More Encore Memories: A River Runs Through It

While Her New York is on the road, a memory about a memory.

Originally posted Sunday, June 1, 2008

Starting at the door and ending up at the back wall the counter swirled like waterways you see on picture maps taken from far away ... like the moon. I sat there for years.

Open twenty-four hours a day, it was my refuge into illusion I belonged to a world outside my door. Today Starbucks and myspace does that for my predecessors. But then, no internet, just real living space offering real living bodies I recognized, a favorite spot where I could write or read or stare out the window hoping "he'd" see me, and come in to renew love (he did several times). That counter kept me going.

The two old ladies (the counter guy called them Jurassic Park) fed me coffee which is all I ever bought and once Zina even patted my hand when, staring at a finished love poem that didn't have a happy ending, I started to cry. At 3am, when I couldn't sleep or after a night of futile socializing was afraid to go back to an empty apartment, I was almost always the rare female there, surrounded by men talking non-stop into a personal darkness from the florescent safety of the formica counter -

*** the 4 foot 9 inches cop who insisted the Thompkin Square Park Riots was the fault of only one or two corrupt cops and the guys at the 5th Street Precinct were straight up and honest

*** the Robert Redford look-alike who loved astrology and whose daughter didn't talk to him and in five minutes you could tell why

*** the unshaven, slightly slovenly, plump "theater-something-or-other" with papers sticking out of his beat up portfolio who talked in ferocious whispers to the Robert Redford look-alike

*** the famous artist who sat and looked for who would be his next subjects in his next famous murals (never me even after 17 years of us facing each other)

*** the short-order cook who announced his marital problems while flipping late night food onto the grill and demanding explanation from the counter guy about why his new bride would get so upset after he locked her out by accident. Again. For the third time. And did any of us think he was trying to tell her something because he didn't think he was HE JUST FORGOT!?

Then the owner's son went to restaurant college, renovation came, light fixtures changed, new murals were put up and the counter was amputated into a brief moment of not worth sitting down. The Jurassic Park ladies insisted it would be the same, hugging me on the street, urging me to come back, and I did, briefly. But it wasn't same. The borscht was served in smaller more expensive bowls, the pierogis became Northern California inventions filled with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes and soon Jurassic Park was gone and in their stead were new waitresses who were young and tight and pretty and impatient to the many new diners who thought they had found an authentic East Village eatery because they were treated so rudely.

And soon after that I recognized only one face in the new Christmas mural - a tiny memorial to an old drinking buddy who died of a heart attack on the corner of 7th and B in 1979.

Sunday Memories Encore: The Corners Of My Mind

While Her New York is on the road, a memory about a memory.

Originally posted Sunday, June 8, 2008

The corner between our buildings and the barrel park had a special secret passage way wide enough for all of us to slip under until one day we were suddenly almost too big. And then shortly after that it was cemented up and we had to walk around to the gate like all the adults.



Before lobby doors were locked and kids were imprisoned inside their apartments for all their play dates, we ran wild from building to building a hide-n-seek game that spanned the entire housing project, almost peed on ourselves giggling as we hid under all the stairs.



And then one day this corner stopped us all when jumping rope B. called "leaders allowed!" and jumped in backwards on a Spay and I followed, not going to let her get the best of me I catapulted myself through the air to jump in on the "J" and when I hit the bricks they all thought I was laughing but the sound didn't stop and people came running from the other end of the courtyard and someone ran up to tell my parents who never ever got interrupted ever about our playing outside unless of course we did something really really wrong like go on the roof or make fun of A. until she cried. Even though Florence thought an ice pack would make my left arm better, finally my father realized it was serious enough not to take the bus but actually take a rare taxi ride to Beth Israel where they put my arm in a sling, and which I quickly slipped out of because I didn't want to ask anyone else to tie my shoes. So the following week they put me in a sling wrapped to my body and I spent the next two months looking like a one-armed lady with a big lopsided tit, being forced by Florence to practice all the right hand parts of my piano lessons, and made to learn cymbals for the stupid student orchestra performance of "Love of Three Oranges" which of course at the big concert I screwed up and just slammed the right cymbal into the left crash crash crash because I didn't know where we were but I knew it was the end and there were many cymbal crashes at the end and Mrs. K the conductor couldn't stop me for all the glaring she did.

Guest Artist: Gabriela - Every Time I Visit Granny

Gabriela lives in the only other city that feels as home as New York.   

Welcome to Her Buenos Aires

Every time I visit Granny, I visit not only her, but her past and all her  memories... when she was young and when I was a little girl.

There's a quote from Pasolini that says that the editing of a person's life (like a movie montage) never happens until that person is dead. Of course, others do that editing.   

So, every time I visit Granny, every story about me, heard a thousand times, changes every final cut of my own self and I find myself doing a tiny rough cut of my life.

I love that moment.  The Past is a big sea where the tide always changes, where pains and fears come up to the surface, but where hidden treasures emerge too.

Yet, like the sea, memory needs to rest so it can continue remembering.  Let the memory rest, let the memory be calm, so I can sail into present seas.  It's in there, when I allow myself to forget, that a feeling of freedom rises, a safe optimism about the future, where anything and everything is possible.


That lets me stay right here, right now, sailing through a sea that I cannot edit, as it transforms itself into the air of this present moment.

Guest Artist: Paula - "My Pinano"

A old Jacob Brothers Piano Upright Grand

Paula had it shipped from her Grandma Emma & Great-Aunt Lee's in Philadelphia to Nassau County and then, finally, to her home in Suffolk County.  

After reading an article in the New York Times about the dumping of pianos into the trash, she sent this picture and some history.  

The Jacob Brothers Piano Company was established in 1878 as a large retailer in New York and Boston.   They described themselves as "one of the most progressive and successful concerns in the piano industry, with several retail stores in the city of New York and in other important cities of the east."   They also stated their pianos and player-pianos "durable instruments, their finish being exceptionally fine and the tone quality satisfying".

There is no mention of Jacob Brothers after about 1955.   And I wonder what shift and change in New York led to their disappearance.

However, Paula's "pinano" is still here.   "It is very damp here", she wrote me, "and it doesn’t stay in tune long but I love it dearly."
 

**

Paula, an old, dear friend is the twinkle in a witty observance and the soft of a breeze.  Born in New York City Sloane Hospital for Women, as it was called then, she lived in the Bronx until she was 12. Then she was dragged away to Nassau County - "very annoyed".  She has repeatedly dazzled and inspired me with emails filled with poems and photos from her life that sing the secret heart of soul, cat or others. 

Sunday Memories: Television, Old School

Someone once told me my sister and I were part of the less than 1% of Americans, born after a certain year, who grew up without a TV.

Even with my sneaking into friends' houses to watch the Addams Family or other forbidden shows broadcasting on days not Friday, the bottom line was that there was so much more to look at in our city life and with way fewer interruptions. 

**

RELATED POSTS:

Sunday Memories - Our Other TV

Sunday Memories: Zing Zing Zing Went My Heartstrings

Sunday Memories: First Love

Message In A Bottle

The Launch Into A New Week

... by nook and by crook and by any way that gets you there...

Sunday Memories Of A Guest Artist: To Love To Be Loved

  Paula and Mr. Ishmael, a.k.a, the baby boy cat

Photo by Shelley Glick

Untitled 

[I know now the beloved]

by  Gregory Orr

I know now the beloved

Has no fixed abode,

That each body

She inhabits

Is only a temporary

Home.

That she

Casts off forms

As eagerly

As lovers shed clothes.

I accept that he's

Just passing through

That flower

Or that stone.

And yet, it makes

Me dizzy-

The way he hides

In the flow of it,

The way she shifts

In fluid motions,

Becoming other things.

I want to stop him-

If only briefly.

I want to lure her

To the surface

And catch her

In this net of words.

**

Paula, an old, dear friend is the twinkle in a witty observance and the soft of a breeze.  She has repeatedly dazzled and inspired me with emails filled with poems and photos from her life that sing the secret heart of soul, cat or others. 

Madeline's Lawn

I thought Madeline lived in a neighborhood somewhere near me.  That's because the ubiquitous fields of ivy covered both our landscapes.   Took me a little while to figure out Paris was not in Brooklyn or above 14th Street.

In later years,  an explosion of potato plants and coleuses and lots of lawn-like patches appeared as the city transformed into a manicured and remodeled visiting destination and/or exclusive enclave.  Or whatever kind of locale needed constant landscaping. 

I didn't realize what I had missed all these years until yesterday, when I opened my eyes and saw a rolling stretch of ivy.  I was back in the soft, cool shade of wishing I could visit Madeline.

Signs Of Times No Longer Welcomed

Photo by Jacques

I saw the sign hanging on the Bellevue psych building iron fence from a moving bus.

I thought under "No Loitering" someone had scrawled "NO HOME". That made sense to me.  You're asking me not to "loiter" but I have no home so what do you want me to do?

This was the kind of picture Jacques (former guest artist) would take.  A Frenchman in New York reinterpreting and rediscovery this city's heart and soul for us all. 

So, I told him where to find the hanging sign, even drawing him a map since I couldn't remember the exact street.

After lunch, Jacques flew into the office on his way to some meeting and said, "I found the picture, but it was not home..."

There in his photo a different story appeared.  Instead of the heartbreak of having no home, it was the never-ending story that sought to crush love and soul and another human being. 

The question that popped into my head about the person who had scrawled that was a question Florence always asked me.

"Don't you have anything better to do?"

**

The work of Jacques is posted from April 24th, 2012 to May 6th, 2012.

Sunday Memories: The Truth And Nothing But...

On Delancey, right next door to Frank's hair salon, there was a little newspaper-candy-cigarette stand.  The  old man owner never really shaved or if he did it was a couple of days ago.

On the visits to Frank's a couple of times a year or returning from the weekly shop at the Essex Street Market, that candy shop beckoned like a mini-Ali Baba's cave, promising magical and spectacular candies.  But the firm rule of no sweets, rare gum and a once-a-week hostess cupcake/ cola at Grammas held.  That, however, didn't stop my six year-old heart from longingly dreaming of having my way with every delight in that shop.

And then one day...

Florence, fresh from a cut, nothing much else - she was one of the rare ladies in the neighborhood who didn't dye or tease - was buying a New York Times or maybe a pack of cigarettes and, in the brief second she looked the other way, my hand zipped up to the window counter and quickly slipped a penny stick of gum into my pocket.

Perhaps I took it out and started chewing it or was admiring it or transferring it to a safer pocket, but somehow Florence saw that stick of gum in my sweaty little palm and, and knowing SHE'D never allow an unauthorized piece of gum onto my daily menu and that I had no obvious means of income to buy anything, demanded to know where I had gotten that piece of gum.

She had taught me never to tell a lie.

I was marched right back to the candy store and there I apologized to the candy story owner and then, shamed but with great reluctance, returned that single stick of penny gum. 

**

RELATED POSTS

Sunday Memories - The Bureau of the Bubble Gum

Sunday Memories - Over the Hills and Through the Woods to Grandmother's House We Go

Sunday Memories: "Candy, Candy, Candy For A Penny" - Another Installment

Sunday Memories - "Not Coney. Coney Island."

A New Year Encore: In Lieu of Flowers...

Encore: "Let the rain kiss you... Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops..." Langston Hughes

Originally post on Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Even the homeless man wheeled his hand truck under the awning. But I threw myself forward hoping the clouds growing dark were lying or at least not telling me the truth for a few more blocks.

...and then it rained and the two old ladies cared tenderly for one another as they prepared to step into the storm.



Their love.  

I cried later after the storm had finished.

Going Up The Country Got To Get Away

I had high school and college friends who lived there, but it was an island of incomprehensible circles that really didn't quite reach 360 degrees, so if I went there, it could have only been a couple of times and I think we needed someone to guide us in.

Then one night in the 80's someone I really shouldn't have been kissing took me there to kiss.  It was the only place in the city where you could go to in the middle of the night and kiss and because nobody was there nobody saw you.  And the mugging risk was only medium-high

After that fiasco ended, I found myself returning during the day and then other nights and then more days and then soon, if I wanted to get away from the city but not suffer a long commute, I came here.  And soon I took friends and family and the people I got to love, not just kiss under cover of darkness.

These days, the fountain is fixed up, there are tons more plants and flowers and birds and dogs.  And sitting in cool night on an old bench, also fixed up or maybe a new bench that was made to just look old, there are tons of people kissing. 

**

RELATED POSTS ABOUT NATURE

Men In Trees

Hope Springs Eternal

Sunday Memories -The Call of Nature

A Car Ride to the Doctor

Sunday Memories: The Stoop

Everyone sat outside during hot summer, air conditioning still only used for special times and fans not as strong as the occasional breeze.

Lining Broome on benches, beat-up lawn chairs facing Grand, covering stoops all over, everthing got watched, everyone got noticed, nothing got missed.

Coming back from someplace not often ventured to from the Lower East Side, maybe a concert or a walk to Chinatown or even 'uptown', we'd walked the normal gamut of sidewalks lined with neighbors and strangers alike.

Now, bars line nearby streets and nobody looks out.  They're looking at TVs or each other or their cell phone, seeing nothing, noticing no one, missing everything.

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?