The Constant Tearing Down

Rostropovich, with a full sweep of his bow, poured out Bach in front of this wall that, before the world's eyes, was being dissolved by hammers and picks and the words of thousands of angry people, fed up with borders that broke or crushed or killed.  Friends told me I stayed glued to the TV, insisting we should all be there to support this moment of history. 

Years later, that wall disappeared into tourist souvenirs pieces, sold at flea markets and fairs and I even bought some as gifts for a few dear friends.  

But it didn't die.  That wall reappeared in other lands and in many hearts.  And the endless efforts  to bring it down happens day after day and night after night, maybe not with hammers and picks, but always with words.

 **

RELATED POSTS:

Brief Peace in Late Night

  

While Everyone Else Was Having A Good Time...

....we wandered empty streets and forgotten alleys, and remembered a city unadorned and unconditionally embracing.

Sunday Memories: What The Stork Brought

 It's hard to see them, but look as closely as you can into that little corner.

It is summer and the babies have hatched.  As they have for the last thirty-six years, maybe even before, like when Bernard Hermann was growing up here dreaming music that could fill a movie screen or even when Sidor Belarsky lived here, his arias soaring up to the high ceilings, like the young sax player who now lives on the 2nd Floor and practices to open windows.

In between the music that fills the building now, it's the cooing and chirping I listen for, especially in summer.

***

RELATED POSTS:

Pets of Our Lives: Part One - Pigeons

Sunday Memories: Part Nine: A View From A Kitchen

Sunday In The Park With Springtime

Home Is Where The Heart Is

Freedom Of Religion

What that light offered him, besides the little bugs flitting around it, was a chance to look up and believe in miracles.


***

RELATED POSTS

God Of My Understanding

In The Still Of The Night The Sound of Silence...

In The Still Of The Night The Sound Of Silence Revisited

In The Still Of The Night

Men In Trees

The street filled with all these happy men throwing up ropes that magically reappeared as a ladder.

I had never seen a tree get climbed.  Not in real life.  Maybe in picture books of kids who didn't look like anyone I knew.  Those picture book trees looked like they had steps and the trees I grew up with were tall and thin and had no steps and they lived behind barriers that said don't walk on the grass and don't touch anything if you accidentally do walk on the grass.

The trees on the block I had lived on for 36 years always reminded me of the socialite ladies in New Yorker cartoons. Tall and elegant and certainly not to be climbed. These big guys just scampered up.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for Asian Beetles."

"Oh."

"We are checking all the trees in New York City."

"All of them?"

"Yeah. We're almost done.  It took five years."

The guys told me the trees I respectfully hadn't climbed for 36 years were called London Plane and the pretty ones that told me spring was here by their pink-white flowers were Ornamental Pear Trees. 

All I could think was what a great job.  What a great, great job.

Sunday Memories: His New York His California His Home - Christmas in July

On one of the last summer nights there,  I took advantage of his distraction by a book of jokes he had read dozens of times.  Quickly opening drawers and closets, pulling out more dirty linens and clothes for yet another load of laundry, an unexpected box festooned with holiday cheer appeared.

There inside were all the bow ties he had worn to work, day in, day out, year after year, being a father, being a husband, being a provider, being an on-time employee, no matter what the heat or the cold or the rage or the loneliness brought.

When I got old enough to know my colors and tall enough to peer into his bureau's drawer, I got to pick out which one he'd wear that day.  I did that until I left home.  And he continued to wear them until that company, after twenty-five years, fired him.

He must of brought these bow ties to California, optimistic and hopeful there would be opportunities to wear them, maybe with joy, maybe in love, maybe toward happiness.

***
Related posts:

It Was His California

Sunday Memories: The First Home

Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Sunday Memories: A Tale Of Two Brothers

His New York His California His Home: Part One

His New York His California His Home: Part Two-"One Step At A Time Dammit"

Sunday Memories: His New York His California His Home-Part Three

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: This Is Why This Is Good

Evolution of The Wheel, East Village Style

Tour Bus

Bible Bus

MTA Bus

East Village Bus

New Media, Old School Style....

a.k.a., how someone came up with the idea of the kindle.

SPECIAL ENCORE FOR A SPECIAL PRIDE DAY: The Lionesses Rule The Pride

Posted while Florence was declining, I was in touch with the woman she had been in love with, involved with and in war with since they were teenagers. Today, with gay marriage now legalized, I wonder what their life would have been like if only the world had loved their love as they had.

**


1982
All the other gay seniors rode. In the convertible, on the bus, in wheelchairs.

But not Florence.

She walked.

She was in her 60s. She had waited her entire life to walk down a street as who she really was. And she wasn't going to give up that walk for anybody or anything.

Sunday Memories: His New York His California His Home-Part Three

It had to have been twenty-five years since all three of us were in the same room.

What unfolded was a living moment of the memory I loved the most, a rare one of childhood being happy, almost like the families I saw in picture books at the library.

It was when the whole family was home at the same time, probably a Sunday afternoon.  Florence would be practicing in the other room, billions of music molecules building her cocoon from family life.

The three of us would gather around the Formica folding and extending kitchen table, before us that special maybe once-a-week but probably more like once-a-month bowl of ice milk and potato chips.

Then Dad would start telling jokes and jokes and jokes, as many as the notes pouring out of Florence's fingers.  And we would laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.  Belly grabbing, tears pouring out of our little girl eyes, nose snorting, almost peeing but refusing to go because no one wanted to break the spell with a bathroom break, full-out laughing.

I wanted those jokes and that ice cream to last forever. Like the magical replenishing bowl I once read in a fairytale, I wanted that fun and joy to never end.

At some point Florence would appear in the kitchen door reminding us it was our turn to practice.

Just a couple of days ago, the crisis of care needing to be brought into this place he now calls home, we sat together briefly, less than two hours.  He may not have remembered who had visited him just that morning or if the physical therapist was coming the next day.  But within minutes of us sitting down, just us three, jokes and jokes and jokes poured out and my sister and I, like little girls, laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

***
Related posts:

It Was His California

Sunday Memories: The First Home

Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Sunday Memories: A Tale Of Two Brothers

His New York His California His Home: Part One

His New York His California His Home: Part Two-"One Step At A Time Dammit"

His New York His California His Home: Part Two - "One Step At A Time Dammit"

After the nine loads of clothes not properly washed in years...

"It's ok, I did this for you and Louise when you were little."

 

 "What do I do now? Do I stand up?"

"Let's go, old man...."

 Old friends, donuts and introducing me three times

 

"What do I do now?  Do I wait for dinner?"

The last conversation of the day: 

"Sweet dreams." 

"Don't take any wooden rhetoric." 

"Thanks, Dad." 

"I'm sorry I'm such a trouble to you." 

"You're not.  You're no trouble at all."

***
Related posts:

It Was His California

Sunday Memories: The First Home

Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Sunday Memories: A Tale Of Two Brothers

His New York His California His Home: Part One

His New York His California His Home: Part One

Once again, chirpy accents that tinkle like fairy bells broadcast news there's been another "episode" of old age winning the battle against a desire to do something simple.  Like, get a glass of water or walk to another room.

California sunshine fills even the dankest of hospital rooms and the pissed off roommate is more polite about how pissed he is than I am with good friends who say something stupid. 

My father keeps saying when, when, when do I go home when are we getting out of here when do we leave and I keep saying soon soon soon soon we're getting out of here soon we're going to leave soon we go home.

But soon is no longer an abstract concept that invites patience. It is only the panic of a memory that doesn't remember itself.

And home now becomes ground that shifts and undulates like an earthquake, making haven a questionable place of uncertainty.


***
Related posts:

It Was His California

Sunday Memories: The First Home

Sunday Memories: A Winter Coat

Sunday Memories: A Tale Of Two Brothers

Sunday Memories: Art Number Three

Millions of brush strokes and thousands of visions over the past seventy years make those hands a museum.

Art Number Two

Do you know Bob Dylan, the kid asked us. This is the stoop he sat on for his album cover.  Would you take my picture? 


 

Art Number One

You're Art, I said. What is the name of your painting?

PS 75, he said.  Make sure you get my hair too.

Sunday Memories: Portrait

Portrait

Jutta says it grew from a Matisse portrait of his wife she pondered at through her now dimmed-eyes.

But I remember hours in her kitchen, an old blue sweater covering a life only a twenty-something kid could survive.

Now it hangs in the Spring Salon at the gallery she, with a whole bunch of other artists, made sure became a home to art.

Diving In...

The Rose Reading Room

For a quiet library room, it's effing noisy.

The big, fat wooden chairs with big, fat armrests scrape across the floor and when you have a room filled with hundreds of people hunched over books and computers and papers and ideas, running to the bathroom, shifting in frustration, giving up, going forward, while sneaking sips of water and stuffing illicit food so a few more hours of work can be accomplished, those chairs are constantly moving.

I used to come here when I was a girl and was running away from home.  This was before computers so all you could do was read a book at the tables that stretched as long as a subway car. 

Now, there's plugs all over the place and wireless and the place is brighter and cleaner than the days I had to run away to remember who I was.   And now I don't have to run away to remember who I am. I just have to find a chair, plug in my computer, hide my illicit water bottle and protein bar from the patrolling guards who insist the library be kept clean and respected....

And then, all I have to do is dive in.

Solitude

The night felt like the nights outside Florence's window.

A street, normally filled with drinking teenagers technically old enough to be in a bar but really unprepared for booze, emptied as rain and mist and fog rolled in.

In this unexpected quiet hidden corners, like the ones I grew up peering into wondering what was really going on down there, emerged.

No one went to Florence's neighborhood unless you lived there.

And, even on a Saturday night all the streets felt wide and quiet.

Sunday Memories: In The Happy Cacophony Of A Visit...

Thirty-six years later,  conversation still bubbled forth, not one corner of the universe that didn't invite colliding curiosity.   So, like explorers launching into uncharted territories, we launched into ideas and thoughts, experiences and questions.

Yet, out of nowhere... it wasn't a constellation.  It was more like billions of threads weaving together a tapestry from long ago, and in between words and private thoughts those days reappeared.  Our conversation was the only thing we had left of the L&M diner on the corner of 10th and Second...

...the one where they took their then itty-bitty daughter every Sunday, so much so that when her aunt took her once, the daughter knew exactly what and how to order...

...the one where I, with a 17 year old's knowledge of cooking and the sudden care of an adult life, new to this apartment, that painting on that wall then, retreated daily to the diner's counter and ordered lunch and then again later in the day dinner specials, asking for family and home served in a plate and watching the owner and cook's strong burly arms place food down before me, his faded blue number tattoo dancing before me as we both sought solace.

A Slight Summer Fun Delay of Sunday Memories

Due to a lovely night filled with memories, Sunday Memories will be posted a bit late on Sunday.


Meanwhile, enjoy the new summer look of Jupiter. 

Some say poodle, but we say lion.

Elisabeth's World

It may be a different vista than the one Andrew Wyeth's Christina looked upon.

But Elisabeth's gaze, looking back or looking forward, is the same.  A uncertain wonderment at a landscape that could become many things.

Will the hotel buy the building or will the lease be renewed?  Will the block stay a working block of mom and pops or become another obituary in a vanishing New York? Will the studio survive or will it become another casualty to the diaspora of artists leaving for kinder land?

Will, for just a little bit longer, this stairway still lead us with uncertain wonderment to a landscape that could become many things?

Unconditional Love. Unconditional Everything.

This guy I once dated said libraries were for poor people.  I should have broken up with him then, but fear of loneliness can make one quite stupid.  If only I had gone then to the library and taken out books on self-esteem....

The library was where Florence took us instead of synagogue or church.  It was as cherished as Town Hall or Carnegie.  It was as sacred as the Met Museum.  It was as intimate as home.  

The library was a haven from chaos and a secret passageway to knowing stuff stupid people didn't want us to know.  I learned about where babies came from and where Nazis went to (not on the same day, though).  I listened to music I had to hear but couldn't afford.  And each time I took out a book, I felt like it was Christmas, Chanukah and my birthday all rolled up in one.  I still feel that way.

These days trundling down to my neighborhood library or the one uptown, I see the 95 year old former Rocket still doing high kicks to the check-out guys and then scooping up her weekly stash of books.

I see neighbors from next door and from down the street picking up movies for the weekend.

I see tons of babies and little kids bursting like fireworks because they are headed into story-hour.

I see people who can't afford laptops have access to the world.

I see the elderly have company and a place to go to read the day's paper.

And when I can't bear another wall to my own words, I see a quiet, safe space where I can keep writing.

I see my city, my life and my home.

The library has made sure democracy is for all of us, not just those who can afford an education, a laptop, or literacy.  And yet, a proposed $43 million budget cut is being introduced that would decimate what is already a beleaguered institution.

Click here and fight back. Fight back against stupidity and short-sightedness.  Click here and fight for a world where, no matter how much you have in your pocket, you are entitled to knowledge.

Sunday Memories: The Arrival of Summer From Sears & Roebuck's

I really couldn't tell time for... well ...  like a really long time.  

So, to marked the passing of what I couldn't read, I did like plants do or what my cat does now -- by time, by light, by sound, by wind and, in my case, by the leaves on the trees in Sheriff Park.

As the trees got greener and the smells in the air weren't of radiators and cold, wet wool, I knew, just knew there would be a knock on the door and our version of Santa Claus, the United States Postal Delivery Man would appear with the holy grail of wonderfulness - a Sears & Roebuck box.

And without fail, at the very last possible second of the very last possible day that demanded I wear a sweater and my sturdy, once-a-year oxfords from Kaplan's on Clinton Street, that knock would come.

Behold. Summer and my Sneakers had arrived.


***
Additional postings:

Florence's sneakers walk the talk


Home and the love between Jupiter and Rags (r.i.p)

Another Visit From Another Her New York

Ilona

The Face Beneath The Hat

By Chelsea Dreher

Before an unhappy marriage

Before a baby and two lost

Before a holocaust that would

Erase all hope

Ilona had possibilities.

New York had 34th Street

Ilona had her studio 

Forgotten places

Misplaced people

Tragedy in faded photos

An old woman

Wrapped in a blanket

Holds a piece of cardboard

"Heartbreak-Please Give"

***

Ilona came to New York from Hungary in the late twenties.  As soon as she saw the city from the boat, she wanted to go back to the vineyards and mountains.  She lived in Harlem with her brother, Herman and made paper flowers on the Lower East Side for $4 a week.  This led to a career as a designer with a business card. Heady stuff for an immigrant single lady.  Famous hat makers used her handmade flowers on hats and gowns. She was my mother. 

She married, gave up her 34th Street studio and had me. Our little family moved to the Bronx where there were parks.   I moved to the Village when I was seventeen.

-- Chelsea Dreher

Rain Encore: ... and Dancing in the Rain

Originally posted Thursday, July 30, 2009

 
It wasn't that I had forgotten.  It's just that I hadn't had to remember. But there she was, a little girl jumping and giggling and running and shouting in Wednesday's downpour.

When I was young and it poured humongous cats and dogs, Florence would send me out in maybe rain boots, maybe sneakers to play in the storm.  I'd race around the empty courtchyard and jump and dance and skip and stick my face up into thunder and wind.

As of her decline deepened, the months and months and months turned into years and years, and to pass the time we would watch Singing In The Rain over and over and over again.  The blessing of dementia allowed it to be an exciting revisit, one she didn't realize had just happened the week before.

Today, quickly snapping a picture as I futilely raced against getting soaked and miserably wet, I wondered if her quirky idea of playtime came from that passionate dance Gene Kelly did when he realized he was in love.

Sunday Memories: The Long Road

In memory of Maura who walks the long road a little bit ahead of us.

We all walk the long road
I cannot stay
There's no need to say goodbye

Oh, the friends and family...
All the memories going round
Round, round round...

I have wished for so long...
How I wished for you today

And the wind keeps rollin'
And the sky keeps turning grey
And the sun is setting
The sun will rise another day

I have wished for so long...
How I wish for you today

I have wished for so long...
How I wish for you today
Will I walk the long road?
We all walk the long road

Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Special Announcement! A New Blog From Argentina

Gaby, a wonderful photographer and writer who works in television in Buenos Aires recently came to New York for a visit.

There's something exciting and expanding when a visitor observes the intimacy of one's home.  Her postings of her trip can be seen here.  This new blog, La Piel de Las Cosas, will also explore her own wonderful city, the only place I'd live outside of New York, allowing us to see her Buenos Aires and other glimpses of home.

The Sudden Delight Of Finding Something New

The windows in the county clerk were high up and big and dirty and they looked out onto a little street I had never seen before.

The little street was filled with trees and a couple of big statues and no cars and on the other side were big windows on a hallway in a big building. The people walking from one window to another made it look like moving postcards.   Chunks of square rocks lined the side by the big windows.

In a corner of the little street, an older lady did Tai Chi by her shopping bags, then put her baseball hat back on, picked up her bags and made a cell phone call. A couple leaned on the base of a statue and filled out paperwork while giving touches that only a couple together for a while gave - the fixing of a collar, the patting of a hand, the leaning in of heads over mundane information.

Birds flew in and out of branches.

Where was this place?

Once released from the clerk's office, I ran around the building looking for it.  There it was, hidden from the main street, this small stretch of Pearl Street and those chunks of rocks weren't just rocks.  They were four fountains. 

Monday's Door To New Ways In All The Old Familiar Places

Sunday Memories In The Park With Mom

Sheriff Street Park

Until Florence got sick, I hadn't been back to the playground since kid-ness.

It was now renovated.  They had torn down the kindergarten building that had the public bathrooms we used during our kindergarten bathroom breaks, and put up a jungle gym instead.  The baby swings were still there and so was the sprinkler, which, when I was little, had been my idea of heaven.

But the sandbox was no longer there because sand had been deemed unsanitary. The big swings were gone because they had been deemed too dangerous (and judging from a small scar on my chin, perhaps they were).  And the Men's Park was still empty.

However, the Bridge still loomed above the playground.  That constant song of train and car was the same as it always had been, from the very beginning of me playing there, sometimes by myself, sometimes with other kids, and when it was summer, sometimes in the summer camp program.  Florence, five stories up, practicing, always a shout away if it was time for me to come up or if I had a question, like could I play outside a little bit longer.  That Bridge never left even when I went off to discovered Washington Square Park.

When I moved "uptown", I would pass the playground, year after year, decade after decade, on my way to visit Florence or a friend sitting shiva or a rare reunion with friends still on Grand Street.  But I don't recall ever entering it. 

Then Florence got sick.  Almost over night, she no longer could rush through her city and her life as ferociously as blood rushed through a body.  Suddenly days were filled with constant care.

So our big excursion, outside of making it to the car service waiting on the corner, became a trek to one of the park benches that faced the sprinkler and was practically under the Bridge.  We'd sit there for what felt like hours, but probably wasn't and listen to the only thing that hadn't changed, that song of train and car.

And then, Florence, with growing awareness that this was it for her day, her life, would ask to go home before she had to admit how heartbroken she was that the playground was now the limits of her world.

In Case Of Emergency...

The test took the time it took and by the time it was over, it was time for lunch.

So me and the Mariner headed to our version of hospital food.  Surrounded by every language in the book - Brooklyn, Long Island, French - we ate and kibbitz with the "maitre d'" (which I don't know how to say in Yiddish) and by the time the Mariner got back from the bathroom, said Maitre and me had found out we grew up down the street from one another and his friend still lived in the Quartchyard.

"Too Late To Stop Now"*

At his 70th birthday party, his wife-friend-comrade-in-arms, in her homage to Miles, sang his praises in a few perfect words that dropped pearls onto a single strand, and his daughter bantered back and forth with him on the merits of bands and musicians that only a few would know unless you were in the know and they were.

And the rest of us heralded his passion, the sound and the fury that insisted on music being understood as a pillar of our hearts and souls and thus our world, a passion that included everyone, be it neighbor or sibling, be it colleague or friend, or be it a kid from a small town writing to him decades before email and online and internet and click, requesting a copy of his top picks of the year and enclosing a dollar for the xerox, only to have a copy made and the dollar returned because in Bob's world everyone was welcomed to the table.


*from Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic" and what was written on the birthday cake

Guest Artist: Jacques - Sunday Memories In The Making - Williamsburg

A series of photographs and favorite poems from Jacques, a Frenchman who wanders through Her New York, capturing little mysteries and secret corners.

If you go far enough out
you can see the Universe itself,
all the billion light years summed up time
only as a flash, just as lonely, as distant
as a star on a June night
if you go far enough out.

And still, my friend, if you go far enough out
you are only at the beginning

— of yourself.

Rolf Jacobsen, "Breathing Exercise"

***
No photograph may be used without permission from Jacques. Please contact my private coney for more information.

Guest Artist: Jacques - Park Avenue

A series of photographs and favorite poems from Jacques, a Frenchman who wanders through Her New York, capturing little mysteries and secret corners.

You sit here now on the hard chair and think about these things and you don't know whether you are happy or sad. And you wonder if you'll ever think some day about now, and if then everything happening now will be nice to think about.

Alvin Levin, "Love is Like Park Avenue"

***
No photograph may be used without permission from Jacques. Please contact my private coney for more information.

Guest Artist: Jacques - Tribeca

A series of photographs and favorite poems from Jacques, a Frenchman who wanders through Her New York, capturing little mysteries and secret corners.

"Hi Friends
I am looking for a nice lady to be my wife!
I'm single
Never married
And I have no kids
Call Robert"

***

No photograph may be used without permission from Jacques. Please contact my private coney for more information.

Guest Artist: Jacques - Sunday Memories - Now And Then....

A series of photographs and favorite poems from Jacques, a Frenchman who wanders through Her New York, capturing little mysteries and secret corners.

The corner of 127th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue

2004

Just the other morning

***
No photograph may be used without permission from Jacques. Please contact my private coney for more information.

Guest Artist: Jacques - Subway #2

A series of photographs and favorite poems from Jacques, a Frenchman who wanders through Her New York, capturing little mysteries and secret corners.

Ce que les hommes nomment amour
Est bien petit, bien restreint et bien faible,
Comparé à cette ineffable orgie,
À cette sainte prostitution de l’âme qui se donne tout entière,
Poésie et charité, à l'imprévu qui se montre,
À l'inconnu qui passe.

Charles Baudelaire, "Les Foules"

"What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes."

Charles Baudelaire, “Crowd” (translated by William A. Sigler)

***

No photograph may be used without permission from Jacques. Please contact my private coney for more information.