Sunday Memories: When We Were Young

The family was still in Bushwick...



...before the money really ran out, before the beatings got worse and more frequent, before they had to move to Henry Street on the Lower East Side...



...where the rats were bigger than Mitzi the dog.



In those Brooklyn days being left handed was not allowed. He was sent home for not knowing how to write with his right hand.

And of course on the first day of school, his name, a Hebrew one, was changed to an English one.

The Fountain of Youth

There was no such thing as bottled water. Just bottled cola. And maybe juice.

And these were the perfect height if you were little but now you have to do yoga to get closer to getting a drink. Which is still just as warm as it was then.

School's Out For Summer

Stairwells were the subways to our classes, filled with pushing and shoving, the dreaded chance collision with the boy everyone had a crush on, the bully everyone feared, or news of the big people's world like the older brother who came back from Woodstock covered with mud (we were all really interested in the mud part).

It was on that last day, everything draining out from the school these old walls and stair emerged into view.

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

The last in a series to visit when on the road which is where I have been for a week or so.



Happy Memorial Day, a day where we honor fallen soldiers of many wars, some that happened between apartment walls, others inside a hidden broken heart.

Part Two: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Part One: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Sunday Memories: Part Six: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Me. 1976.



How did I know I needed this corner? I didn't know what it was I was supposed to be doing in that corner. I wasn't anything but a kid who didn't know I was a kid, paying rent, going to a deadend job and only allowing myself to dream of a future when everyone else was asleep.

But something deeper and smarter than myself pushed me one night in those early days to borrow an old drill, get brackets and, while listening to Jean-Luc Ponty and aching from loneliness from a recently departed stab at love, put up shelves and start to fill them to stuff to remind me I was actually going to use that corner in all its incarnations for the rest of my life.

Part Five: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.



Kosky

For fifteen years he has walked the gaunlet of competing lights from two Indian restaurants to get to his front door and to a room that on its own might be generous but stuffed with the important elements of an apartment - a kitchen, a bathroom, a small alcove pretending to be a bedroom but barely able to accomodate a bed - it is small. Quiet, filled with gentle curry smells, but small.

In the early days of internet, his dial-up would hog the phone line. So while the file was uploading or downloading, he'd run downstairs to one of the two payphones to discuss what was being sent and then run upstairs to check on the progress and then back downstairs to the payphone to continue discussing and then back upstairs...

Now the payphones are gone, internet whizzes through the air, and he uses a cell. And now looking around he yearns for just one separate room. Just one. A room where he can't see every corner of the apartment, or where, when he reaches his arms out wide, he doesn't bump into the kitchen.

Part Four: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Victoria



It had originally been one of only a couple of rooms in an apartment in a building filled with squatters on a block with lots of drug dealers and she was a single woman.

But then the neighborhood changed, and she got a union day job and then a husband and then a baby and then another baby and then another apartment below and then one day twenty or so years later each one had a room of their own. And this room was hers.

And when she steps into this room to paint, either during brief weekend afternoons or on the night shift, fear of failure stays outside and she can go face a painting that is pissing her off.

There is nothing in this room she can do wrong.

The Night Shift

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Florence


This was the only place in the apartment she ever looked like she could breathe.

She started practicing between 9 and 10am. When I was little and on rare occasions came home for lunch, she would quickly make french toast and returned to practicing. When I got bigger and wasn't in risk of setting the house on fire, on those rare days, I made my own french toast.

After school it was my turn in that room and I practiced the piano (until one rare day I refused to) and the violin (which was the price I paid to not practice the piano anymore).

And when all that was done and some dinner put in front of me or my sister or both, Florence returned back to practicing until it got dark enough for neighbors to complain.

No one ever did.

Part Two: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Adrian

I’ve made things ever since I can remember. By the age of 5, I was happily drawing perfect horses on demand for family members. In those days, crowded into a home with 7 other people, I drew anywhere and on anything I could get my hands on. Even then, drawing was an essential part of who I was

My first studio, the first space I could physically walk into, close the door and focus on only creating work was in New York 25 years later. Having cleared my world of many of the obstacles that repressed my art-making, it was here in this studio that I set forth to clear the mental obstacles that remained. More important than the drawings, videos, curtains and dresses that I made in that space is the personal growth the space allowed.

This is what my office space looked like in Brooklyn, NY, 2007.


This is what the space looks like in my head.


superadriancito

Part One: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.



Goggla
(that's her on the computer screen)

So...I used to be a painter. That was back when I had a big apartment with room for a table, easel and natural light. Circumstances forced me to move into this smaller space, which was supposed to be for only two months. Those two months have stretched on for almost ten years.

Being in such a small space meant no room for setting up a work space for painting, so I started playing with my camera instead, which took up much less space, but still fulfilled my need to be artistic. These days, I'm 99% digital, but in the beginning, I used the bathroom for loading and exposing film.

This is a shared space, used by my partner during the day and me at night. There's only room for one person's project at a time, so when I need to print, cut mats or assemble pieces, he needs to go elsewhere. As there's not enough space to spread out, I work on one photo at a time. The real problem is storage, so I need to sell anything I make or there is not enough room to make more. The laundry cart functions as the mode of transport to the street or fairs, where I sell my work.

A few years ago, I began investigating the history of the building and that's when I grew very attached to the place - not because it has any significant past, but because it took me on a journey through the evolution of the city. With each new bit of history uncovered, I'd take my camera out to document my findings with the hopes of weaving together a visual story. Working out of the studio gives me a romantic connection to the roots of the Lower East Side where so many businesses were run out of tenements stuffed with families.

I grew up on the spacious west coast, truly believing the notion that NYC was the one place in the world where a young artist could come and make something out of nothing. I've lived in bigger and nicer apartments, but this is the one that connects me to the neighborhood and everything about it that I love; its history of entrepreneurship, activism, creativity and self-expression is what inspires me to get out of bed each morning. That, and the yowling of a hungry cat...

Sunday Memories: The Look of Love

Judith

She escaped from Hungary to England as the Nazis began to round up the Jews. In 1950, she sailed on the Queen Elizabeth into the New York Harbor.

It was morning and the crescent moon glimmered on the water.

The Lady beckoned.

The boat horns blew welcome.

Then the city unfolded before her eyes.

It was love at first sight.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: When It's His Birthday All The Angels Sing

And the world becomes even better than before.

The Look Of Love: Part Two

You can't really see them. But even in the gloom of a jazz club, I couldn't take my eyes off of them.

They matched from head to toe.

Shocking white hair and tanned skin that made them look like vibrant 70 year-olds in a vitamen commercial. Matching white shirts and jeans pretending to be dress pants and pretty shoes disguising their comfort function but not doing such a good job at it.

She looked like a nice girl, a good wife, a perfect helpmate, from a nice life, a safe neighborhod, a coordinated decorated home. He looked dashing and he looked like he knew it. The collar was jauntily turned up and I thought, oh this is a man who is fucking his secretary.

Then Beat Kaestli began to sing a song about a desert island, one made of touch and taste and moans and sighs and when Beat sang about kisses that could only happen on such a desert island I saw the dashing man send a glance to his matching wife that could only be saying how much he lived every word of that song with her.

The Look of Love: Part One

She wears the same soft outdoorsy clothes he does and their shoes are sturdy and hardy and probably very very comfortable and only the colors signify if they are sturdy-hardy-comfy girl shoes or sturdy-hardy-comfy boy shoes.

She strides ahead to the corner to wait for the light to change and he comes up behind her and gently nudges her elbow. Hello, his nudge says, I've caught up with you.

And she turns and smiles and he grins back at her and I see billions of seconds and minutes and moments shared and traveled through and that no matter where they are they get to turn and see that the other one has caught up and now together they can patiently wait for change.

Nobody notices them because they are too old to look like TV love. Love on TV only happens between the ages of of 15 and 22. Sometimes thirty. Occasionally forty. Never eighty.

I follow them for blocks because I need to see what real love looks like.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Thank You All For The Kitchen Series

Who knew how much of our hearts and souls spoke through a kitchen window?

Thank you all to the brave writers who sent in their pictures and words about such an intimate space and moment.

Sunday Memories: Part Nine: A View From A Kitchen

Last in the series, A View From A Kitchen explores what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.

Me
A bit before 6am.

Even with the recently fixed and repointed bricks on the building facing the window, the view is exactly as it was 35 years ago. But the life inside the kitchen is completely different.

This is the view I had of the transvestite prostitutes catwalking the street as men in cars dreamed of a $10 solution to their lacks and woes.

This is the view I had of the angry crack pimps threatening the resident who dared to challenge their turf with bright lights and video cameras. (He eventually moved quickly from the neighborhood, having realized this was not a movie and he was not Charles Bronson.)

This is the view I stared out of one holiday evening, promising myself the next year would be different and then the next year I looked out again and promised myself that the next year would be different and then the next year and the next year and the year after that, promise after promise floating out and disappearing into thin air along with a sense of my future.

It's the view where I saw at 3 or 4am a woman run down the street in skimpy pajamas and a man also in pajamas run after her, grabbed her, drag her back to some fancy lobby door as she stamped her feet and flipped her hair back and forth. I didn't call the police because it looked like neither of them knew honesty or love. It just looked like a drama neither of them could change or leave.

And this is the view that, after a sudden and unexpected reprieve from having to work a full-time job, I looked up at one day and saw sunlight burst through for brief moments in late afternoon and, after 35 years, realized that any day the sun was out there would be a precious twenty minutes where my home became happy and calm, no matter who was in it or what was happening.

It is the view I hope only I have and that no one below has a view of me in slovenly sweats or sometimes even quite naked as I rush from the shower to put out the fire of a cooking pot accidentally forgotten.

It's the view that has told me how hard it is raining, or how windy it is or how close spring is by the huddled pigeons returning to roost and fuck and make many ugly baby pigeons right by its ledge.

This is the view I have stared out of, through loss and through hope, washing dishes only I used or washing dishes 16 friends used and its constancy has told me my own transformation.

And now, before 6am in the morning, this is the view I stagger to, exhausted, but not questioning, to open a can, reach for a bowl, and burst with feelings I had once only read about while my legs are bumped repeatedly by love for a mommy-can-opener.

Part Eight: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.


Rebecca and Tim*

When I was ten or 11 years old, I became obsessed with the movie "Crossing Delancey." I'd never been to New York, and my only knowledge of the Lower East Side came from how it was portrayed in the film: as a gray, sooty place crowded with old Jews and handball courts. It didn't look particularly pretty, but it fascinated me, a kid growing up in the leafy confines of a Midwestern college town. Shortly after watching the movie, I drew a picture of a woman buying oranges from a neighborhood sidewalk vendor. She was dressed like the film's protagonist, but in my mind, she was me, or the me I someday hoped to be.

Shortly after I moved into my apartment, I realized that I'd moved into the picture I'd drawn over two decades earlier. I'm reminded of this every time I look out my kitchen window, which provides an unfettered view of the Williamsburg Bridge, the streets and trees that crowd below it, and the yellow brick towers that loom above it. That view places me unequivocally on the Lower East Side, and, as with the movie, allows me to observe New York through a heavily edited filter. I forecast the day's weather based upon the number of people on the bridge, know it's the Sabbath by the crowds of Hasidic families pushing strollers against an oncoming tide of fitness enthusiasts, and at night am reminded of the city's relentless, mysterious energy by the sight of the train rumbling to Brooklyn and back, lit up like an incandescent caterpillar against the darkening sky. On rainy days, the view from my kitchen window allows me to imagine I'm in a New York that otherwise only exists to me in Steiglitz photographs.

It is, in other words, my link to the past, both one that I never experienced and one in which I dreamed that my future would somehow be made in this city that at the time was as unreachable as a movie set, as alluring as tropical fruit glimpsed from a busy sidewalk.

***

*Post Script: Rebecca and Tim are the new eyes who look out the old windows of Florence's apartment. Those windows couldn't have been luckier.

Part Seven: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.



Dana

You mean the Empire State Building?

Then there’s the bridge.

And the blue bottles – they’re European water bottles.

And the people rushing across the bridge.

At night it’s spectacular. They [at the Empire State Building] observe all the holidays.

Sunday Memories: Part Six: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.


Riverside Drive

I have been visiting this home for 38 years. I didn't realize that until I pulled out the calculator.

It was just a home I was often invited into and one time when I was 17 or 18 I lived here caring for the youngest daughter, one of my closest friends then, while she was sick and her parents had to go away. I did the shopping and the cleaning and, although I can't remember this, I must have done the cooking because I remember doing the dishes by this view as intimately as I remember doing the dishes by the view at Florence's.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: IT'S SPRING! IT'S A PARLOR! IT'S THE ANNUAL SPRING ARTIST'S SALE!!!

Des Becker Roses

This Sunday, six artists will gather in an old parlor of a beautiful turn-of-the-century home to sell some of their most beautiful works.

Hand Dyed Silk Scarves, by Colin Houlder Designs

One-of-a-kind jewelry of precious, semi-precious gems, gold, silver, austrian crystals, antique pen nibs & pearls by Alina Neganova

Amulet bags with crystals, stones and beads molded from hand dyed batik fabric by Barbara Zernov

Lilly Recht (age 11) sells fashionable and recyclable duct tape bags.

Porcelain dinner ware, serving pieces, oversized coffee and tea mugs, iridescent glass bird baths and other ceramic marvels by Claire Des Becker

Haramaki (belly warmers), yoga cushions, tick repellent and hand-made lip balms for all seasons by Sharon Kimmelman


Des Becker Birdbath


I asked Claire Des Becker about the origins of her parlor sales:

I held successful yearly artists' sales, twice a year for 10 years in my large ceramics studio. The parlor sales began after my husband and I move into our 120 year old house in Manhattan.

Artists like and need to educate people about their work. In a world of mass produced goods people need to understand why the handmade item is special.

Now, with money less available for extra things people are delighted to be able to buy often museum quality items, at the artists' best prices. These same items may be found in department stores and galleries, but there is a huge markup in the stores and galleries because the overheard is high.

Artists and and clients enjoy each others' company and have a good time in the non-pressured comfort of my parlor twice a year. I am truly pleased to host this event.

ANNUAL SPRING ARTIST’S SALE
(Mothers’ and Special Others’ Sale)

Date: Sunday, April 25

Time: 1:30 pm.-5:30pm.

Location: 126 Manhattan Avenue, between 105th and 106th Street
(just off Central Park West and behind the chateau)

Refreshments served.


Des Becker Roses #3

Part Five: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.



Cowboylands

I don't often sit at my kitchen window in the morning with my coffee--if I'm imbibing caffeine I'm either writing, working at the latest editing gig, or catching up with My Private Coney and other blogs. What I will do is when stuck on a scene, or tired from squinting at commas, I walk restlessly through my apartment, and I will stand at my kitchen window and look out, catching the drift of the clouds, the look of the newest green shoots on the garden below, the cheery red-headed whatever-they-are birds at the feeder on the fire escape. It's my way to leave my body and get some peace. To fugeddabout myself.

Seeing sky is crucial for me--just as I feel closed in by something, panicked or unhappy, a scan of clouds or blue blueness or the distant Empire State Building keeps me, well, nicer. Note the new fucking condo to the left, which cut into my sky. MY sky! Anyway, at least it's a light color. If I squint my eyes, it looks like a desert bluff.

The growing garden below. I pretend to be God and make flowers and plants grow where I want them. There's a stray cat down there sleeping because he has sex nightly. Go forth and multiply, saith the Lord.

The birds also cheer me up--some kind of sparrow that's scrappy but melodious, with a bright red head that becomes almost fluorescent red in the summer. Writing, a compulsion, can be dismal or incandescent, but it's solitary. These birds remind me there are beings who exist, happily, to eat, drink, and fornicate. Amen.

Part Four: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.



Smoke and Gaslight

I like to call it the mystery window. The cut of my apartment house limits the full view so I can only get partial views of people coming and going. It actually helps with the imagination. A quick glimpse of a sleeve or an echo of a voice can tell me which of my neighbors are walking out on their way to who knows where. Or if I see the rake of my neighbor propped against the opposite wall, I know that spring is here and she is about to replant the garden with a skill and mastery perfected over 50 years that I could never get right. Kids running a hundred miles an hour as they race to the center of the courtyard bounce by as I sit at my kitchen table.

One of my first memories moving into my home was of the bright stream of sunshine that starts as a peek through the blinds in the early morning, gradually growing till it spills into my living room. Light in other parts of my home doesn’t radiate that way. And it is a welcome start to the day as I race out to whatever surprises await me once I open my door.

Sunday Memories: Part Three: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.


Florence

What possessed me at 9 or 12 to snap square pictures of our home?

But a brief moment and quick snap of a mundane occurrence now remembers how Florence practiced her cello in the kitchen by the old radiator in front of the view that looked out on tougher projects and the playground under the old bridge.

Part Two: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.



City Of Strangers

The kitchen itself is amazing, but the view is not.

Part One: A View From A Kitchen

A View From A Kitchen is a series on what meets our eye when we look up from our dirty dishes or half-full coffee cup.


JANE

I've looked out my windows for eleven years and watched piece after piece fall from the solar frame. Some hung on by rust alone but withstood a guy with a metal saw who tried for a day to cut them down. The buildings behind and to the left of the panels have grown by two illegal floors, one shut down and leaving hanging streamers of blue tape and open windows, the other legally required to demolish but still renting unimpeded.

The tragedy is that the flock of pigeons no longer wheel and swoop in to roost on the cross-bars, too many predators in the sky. One day last summer there were an unbelievable five hawks circling above, barely visible.

When that structure comes down I may have to leave, it's the last abstraction in my view.

Sunday Memories: All Roads Lead To...

A rare destination, once in a while my father would shepherd us over for one small piece of a cannoli.

The pastry is still utterly exquisite and now I can go as often as I want.


Caffe Roma Pastry‎
385 Broome Street
New York, NY 10013-3961
(212) 226-8413‎

Sunday In The Park With Springtime

The kids fed the pigeons.


We fed ourselves.


The daphadils attempted surival


And while the men gambled below, yet another fight scene for yet another student film got rehearsed.

It Was Our New York

All four of us from different corners. Still, even if the streets barely look the same anymore, the feeling of returning home to landsmannes words pouring out most of them 'fuck' and crossing wherever we want against the light at Olympic paced charges that were barely a stroll in our childhood neighborhoods.

Sunday Memories: A Cup Full Of No Memory

It's not the cup reminding me of the home I thought I was going to share with a promise of marriage.

It's not the cup reminding me Florence never went beyond Grand Street with her dreams.

It's not the cup reminding me of my own diaspora.

It's not the the cup reminding me of the shot in the dark at the possibility of new.

It's a new cup with a cartoon character I rarely saw as a kid who lived in a neighborhood I've never been to and all it reminds me of is a wonderful friendship that always opens up into doubled over laughing so hard while stumbling through the hell of words often referred to as the Joy of Writing.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: MY PRIVATE CONEY / HER NEW YORK ON THE BLOG INTERVIEWER

Mike Thomas, of The Blog Interviewer was kind enough to invite MY PRIVATE CONEY PRESENTS IT WAS HER NEW YORK to answer questions about the blog and about blogging in general.

Thank you, Mike!

Luke Wouldn't Have Been Invited To The Tea Party But He Would Have Been Welcomed Here

On a rainy, cold Sunday afternoon in Williamsburg, strangers trundled down a staircase to the Sandbox's very comfortable basement, and ate mint jelly candies and unsalted popcorn while sitting patiently through technical difficulties. It was worth it. Because for a couple of hours we all felt hope for our country.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.



Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.



But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.



Capitalism: A Love Story

Hope Springs Eternal

There are new eyes looking out of Florence's windows. I mentioned that when I was a kid, the trees in the park below always let me know when Spring was coming. The tenant wrote back that she knew Spring was coming by how many more people were walking across the bridge. Oh, have times changed. When we all lived there, no one walked across that bridge.

The trees outside the windows I have lived in for the past 34 years never really tell me anything until it's summer and much too late to get excited. So the heralding of Spring has instead become that roller coaster of volatile weather - hot! cold! warm! cold again!

A chilly walk on 103rd Street the other day changed all that when I saw something I hadn't seen since I was a kid.

Flowers. At least what passed for flowers on the Lower East Side. Spring.

Sunday Memories: Zing Zing Zing Went My Heartstrings

This was before video games. This was before the internet. This was even before James T. Kirk appeared in the horizon on the Starship Enterprise.

And since we didn't have a television, excitement had to be found where ever we could find it and what better place than public transportation. The subway had that front car window, as good as any Coney Island ride. But if you were on a bus, you had both the window and the chance to pull the bell. A ride with sound effects! Couldn't be beat.

Then somewhere along the line they modernized the buses and those long cords begging to be yanked so the bells pealed like a Sunday church disappeared. Now most buses had subtle strips that only rang on the first request, thus sparing the bus driver from going batty from constant dinging all day.

And then today in the middle of a lovely meandering down Fifth Avenue on the M5, I looked up from my window seat only to see a cord. With a little sign:

Pull
Cord
To
Signal
For
Stop

The Primary Reason We Are A Democracy

"Most people don't vote in the primary," the young candidate observed. "Candidates win with only a small group of people voting."

And yet in a crowded room filled with a medly of New Yorkers, plans were made to change all that, person to person, word to word, handshake to handshake.











previous posts on Reshma Saujani: Stepping out and Then Stepping Into

Reshma Saujani
http://www.reshma2010.com/