Sunday Memories: Visiting Santa

Why my Jewish parents did this or what they were thinking will forever remain a mystery.

Every year when the blinking lights went up and the store windows filled with moving animals, toys and people, my mother and father, my sister and me would leave the lower east side where nary a Christmas tree could be found and head to Macy's to look at all the Christmas decorations.

In those days, the corner window squeezed in between the Nedicks doors had a special Santa throne. We would wait in the freezing cold and then he'd suddenly appear out of the chimney or a beautifully wrapped box and the crowd would go wild as he waved through thick glass that blocked the sound of our cheering or his 'ho ho ho's.

He also lived on the 8th or 9th floor in Santaland. We may have visited him on more than one occasion but I only remember this one time.

I was in fifth grade and it was not going well. Especially math. I was worried. My father, I think, brought me up to Santaland which for some strange reason was almost deserted. I didn't quite get the "ask Santa for presents" deal. I knew it was my dad or my mom who produced the eight days of Chanukah presents. And our God which we never discussed was busy with plagues and lion dens and Israel.

I was kinda big to be climbing onto Santa's lap, but desperate times call for desperate acts. There was only one thing I really wanted that couldn't be gotten anywhere except from someone who made happy dreams come true.

I perched my ten year old self on his knee, and when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told him. I want to pass math.

It recently occurred to me, 40 plus years later, that maybe he didn't hear many requests like that. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. Passing math was beyond my own abilities, asking my parents for help was beyond theirs and our God was busy with more important things. It was going to have to be up to Santa.

As if it had already happened, he decreed, "You'll pass math."

And so it came to pass that when fifth grade ended many months later, I had passed math.

"She's Leaving Home"

The West Side Train Yards - soon to be luxury high rises.

Before the rare purchase of that car, it used to be trains, subways or a Greyhound were the only way out, that is if we had to leave.

Airplanes were as exotic as suddenly living in a Hollywood movie. Beyond imagination. So we didn't imagine. Unless there was a death in the family in a very far away place like California and then only one of us got to go only once.

But besides death, the annual trip to Philadelphia to see aunts, uncles and cousins was about it.

After reading that Bach had lived and died within 60 miles of his birthplace I swore to my mother or my sister or my dad that I would never do that. I was going to go far and away and die some place that proved I had left.

Those train yards and those trains look like what my feet could do if I had kept my promise.

A Day In the Life...

That section of the subway had always been a tunnel, rough concrete, bleak light and often empty except for those not lucky to have a home or another way to make the connection between the BMT and the IRT or IND. If you could get to the Port Authority another way you usually did.

Then they made Times Square pretty and that meant the subway too. Beautiful tile and picturesque murals. Even the bands got upgraded.

Saturday night, I had heard the strains of a band banging out Beatles drift down to the platform on my way uptown to another attempt of joviality.

On the way back down, I found myself in the now pretty tiled and brightly lit tunnel. There at the mouth was a motley crew of men and one woman crowded together, her in a Santa hat doing bass lines like nobody's business as the Beatles' A Day In The Life poured into space once too dismal to walk.

The words of suicide and desire and then that last chord never ending of both feelings followed all of us rushing to the BMT line.

SUNDAY MEMORIES: COUNTING THE MIRACLE OF LIGHTS

On our side of the Williamsburg Bridge there were barely any electric menorahs in our windows. Our menorahs, old brass or faux silver with blue inlays to represent Israel, lived on tables and had old melted candles of muted colors, candles bought in the same blue box made by the same company from any store on the Lower East Side.

So it was the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge that every year as it got colder and colder I would watch carefully. There, the tall projects would burst, window by window, into brilliant colored lights rarely seen in the homes I knew. I counted them, like counting flowers in a garden.

Mechanic's Alley

Near where Gramma, Bubbie, Aunts, Uncles, Mom, Dad and many friends lived



The roar of the trains on the bridge is so constant it becomes the sound of silence. Whoever lives on this block truly lives in this city for there's no space for anything but Her New York.

Same City Different Camera: Increments on Night Stairs

A friend from the neighborhood said, "When it comes to healing, there are no elevators. You just gotta take it one step at a time."

Sunday Memories Old and New: Sunrise Sunset

It was more than a year and a half ago, but it seems like just yesterday he was chewing on envelopes almost as big as him.




Today Jupiter is now 15.9 pounds.*



And just like that first week he moved in when I heard myself laugh again for the first time in years, this year with all its new days and weeks, I've watched myself love again for the first time in years.


*Us waiting for Dr. G. to break the news Jupiter needs to eat a bit less.

Day of Miracles

It had been years because the menorah had been up in a closet and Dana couldn't reach it. This year Ping brought it down. The miracle of a helping hand.

Dana couldn't remember if there were candles but Ping found the two boxes Dana had tucked away years ago. Another miracle.

I was able, after weeks of work, to come visit. Miracle!

And then Dana sang the bruchas and for the first time in years, miracles of miracles I got to celebrate the Miracle of Lights.

Of course neither of us could remember the words to Rock Of Ages but the miracle of joy at sharing the holiday together unfolded instead.



Rock Of Ages

Rock of Ages let our song,
Praise thy saving power;
Thou amidst the raging foes,
Wast our shelt'rng tower.

Furious they assailed us,
But Thine arm availed us,
And Thy word broke their sword,
When our own strength failed us.
And Thy word broke their sword,
When our own strength failed us.

**

The Eight Days Of Miracles

Once the Maccabees had regained control they returned to the Temple in Jerusalem. By this time it had been spiritually defiled by being used for the worship of foreign gods and also by practices such as sacrificing swine. Jewish troops were determined to purify the Temple by burning ritual oil in the Temple’s menorah for eight days. But to their dismay, they discovered that there was only one day's worth of oil left in the Temple. They lit the menorah anyway and to their surprise the small amount of oil lasted the full eight days.

"The Slowest Way Is The Fastest"*

This building once housed the work of peace. Now, instead, piece by piece, it is being rebuilt and healed. It will take years.

The work of peace is now done in another building. That work, word by word, never stops. It too has and always will take years.

But like true, unshakable, deep-abiding love, that building, those words, built and rebuilt from scratch become unmovable monuments that defy destruction of any kind.


*Katherine's aunt.

Sunday Memories Old and New: Ashes to Ashes

Dust to Dust.

Mom To Coney Island.

And as always, at her favorite spot right by the Aquarium.































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No. Next week is "Bring Your Daughter to Work" Day. This week is ...

The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Six - Home Where My Love Lies Waiting*

God Of My Understanding

In the trenches, everyone had to figure out how they were going to pray. This being New York, there were many versions to pick from just in case you couldn't do the old white guy with the white beard up on a white cloud.

For a while mine was a hand on a doorknob. Somehow that seemed to opened me up to hope that the war, both within and without, would end.

This guy said his was always the Chrysler Building. He could always look up and see a beauty of lights.

Decades later, the hand on the doorknob often got dimmed by worry and fear. But with so many glass building crowding the sidewalk, I found myself catching glimpses of a beauty of lights, remembering that however I understand it, there was a greater expanse awaiting me. I just had to look up.

Sunday In The Hall With Cat Boy

He's in love with the dog next door.

So his request to be let out often has less to do with climbing stairs and sniffing doorways than it does waiting patiently for Rags to take her afternoon constitution.

It isn't that Rags doesn't know he's alive. On the contrary, she does. She just doesn't understand his place in her world. He speaks a different alphabet and she is usually in a rush to inspect her favorite trees.

Still, he waits to gets a chance to march up to her and say hello before the elevator door opens causing him to retreat to safety. He has great hope and even greater determination. And his heart is even bigger than those two combined.

Sunday Memories of High School Stairs

Stairs in the former High School of Performing Arts on 46th Street



My withdrawal to the back staircase during lunch hour had nothing to do with any sense of integrity or autonomy. It was a full body retreat. I just gave up trying to fit in with the kids who seemed to have figured out how to be human.

So I sat by myself and to this day I wondered what I was eating for lunch since I don't remember anyone at home making any more food during those days.

Not sure how it started but the cute violinist came across me one day and asked if he could join me. He too needed a break from attempting to fit into a scene completely foreign to him.

Soon after, the accordion player who was the only one in the school found us. I think the cute violinist had said something.

The 13 year old Prodigy sent to New York by himself, living in a walk-up railroad on the east side by himself, taking care of himself by himself, began to eat with us.

Then so did the pretty oboe player, who the Prodigy liked.

I had without realizing made some friends.

Same City Different Camera: Night Stairs Bound For Home

Special Encore: I Hear It Was Her Birthday

November 24 would have been Florence's 87th or 86th Birthday.


Not really knowing the circumstances of her birth on November 24, 1923 or 4, I have no idea if she was celebrated when she arrived. Possibly not. Her father was a World War 1 veteran who wasn't very nice and her mother, erudite, educated, multi-lingual, worked as a practical nurse because as an immigrant and refugee from Russia, it was what she could do. Her father not much in the picture in between hospital stays and abusive behavior, resources her mother had went toward the basics and then Florence's music lessons.

Poverty and unhappiness perhaps didn't lend itself to birthday parties with pretty cakes but stories of how much could be done with so little offer some hope that maybe there were birthdays she really enjoyed.

It was her 65th birthday that my sister did it up right with Florence's first birthday cake. A real cake with icing and flowers and her name and candles to blow out. As it wasn't something we ever got as kids, giving her this cake was a big deal. I found the candles - a 6 and a 5 - in a drawer of one of her tables when we cleaned out her house.

Same City Different Camera: Night Stairs

Sunday Memories: Encore - The Hand That Fed

I had written this old friend to see if she had an extra camera lying about that she wasn't using. A week later, much to my shock, a new one appeared in my mailbox. Her New York will begin a new series next week thanks to Morgan's amazing generosity, friendship and support.


Thirty years ago I met Morgan. She wasn't from New York but she moved through my city as its eyes, a witness to its private corners and secret worlds and painful revolution that soon became joyous mainstream. Her hands danced a ballet with her cameras and when decades later I got up enough nerve to pick up a camera my hands danced as hers did. After all, her hands had, for a long long time, been the only role models I ever had.

Brief Peace in Late Night

It was past the world's bedtime. No one was really there.

Still, the remaining countries who had waited days to speak stepped up to the podium, and in the formal shoes of a tired man or the polite heels of a fatigued woman, addressed the empty seats.

World, they said, let's give peace a chance our country is hurting your country is hurting we are all hurting there is no need for this...

If the seats could have nodded they would have and they would have made sure something was done to make it better. But instead, each word bounced and banged against walls and ceilings.

We, the scribes, though, we made sure the words didn't shatter against hard surfaces.

We, the scribes, noted stressed stated said and urged.

We, the scribes, made sure even in empty spaces peace was recorded and thus given a chance.

Brief Peace

The international center of peace and security had gone late into the night. The main gates were locked. That meant a long walk along my childhood river to the only entrance to home.

We meandered down, keeping an eye out for rats and talked about the small wars we had won in our own lives and the peace we had made with our past.

Suddenly, I realized our walk, this night, those lights, my colleague, that reflection, this moment would never ever happen again, the next day offering only more blizzards of words that brought nothing closer to kindness.

However badly done, peace always looks beautiful.

Sunday Memories: Encore- From That Moment On The World Was Different

As a replacement camera hurtles through space, Her New York presents encores of beloved posts and dear memories.


B. told us. Of course none of us believed her. But she insisted. She had it on good authority and could even prove it to us.

So we all trooped off to the Children's Section of the Seward Park Library on East Broadway where the librarian nodded gravely at B.'s request and then guided us to a little bookcase we had never really paid attention to before. And there she pulled out a big enough picture book with big enough pictures called How Babies Are Made.

The sudden information that not only did our fathers have one of those but that they did that with our mothers was numbingly shocking.

That is until we discovered dirty jokes.