Sunday Memories: Home Where My Love Lies Waiting - revisited

This is Florence somewhere in Bushwick. She told me she could tell how their fortunes were diminishing by how bad the new home was. This move was one of the bigger steps down.

The trip from Trenton to Brooklyn was taken illegally in the front of the truck with the driver who, according to Florence, took pity on Gramma and her, two lone females on the border of destitute.

I know nothing of that apartment on Patchen Avenue, except that Florences flourished at Eramus High School, was neighbors with someone who knitted mittens used for shooting rabbits, and had someone mailed her a little letter so that she could have this special stamp for her collection.




***

original post:

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Six - Home Where My Love Lies Waiting
Saturday, April 4, 2009

Welcome, New Visitors to HER NEW YORK!

Thank you so much for taking time that at the end of your life you do not get back to visit IT WAS HER NEW YORK.

I post three times a week on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, Sunday's posting always a family or childhood memory. However, as we see from JEREMIAH'S VANISHING NEW YORK, something in our home can without warning suddenly become a memory.

Still, perhaps foolishly so, I write to defy what some call inevitable and others call stupid. I'm with stupid.

Like Father, Like Son

It was a dream come true. As wonderful as Gramma allowing me a ride on the Wonder Wheel or Florence playing hookey with me and Louise and taking us for a early morning summer swim, recently one night I got to have Coney and baseball together. The Brooklyn Cyclones, farm team for the Mets, were playing the Pennsylvania Auburn and with $8 tickets for the outfield boxes, once again we rode the emotional roller coaster until the Cyclones, just like the Mets came from behind and we're still not sure how but then again family traits do run deep.

And of course, the fireworks helped ease the exhaustion from the ride.



*with thanks to Kristopher for the hotdogs and fries. Go Nathan's!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Vanishing New York Highlights Her New York: C.O. Moed Faints

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York a.k.a. The Book of Lamentations: a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct, one of THE most important blogs in the world (which NY is) highlighted IT WAS HER NEW YORK on it's Wednesday July 22nd blog.

Vanishing New York

To say that this is an honor is an understatement. Jeremiah Moss is a New York hero who epitomizes the African proverb "Only when lions have historians will hunters cease to be heroes."

Well, Mr. Moss is one mean-ass lion with a computer and because of that, our city won't have to go quietly into the night.

Sunnyside Up

The maintenance guys had to get in immediately because something was leaking somewhere.  Luckily I still had an emergency $20 tucked away so I grabbed a taxi to Florence's.

The dashing driver and I talked about the decrease of taxi use and the possibility of driving a bus. He asked what I did.

"I'm an out-of-work writer."

"Oh! You can write about me."

So I took a picture and, handing him my card, told him to check the blog in a couple of days.

"I don't just drive a taxi." And he handed me his card. There, dashing smile and all, was his picture next to bright bold letters announcing SUNNYSIDE REAL ESTATE: All Your Residential and Business Needs Met!

"You're like in the two worst professions to be in during a recession,” I said in disbelief.

He laughed, said, "What can you do? You work."

Knock down 7, get up 8.

Sunday Memories - Fine Dining At Chez PS 134

PS 134 on East Broadway between Grand and Montgomery/Pitt

The spartan diet of Florence's limited but very healthy cooking took its toll early in my life and in need to something interesting to eat I would, against the rules, often visit friends' homes to ogle their tuna fish casseroles with potato chips on top, or their peanut butter and jelly sandwich (a forbidden delicacy in our home) or the obviously gourmet macaroni and cheese dishes. I didn't partake of any of it, the imposing on other people's limited food supply and strained budgets a cardinal sin, but I did lustfully leer at those dishes.

And then one summer, once again enrolled in the city-run day camp program in the park across the street, I was told that because I was a camper I was eligible for the summer lunch program at PS 134. I almost died and went to heaven. And for several weeks I indulged in plates of all the starch and gravy and meat loaf and macaroni they'd pile on my plastic tray.

Years later, I found out that PS 134 had a lunch-time program for the senior citizens in the neighborhood. For $1 you could get lunch. Florence, barely still cooking for herself or occasionally going to the Luncheonette with me (our version of eating out), swung by, perhaps motivated by the same curiosity that drove me to meander around friends' dinner tables. The fare, this time low sodium and low fat, was just as exotic to her as those summer meals years ago had been for me. I was thrilled, thinking a steady source of food would help balance the nutritional swings between her diet of national chain fast foods she saw on TV and the tasteless salt free organic stews she made for herself.

But soon she stopped. "I don't feel right," was her explanation. She worried that taking her $1 meal when she had a little bit more than nothing in her bank account was taking away a $1 meal from someone who didn't have anything in their bank account.

Coming Home

He and his five brothers and sisters were found in a box on Queens Boulevard in the pouring rain.

From the beginning we liked each other
-->

However, I'm allergic to cats.

And there was that story of a cat who lived with my parents briefly. It kept following Florence around all day interrupting her practicing. The message was clear: pets stymie art. The cat was given away on day three.

Still...

When someone decides they want to adopt you and they decide it with a heart that has greater horizons than any limits that appear, there is really nothing much you can do about it.

And this kitten decided I was his.

So, one day, quite recently, he took up full residence in an apartment I obviously had been renting for 33 years just so that, one day, he could move in.

-->


Jupiter has come home.

Old School High Tech Revisited

I couldn't get a signal on the computer to find the number of the theater to find out the times of the movie on Friday. "When I get home I'll go on their website and call them," I grumbled.

"I do have a phone book," she said. "It's white and it has numbers in it. I'm even in it."

Later, she read aloud from her hand written stories. I typed them into my computer. "Wouldn't it be faster to xerox it?" she asked.

"Who's old tech now?" I answered.

Sunday Memories - It Was Her New York and For a Brief Moment It Was Ours, Too

The people gathered.


The lady sang.


The audience listened.


The neighbor sat enthralled.


And she talked of her New York.


The Renegade Cabaret
Highline at the end by 21st Street
At night, usually Friday

What I Stared At While Wondering ....

Then Why Are You Living Here?

Where: a tiny plane going from a tiny city back to New York

Who: two high-powered business people with accents from places I'm told I should be more open to

What They Said:
#1 - I'm still getting used to it. Did you ride the subway when you lived in NY?
#2 - no, not really...I wouldn't. There are um interesting people on it if you know what I mean.
#1 - Ha ha.

What I Stared At On My Subway Ride Back from the Airport Wondering...


Where Are All The Interesting People?

The Door

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. - Matthew 7:7

But if all else fails, take a picture of it.

Sunday Memories - "You Say You Want A Revolution..."

Monty's Mom asked what everyone in the courtchyard asked. "What are you doing with your mother's apartment?"

(actually it was more like "whatcha gonna do wit ya motha's apartment?" note: the "t" is silent)

I gave the usual answer about renting and the piano.

"You still play?"

No. I had put my foot down at 13 and refused to play anymore. If I was going to be forced to study music, go to music school and attend the music department at the School for the Performing Arts for violin, I wasn't also going to study the piano. In a rare nod to my individualization, Florence agreed.

I never liked it, I told Monty's Mom.

"Well," she said, "You were a rebellious one."

I was? I had played with Monty when we were little little but like most of the neighbors in the courtchyard it never really felt like anyone knew me, just of me as I ran past in a game of tag.

"Oh yeah. You were power to the people. I mean it was the 60's. But yeah, you were. You were little, too. Yeah. Power to the people."

Songs from the Second Floor*

While they all took pictures of the Empire State Building I looked up to where New York really exists and took a picture of the second floor.


*Sånger från andra våningen (Roy Anderson- 2000)

A film poem inspired by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. A story about our need for love, our confusion, greatness and smallness and, most of all, our vulnerability. It is a story with many characters, among them a father and his mistress, his youngest son and his girlfriend. It is a film about big lies, abandonment and the eternal longing for companionship and confirmation. Written by Fredrik Klasson {fredrik.klasson@telia.com}

Pets of Our Lives: Part 4 - Cats

It was like the names of the seven dwarfs or those reindeers. But in the courtyard (pronounced courtch-yard) we had (to the tune of that reindeer song) Mikey and Kushna, Skinny and Bob, Frisky and Blackie and that randy-like Tom...

Hartstein the cop hated them and was constantly yelling at us to stop playing with them. But except for Marcy's dad's fish, those cats were the closest thing any of us got to having a pet. (I don't count the summer I had snails.) (Or the gerbil that kept dying.)

Sunday Memories - Our Other TV

It was normal for our parents to take us to the Metropolitan Museum. Not sure why. Just was. Only recently I realized those big tableau paintings were, after Lang's fairy tale books, my illustrated bible stories, the Family Of Man photos, and Friday night at Gramma's, a way to see a movie of the passion I felt in my soul.

YELLING! SHOUTING! BABIES AND OLD PEOPLE CRYING! BIG BURLY MEN CARRYING BIG DELICIOUS WOMEN!!! WHAT'S GOIN' ON HERE!???!!


HAPPY MOMMY AND DELICIOUS BABY LOVED BY HAPPY MOMMY JUST LIKE ON TV!!!!


ANGELS AND MAGIC DO EXIST! THEY'RE GONNA MAKE IT ALL BETTER!!!


LOVE! LOVE!! THE GIRL LOOKS LIKE THE GIRLS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD YOU KNOW BIG AND JUICY!!! LOVE IS POSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME!!!!!!!!!


WOW!!! LOOK!!! SHE'S IN THE MIDDLE OF A MYSTERY!!! LIKE JAMES BOND ONLY DIFFERENT!!!!!!



* All photos taken, possibly against the rules, at the Met this past Friday night.

GUEST ARTIST: DANA - The Sad Little Crone

Another one of Dana's short New York stories.

I seem to have trouble visualizing accurately how my face betrays my age. Especially when I hit a patch of exhaustion and my color drains completely. On my birthday I went to Trinity Church to hear a concert by a group called Alhambra. They specialize in Sephardic songs accompanied by very exotic instruments. Sensuous and rhythmic 14th and 15th century melodies. When they ended, I was caught in their spell. But hunger and fatigue had to be remedied. I crossed the street to a dingy pizza joint and ordered a large orange juice. Then I plopped down at a corner table to simply rest. I closed my eyes for a moment and awoke suddenly when a young Asian woman poked her nose in my face and asked tenderly “Are you all right?” followed by, “May I buy you some lunch?”

My first thought was “I really must buy a new winter coat. My God, I must look dowdy."

“No lunch, please.” I told her I was enjoying my birthday but just needed a little rest. Then I stood up and left the place. She followed me asking where I lived and how I was planning to travel home. I kept reassuring her that I would take the subway, as usual. She offered to escort me down the steps. I refused her kind help Then she put something in my right hand and ran into the crowd. I opened my hand to find a neatly folded $5 bill. I was truly shocked but also touched and somewhat ashamed at her judgment of me. Her compassion brought tears to my eyes. So that’s how I appear to her!

When I got home I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. There she was – the dear little old lady or perhaps the sad little crone needing a good meal. I swore I’d save that $5 bill forever. But I broke my vow 4 days later.

Like Summer In San Francisco

Staring at a street that used to be in a bad neighborhood, we sipped expensive coffee in designer cups and talked of the weather.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: ALL ABOUT DICK!

I'll be reading the first 12 pages of the new novel, ALL ABOUT DICK, which I started to keep me sane while finishing WIRE MONKEY. It did not keep me sane but now I'm in too deep to stop.

ALL ABOUT DICK: the night just perfect for love, that corner about to be turned, a really bad joke told by God


Writer's House Reading Series
Kettle of Fish
59 Christopher Street
New York, NY

June 24
7pm

with Carola Dibbel (bohemian slapstick!) and Elizabeth Smith (cowboys and tampons!)

Sunday Memories - Getting Out Of Town

Except for the rare trip on the Greyhound Bus to Philadelphia and later, after a purchase of a car, two trips to Atlantic City, leaving New York happened on public transportation - the F train to Coney Island or the Staten Island Ferry to... well... no where really. All we did was get off the ferry, run around the corner and reenter the terminal to wait to go back to recognizable land.

Later, when I had my own set of wheels - a three speed Raleigh bike - or enough carfare to take the Madison bus to the First Avenue Bus connection in Chinatown, that ferry ride because respite, refuge and freedom. I'd stand in the back of the boat as it slugged it out with the water and learned perspective. I lived in the most beautiful city in the world, on the most beautiful harbor in the world and I was going to be OK. Everything was going to be OK.

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

In the tradition of Union Square's more than 150 year history as a meeting ground for social change, today's demonstration of Iranians and Iranian-Americans demanding a fair election in Iran.

Old School High Tech

Before ipods, before walkmans, before tvs, before cable, even before satellites left the world of sci-fi and went into the sky, it was a transistor radio stuck to your ear, the crackle of the announcer "foul... rbi... and he's... OH AND IT'S.... bullpen... " and the fiddling of the tiny dial not a button preset but a precise touch and turn that required the finesse of an ancient watchmaker.

Sunday Memories - Yeudi

This is how she looks today and it's also exactly how she looked 40 years ago when we met in 5th grade. She was one of the new girls transferred from PS 134 on East Broadway to PS 110 on Broome Street. She was exotic and worldly and exciting. She was clean and graceful and unwavering. I was a baby monkey on caffeine. I longed to be her elegant grace. I still do.

I had my first real birthday party at her house (it was a surprise). We suffered through the punches and grabbing and pushing at J.H.S. 56 together (she chased Willie Joe down Pitt Street after he sprayed her hair with Pledge. It was a fierce sight to behold.) And after that we went on to survived the High School of Performing Arts where the dancers and actresses ruled the boys and us musicians had to be inventive just to be seen. (I gave up and hid in the staircase during lunch for two years.) We ate, drank, and partied together and at some point in our late teens, maybe early early 20's, we were roommates in my first and only apartment. I still have her lamp, table and the dish, cup and bowl she left behind. She still looks like she lives here when she visits.

But what I remember most and always of Her New York was the day in 6th grade we got back our creative writing assignment. I don't remember what I wrote. But the moment I read hers my life changed. This, I remember thinking, is real writing. This is literature.

Little Mitzi and the Welbilt Stove

"What are you doing with your mother's stove? You going to sell it?"

(Actually it was more like "whatcha gonna do wit ya motha's stove ya gonna selit?")

Little Mitzi was finishing off a day of collecting signatures in front of Moishe's Bakery for I don’t know what.  We were walking back to the building she and Florence had lived in as neighbors on different floors for 50 years. She had been a school aide at PS 110 when I went there.

Talking to Little Mitzi, punctuation didn’t exist.  At least in the conventional way.

”I used to visit your mother we have the same stove a Welbit I lost some knobs she said here take one of mine I said NO! what are you going to do NO! keep your knobs NO! but if you're going to sell the apartment because they don't make those knobs anymore I called they said they don't make them anymore I love my Welbilt I used to visit your mother she was lonely she told me."

I promised to give her the knobs if we ever sold the apartment. When I asked to take her picture she said "No! I'm a very private person" and flounced out of the elevator.

New Home Edition!

Before


After

RAIN DELAY: Special Home Addition will be posted Tuesday Evening

Sunday Memories - The Domino Effect

What happened when in 1982 an ex-roommate from Holland told her best friend to come visit New York because we had a ton a space for guests:

January, 1982: Best Friend sits next to Strange Young Woman on plane and tells her "Oh I know a place you can crash at in New York."

Best Friend and Strange Young Woman show up at apartment after wild party. Beds made, pizza offered, party continues. Strange Young woman corners me as I make up guest beds and confesses she just met Best Friend. I think, "Oh God, we have a serial killer in our house.""

Strange Young Woman turns out to be funny and smart and a great gossip. We figure out a way to kick out Best Friend and keep Strange Young Woman.

We become great friends. I leave the United States for the first time and visit Strange Young Woman in Holland. I also find out they have toothpaste and toilet paper too.

Because of Strange Young Woman, I am introduced to Lesbian Nation, meet first, second, third girlfriends, get involved with Lesbian theater, become an actor, become a writer, go to graduate school, survive my return to dating men, become a film/video maker, go to another graduate school, visit Spain with Strange Young Woman, and together survive family weddings, gatherings, passages, memorials, heavy breakable ceramics we buy in whatever country we are in, drink, eat, gossip, grieve, walk, watch, consider, grow, bury, celebrate, survive break ups, break throughs, kittens, dogs, homes, ice cream, and shopping sprees of teeshirts...

Until...

One day it is not 1982 anymore. It is 2009. She is no longer the Strange Young Woman. She is family and it is 27 years later. From that one accidental meeting on a plane and her accidental stay at this home, my life became irrevacably changed and forced onto the road of its destiny.

Shelter From The Storm

It could be perched on top of a recycle bin by old windows.


Or around a conference table, the florescent lights becoming windows to a better way of living one day at a time.


And sometimes it's just a familiar bench by the bathrooms waiting for a movie to start.

Pets of Our Lives: Part 3 - Horses

Well, there were horses in fairy tales and history books. There were toy horses that raced across the bedroom floor. There were horses at the Metropolitan Museum although they just felt like blown up fairy tale horses. And although there were the $1 pony rides at the Central Park Zoo, I'm not counting them because they were just ponies the size of a big dog.

Then there were these horses, huge fierce powerful metal ones about to leap off the stone boxes and gallop into traffic. I didn't know the size of a real horse until later when I began to wander into neighborhoods that had mounted cops. And the first time I rode a horse, I was shocked. Those reins didn't feel like the handle bars of my bikes. So I returned to admiring the metal ones.

Sunday Memories - A Bridge to Groovy

The teacher in charge of us singing was one of the very few hippy teachers at P.S.110 on Broome Street in the 1960s. He had a mustache that wasn't like the Hasids' facial hair and wide lapels and he was lanky and moved fast and languid at the same time, not like the men in the neighborhood who moved in various forms of clenched misery or defeated surrender to beige meals and lives.

Our class was required to sing at some general assembly and I, who remember nothing, not what movies I have seen or books I have read or conversations I have had, still remember the words to the song he had us sing:

Slow down you're moving too fast
you gotta make the morning last
just kicking down the cobble stones
looking for fun and feeling....

*Simon and Garfunkel
59th Street Bridge Song

For All Other Things....

Clean biking clothes: zero dollars

Trader Joes brownies for Hostess: $3.49

Gas: $5.00

Going 80mph on the Ducati: *&#$&@# priceless


*thank you to Yvon Nives

A Day in the Life in Three Short Movements

Sunday Memories - On The Radio...

We had no TV. Florence was worried we wouldn't practice our violins if there was a TV in the house. Instead, we had lots of books, two record players, a small but substantial record collection and many, many radios. There were radios in the kitchen, living room, their bedroom and ours. There may have been even one in the bathroom.

Books were gotten at the library, but records were rare purchases. Besides, I was too little to travel to places that might have had record stores. And even if there had been one in the neighborhood, I had no money, my skill at stealing cash from my father to come much later. So if there was a song I wanted to hear, I'd have to wait to hear it on the radio.

So I clung to the little radio by my bed. Like some of my favorite books it was a portal out, even if I couldn't leave. Late at night it pressed to my ear I'd tune that dial so carefully, bring in WABC AM, my favorite station and wait as long as I could stay awake for the song I needed to hear.

And one summer The Edwin Hawkin Singers sang Oh Happy Day. And night after night I waited to hear a song about something so far from any thing I could recognize, yet singing something I heard in my heart, what I thought was a sound of joy and hope. Years later, like last night, in reading the lyrics I wonder how a little kid's brain could have understood the deeper lesson of watching, fighting and praying.

OH HAPPY DAY

He taught me how
He taught me
Taught me how to watch
He taught me how to watch
and fight and pray
fight and pray
yes, fight and pray

And he'll rejoice
and He'll, and He'll
rejoice in things we say
and He'll rejoice in things we say
things we say
yes, things we say

Oh happy day, Oh happy day
Oh happy day, Oh happy day
Oh happy day
Oh happy day

The Village

The apartment building spanned from one avenue to the next.

We were at a tiny rooftop party across the street.  Standing there, I felt like I was in that Fellini movie where all the little rowboats bobbing on the sea watch the huge ocean liner pass by.

Bernard gazed at the enormous building.   "It's probably the same size as a village." Since he is French, and France has villages, I assumed he was right.

Light from hundreds of TVs flickered across the hundreds of windows.   Bernard checked his phone again to see if Jacques left a message of when he’d be meeting us.

I took another picture. "They think their homes are unique and exclusive, but really they're just boxes."

Since I grew up in New York amongst sprawling apartment buildings of boxes piled on top of one another, Bernard assumed I was right.

We continued to wait for Jacques, watch the soccer club of middle-aged guys mug for pictures and count how many TVs were being turned on and off.

"One Day I Wrote A Sentence"

How Dana, Guest Writer, started writing.

Ghost Longing (excerpt)

“His homecoming every night was thrill enough for me because his physical presence was sexually provocative. I loved the intimate challenge of living with a stranger. Present, but not completely knowable.”