This Will Be Her Sunday Memories Of What Florence Taught Me

It was the annual Dance Parade and everybody came out to celebrate!

Everyone!  (She was like 80 and getting down in between making requests...)

And him?

Nothing was stopping him... nothing...

Not the traffic, not the cops, not the fact he didn't even have a float of his own

You don't need a float when the music is right and everyone is singing and dancing along with you...

But it was her, this little girl who made the parade the parade....

Maybe she didn't know how to read the teeshirts...

...but she danced to what they said.

**
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Years ago Jeremiah's Vanishing New York a.k.a the Book of Lamentation asked me what I missed most about the tender rubble of New York.  I answered that that was asking a fish at a fish market what it missed about the water.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Doug, Shawn and the Mariner coaxed me into a sea I had only seen in pictures.   And there we saw a city of fish.  All kinds, living in different nooks and crannies of rocks and coral and some weird concrete slabs - I had no idea how those slabs got on the bottom of the ocean but there were lots of fish and even some lobsters that were glad to nestle underneath.

And then I thought about all the fish living in tanks.  Like the little guy I passed so often on my way home who always came up to the glass to look back at me.   I wondered if he missed his city like I missed mine.


**
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Same Job, Different Lunch

A lot of men died building the Chrysler Building.  A lot of men died building the city period.  But you'd never know looking the happy go-lucky lot of them eating lunch a million miles above the city.

These days are a little different. Better equipment, tougher regulations, reasonable hours....

...and a lunch you can eat on the ground.



**
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Sunday MemoriesIn the Beginning Was the Word

All those years yearning for a TV were spent between these bookcases at the Seward Park Library.

Florence, seeking her own escape, parked me by a stack of Charles Addams books and disappeared into another row.   Those pictures were not macabre to me.  Oh no.  They were a glamorous call to adventure.  And perhaps an unsightly end.

Soon I graduated to being old enough to climb the stairs to the children's room on the second floor and books with more words than pictures.  Along with librarians eager to direct me and my friends to explicit and very well illustrated books on the facts of life, there were piles of biographies that taught me famous people like Thomas Edison or Jane Adams had once been a little kid like me.

And soon after that I graduated back down to the the first floor and the young adult corner where, as only it could be on the lower east side, there were shelves and shelves of books on young people surviving or not surviving the holocaust and one about a boy kissing another boy.  Gobbling up those books, three or four at a time, I felt so less alone with the difficulties I faced every day.  Sometimes life hurt and was frightening and confusing. Especially as a kid becoming a teenager.

Those years of curling up in wood and paper on East Broadway were as normal as breathing or walking or dreaming.  I had no interest to write my own book.  Nor did I have dreams of being a writer.  Just like Florence, I loved the relief of an escape, disappearing into a world I wished I could live in or one I was glad I didn't.

Perhaps all those words that poured off the page and into my heart had plans of their own.  Perhaps filling myself so full was what made all those words push into my fingers to tell my own story.  Who knows?

What is known more than fifty years later is that a library is a sacred place.  It holds for us a million stories from around the world, letting us know we are never alone in our experience, and assuring us of other doors to other ways we didn't know about.

And now the Seward Park Library is even more than that.  It is now a place that will hold and protect all the stories we don't write down.  They are collecting oral histories of us lower east siders.

So if you grew up below 14th Street and above the "bottom" and you know you are from the Lower East Side, join in.  Because every story, whether it is on a shelf or one we tell over dinner too many times, could be someone's door to a wonderful escape and other possibilities.

Tell your story and become a "book" for some kid, maybe one just like me, who needs to know about childhoods and challenges and other doors.

The Lower East Side Oral History Project

The Seward Park Branch of the New York Public Library aims to collect audio of memories and stories pertaining to the Lower East Side, including Chinatown, the Bowery, and the East Village. Stories may run 45 minutes to 2 hours long. It's a rather informal procedure, more of an extended story telling than an interview. Interviews may be done individually or as a group. We are hoping to gather stories from all ages, times periods, backgrounds, and outlooks--and you don't have to be a lifelong Lower East Sider to participate!
The stories collected will be a part of the Lower East Side Oral History Project, which will have its place among oral history initiatives throughout New York which the New York Public Library has been collecting for posterity.
Participants will need to sign a release form and have their picture taken, or send a picture they would like to use for the project's website.
To participate, please contact Andrew Fairweather via email (andrewfairweather@nypl.org) or telephone (212-477-6770) at the Seward Park Library.
The Seward Park Library
192 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002

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Sailing with the Mariner

It's in the wee hours of the morning that, after placing a full cup of coffee by my side of the bed, the sounds of typing fills the quiet. 

He doesn't use his desk computer.  Instead he props his feet up on a chair, puts his laptop on his lap and begins whirling and weaving words into another world.

Like awaking to Florence's morning scales, his soft tapping is music to me. 

**
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Guest Artist Alana: Jutta's Kitchen Moves on

Alana of Smoke and Gaslight:

“Would you like an adorable tea cup?”

Of course I would, I thought as I read the summons to head on down to an address on the Upper West Side.

I was distinctly aware that this was no random decluttering on a Sunday afternoon, but the release of scattered rays of light from Jutta’s amazing life. Out of respect, a large part of me didn’t want to rummage through the carefully packed boxes, but Claire took the lead.

Her every move vibrating with happiness and determination, showing me one adorable tea cup after another, and glasses you can’t buy in stores anymore unless it is the knockoff variety.

And of course books. I’m a sucker for books.

In a daze I barely took in the details as they were unwrapped and then repackaged in a box for me to take home. That moment was reserved for when I was standing in my kitchen, carefully unwrapping each one until the floor was covered in newspaper.

Details galore: bright flowers, gilt edges, silver hand painted patterns and glasses as blue as the sky. I’ve never seen cups like these up close...unless you count movies where the ladies wear white satin gloves and pour tea from a silver pot and ask for two cubes of sugar.

This past weekend, I decided I wanted to have my morning cup of coffee in one of Jutta’s teacups. The cream colored one with ornate flowers was my favorite with the word “Bavaria” written on the bottom of the saucer and the cup.

No fancy sugar cubes, but a dash of it, combined with coffee and creamer. I could have stared at the cloud swirls the creamer made on top for hours.

It took a vintage teacup to show me that I have been making coffee wrong all this time.  I can’t explain it, but everything blended perfectly.  I could savor and taste every part.  Thinking that lightning can’t strike twice I made another cup of coffee before heading to work today, with the same adorable teacup.

Thank you Jutta.

**
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While Her New York is on vacation, encores from the beginning.

Originally posted September 14, 2008:


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.

Summer Reruns of the Beginnings: My Private Coney

While Her New York is on vacation, encores from the beginning.

Originally posted September 7, 2008



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)

Summer Reruns: Once I Was a Man

While Her New York is on vacation, and a good friend tends the beasts, encores from the beginning.

Originally posted October 29, 2009


Once I was a man.



Now I am a fucking eunuch with a cone around my head.*





*According to Dr. Gagliardi of Cooper Square Veterinary Hospital, of all the hundreds and hundreds of neutering he has done on dogs and cats, Jupiter was the first to chew off all his stitches. And then after getting fixed up again, go straight for them again.

Cooper Square Veterinary Hospital
211 East 5th Street
NY, NY 10003
212.777.2630



**
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While Her New York is on vacation, encores from the beginning.

Originally posted October 15, 2009

This is like daylight to me. Decades of working inside cubicles sometimes never going outside during the hours of nine and five, nighttime becomes freedom and joy and play, skipping down dark and bright streets.

What Diaspora Looks Like

The room almost emptied, the chair he sits on about to travel to a new home, Jutta's reading glasses I borrowed so I could see what I was doing.

Jutta's Sony CD/cassette/radio, her fingerprints in paint on the "play" buttons and drips and smears all over the speakers, now playing different tapes and CDs while a different kind of painting is attempted.

The little one claiming the chair Jutta sat in and claimed her art.

**
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Forty-five years ago, we held hands in this room.  Sitting exactly where I was sitting taking this picture.

That grasp between us was how we pulled each other through bewildering and frightening times.  When we couldn't hold hands, a secret signal - one ring - signaled the other that a phone call was critical...

...dragging the old phone extension into the bathroom, all those long talks deep into the night...

Teenage love rarely lasts, although Romeo and Juliet took it way too far.  We had other things to do.  Our grasp and our fierce adoration of his mother, Jutta continued us on in other ways.

 And so we did. 

Those days, like this room, are now both long gone.  It is time to pack up that former home he grew up in and I visited every chance I could.

I understand we are now near sixty, not near fifteen.  Yet, as we push cartons, and wrap plates, we still talk as we did as kids.  Perhaps less about high school and more about how to grieve and still hold onto hope.

It is that old grasp and our fierce adoration of his mother, Jutta that continue us on in other ways.


**
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The Love that Guided the Remains of the Day Into the Right Hands

We didn't know how much of Jutta's life lived tucked away in her apartment's corners and her decades of paintings.

As we began to clear out closets and cupboards, all the vases and pitchers and bowls immortalized in her watercolors and oils appeared.

One by one, day by day, her community came by to take moments Jutta had painted.

Neighbors took the kitchen table and chairs Jutta had served her son and his ragtag friends dinner all those years ago.  It was the kitchen table I sat at, young and on my own, and poured out my heart about life.

And it was the kitchen table at which I sat for Jutta when she picked up her paints again after decades away and began to reclaim who she was - an artist.  

Now it was going to be a whole new breakfast, lunch and dinner nook for an irreverent cook and a working actress.

The Sisters of Assumption called to say they could take all her pots and pans and bowls and vases for their thrift store in East Harlem.

A gaggle of painters - friends of Jutta's, Art Student League folk, people I knew, people I didn't know, came from all corners of New York.  Her frames, her canvases, her paper, her palates, her paints would not end up in the dumpster. 

These artists would carry on with what she loved so passionately.

But the old wooden easel still remained.  Someone offered to take pieces of it for lumber.   If it was still in the apartment, come our last day,  I guess we would have to.

Jutta, I said, let me know what you want.

Then I went through another pile of notebooks and papers.

An hour later, I got a message from a young woman I had met years ago in a workshop.  The very workshop I found out sorting Jutta's notes in that hour that she had taken years and years and years ago.

The young woman wrote that her paintings were outgrowing her easel and she was looking for a bigger one.  Was it still available?

Jutta's Declaration:

**
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Another day of clearing of Jutta's home brought back memories of letting go and going on.
 
Originally posted April 1, 2009

"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.



Louise had it first but I didn't know that because I was either not born yet or too little to sit up on my own.

I only knew it as my baby chair. After Louise had her own kids, there was a brief moment where Florence said something about giving it to Louise and it was one of the few times I put my foot down and said no, it was my baby chair and I wasn't sharing it with anyone. I think I was in my 40's at the time. So it continued to live by the piano.

Fifty years after it was brought into this house, I folded it up and put it in the corner. I was sending it to Louise's. Even if it did have my name tag on it. And then I looked back and realized just like the picture of Florence and Whoopi visiting...



... this was it. A brief moment that would never happen again.




**
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An Encore of Sunday Memories When Mothers Are Remembered: What Remains

After a day of beginning the clearing of Jutta's home, we spoke of unexpected remembering.

Originally posted February 1, 2009:

What Remains

It happened in a yoga class.

Clair de Lune by Debussy.

A perfect musical selection to launch resting bodies into an hour of hell which was eventually suppose to lead to improved health.

But for me I was suddenly in a minefield of millions of years wandering around the house as her fingers broke the heart of her piano, this piece swirling through my childhood's silence, and sang her own sorrow and disappointment.

In a class of 40, the only student over the age of twenty-five, preparing to drag my fifty years from child pose toward some recovery, the vision of Florence - the young girl playing as if the piece heralded hope and love when she grew up - crushed me deeper into the mat.




**
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For Mimi Who Insists Idealism Win: An Encore of When This Was Normal

This is Bernie talking New York to New York about reclaiming America for Americans.  ALL Americans.

This is New York's primary day.



So whoever you are voting for - I DON'T CARE -- WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY SO JUST FUCKING VOTE! - GO VOTE!!

Here's why I am voting: 

Originally posted March 13, 2016
**


This was not only or just or always luxury housing.

It is now.  Because something this beautiful is now only afforded by lots of money. 

Nowadays, you don't see this kind of place filled with the people I grew up with. 

But back then, it was where the guys working at the post office lived. My neighbor's dad was the short-order cook at Kozy Korner and then a maintenance worker at one of the buildings (that's the guy who does all the dirty work the super tells him to do).

The two sisters on the other side of the courtyard were secretaries, not administrative assistants. Secretaries did everything too, just got paid less and were called "the girl" more.

My father, Seymour worked his way off the retail floor by getting a Masters in Business at"NY-Jew" night school.  (Back then NYU was one of the few big universities to let Jews in so everyone called it NY-Jew.)

That Masters in Business, like the housing we lived in, was not a luxury item. That Masters was affordable too.  My father did not spend the next 30 to 40 years paying off student loans.  (I only have $25,000 to go!)

This was not an expensive view.

It is now.

But then, it was just my grade school.  Florence would stick her head out the window and yell down to me when to cross Columbia Street.   Depending on who you talk to, that school sucked (friends) or was normal (me).  I was just glad I was taught how to read without switching up everything and that I survived every fist fight I found myself in the middle of.  Honestly, I didn't think it was such a big deal.  It was... just normal.

These days, it's a great school.  It has computers.   I don't think they have fist fights anymore. 

This is now a edgie view.  Meaning that now that this comes with luxury housing, you also get a bit of industrial and street edge too.  On the other side are the city projects.   They are still not luxury housing.

I wonder how many new folks cross to the other side of the bridge and wander up Columbia Street.  Maybe they do. 

This is now a "Real New York!" photograph (as in "wow look at the authentic old man in the authentic law chair - only in New York!").

Didn't use to be.  Used to be just.... normal.  Because this is how everyone sat in the sunshine.

In fact, all the old ladies would drag out their lawn chairs and sit in front of their own buildings, talking about all the old ladies on the other side of the courtyard sitting in their lawn chairs in front of their buildings.  It was like a turf war, only with lawn chairs.

Not sure why my family didn't have lawn chairs.  Maybe because Florence was always practicing and Seymour was always reading.  When I hung out with my friends, we sat on the steps.

Even when the steps were as far as Florence could go, we sat on the steps.

Then it became luxury housing and lawn chairs were banned.

Officially.  Banned.

Six decades of people sitting on the steps of their buildings or in lawn chairs and suddenly it was too low-class to have a lawn chair out in front of the building to enjoy the green grass and the fountain.

At that point Florence sat in a wheelchair.  

Even the maintenance guys made sure no one fucked with us.

I miss sitting on stoops and running past old ladies in lawn chairs.

I miss it being normal for post office guys and secretaries to have beautiful gardens outside their front door and sky outside their windows.   

These days listening to fucking assholes hate hard-working Americans like my parents and my grandparents who were immigrants I really miss my mother.

I miss normal.  O.K. not the fist fights because they really did suck.  But the normal where anyone who needs a good apartment is able to get a good apartment.  I want the American Dream to not be a winning lottery ticket.  I want it to be a great job that pays well, has real health insurance and allows whoever the fuck wants to to be able to go to college and not have to still be paying it off 30 years later.

I want normal back.

So, fuck it all to hell.  I'm voting Bernie.

**
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Busy Times=More Encores: The Bridge to New Lands

As new lands appear in the horizon, so does a bridge to walk there.

Originally posted September 10, 2009

 

This is the Williamsburg Bridge.

When she was a teenager, Florence would walk across it to mail a letter in Brooklyn. It cost 2 cents to mail a letter in Manhattan, but only 1 cent from Brooklyn.

There was a bathhouse underneath it on Cannon Street and everyone in the neighborhood went to it.

We grew up across the street from it in one of the first buildings in the neighborhood to have elevators and bathrooms not in the halls. We would walk across it but never get off in Brooklyn. It had a concrete walkway with low railings and lots of broken things. Florence would panic if we leaned over too far.

During Christmas time, I'd look across it to the housing projects on the other side and count the holiday lights blinking in the windows. They were exotic promises of another kind of life. One definitely with more candy and presents.

It fell apart during the Koch administration.

They rebuilt it after to be prettier and stronger.

Adrian walked across it all the time.

I walked across it with Adrian and it was different from when I remembered - it was nice and pleasant, not the barren concrete but the comfort of a pedestrian walk welcoming strolls and bicycles. I don't think people even got mugged on it that often. Walking across this time, Adrian and I got off in Brooklyn and had a burger. Then we walked back.

And just the other day Dana insisted I go out on her balcony and take a picture of it and the moon. And I stood there wondering about all the bridges we have to cross to new lands and other points of view.

 **
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