once was foreign in my life was suddenly present.  I would have never have noticed my life was becoming different from what I had known for so long.

So, imagine my surprise 780,000 minutes later (which is approximately 39,000 20 minute segments) that what once was different now seemed normal. 

Happy Valentine's Day to the Mariner.

**
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A Poem Becomes Her

The picture of her and Baby Boy, snapped quickly with an old Instamatic and real film, has been in each and every old Filofax lugged about in handbags and satchels.  A photo in a phone could never be this loved, bent from being taken out over and over again to show life and love, history and family.

When there is great beauty, there are fewer words.

I keep scooping up pens and cameras, attempting to tell a poem offered by fading light on a city street or a cat's heartbeat, or sorrow and loss, or the inevitable journey people I love take into the unknown.

"There needs to be another word for what we are to each other than family because it is so much better than that," she said recently.

Poem.  Poem works.

 **

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: MINDBENDERS 2 COMING ATTRACTIONS!!!!

 

Read the excerpt, The Man Who Didn't Die from Ted Krever's sequel MINDBENDERS2: UNDER THE RADAR


Ted Krever, author
Video by Adrian Garcia Gomez

Sunday Memories: On The Road

You can't quite see it, but my father, Seymour has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

And you may not recognize it, it now quite redone, but this was a stretch along the East River by the Williamsburg Bridge.

My parents always biked.  Not in any special lane, not with helmets or fancy spandex.  Regular shoes or sneakers.  They had sturdy Raleigh bikes, and an L.L. Bean saddle bag and they went places.

Just married, Seymour turned to Florence and said, let's go! Without gear or extra clothes, they traveled for days.  Later, Florence wrote excitedly to the woman she had always loved, telling her that after several days, their clothes had become unbearably dirty.  Seymour went and bought her an entire outfit of new clothes.  Both of them barely out of poverty, this was a big deal.  (Even after my father had a full time job, my sister and I could count on one hand the times we bought new clothes.)

They travel up and down the Jersey shore and all over the city.  They traveled uptown and across, and when I was 12 or 13, I too took to the road on one of their Raleighs, biking to babysitting and soon, on my own, to City College with my violin strapped to my back.  Occasionally, a cigarette dangling from my mouth.  No helmet, no fancy spandex. Regular shoes or sneakers.

Florence quit smoking in her fifties, but she continued to bike into her late sixties until I think the bike got stolen and she couldn't replace it.  That or we sold it or gave it away because she wasn't wearing a helmet and besides, if you walk, you get to eat along the way.

***
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Subway Rat

I think that boyfriend in 1977 was complimenting me when he called me that.

But here are the things that are normal:

• knowing which door to stand at so I could walk straight out to the street 

• the many ways to get from point A to point B, and if I didn't know, calling Baby Boy (until he was eight years old and got bored with it), because he knew the entire MTA system - buses and subways and could map you from anywhere to anywhere, usually in multiple routes.

• riding without holding on because it was too crowded and the pole was too far away, not realizing until recently that it was just like surfing, just without the cold water or the sharks

• hanging out in between cars in the summer because the Lexington IRT never had any air conditioning in the summer, only in the winter, and it had air conditioning in the winter because it never had heat in the winter (that was the 70's and 80's)

• walking from one car to another, and when the young kid cop stopped me and said "hey that's against the law - didn't you see the sign?" I said, "Oh?  I thought that was just for the tourists."

• NOT knowing which damn color goes with which line.  They're called the BMT, IND and IRT for fucks sake.

***
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Our Westerns

"He's a cowboy," Florence would hiss.

I'm not exactly sure where she got her terminology.  She was in her sixties the first time she went west of New Jersey.  Maybe, watching westerns as a girl in Bushwick or the Lower East Side, she got the idea that only a cowboy would drive a vehicle reckless and fast through millions of cow-like traffic.

It wasn't until Bucko's blog that it dawned on me that the world of the cowboy was a bit larger than Blazing Saddles and New York City bus drivers.  (I am purposely ignoring the two westerns I was dragged to see in 1981 at the St. Marks Movie theater because they were being screened with irony.)

So, as the M3 bus driver barreled down Fifth Avenue, zipping in and out of billions of cars and taxis and pedestrians and those bicycle rickshaws, imagine my surprise when I heard myself mutter, "Cowboy!" 

***
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Sunday Memories: Girlfriends

The cat doesn't understand Dutch and only begrudgingly shares his couch corner with her.   He is tolerating our three decades plus ability to spite over 3000 miles of ocean and land in order to talk non-stop about every single person in our lives, whether we both know them or not.  It doesn't matter.  What we do know is the air and light and sound of each others' city, the laugh of the ex-lover and the cooking skills of the current one, the lilt of a family member's voice, the rubble left from a parent's failure at care. 

She is the one, who after Florence died, gently coaxed, "Don't chew," and each time I returned to that night and redid my actions like it would change history, I would hear her.  "Don't chew," I'd repeat and again let go of my delusion I could make the past different just by raging at it.

There is much to cover in her few days in New York.  In between rationing out dozen of pieces of licorice and taking one of our meandering walks that now illuminates another land than the one she visited in 1982, we re-become each other's diaries.  It is too dangerous to commit to any evidence, in Dutch or English, where we have buried the bodies of our many adventures, unless of course we write it as fiction.

So we recount to one another, relieved the memories will die along with us.  She does the remembering of events.   I do the remembering of emotional processes.  It had been a similar division of work when, as young women, we traveled together.  I could remember how, in the appropriate language, to ask where the auto bus was and she could understand the answer.

Now, we are the old ladies we once peered at when we were twenty-two.  We grumble about young people and their cell phones.   We discuss preparations necessary for illness and funerals.  We say, "Leave that for me in your will" or "I will leave that for you in my will".  We try on much different fashion than we did years ago, enjoying styles that only adults used to wear.   We no longer drink Southern Comfort or Jenever.  Although I'm still open to it.  We exchange, no matter what, breakable heavy objects to carry back to home. 

In the whirl of time, we hold each others' footsteps, the ones we took towards love, through loss and then back into unexpected life again, and we bear witness for one another of how amazing and surprising life turned out to be.

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

Orchard Street

It was the only stoop on the block that still looked familiar.

The Old Normal

The sign on the door said "Careful - wet paint in hallway".   Clearly the work hadn't begun. 

The peeling paint off the wall and the cigarette butts and empty packs littering the stairs - it was just like home when home was anywhere me and my friends could be who or what we were or weren't. 

It makes sense in new nice neighborhoods rising from factories into tri-plex multi-million dollar lofts with triple pane windows and spectacular views that hallways get to change too. 

Before paint and work erased yet another haven, normal to us, a quick glimpse, remembering littering stairs, smoking, and glaring at the people, stepping over kids like me and my friends, as they trudged up and down heading from work to street to more work to life that didn't include multi-million dollar nothing.

Sunday Memories That Become Part of Now

The old chairs inherited from Florence, the beat-up table left by a old friend and roommate in 1979, the table clothes found at yard sales in 1998, the dishes collected over twenty-five years from different restaurant closings, the forks a moving neighbor left up for grabs in the lobby, the vase carried back from Spain in 1988, the serving spoons Florence got from Mrs. Applebaum's apartment when she died in 1981, wine glasses quickly purchased today from the thrift store across the street....

Then me and the Mariner opened the door and let the cat out to greet friends who over two or eight or twelve or 18 or 37 years joined in once again to welcome another birthday.

**
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Winter Encore: Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Originally posted December 4, 2011


Although the date on the picture says "Aug 67" more likely than not my father took this picture in the winter but using the camera sparingly (after all, film was expensive and so was processing) he didn't finish the roll until the summer. So probably every season was recorded in one roll of film.

This was my winter coat for several years.  A couple of sizes bigger than me (of course) and grown into (of course), my father called this my Joseph Coat Of Many Colors.  When the musical came out I became very confused.  THAT coat didn't look like mine.

I also didn't realize that Joseph, as a son of the desert probably didn't need a hood on his.  But this was how I understood this coat, bought second hand or handed down but clearly a coat that that traveled through other lives before reaching me.  I wore it as the mantel of a man in the midst of sibling rivalry but destined to heal his family.  This of course led to many years of therapy.


And these were my parents' winter coats.  Judging from the angle, I must of taken this picture.

Florence was still wearing winter coats then.  I suspect she gave them up around the same time she gave up skirts and men.  Her coat was a Harris Tweed bought probably at Macys or A&S or B. Altmans or Gimbels.  It was expensive.  At some point she relined it.  Forty-four years later, it's still in great shape and I wear it.   Being shorter than Florence was then, I look like Little Red Riding Hood, only without the hood or the red.

My father's coat was, I believe, a Hudson Bay, also very expensive.  Or it  could have been an LL Bean.  It was his winter coat until he moved to  California in the 1980's.  It is still in his closet.  Just in case the  weather suddenly changes.  The last time I checked, it was dusty but  ready to go.  For a brief moment, he and I talked about giving it to my then boyfriend who was unprepared for the North American winters.  However, I suspect he clung to that coat the same way Florence discarded hers.  A reminder of other times and other weather.

The Long Road

I was too busy standing up and singing along and being proud to be an American, included in that word like never before, to take a picture of the television.  This is from the New York Times.

On days like this, remembering that the promise of the Constitution wasn't just for some but for all of us, I miss Florence a lot.  She would have heard that this land was her land too, not just parts of the Village or a couple of friends' living rooms.

And on days like this, I wish my gramma and my bubby were here to see this.  They fled from the Old Country to the New World because of the promise of the Constitution.  They would have heard that the promise wasn't just words, but real lives thriving.

Look! A woman justice swearing in the Vice President!

Look! Us and all our family and friends and neighbors and co-workers in the crowd, on the podium, everywhere.  It's not just that scumbag Republican who gets to be there.  We do too!

Listen!  That's Brooklyn up there, where our families lived before moving to the lower east side, and that's our anthem, sung like it was meant to be sung!

But most of all,  my gramma and my bubby would have heard "Thank you".

The long road of their flight from that Old Country to this New World had not been in vain, even with the brutal poverty and horrible violence and crazy-ass people hating them because of what they were, not who they were.

They took that long road and, because of that, their granddaughter, standing up proud in front of the television, gets to live in a country that allows her the freedom to vote, to protest against the government, to own property if she can ever afford it, to practice the religion of her choice, to fight for change so the promise of the Constitution continues to be for all, not just some, and to love who she damn well feels like loving.

Shona Tova, Shona Tova, a new year for all of us, a new year, indeed.

**
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Sunday Memories: Along Came Bialy

Both sides of the family have a long relationship with bialies.

My dad's family came from or through Bialystok on their way to the new world.  My dad and his brother, Uncle George were bar mitzvah'ed at the Bialystok Synagogue on Willet between Grand and Columbia.  They all ate bialies.

Florence grew up over Kossar's, the bialy store when it was still on Hester Street.  It moved around the corner to Grand when Dana's husband, George convinced everyone to trade the tenements for nice high-rises that had hot water and plumbing inside the apartments.   They all ate bialies too.

Kossars always closed for Shabbos.  So, during summertime, me, Cindy and B. would wait until sunset and then some, and then stroll down to the store on Grand and Essex and get the first hot, fresh bialies straight from the ovens.  It was - pre-breasts and boys - the highlight of our Saturday nights.

Come to think of it, it was - post-breasts and boys - still the highlight of our Saturday nights .

The store changed hands but the bialies didn't.  Ok, maybe a bit more doughy but the one time I complained to the counter guy they weren't cooked as much as they used to be, he yelled at me to toast them if I wanted them crunchier.

Then one day someone suggested I give up gluten.  She said that everything ailing me sounded more like gluten was the problem rather than early dementia, laziness or inferior genes.  I reluctantly said goodbye to most of what I loved and ate and things improved. 

Bread, bread and butter, bread and gravy, bread and anything, pasta, more bread, cake, bagels and most of all, bialies became more and more relegated to the past.  However, so did all those annoying problems I thought were early dementia, laziness or inferior genes.

However, there are several ways to connect to one's well-being and one of them is the spiritual reunion with one's people and the past.  So, one night, late and tired, braving the cold, I took a trip to Kossar's and got a bialy.

And even though the next day was hell, that meal was the best of many, many meals over many, many months.

**
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The Eyes Have It

Three New Yorkers looked into the future.

All three included food.

**
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Répétez, S'il Vous Plaît

When it comes to writing or music or painting or dance or any other hellish vocation you are condemned to do, there is no end.  The "going off into the sunset" of movies never happens.   Except when you die. Then there's a sunset, but you're dead so you don't know the sun is going down on you.

Beginning can feel futile, especially if finishing feels like death and not finishing feels like death that won't come.  Either way, the terror of sitting down to find out only makes those options worse.
When I was still imprisoned in music studies, Florence would order "Répétez!" and demand "Commence!"

When I escaped clef notes and bar lines into words and paragraphs, she'd say, "You know writing is really just rewriting", and "Sitting down is half the battle."

She also said, "Show me a dirty house and I'll show you a woman of character."

Thanks, Mom.

But,  I had to clean the house first.   

**
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 My sister and I never thought "oh that's art" as we passed it every day on our way to school or violin lessons or, in my case, jump rope.   Looking at those three women was  like looking at a family photo - as normal and intimate as maybe the way my friends with televisions looked at the Brady Bunch.

The only thought either of us had was "oh, is that Mommy?"  We were not talking the rich looking ladies there.

Later, after we stopped calling her Mommy, Florence would bitterly laugh as she recounted how we repeatedly asked her if that was her.  She also laughed bitterly about how people told her she looked like Katherine Hepburn.   Clearly, she had a couple of looks.

Finding out years later "The Critic" was, in fact, art was like finding out your favorite kindergarten teacher had found the cure for cancer (she didn't).   Or that your sweet, funny uncle was a brilliant rocket scientist (he actually was).  

And then after that, I found out Weegee had, in fact, given Florence that picture himself.  Hard to get the straight story on it - there were several.

• He gave out prints to pretty girls on the lower east side as a matter of course, so it was no big deal.  
• He was crazy for Florence and wrote her a love letter which got separated from the photo when she had it reframed.  
• The letter was sealed up when she got it framed, and if we unframed it, all would be revealed.

The only thing I ever really asked of Florence was to give me the picture when it was time to be given.  She was hiding decline, but knew something was up.

"Take it now," she said.

"No, it's yours and it belongs in your home.  Just put a note on the back of the picture."

On the untouched backing, still sealed as it had been when it was reframed probably in the 1950s, there's a pink stickie taped there that says 'This will belong to Claire'.  

**
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Letters At The Speed Of...

I finally went through the two boxes of letters from Florence's life that I had hidden away years ago after I brought the rest of her estate home.

The first box was packed with a ton of handwritten mystery notes, both in her elegant penmanship, and in others. Pictures of people we clearly weren't related to, obits of girlhood friends, two 1934 post cards from an uncle hiding out in Ubekistan from the anti-semites in Kiev, poems and letters from the girl she grew up with the one she loved, my father who she never spoke to again after 1977, my sister's missives from age three into her 50's, and attempts from me to either be a good daughter or to break through to something akin to understanding.  It was a collage of her life.  Up to a point.

The second box was after that point.  Packed with greeting cards warbling love and pop-out hearts and cute animals professing forever-yours, piles of letters from her and from a lover twisting in desire and missing and sharing of the day, and notebook pages and pages scrawled by a furious spurned girlfriend sobbing, raging, pleading, demanding, begging, defending a relationship that suddenly didn't work anymore.  No matter what card was open, what letter unfolded, desire and pain opened and unfolded with it.

There are few, if any, such letters in any boxes I have tucked away.  Everything in the past decades have become more and more immediate and transient, allowing a history to be easily deleted into electronic garbage pails.  And the mysteries of love gone bad or good or just gone have been unraveled through modern versions of therapy and self-help and Oprah.

These days offer the zen of Now, a space between 'then' and 'soon'.  In that cradle of peace and with some clicks on a keyboard, a living letter appears in a friend's face, a letter that lasts as long as words are spoken.  That unshackled moment might be made at the price of a story constructed from colorful animal pictures that get piled into a box, but, staring at all those letters and cards and notes, I was left just as puzzled by the secrets that died with Florence as perhaps anyone, seeking answers about me. might be staring into blank screens and electronic garbage pails, only to find them empty.

**
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Becoming Beauty, Becoming Home

Jim Hendrix moved to New York when anyone not rich could.  He knew the East Village streets were where he would continue becoming who he was inside.

Uliana also moved to New York when anyone not rich could.  She knew the East Village streets were where she'd continue becoming who she was inside.

Before she headed east and village, a friend gave her this photo of Hendrix because he knew she loved Hendrix.  Where ever she lived in New York, it hung on her wall. 

She wasn't a musician, but just like Hendrix could make a guitar sing like never before, Uliana could make women's beauty (and a couple of men) sing like never before.

She was a sculptor, a painter and a magician when it came to hair.  She'd eye your head, pick up those scissors and brilliant music would pour out into the world.  Afterwards, you'd look in the mirror and see how you were always meant to look like.  It's just that before Uliana touched you, you had never seen it.

Real estate and life and years and the East Village changing, at some point Uliana needed to move her Hair Salon to a new location, but she didn't want to move off 9th Street.  A real estate agent showed her a basement space only a couple of doors down.

Uliana didn't know what it was, but something about the space felt just right. 

"Did you know Jimi Hendrix used to live here?", the real estate agent told her.

**

Uliana's Hair Studio

321 E 9th St
(between 2nd Ave & 1st Ave)
New York, NY 10003

(212) 475-4302
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