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

Now, Today, These Days: The hallway leading to the roach apartment where Sophie kept her last years has been repainted.



Then, Before, In Those Days: We visited once a week. Friday nights. Take the Madison Street bus to Market Street. Or walk down East Broadway. And when I got older, ride the old Raleigh 3 speed.

Then, Before, In Those Days: Press 9 and the elevator would take me and my sister up to the only time of the week we got to drink a C&C coke, eat a hostess cupcake and watch the TV. Slam the elevator door open, run as fast as we could to the next to the last door, the next to the last door down the really long hallway banging the old knocker bang bang bang GRAMMMA!!!!



And at the end of the night sometimes being picked up by Florence and our father, a meandering walk home where we tortured Florence with questions about why she couldn't walk in a straight line, or what happened to her eye, or how come she had no hair on her legs. Or I would hold my father's hand and ask why do we die and do I have to marry a Jewish man.

Then, Before, In Those Days: But other nights just me and my sister maybe I'm 8 maybe she's 12, walking home at 10pm along East Broadway



me asking and asking and asking every questions I had about Star Trek and Captain Kirk asking because I knew she was the smartest person in the world and would know the answer to what I didn't understand about that episode that week.

Blog With A View

At the end of us all being a family she moved into our childhood bedroom and never left.

Now when I sit beside her I see what I looked at for hours before I learned to talk and what I looked at after I learned to say nothing.

The Real Joy That Day

They shut down 8th Avenue because a second guy climbed the Times Building. Just like when we were kids, watching an accident or a fire, we all hung out smack in the middle of the street watching the flashing lights, playing with one another and reenacting the news we were going to watch later.

Sunday Memories - Like the Corners of My Mind

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.

An Untitled Day - Part II

Lunch is done.

I pull out the new walker Medicaid has gotten us.  None of us are strong enough to hold her up anymore. Especially when she does that I-gotta-sit-down-on-the-floor/sidewalk/doctor’s office/stairwell/lobby thing.

That walker is our safety net. It has a chair and it can hold her weight on its arms better than me or Penny or Gabriella.  Beats calling 911 or the Maintenance Guys to pick her up.

Florence does not see it that way.  She hates that walker like I hated the violin.  And she is seriously pissed off about having to use it.  So I sell it like the masterful liar I’ve become.  If she uses the walker, she’ll get strong again and can then tell me, Penny and Gabriella to go to hell and live by herself again and go to dances with lots of girls ready to foxtrot with her and run up and down Sixth Avenue eating whatever fast food she wants.

With that in mind she grabs the handles and starts shoving herself through space. I shout things at her like You're Doing Great and Let's Go You're Strong Go Florence.

She's as bad a driver as me and neither of us can get the walker through one doorway and into another without banging into walls, the desk, bookcases and every chair in the apartment.

At some point we all give up.  Florences settles into the big chair in front of the TV. I put on THE PARENT TRAP with Lindsey Lohan because I don't have anything left inside to watch SINGING IN THE RAIN for the thirtieth time I just don't. There's nothing left inside.

THE PARENT TRAP is a miserable movie for both of us. She can't follow it because there is no music to take her through a familiar story.  I wince at the bad writing and crude acting, but marvel at the young Lohan and answer Florence's repeated questions about the title the plot the actors the title the plot the actors the title the plot and soon it's over ...

...and I surrender and put on SINGING IN THE RAIN and Florence sings furiously along, each and every note and soon to hell with Gene Kelly wherever he is in the song.  She motions me to join in and I sing along with her "... in the rain, what a glorious feeling..."

"YOU'RE NOT SINGING IT IN TUNE!" she yells.

An Untitled Day

It’s Sunday and I’ve arrived with my usual bags of food from various eating joints.  Penny has successfully cleaned Florence up and gotten her to the kitchen table.

The Jonathan Schwartz show is on and Sinatra pours out of the old kitchen table radio.  Florence sings along furiously along and at some point, to hell with Sinatra wherever he is at in the song, she is in the middle of her own rendition.  She motions me to join in and I sing along with her as I dish food onto her plate.

"I am singing every note in tune! You don't sing in tune!" Florence yells at me.

I don't bother to argue with her that she is in a different key than the radio. Like most recent experiences it doesn't matter what I do. Today all that matters is that Florence needs me to be someone incapable of singing as well as she does, keys be damned. It's the highlight of her week.

Coleslaw shakes precariously on her fork. I hover with a napkin. Florence hates everything she eats, save the coleslaw. That she'll eat without telling me how awful it tastes.

I cut another piece of meatloaf. Hand it to her. Do the mommy thing of "Just one bite come on you need to eat some more..."

She bites. "This is terrible."

It's the third sandwich I've tried on her this week. Nothing works. “How can I make it better?"

"Make the food taste good again."

I stare at all the pills I've poured into little neat daily piles. The drugs keeping her alive are killing her life.

The Up Side of Gentrification

this


and this



and then this



because lemme tell you we never saw this shit when I was growing up...and I'm including that fake green grass too...

Sunday Memories - River Runs Through It

The internet hadn’t been invented yet.  So, at 3am when I couldn't sleep or after a night of futile socializing and too depressed to go back to an empty apartment,  I came here: an all-night diner with a counter that swirled like a river you see in pictures taken from far, far away ... like the moon.

My favorite spot at that beat-up counter faced Second Avenue.  Sat there for years - staring out the window hoping "he'd" see me and come in to renew love (“he” did several times) or writing all the stories I knew could change the world if only someone would read them.

The two old counter ladies - called Jurassic Park behind their back by all the dishwashers -  fed me coffee, which was all I could afford  in those days (except for an occasional splurge on borscht).  And once, when I started to cry at a finished love poem that didn’t have a happy ending, the red-head one even patted my hand and got me a free refill.

Besides the Jurassic Park ladies, I was almost always the rare female there, surrounded by men also sitting in their favorite spots and talking themselves non-stop out of their own darkness.

*** the 4 foot 9 inches cop who insisted the Thompkin Square Park Riots was the fault of only one or two corrupt cops because he knew all the guys at the precinct and they 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 understood 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 short-order cook who broadcasted his marital problems while flipping late night food on the grill and demanding explanation from the cashier about why his new bride should 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!?

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

Night after night all of us floating on this old counter…and when the streets took a breather from muggings and other assorted crap, we all (quickly) wandered home.

Then the owner's grandson went to restaurant college.

And shortly after, light fixtures got changed, new murals went up, walls came down and the counter was amputated into a brief moment of no-view-not-worth-sitting-down.  All the regulars regularly peeked into the new place as it slowly filled up with folk we didn’t recognize.

One day I ran into the Jurassic Park ladies by the Polish Meat Market.  Hugging me, they kept insisting it was the same and urged me to come back.  So I did.

But it wasn't the same.

The borscht came in small expensive bowls, the pierogis changed into Northern California inventions filled with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes and soon the Jurassic Park ladies were 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 being treated so rudely.

And soon after that, splurging on a more-expensive bowl of borscht, I recognized only one face in the new mural the famous artists did for the reopening - a tiny memorial to an old drinking buddy who died of a heart attack on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B in 1979.

There is no picture for this kind of sound.

The scream from the office down the hall filled us like a tsunami of words strung together painting horror a son a son a son found dead.

We all ran through fluorescent light down the linoleum hallway to grab hold tight the body trying to push her way into another reality where the voice snapping from her cell phone was making a big mistake a big mistake calling the wrong number someone else with the same name and same son but not her not hers.

Waiting

Until the lease runs out and they're evicted so that a fancy something-or-other can move in, it's a thin, narrow bare bones waiting room that, past a crammed nurses-bill paying-file-getting corner, trickles into a small labyrinth of tiny rooms where patients pee into cups, bleed into tubes and whisper common complaints.

The old Italian lady, one tooth on the bottom, hobbles out of the trickle into the waiting room, her Dominican home attendant behind her. The Italian lady is from the old neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore. You can tell from her accent. And the comfortable way she bosses the home attendant around like she was a baby chicklet needing protection and guidance. "Sit here, no, not there, here, put the bag there..."

They get settled. W, a young Black man sits down. The Italian lady knows him from the waiting room and starts telling him about her current situation.

"I'm waiting for the ambulance, don't feel well. We're going to St. Vincent's."

The home attendant slips into a nap.

W nods concerned. The Italian lady continues.

"Since Easter."

W asks, "Did you have Easter Dinner?"

"Yeah. With Rosie. It's good company."

A tall White guy walks in. There are no more chairs. The nurse calls my name, asks, "You ready?"

The White guy looks at my chair, says. "You're on."

I gather up all my stuff, but not neatly. "I'm ready."

Sunday Memories - Breaking Braking

There are things you just can’t take back and as it pours out of you, your wails of NO don't reverse the seconds it took to make a decision...

... that night in 1993 to throw that shoe across the room, sobbing mad at the suicidal prison built from family misery but then watching the shoe shatter the only present you loved from your father a ceramic owl penny bank, a gift of beauty and care and poetry from a far away country bought at Macy's in 1967 a rare expression of his delight in you being his little girl your sobbing now howls trying to make time run backwards so that maybe like in the movies the owl would rise up from tiny pieces and bloom back into whole, you’d throw the shoe to another part of the room you promised…

... or that day in 1972 seconds after your friend got you to stop looking out the window of the front car of the F train, the decision that woman made, the train brakes screaming and her screaming the two of them screaming like an orchestra blasting the final notes of a really big symphony, did she as she watched herself unfurl her body into the tracks wish suddenly desperately her cries would become the wind that turns back time and brings her safely to the platform and another decision?

V.'s Last Day Here

15 years Dictaphone Operator
11 years Regular Secretary
2 years Legal Secretary
6 years Medical Secretary



Going to Disneyland and then the Price is Right in California, Oprah in Chicago and Rachel Ray back in New York. Want to see what these TV shows are all about.

And after that, the college is right down the block. Learn PowerPoint and Excel. Mostly Excel. Get another job.

keeping kosher, eating babe

...and the swine... he is unclean unto you - Leviticus

It wasn't that we had to wear skirts during the High Holy Days even if we were on our way to music school and it was Shabbos to boot. For a brief time it was the special every-once-in-a-while treat of crispy bacon - the whole package - all mine that Florence would make me never on a Saturday, but always on a Sunday with the windows open. I loved it more than the once a week Hostess cupcake I got to have at my gramma's house.

"Hoy Hong makes the best pork buns in the city," my father would announce as we walked on Mott toward another once-in-a-while treat. I never questioned him how he knew that. He was all knowing and he knew Hoy Hong made the best pork buns. A steamed white cloud with something delectable inside. Almost like a Christmas present.

Stuffed into a paper wine bottle bag and dragged to JHS 56 on Henry Street a reluctant lunch was much too often a ham sandwich on dry Arnold white bread with an unappetizing apple lurking about for dessert, but I looked longingly at my classmates' exotic and (to me) rich people's food of peanut and jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread and extra stuff like pudding and cake and things that came already made from the supermarket. And soon after that I moved to a place where chocolate donuts were the norm and I got to eat as many peanut and jelly sandwiches as I wanted and soon after that I got a job and could order anything at any place I wanted.

But when the movie BABE came out and confirmed that pigs were smarter than dogs, all I wanted after watching it was bacon and sausage and then even more bacon.

Sunday Memories - I Shot The Sheriff But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy

It was a bad week, that week in 1965. In a rare moment of having the brief upper hand I had taken my sister's head and banged it quite hard against the baseboard of our sturdy couch. I was six. She was nine and a half. In a hour she was in bed crying differently than ever before and in a week she was in Beth Israel Hospital with spinal meningitis.

I knew it was my fault. I believe I tried to tell my parents that in fact I was the cause of my sister being at death's door with thousands of needles stuck in her spine. But Florence and our father, being destroyed human beings incapable of experiencing any more trauma than what they carried in their bones and souls and hearts let alone hear the anguished fears of a little kid may not have understood what I was trying to say.

During this time, an amazing invention heralding great luxury entered our home facing the Williamsburg Bridge. A dimmer for the living room "chandelier." It was not the ordinary light switch that went on for the piano students from the neighborhood and off when we were not in the room. It, like silk gowns in the movies we watched, ushered in light with elegance and grace.

I was given strict instructions by my father to never touch it. However, in a not so rare moment of refusing to follow orders I stood before that new knob one evening and decided to know the power of the dimming. My sister in the hospital, my father somewhere in the mysterious travel between work and home, and my mother, oddly enough, not in the living room at her piano, a place she spent more time in than in the embrace of anyone who loved her. I was alone and I was ready to go on tippy toes to fulfill my mission and satisfy my desire.

I gently turns the knob and the lights glowed. I gently turned it back and they faded and turned again and they glowed. It was better than music. It was magic and I glowed them again and then suddenly the room went black. Frozen in terror, I looked at the living room light. Not working. Then beyond the light, out the window, I saw worse. The bridge and the entire Lower East Side had gone black as well.

Florence came stomping back from where ever she had been and went to the building's hallway. Neighbors' voices filled the stairs. There were no lights anywhere and with this being November, our entire world became very, very quickly very, very dark. The horrifying truth faced me. My act of disobeying my father had broken the lights of New York City.

All the Shabbas candles came pouring out of all the apartments and lit the stair banisters into a magic fairyland, my father found his way home from some darken subway station or did he walk over the bridge that night? I can't remember. All I remember was being so scared of the dark, I clutched Florence's skirt and refused to let go until, needing to pee, she refused to let me into the bathroom with her. So I stood outside the bathroom door, in the pitch black, and slowly died inside from the knowledge that this was the fate of a destroyer - unloved and in the dark.

The next day or so my parents and I walked up to 15th Street and 2nd Avenue and waved up to my sister on the 9th or 17th floor of the hospital. She merrily waved back. Beth Israel had its own generator and she had been spared the dark.

Of course it was just a bunch of rats in some power station somewhere, my sister returned home well enough to continue being my sister, and nine months later a whole bunch of babies appeared on the street. And years after that I understood that my dimming and glowing the lights was just bad timing on my part and made for a great dinner story to friends who didn't grow up in New York City and were easily impressed.

But a few years after that, the internet was invented and someone introduced me to Google. The first thing I looked up was causes of spinal meningitis. And there, in very clear language, after bacterial and viral, were these words: "a traumatic injury to the head or spine."

stupid hope in stupid cement

Every corner, every block like being run over back and forth by a truck made with 32 years in this neighborhood of heartbreak and brilliantly stupid hope here is where he kissed me there is where she cursed at me here is where I ran away there is where we argued here is where I wept there is where I thought things were going to get better here is where in 1976 I bought the cheap high heels with borrowed money from Florence so I could look for office work because X. had just gotten stabbed to death and I didn't think I could go back to babysitting or bike messengering just needed a place to sit during the day and was willing to do it in nice clothes today trudging back from yet another attempt at brilliant stupid hope and hating each and every moment of cement.

What We Did On Our Night Off

The fake purple flowers, the soft gray tones, the rose accents pillows, the comfortable couches, a lovely meeting room, big flat screens, expensive stackable chairs, the best fluorescent lights money and funding can buy…

It's the Alzheimer Chapter's Tuesday night “How to Bath your Batty Mother-Father-Husband-Wife-Aunt-Sister” workshop!  How to bath them without them freaking out, screaming, crying, wailing and punching the shit out of you.

The workshop facilitators start the workshop with a video. I never saw anyone like my mother before but here she is, appearing as a frightened and bewildered ancient skinny bald white guy with boney sticks for legs, a not-as-ancient-but-pretty old Black woman who is very Christian judging from the prayers she is crying out, a middle-aged plump, blond with a southern accent clutching a dolly begging to be left alone…

I see and hear Florence in their crying and screaming and flying fists and shouted fears, yelling they are being hurt and it’s cold and it’s wet and they don’t want to fall and…

I look around. The room is packed with lots of people who suddenly finds themselves not in the relationship they started out in years before.  The faces are fierce and tired and the questions loaded and desperate.

**She took him on an expensive cruise he wouldn't shave should she try to shave him?

**Why did he stop playing the piano?

**He lies about bathing but won't let anyone in the bathroom with him.

**She is hiding soiled underwear and…

We are all clutching the remnants of someone as they slip out of our grasp and begin a plummet into insanity that only comes when something inside the head starts eating the brain for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"Lower your standards," the facilitators tell us.

Florence, once crisp in her chic pants she got for $2 at the flea market at Coney Island, a bit of silk flare around her neck, a jaunty man's jacket that made Hepburn look dull, her old Stride-Rite snappy heels… now in diapers and cheap $10 sweatpants that pill after only one wash.

 I turn to the wall and bury myself in my workshop notes so no one sees me cry.

After tonight there will be no more baths. The baby wipes will do just fine.

Sunday Memories -Return To The Promised Land

There was a cat clock that wagged its tail and rolled its eyes to each ticking second. Very exotic compared to our bare-bones kitchen clock.  The almost leather seats were burgundy-something. The so-called carpet was dusty and the lights were, of course, florescent. Only uptown stores where rich people shopped had real lights.

Kaplan's Shoes - on Clinton between Rivington and Stanton.

We went there for our once-a-year-(ugly)-pair-of-oxfords that wouldn't become hip and fashionable for another twenty years. In the interim, the meaner girls at P.S. 110 in their white go-go boots called me "baby shoes" which is devastating if you're only 8 and suddenly in the 4th grade with the bigger kids.

Florence's rule was whatever ugly oxford you picked at Kaplan's you had to wear out of the store. This showed commitment to the shoe you'd be with all year. And, since that and the sneakers from Sears & Roebucks were the only things we bought new, you had to really know if the shoe fit.

The pressure was tough. But those ugly oxfords were made so good and Mr. Kaplan's measurements were so precise, somehow everything worked out.  Except for the part of looking like a dork from a-turn-of-the-century picture by Jacob Reis.

I spend the next forty years wearing shit that looks hot while avoiding any shoes stores that sold anything that was comfortable and good for your feet.

But there is a God and She does wear lots of shoes because ugly came back into style and was even hipper than hip, especially if the jeans were tight.  It was perfect timing. My feet were old and unhappy.  It was time to find a place where the oxfords were made so good and the measurements were so precise.

And when I walked into the dusty shoe store on 39th Street, it was just like being back home.

My Mama Done Told Me

Florence is refusing to do much but lie in bed.

I say, "Fine. You don't want to get out of bed, then go lay down and die."

She yells, "Lie down! Lie down!"

I say, "You can't get out of bed, but you can still correct my grammar?"

She yells, "Yes! It matters!"

I yell, "THEN GET OUT OF BED!"

She doesn't.

The Jonathan Schwartz show starts.

We settle in to listen.

I look at her butchered hair. That's because the week before I took the household scissors and chopped off big chunks of it. I did that because it was a huge halo of wildness, so thick and silver sparkling. Now it was a huge halo of wildness that got caught in a buzz saw.

Sinatra comes on. She sings along.

"My mama done told me... a woman is two faced... cry in the night..."

Knowing something of her dating history, I ask her if that's true.

She says, "I didn't make it up. That's what's written.

I start laughing. She asks why.

"You're singing with heart.”

Shrugs, "I'm just trying to get the words."

And then she - who broke many hearts of many old girls and garnered many angry love letters and hurtful looks across crowded dances put on by the local gay senior citizen group - she looks up and asks, "Is it true? A woman is two faced?"

Kindred Spirit

This is how I feel about shoes.

Sunday Memories-Grand Street: Aladdin's Cave

Right past the ice cream sign. In a corner nobody can see in the new luncheonette now painted nice and white and cheerful. A splotch of brown.

That's what's left of the first luncheonette. Brown walls and moldings and red-brown stools...Aladdin's Cave, safe and dark, a passage way in to something rare and beautiful and dazzling.

We were allowed ice cream sodas once a year, sometimes twice if we performed at some big music school concert. But for the most part, once a year. Last day of school an ice cream soda. A celebration of surviving earnest young teachers with ideals and bitter old ones with rage and rulers, quizzes I could never study for, school projects I attempted to finish last minute in a midnight bathroom, classmates with newer clothes and meaner dispositions, and tougher kids in other classes really pissed off about things none of us ever decided for them but somehow ended up being responsible for.

I don't remember who was behind the counter or what flavors I picked. Or why it was an ice cream soda, not a sundae or even just a dish. Perhaps it was the lack of daily sodas in our lives. And a sundae was as foreign to my parents as the Episcopal church. I don't even remember liking my yearly soda or not. I just remembered entering, entering that soft safe brown and visiting briefly a place of utter beautiful dazzling, rare richness.