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

In Lieu of Flowers... was originally posted on October 1, 2008 as an obituary for Florence who had died the previous morning. Since Rosh Hoshanah appears in the English calendar differently each year, she in death has become as unpredicable as she was in life. Wouldn't have it any other way.

In Lieu of Flowers...



Tell the truth.

Tell yourself the truth.

Don't let your bullshit compromise either of the above.

Don't lie. Unless you're drunk. Then really don't lie.

Don't steal.

Accept hand-me-downs.

Look fabulous in your own clothes. They may have started out as hand-me-downs but they're yours now. Proudly recount their lineage. Never feel ashamed about that.

Never take a taxi.

Walk everywhere.

Don't wear a coat in winter.

Carry your own weight to the point of pathology. Better to err on independence than not.

Refuse to lose at the hands of cowardliness, mediocrity, stupidity, and the need to blend in.

Suffer aloneness at the risk of fitting in with any of the above.

Refuse to feel fear. If you do, ignore it and keep going. Just like Florence did that night during a World War II blackout under the Manhattan Bridge by the movie theater (now a Chinese market).

Always put your work first.
Always do your work.
Always put your work first.
Always do your work.

Rage against the Machine. Even when it looks like it's related to you.

Risk being laughed at by morons when you do something no one else is doing. Just like when Florence put on those roller skates in 1972 and skated up and down Grand Street and all those people laughed at her and then a couple of years every one had disco skates.

Start your entire life over at 60 like you were a 14 year old. Because on some level, you still are.

Fight back just like Florence did all the times someone mugged her or tried to mug her during the 1970's.

Don't EVER quit.

Know that that beer, that sandwich, those shoes, that jacket, those pants, that avenue, that movie house, that proper grammar, that street, that bar, that woman, that dance, that etude, that sonata, that scale, that subway, that bus, that hotdog, that boardwalk, that beach, that ocean is Your New York.

It Was Hers.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Why I Still Write

I still write because I am inspired and fired up by Ela Thier's workshops (I've taken several and each time my work gets better and better and better).

Otherwise, the joy from knowing how to build a story would have withered away from lack of knowledge.

If you want to attend a FREE evening workshop, then see below:


FROM ELA THIER:

How do you structure a story while enjoying the creative process and allowing for fresh surprises? Ela Thier's unique approach to writing joins craft and structure with inspiration. Forget plot points and page numbers. Regardless of your level of experience, in the course of this evening you'll unleash a creative flow and gain new insights into the craft that will ease and improve your writing life for years to come.

TIME:
Thursday, September 9
7:00-9:30

Doors open at 6:30
*No late-comer admitted past 7:15

PLACE:
University Settlement Community Center
184 Eldridge St, Manhattan, NY

Reservations are required.

Summer Vacation Encores: Former Posts With Florence-Part III

My Private Coney is on a brief summer vacation.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Sweet Spot: More Snapshots from Deep Waters



You curve yourself onto that soft edge between your back and your belly, and like paint from a Matisse brush pouring into a reclining woman you glide on the sweet spot toward home, home being the other side of the pool. Or maybe a place that only looks like the middle of the bed but is just the beginning to some place buried in her heart where love buoys her to the other side of some deep waters.

Sunday Memories with Summer Vacation Encores: Former Posts With Florence-Part II

My Private Coney is on a brief summer vacation.

Sunday, July 20, 2008
Sunday Memories - "Not Coney. Coney Island."


Florence is 62 in this picture from the mid-1980s.

Now she is not only refusing to get out of bed, she is refusing visitors anything but her back. K., the recreational therapist managed to get Florence to turn to her by playing a sonatina badly on her portable electric keyboard. Annoyed by sloppy playing, Florence rolled over to K., corrected her mistakes and then rolled back into her little corner. K. didn't give up. She began mispronouncing composers' names. It worked. Florence faced her and thus began a lesson in how one is required to speak.

A couple of days later, finished with my swimming lesson which actually went... swimmingly (in other words, I did not drown), I looked down from the glass balcony at the gym's pool filled with bodies going back and forth, and recalled a recent conversation with her former girlfriend who had loved her since they were teenagers ("Your mother was a great swimmer, your mother could swim anywhere, your mother....").

Years ago before we knew her memory had begun step behind closed doors to hide her accidents and mistakes, I got her to talk into a microphone about the place she loved more than her piano.

(See Daughter Of Coney at myprivateconey.com/audio )

Perhaps wondering if I too could coax Florence to roll back into life, I called.

"Hello Florence, I just finished another swimming lesson!"

"I used to go swimming. I swim," Florence said.

"I know. In the ocean." (I had to shout this because she had forgotten how to hold the phone up to her ear and my cell phone in a cavernous gym wasn't helping.)

"Right. And then you sit on the boardwalk, watch the people and they see you alone and they try to strike up a conversation."

"Get out of bed and I'll take you to Coney."

"NOT Coney. It's Coney Island. Coney ISLAND."

"Get out of bed and I'll take you to Coney ISLAND."

"OK. Maybe tomorrow. Don't eat too much. And lie down."

And with that she clicked off to roll back into her resting spot.

Summer Vacation Encores: Former Posts With Florence-Part I

My Private Coney is on a brief summer vacation.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Swimming Swimming In A Swimming Pool* -
Snapshots From Deep Water


Florence said that after Gramma died, she started going to Coney “to make things right” and swim in honor of her mother.

Water was not a foreign entity on the Lower East Side. Not everybody swam but everybody got wet -  Coney or Pitt Street Pool or, in my aunts' and uncles' days, the East River.

I thought I had Pitt Street Pool conquered until one day the four feet of water wasn't four feet anymore and I found myself flailing.  Either one of the bigger kids or my big sister or a life guard pulled me out. The Educational Alliance day camp pool lessons taught me to float in case that happened again.

The 14th Street Y had a pool and a teen program. At the age of 13, in a rare fit of acting my age, I badgered Florence for a bikini.  It wasn’t just the money which was always tight; it was also her slow fade into private desires and secret regrets that made it risky to interrupt her.

But there was this boy and I was this girl and somehow I understood a bikini was part of the deal I wanted to happen.

She caved and with $20, I headed off to A&S in Brooklyn. I don't remember the color, the style, the stripes, the dots.  All I remember is rushing to the pool, seeing the boy I liked and jumping into the pool to say hello.

No one told me that, as I stood in freezing water trying to impress the object of my affection, the top of my bikini had slipped off my adolescent breasts.

Florence sewed the straps tighter but I never wore it again.  I also refused to return to the Y for years and years.  And when I did, this time as an over-sized overall-wearing tax-paying adult, even then, I shook with humiliation.

Then one day Gramma died and Florence got on the F train to Coney and dove into the ocean.  I continued to stay dry with only a couple of interruptions here and there, like at the 100 year old City College pool or the elite NYU pool or some tiny hotel pool or a rare ocean vacation (but only up to my knees for fear of sharks).

Not sure why, but as Florence began to swim in a haze of NPR and sheets of pee liner pads - occasionally coming up for air to say she hurt and was unhappy - I enrolled for maybe the fifth time in 25 years for beginner swimming lessons after work in a big indoor pool.  There was even a sauna waiting for me at the end of an hour of breathing water up my nose.

When I told her I was learning to swim, rare delight, passion and determination flooded her face. "Oh. You must."
*a little song we used to sing on the Lower East Side with accompanied hand dance:

Swimming swiming
In a swiming pool
When it's hot and when it's cold
In a swiming pool
Right stroke
Breast stroke
Fancy diving too
Wouldn't you like to be in a swimming pool?

Nighttime at My Private Coney

We never went at night. We went during the summer or on New Years Day.

However, Florence went at night (naked swimming).

This night wandering through I wondered if her nights were as alive as this one.

Sunday Memories -The Call of Nature

I realized too late that my previous decades-long acceptance of nature had been due to peer pressure from non-New Yorkers. The fact of the matter was that like Florence, I had no affinity for it. And in my case, as time went on, visits to the country or similar places were only tolerated if at the end there was a promise of food, sex or a train ride home.

A recent urging that I visit more pastoral settings to encourage some relaxation during a stressful time was met with a determined no until I was reassured it could happen in a near-by city park. Those trees counted.

However, wondering down Delancey Street I passed the parking lot where my father's Valiant four door green car named Charlie Brown had lived for years. And there I saw how nature was to me.

Was This Still Here?

It was her annual trip...


...when in an elevator she had traveled in over half her life, she pointed to the worn patch of wood and said, "This is still here."

After dinner the missing of mothers drifted into words.

I looked up.

What was still here was how certain nights still felt like Florence if she were a New York evening.

So we wandered and looked at what was still here.

The Secret To A Long Life

"Laugh a lot and have a cat."

-Dana

Sunday Memories: Do You Know Where Your Memory Is?

There is no date on the picture, just a neatly written note from someone taught penmanship.

"this isn't a photograph, it's an illusion.

Love,
Ike"

Who is he and why Florence kept this photo tucked away in other places than the photos she allowed to represent her life, we will never know. And it seems no one else does either.

The Showdown

That pigeon knew what it was doing. Sort of like the stare across a school lunchroom when you knew there were a couple of teachers in between you and having to prove it.

In The Still Of The Night The Sound Of Silence Revisited

In those days, only the fancy apartments or rich people uptown had air conditioners.  So, during hot summer days and nights, Florence, along with all the neighbors, would prop open her front door and hope for a breeze to waft in from the stairwell's window facing Columbia Street.

From all those many opened doors, all the different lives would  drift up and down filling the stairs with television commercials, occasional conversations shouted from one room to the next and the smells of a billion things cooking for shabbos or Sunday dinner - all of it weaving in and out of the village of thirty-five apartments.

One late night at home, during a heat wave that had gone on for days and with only a tiny air conditioner in the bedroom, I propped open my front door in hopes of relief.  A breeze blew in from the airshaft.  And as it did, the cat ran out, unable to resist the cool of 100 year old marble floors.  I tried to catch him until, feeling better for the first time in days, I realized he had a good point.

Soon after, like Florence, I began opening my front door into a cool deep night.  The cat and I wandered the stairs, listening to our neighbors sleep and humming along with all the air conditioners in the airshaft.  And after our stroll, the two of us sat in the still and the silence.

I miss the normalcy of open doors during hot days and sleepless nights, and when my door is closed because the neighbors are awake, I miss my mother.

Sunday Memories: a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 3

When the old people die in the old neighborhood, usually it's their kids who clean out the apartment.

But sometimes their kids send their kids who don't know what's what.   Or sometimes there are no kids so it's the niece or the nephew or their kids.  And sometimes it's even the kids of the neighbors next door  - complete strangers - who clean out the life of a person who has no kin and no connection except to the people in the photos they leave behind.

Which is how Laurel found all these old photos tossed in the garbage. She brought them home so that a discarded life and history could always have a home.
This is Delancy Street. The Delancy Street Florence roamed. The Loews Delancy in the background still looked like that when we went there on Saturday afternoons.


Laurel thinks this was taken on Orchard Street. The boy, the mother, and even if she was the sister, the young woman relegated to the back.  We all hoped the picture was taken when he was back for good. 


On the back of this, in beautiful fountain pen cursor, someone wrote "Herman. He played for the Czar." Since the only Russians who came to America in the early 1900 were Jews, all we could think was this was a Jew who played for the Czar. That was a big, big deal.

Did Herman ever make it here or did he die there, probably in a pogram or in the camps?




Me, Laurel and Joyce looked at this guy and we all said "He looks familiar. That place looks is familiar."

This picture, every inch of it, is a picture of one of those rare delicious moments I had as a kid - the evening dark, the clock early, the smells recognizable, the accent my own.

a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 2

Laurel and Joyce’s Uncle Joe and my Uncle George were friends.  They both played trombone. This was taken at the picture studio on Rivington Street.  Wittmyers. 157 Rivington. 

But after the war, both of them left New York and that was that. The only thing Uncle Joe wanted from New York was his trombone.  His mother mailed it to him.

a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 1

Another on-going series of New York stories



Joyce and Laurel’s father and his family grew up next door to my father and his family in the tenements on Henry Street. Not the hip, over-priced, badly renovated, tons of cache, faux-street-cred tenements of today but the rat-filled, roach-saturated, filthy, over-crowded tenements of yesterday.

Their great-grandfather and grandfather had the stables down the street. They were the blacksmiths.  Laurel and Joyce say it like it is, no bullshit.  Maybe that came from the horses because you know you can’t bullshit a horse.

My grandfather taught himself English, showed up to whatever work he could get, despite suspected depression and was pro-union (although there's speculation it was just an excuse to be self-righteous and punch other people besides his wife and kids).  I think workers should be fairly paid for their work and I’ve shown up to every job I could get despite suspected depression.  Yeah, I got a temper but unlike my grandfather I keep it in check.

After the co-ops were built and the tenements disappeared, our families all got new fancy apartments near one another.  In our world fancy meant elevators, hot water, toilets inside the apartment, no rats and less roaches. Trees too.

(Dana's husband, George was one of the couple of men who got those co-ops built.)

Every once in a while, Dolly their mother would say "Let's go visit Florence" and they would come over and sit at the kitchen table, watching the trains going back and forth. Both of them knew the plaid "lumberjack" jacket from LL Bean and the Kedd sneakers Florence always wore.  No one in the neighborhood looked like her.  So it made sense they would remember.

They also knew we all walked everywhere.  Spending carfare was a very serious decision and if it wasn’t necessary then we didn’t.  And by necessary, I mean if the destination was less than an hour away by foot, the answer was no.  Even if it wasn’t, like Gramma’s, we had to walk back. 

Laurel and Joyce still live in the old neighborhood that was built on top of the old-old neighborhood.  I come downtown for tea and talk.  As I walked in the door, Laurel said, "Betcha walked here."  Of course I did. And although I’m not wearing plaid, it’s clear to see from my sneakers to my jacket, I got Florence’s fashion sense.

Both of them point out the window to a new, ugly, blue high-rise rising on the other side of Delancey.  “Blue Smurf dick,” they both chortle.  Like I said, no bullshit.

Joyce reminds me they played with my hair during those visits.  I don’t remember.  But something inside me remembers more than what they did with my braids.  I will probably get details wrong and forget about dates and lose track of which family did what, but I don't get wrong the neighborhood.   Because, sitting at Laurel’s kitchen table, my lower east side accent returns full force and I talk like I was six and home again.

Inheritance. Neighborhood. Heritage.  All of the above.

Sunday Memories - How My Sister Spent Her Summer Vacation

On Lewis and Grand you had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the now-luxurious-but then-barely-middle-class roof penthouse, a one bedroom affair quickly outgrown when I arrived and could no longer fit in a bureau's drawer.

But until my arrival, that penthouse was a sure fire way to beat the heat during the dog days of August. A metal bucket big enough for my sister and any breeze off the East River and stirred by the trains on the Williamsburg Bridge usually did the trick.

...A Shadow In The City....

Those spots - where I dreamed something kinder than a hot summer and a silent family lived. Dragged by during long walks I swore if I could just get in there another kingdom would open before me.







Then I discovered bars.

Why I Visit Dana - or - How I Keep Writing

"[Writing] makes me feel so close to my mind."

"Drag the brainless pen across the passive paper and see the result."

And on facing a blank canvas:

"The canvas is just four lines. What I put down is the fifth line. Let's see what the fifth line is."


Previous works by Dana:

The Gift That Kept On Giving

Sunday Memories - And What Was Your First Job?

Her's was when she was 12.

It was the depression, they were all stuffed into that tenement on Henry Street, and school was a thing of the past because only her brothers, my father and my uncle, got to go on to the next grade.

So a relative who had some connections nobody talked about (and maybe still shouldn't) got her a job taking bets at the Armstrong News which was a racing sheet.

She got fired because she talked too much.

At her next job, age 13, she got a job at one of the Settlement Houses and went on to changed the world.

Under The Boardwalk

Now the only time I can see this intimate corner is in the movie the Little Fugitive.

It was where we changed out of wet bathsuits because there was "No Changing Clothes" in the ladies rooms. Or where we slipped away, tired of the hot blanket and familiar faces. Where when it was too sunny we went for a quick respite before jumping back into the waves. It's where I saw full body necking for the first time and felt I had just visited an exotic land, that kind of touch in our neighborhood only happening behind closed doors or in movies.

I once asked Florence if she went under there as a teenager but her tough smile response let me know it had not been good memories.

Now, it seems there is no way to go under anything except in certain spots and those places look official.