Sunday Memories - The Bar: Part Two - I Call Your Name*

When cell phones didn't exist and home answering machines had cassette tapes, when there was no such thing as voice mail, and texting meant typing a letter on a typewriter, this bar's telephone booth was my starship of an attempt to reach out and touch someone. The third martini was my fuel and with a finger swirling I took flight, drunk dialing Florence or my father or errant lovers across the country to tell them all how much I loved them.


*I Call Your Name (The Beatles)

...Oh I can't sleep at night, but just the same I never weep at
Night I call your name, I call your name...

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As Time Goes By...

Twelve years of Lombardi pizza (six years in finally admitting I couldn't eat mushrooms), always red wine, tea, tarts and tarot cards and the conversation ages as we do, from workouts and diet to incoming babies to milestones of survival to new love to lost love to elderly parents to great leaps of faith to life.

Beauty In The Eye of...

Any bar that's a real bar has her over the cash register. This bar has had her there since the 1970's and I'm sure my cigarette smoke is part of the layer of grime that coats her.

I don't know if she has a name or if each bar names her themselves. I just know that at 12:09 on a Sunday night  - or Monday morning if you’re really going to be a dick about it - sitting at the bar by myself and recapturing the weekend's highs and the lows of perseverance and loneliness, I find it reassuring to see a voluptuous woman command such respect and radiate such beauty.

Sunday Memories - Where We All Now Live

What is it about stuff, a friend writes. The haunting of stuff discarded from her mother's house or the boxes of stuff imbued with her soul , what she calls evidence of who she has been, what she has done, now tucked away in her attic.

"I think, if they were gone, I would still be me, wouldn't I?"

I have briefly stop sifting through the remnants of Florence's and her mother Sophie's life because it's like finding the only proof that a once great pyramid stood are three teeny tiny pieces of rubble.

Or this crossroad of our family... not yet metamorphosed into Chinatown by fleeing immigrants... my grandmother, my other grandmother, both my grandfathers, my aunts, my uncles, my father, my mother, my sister, myself walked, often at night, stores closed, conversations murmured, sometimes pork buns eaten from Hoy Hung on Mott Street, that sign is just a teeny tiny piece and if I didn't see it would all that had happened still be remembered?

Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet

George and Jutta met when they were both quite young, just past teenage-hood but not by much. He was a Jewish refugee from Berlin via Palestine. He came to New York and stayed with his aunt, also a refugee. Jutta's family, Germans, welcomed the refugees into their home, 88th Street or 89th on the Upper West Side, then still a neighborhood of modest incomes and new immigrants. Friendships grew. When WWII started, he enlisted and was part of the troops that liberated a concentration camp.

After the war, new marriages, new homes and new lives separated these two old friends.

Decades passed.

Then Al Gore invented the internet. And one day, fifty years later, Jutta mentioned George's name and wondered if there was a way to find him on the computer. A half-hour search and these two old friends spoke to each other once again.

Three Decades At Veselka's

At this restaurant I wrote a huge book of miserable poetry, sat at a rickety old table with a milkshake and begged the ex-girlfriend of the artist I was crazy for to explain to me the secret of loving him, stared at the mural artist for decades wondering when he was going to put me in his pictures, and spent years at 3am in the morning staring into coffee and tea cups wondering if art and love was worth it because it all hurt too damn much.

But now billions of minutes later, here a new year, a different medium, an unfolding life that says yes art and love are still worth the effort I invite Joel to try the borscht I needed to eat before I performed, and so I ate that borscht for 10 years, night after night after night.

Joel, in turn shows me new pictures of his new love and the places they visited I have only seen on TV and we machine-gun rapid ideas and concepts and feedback and then even more ideas. We both have our cameras out and snap furiously at each other. And thirty years later love and art are still on the table.

Sunday Memories - The Boy Next Door

This is David. He is the son of Dana ("If I Bring Forth What Is Inside Me, What I Bring Forth Will Save Me," March 2009) .

He was my second love, Allan who lived in the building on Broome Street with the Fedder Air Conditioning being my first.

All that was a long time ago.  Today David is 53.

Still, the heart of my inner four-year-old always jumps up and down when I see him, either on the street or at his mom's or even at Florence's memorial.

He was the boy who could make me laugh so hard that many liquids poured out of many places on me. I was never sure what exactly we were laughing about. I just knew it was rare laughter and I wanted to drown in it, it made me so happy.

He was the boy who could swing upside down on the ladder to his bunk bed, and watch Hitchcock's THE BIRDS without crawling under available big pieces of furniture like I did.

And right before the Paper Bag Players began their show at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse and I wanted to rush outside to see if my friend was waiting for me on Grand Street, he was the boy who explained what would happen if, per chance, I tripped on the stairs in the dark just as the curtain rose.  And to this day I am not sure how he did it, but my last minute foray clearly was going to lead to the destruction of Planet Earth. Needless to say, I stayed put in my seat, terrified.

Oh, but most of all, he was the boy who played Conrad Birdie in BYE BYE BIRDIE at P.S. 110 on Broome Street. When I saw him sing and dance, I almost forgot who the Beatles were.

Leaving Egypt on Maundy Thursday

(picture by Adrian Garcia)

At Sedar we were always urged to leave behind the personal Egypt that enslaved us, be it bad habits or unhappy circumstances. And as we did, to remember all the people in the world struggling to leave whatever Egypt they inhabit, for we could not be free if someone else was still enslaved.

At His last supper, also a sedar, Christ asked the Apostles to love others as He loved them and He washed their feet as an act of love and service.

Eleven years ago at Riverside's Maundy Thursday, it dawned on me I could forgive someone who had hurt me and in doing so leave an Egypt of shame, bitterness, and blame. When I left the unhappiness I had lived in for so long, I found Buddhism.

Every day since offered freedom and liberation even when that seemed furthest from the truth. But it never was furthest from what I sought. Ever. Like the steps the Hebrews took through the desert and the feet Christ washed that night, each moment brought me closer to a promised land. And as I stumbled forward I remembered all those struggling and as I grew closer to freedom, love became the bigger land within my heart.

The road to the banks of the River Jordan was made with sorrow and disappointment but traveled with hope and heart. And on this auspicious anniversary, oh, is the view just so beautiful.

Sometimes A Friend Is A Cole Porter Song (or And Now For Something Completely Different)

This is Adrian.

Between the thirty daily emails, the late night visit to a suddenly broken heart, the rapier wit, the crystal clear feedback, the willingness to seek the perfect burger, the leadership by example and the companionship in the constant search that shouldn't be rare but often is, there is nothing left to do but to quote Florence's favorite verse from her favorite song.

You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.

*You're The Top, Cole Porter

(YOU'RE CELLOPHANE WAS FLORENCE'S FAVORITE LINE AND AS WE SANG IT TOGETHER SHE WOULD BURST INTO CACKLING LAUGHTER)

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

This is the last installment of "The Exhaustion of Diaspora," 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.

***
Where the bikes lived, a dusty smell, the secretary nestled between the two doors, a perfunctory space with no welcome, just function.

Where she washed our hair in the deep sink with Sebulex, a towel wrapped around our hair and faces, her rare joking around with us shouting "headless monsters!," the meals just the kids, a pile of books by our plates, reading allowed at the table, the french toast I made myself during Junior High School 56 lunch period while she pounded her fury at imperfection through Brahms or Chopin or Beethoven.

Where the endless practicing commenced, the naps under the piano as she played, the earliest memory of being too small to get on the couch but climbing and struggling until I got up there, the dancing in front of the window hoping he would see me from the Canarsie train he took home from work, where I crouched by the radio speaker to hear every moment of the Goon Show, where I listened through headphones the reel-to-reel tape of Abby Road so I could imagine another world than the one they screamed at each other, the evening spent with him listening to a Leroy Anderson record while reading the last Doctor Doolittle book and feeling so overwhelmed with grief from the music and the sorrow of the story, never listening to that record for twenty years and never reading that book again.

Where they slept, the smaller room without cross ventilation, a place we could, during days home sick, rest and listen to the children shows on the New York City radio station, where, when he didn't want to hit us, he locked himself in, where I accidentally walked in on them having sex and never being told about birth control immediately assumed I'd have a baby brother and a happy family, a bedroom she left behind and an office she resurrected with her new life.

Where I learned to tuck the shower curtain in after my first shower flooded the floor, where I did homework in the dead of night, ironing my lined paper to make it look old and like it really was Lewis and Clark's diary, where also in the middle of the night, snuck a few more pages of a book I couldn't stop reading, the corner of the house I could drag the old phone into, again in the middle of the night and whisper my 13 year old secrets and pains to my 15 year old boyfriend for hours, where I was potty trained, injured myself, pulled out my baby teeth, had bloody noses, played with matches, smoked their True Blue cigarettes and when I was older, a joint, and where one day when I asked my father if I was pretty only to be told beauty was skin deep, decided right then and there that being as ugly as a dog, I'd better be smart.

Where my sister and I grew, with Snuffy and Willoghby and our own reading lamp we could pull down close to our pillow, and books and records and our own record player, first the little tiny one that played 45's and came in a suitcase, where, while Florence taught students, I listened to Harry Belafonte on my little suitcase record player singing along to Day-O and Matilda, and figured out finally how to make the number 2 the right way, not reversed, the room where terrible things happened, and memory erased only parts of it, the crying, the cowering, the defiance, the withdrawal, the accidental hair cut she insisted on, just a trim but so badly done, she wore it short until the day she died, the room where we grew and finally left because there were other worlds beyond their silences.



*Try To Remember (Jones & Schmidt)

Try to remember
When life was so tender
That no one wept
Except the willow

And if you remember
Then follow

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.

***

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)

 ** 
Related Posts: 

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Four - Hyman

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

"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.

***



The Blue Sagittarius tile made for Florence by someone named Bonnie:
It lived in the living room for as long as I could remember living with my parents. It now lives in my living room.

The tube with a photo of Florence's graduating class of Julliard:
It was mailed to Monroe Street, when she and my father lived at Knickerbocker Village (pronounced "knickabocka villigsh"). I only found it a couple of years ago. It is going to Louise's.

The metal sculpture of a flutist and cellist from the 1972 Greenwich Village Art Fair:
Our family's version of summer vacations including Louise and I working as Au Pairs to better-off families who could afford beach houses in other parts of the world like the Jersey Shore or Fire Island. I had just finished my first stint for two families, one kid each, sharing a small house. I slept in one of the baby's rooms. I think I made $25 a week. Maybe a bit more but finally coming home and wandering around the fair, I took almost all of the money I had earned from those weeks of wiping baby butts and spent it on this little statute as a gift to Florence. It lived until this Sunday on the window sill of the living room.

The old sewing box:
It held the magic of tiny thin cigarette tins from Mr. Oppenheimer the piano tuner, now filled with straight pins, wonderful piles of buttons each like magic jewels telling a story like the ones I read in Florence's old Lang fairy tale books, and spools and spools of thread. Also in this old wooden box are paper envelopes with threaded needles of black, white, brown and blue thread that I made for Florence when she could no longer thread the needles herself. Louise says, "I remember the day she brought this sewing box home. I thought it was so big." This will now live in Louise's home.


*SOMEONE IN A TREE
(Pacific Overtures, S. Sondheim)

It's the pebble, not the stream.
It's the ripple, not the sea.
Not the building but the beam,
Not the garden but the stone,
Not the treaty house,
Someone in a tree.

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

"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.

***

Signs in all the buildings started with "Furniture for Free..." and ended with "... a bit dusty." Most people come for the furniture and other sundry household and office items. But a couple of them come by to see what Florence had that they didn't have - maybe more rooms, more light, a better view of the Williamsburg Bridge.*

Hyman, still 91 or maybe now 92 years old, comes by to see if there's any furniture left, see if I'd take an old frame down to the garbage along with the all extra stuff left over, but mostly to talk about the broken front lobby door.

"A junkie did it! Only this building. It was a junkie. From the other side of the bridge." he insists.

"No, it was revenge against the board member who lives on the ** floor. That's why it's always this building." I was sure of it.

"Obama, but I don't like he wants to talk to Iran."

"Hyman, dialogue creates peace. War hasn't ever worked out." I don't know what happened in the POW camp he was in but his face goes far away. (OCTOBER, 2008: HYMAN)

"What if they don't wanna talk?" he shoots back

"You talk anyways..."

He changes the subject. They took all the furniture? Did we have any records or tapes? He liked music. I promise to bring him the jazz cassette tapes I had just taken home.

"I got tons of tapes. Here, come on I'll show you."

And for the first time ever, 50 years my family is in this building I go visit Hyman's home and see all his paintings, his real kaleidoscope and his many, many tapes of just about everyone.

He points to his kitchen sideboard. "Gotta paint that."

"Have Jimmy do that."

"Nah. I can do it."

Later, I run into him coming back from a walk carrying a can of paint. Over the shoulder he says, "It was the fire department. They broke the lobby door."

*The painting that Hyman is sitting in front of is a 1950 painting of the Williamsburg Bridge.

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

"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.

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

"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.

***

This is Marianne of the Pizza Shack.

First there was Rosy's on Pitt and Grand. Then there was Aldos on the corner of East Broadway and Grand and finally there was Pizza Shack on Columbia and Grand and some other place in the middle of Grand but they also serve dogs and burgers and everything is deep fried so for real pizza you go to the Shack. And if you don't want pizza,there's the the Luncheonette, the Chinese combo-plates-with-grease and a sushi place. I can't imagine eating sushi on Grand Street. Besides, on Grand Street, pizza is the thru-line and when you're packing up your mother's life, pizza wins hands down.

For three days straight I got the fried chicken-tomato pizza. Today an eggplant stromboli. While waiting, I mention Rosy's to Marianne. My co-worker, Annie had grown upstairs from Rosy's (AUGUST, 2008: SUNDAY'S MEMORIES-ANNIE'S SONG) and I still dreamt of a meatball hero like the ones Rosy made.

(Actually I never really had a meatball hero from Rosy's, just bites offered from occasional generous friends. Florence didn't believe spending money for food outside the house so a baloney sandwich was it for lunch.)

Marianne not only remembers Rosy's, she tells me the family still lives in the neighborhood. Then she tells me about Rosy.

Even after they torn down the tenement and built a nice project building and new precinct on Pitt, Rosy still lived in the neighborhood and was a helpful neighbor. One day she decided to visit someone in Staten Island, maybe they were older or sicker than she was (she was pretty old herself at that point). So like anyone without a car which was just about everyone, she took the Staten Island Ferry.

These are different times now. What happened that day might upset us now but I doubt it would faze us much.

But that day was in a different time. There were no metal detectors anywhere. Shootings in schools hadn't happened yet. And if you got mugged you could still have a chance to fight back.

Rosy got on the ferry. At some point out in the harbor, a guy wielding a machete started slashing people. He headed toward a young girl, he clearly was going to kill her when Rosy stepped in front of him, shielding the girl.

"She's a young girl," Rosy said. "Why are you doing this?"

He killed Rosy instead.

All I could say to Marianne was "I'm shocked, I'm shocked, I gotta tell Annie, I'm shocked." Since everybody knows somebody who knows everybody, we try to figure out if Annie's siblings went to PS134 with Marianne's siblings. But mostly I'm shocked and Marianne just keeps shaking her head and repeating, "Helped everyone. He was going to kill that girl..."

When I ask if I can take a picture of her, Marianne says how she never likes the way she looks in pictures.

"Beautiful women never do," I tell her.

The pizza gets me through another three hours of packing. It has become the thru-line of these last days on Grand Street.

Sunday Memories - The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part One

"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.

***

We start with one of the many ends to this journey



That's Florence's window behind those trees. The white corner coffee table is poking out of the taxi's trunk.

We tie the trunk as closed as we can get it which isn't very closed -- actually the young man from Pakistan ties it not-very-closed with a scarf I had found in the Laundry Room in the "up for grabs" pile. It takes about five minutes on the corner of Columbia and Grand to get the table into the trunk and to make the knots hold. This pisses off several mini-vans of Hasid origins since the taxi driver isn't white, I'm wearing pants and they're in a hurry.

On the way home I stare at First Avenue - I look at the east side of the street rather than the west side. The day is dark and grey. It is not the day Florence and I rode up First and stared at the west side of the street. (APRIL, 2008: CAR RIDE TO THE DOCTOR).

This is my neighborhood. This is my home. This is where I have lived for 33 years. Do I recognize it? Do I understand what it means? Is there a reason I keep starting to cry?

I give the taxi driver all but $5 of my money as a thank you for driving with his trunk half up. I hold onto the $5 just in case I need emergency Chinese food or intervention ice cream.

It's only afterward, I see bruises up and down my arms from all the moving.

RAIN DELAY: THE EXHAUSTION OF DIASPORA HAS DELAYED SUNDAY MEMORIES

The packing of the Life Of Florence and the dissemination of beloved items that lit our books and held our tushies has caused a night of collapsed couching and Michael Palin watching.

However, come tomorrow night yet another Sunday Memory will unfold and once again reveal the secret New York that now only exist in Florence's heart.

Stay tuned.

Sometimes It's a Friend Who Becomes Your Horizon

This is Michael. He runs a reading series that introduces writers to a world beyond their constant terror that every stroke on the keyboard is hopeless and futile.

For eight years, he has sat in the front of every one of his reading and has never looked anything but interested and enthralled. Sometimes I think he actually is but really, who wants to take the risk to find out that might not be the case? I mean, what if he hates everything he hears and that includes your work?

So I sit way in the back, curled up in a cringe or stretched out in delight and marvel at the breadth and generosity, the ferocious commitment to all being heard, the elegance and the style that is Michael.

"If I Bring Forth What Is Inside Me, What I Bring Forth Will Save Me"

This is Dana.

Her husband, before he was smart enough to marry her, had, as a teenager, a crush on Florence. When they all grew up, Dana and Florence and their husbands and children lived across the hall from one another on Lewis Street.

I knew Dana was the most beautiful woman I knew. And I knew this before I knew how to tie my shoe. I also knew she knew something about the world that would be essential to my survival. Perhaps it was the beautiful stones from Brazil she gave me after her trip there with her husband to help establish socialist co-op housing. Or maybe it was the tiny little Bolivian dolls given after another trip to continue developing affordable housing in South America. Or maybe it was the story book with real art as illustrations that told me there were more worlds beyond the wall of sound I heard every day from Florence's Steinway.

Whatever it was, what beamed from her heart and soul was a living example of utter enjoyment of every second of every moment to love, eat, laugh, talk, touch, live.

Today, at least 45 years after learning to tie my shoe, Dana is still the most beautiful woman I know. Or at least Number One of a very short list. And today she brought forth a story she had poured into devastating poetry. She said that when she wrote that story it saved her life. Once again, so many decades later, I learned of a world beyond the horizon of my own fear, my own pain, my own disbelief.

*The fortune cookie fortune Dana reads every morning as she fixes her hazelnut coffee.

Sunday Memories - For the Heart of the Building and the Sweetness of the Day: Stephen O'Haire (1959-2009)

Stephen was living in the building with his Aunt Pat when I moved in in 1976. We were both 17. He went into the Navy but this was where he lived. And when he got out of the navy, this is where he lived. Ok, and sometimes he lived in Montauk but mostly he lived here and even when he wasn't living here, I still felt he still lived here.

He was our good morning, good afternoon, hello, anything you need, how's it going. He was the one who, after 9-11, put a little angel on the lamp between our front doors. He was a papa to his dog, Rags who became a star of Fox 5 TV because she could jump six feet straight up - like a yo-yo, only in the other direction. And one of Stephen's proudest boasts to me was that Rags won Fourth Place in the American Mutt Competition for Most Misbehaved.

No matter what his struggles and his victories were, he was a neighbor to each and every one of us.

With apologies to the incredible writers and reporters in his family and community, here are some moments from the mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception on 14th Street and First Avenue.

Terry, his younger brother: (on being brought home from the hospital) "Joe, Jr. [older brother] said 'One peep out of you, we're going to throw you out into the snow.' Stephen bent down and kissed me on the forehead."

The Priest leading the service: "A gentle giant. When he was in town, he came to Saturday Mass at 4:00 or 5:30."

Terry: "He was the Bill Gates of our neighborhood [Flushing, Queens]. He did all these paper routes on his big Schwinn bike.

His aunt Kay: During the six years in the navy, whatever port they docked out, he'd buy an expensive gift to his mother back in Queens. "I asked him why he bought such expensive jewelry. He said he didn't have much time, but lots of money and he had to spend it quickly."

Terry: "He fell in and out of love hard. He felt both the joy and the sorrow of love. And when our mother was dying, he would sing to her."

***

Stephen had a Last Will and Testament. In it he left something for all of us:

"Have a great life and be happy. I am happy now."


...so you do not grieve as the rest who have no hope.
Apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Pen & Brush Photo Contest - Audience Participation

Pen&Brush is having a contest for women photographers to submit THREE photographs.

I don't really think of myself as a real photographer. Regardless, I'm going to submit. Below are photographs culled from my collection by an informal panel of friends. I would love your input as to which ones might have the best chance to get into this show. Leave your comments and your picks either in the comment section below or via email! The photo on top of Florence looking out of the window is not eligible as it comes from a video I directed and Ruben Guzman shot. Technically it is not my photo.

The Promise Land

Prayer

Soldiers At The Wall

Florence and Whoopi


Protocol

Room With A View

A Corner of the World

Seymour Talks To His Hospital Bed


Not-the-Movie-Airplane!

I Still Have Pain

Hall of Water

The Luncheonette

On The Street That You Live*

Nights walking home from Gramma's once-a-week-TV-watching with her...


...these nooks and crannies, as intimate as her small apartment....

... the purring of the bridge...


...if I had my way I'd live right here.



People stop and stare. They don't bother me.
For there's no where else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.
*My Fair Lady

Sunday Memories - Stairway To Heaven Loew's Delancey Street

We didn't call it LOW-SSSS like it was some royal palace. We called it LO-EASES. Because that's how you really say LOEWS.

This one was on Delancey Street. So we called it DA LO-EASES DELANCEE (as opposed to the one on Grand Street and Essex which was smaller).  And it was no royal palace.  It was a beat-up movie theater with a tattered lobby.

"Where ya goin'?"
"LO-EASES DELANCEE. Gonna go see a pitcha."

Florence told me when she was a girl - and even as a young woman - she used to climb up the fire escape stairs and sneak into the movie house to see the second feature because it was easier to sneak in during the second half. It was easier to sneak in, period. No fire alarm, no cameras, no nothing.

I remember me and my big sister going to the Saturday matinees, the place packed with screaming kids.  The "COMING ATTRACTIONS!" were always horror movies trailers with monsters and demons and really scary men. Maybe there was already too much fear inside me from this life or a past life or the street life but I would freak out and run to the back of the theater and hide in the lobby until "COMING ATTRACTIONS!" were over. For years the words "COMING ATTRACTIONS!" sent me into a panic.

On the rare occasion Florence took me along in one of her infrequent escapes, it was understood I was not to bother her or remind her of her current life as mother/wife/piano teacher. I was to be a silent witness.  So when I panicked at "COMING ATTRACTIONS!” I tried to be really quiet about it. This was her time and I now wonder what movie I really watched - the one on the screen or the one sitting next to me.

Who knows what lives inside DA LO-EASES DELANCEE these days…the neighborhood spouting up luxury housing, the street level filled with cheap stores and cheaper national chains.  Any hint of a movie theater has been obliterated. But ghosts of those stairs are still there, etched into brick, holding memory of a rakish girl sneaking in to see a pitcha.