A Birthday Celebration of the Writer Dana

Dana celebrated a birthday the other day. She was NOT 89 years old, she stated firmly. That year had just finished. On this auspicious day, she was beginning her 90th year.

Encore posts of Dana's sharp and dazzling short stories as well as new works will be presented on HER NEW YORK over the next couple of weeks.

Guest Artist: It Was Doug's New York

Doug is from Long Island. That and his niceness can't be helped.

During tax time he travels back to Long Island to help out at his brother's accounting office, staffed almost entirely by women. On Saturday, they all bring their children. And words take on wonderful new meanings.

Sunday Soon-To-Be-A-Memory: The History of a Couch

It had been purchased by Susie’s then-girlfriend in an effort to keep two people in one spot.

Didn't work.

Susie’s incoming new wife - determined to clear their new home of old memories - sawed it in half so it could fit in the tiny elevator of their 5th Street apartment and get it the hell out of their new life together. The newly married couple walked both pieces up to my apartment eight blocks away and stuffed it into my tiny elevator.

Having never had a real couch before, I was thrilled and watched in awe as the new wife power-tooled the two pieces back to their former glory.

In the ensuing decade and then some, sex and love and happily-ever-after were attempted on its cushions.  Art was marveled at from its comfort, stories were written and, when sick, it was the best place to curl up and become a little girl again.

Until, without enough warning, life flooded with unending loss.  That couch became a refuge to hide in, often with take-out and TV to numb and soothe everything from too much of too much.

In the midst of all this, Jupiter the kitten unexpectedly arrived.

Those first few weeks, it was the perfect place for him to hide under when – little and frightened – he waited for me, the mommy-can-opener, to return back from some unnecessary errand and love and feed him.  Not necessarily in that order. 

However, as several house guests observed, when I wasn’t home, he retreated back under and waited. 

Months passed.  Loss didn’t bang around my head so much.  Jupiter got bigger and less frightened and soon, that couch became the place for me to hang out on and for him to hide his favorite toys under, including my favorite pen, my reading glasses, hair bands for the gym, the floss, plastic rings from bottles, all the thousands of jiggling bell balls I kept buying him, the catnip mouse, the catnip bird, the catnip sausage...

And before we knew it, enough time had passed that I didn’t need to curl up with take-out, and Jupiter was so big he couldn’t even fit a paw beneath the broken frame.  Instead, the beat-up couch became his warm corner to catch up on his beauty sleep as I did paperwork for a better future.

One day, the couch just became too broken for both of us – an aging tushy and a big-bone cat.  Hammers and crowbars dismantled it into small pieces and strong hands stuffed them into our tiny elevator. Me and Jupiter watched decades of history no longer welcomed and no longer needed depart to the basement garbage room.  

A new couch was coming soon, second-hand like the first, but bought from strangers, more functional, a bit smaller, not so broken.  I swept and mopped the dusty empty space, making it ready for that new couch.  And as I did, I also made it ready for new memories and a new history – one that me and Jupiter would both get to choose.

University Of The Streets: Millenium Style

It used to be you learned from running around the city and taking a good look at it. Florence would whip on her glasses and stare if there was something she wanted to know.

Then the the city got nice and the streets got safe. There was nothing to learn on them except how to zip around a gaggle of tourists clogging the sidewalks or the new residents who, like the tourists, clogged the streets but at least shared with the world interesting cell phone conversation.

So imagine the delight and the wonderment when the best scientist in the city, and thus the world, gave a small group of important looking people a 101 overview of astronomy, a course I had failed at least twice at City College. He did this while interweaving the history of pollution into the stars and telling us how Grand Central Terminal wasn't a station but a terminal.

I don't care if I don't understand what the Earth Wobble is. I'm just thrilled that, like Florence, I stared in delight and without an invitation stood close to learning something new on the streets.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place There Is...

In these recent years, there had been times even an old beloved song cut too close and deep to what was left of me. Yet quiet became unbearable. That El wrote her music as ferociously as I wrote story - a sword cutting through personal silence - brought me respite from this high speed mess called life, and led me out of my own Egypt and into a promised land of new possibilities and new stories.

Sunday Memories Encore: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Gloom of Night...Until Suddenly...

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2010


None of us really understood that things were changing for Florence.

She seemed as she always had been. Teaching cooking walking arguing fuming eating investigating practicing devouring life intrepidely sallying forth into the world as the force of nature that she was

The rare cracks were easy to ignore, more often than not camaflouged in the heart and soul of her New York.

This was the first crack I suddenly remembered ignoring.

A brief moment after a snowstorm on the corner of 6th street and Avenue A. Between her and the curb a pile of snow.

Suddenly she couldn't traverse it. Suddenly she didn't know what to do. Suddenly she was old.

Then suddenly some young men came up to her, picked her up, carried her over the mound and gently placed her on solid sidewalk before vanishing into the crowd.

She laughed and laughed and laughed about it because the sudden ride erased the sudden reality she could not longer climb her own mountains.

Birth

I wondered where she was at this age. My sister, doing the math, figured out Florence had just begun the life she had always wanted to live - on her own, practicing her art and dancing with girls.

There was nothing left to do but thank Florence for her labor 52 years ago, give gratitude for the day, and in the evening enjoy the company of friends and family who had witness my own journey to living as I had always wanted to.

Photo by E. Smith

Happy Meal

It had been a long while since this dinner had been attempted. More than time had to pass. The space for joy had to be carved out again and serenity and love had to be invited back in.

Along with the chicken, wine and cupcakes, a friend's cheese rice casserole was a new addition, perfect to herald in this next new year which, as the night flew by, was punctuated by a puzzled cat and talk around the table of Christianity in teen literature, the elections in Sudan, the eccentricities of certain writers, and the bravery of family who, during Jim Crow days, sat at Woolworth lunch counters to claim the right to eat at a table of their choosing.

Sunday Memories: Tranformation

This is a room at the 14th Street Emanuel Y. Once it was the room we teenagers ruled just as the Vietnam War was ending and we were singing protest songs while shooting pool. The table was tilted and I ruled my advantage while eying the boy I liked.

Now on Friday nights, forty years later, a warm and intimate congregation does Shabbat services where, through the God of their understanding they call forth the spirits of justice.

The Little Men's Store on 14th Street That Could

It's the size of one of the bathrooms at the huge chains further west. But nobody carries what this store carries. Suave shirts, sharp pants, jewel colored sweaters and elegant shoes for clubs not listed in Time Out or websites catering to the hunt of hidden New York.

Light In The Darkness On A Federal Holiday

Chamber Street, New York City at 10:30 p.m.

Sunday Memories: More Traces of Love

Her chair for watching Her New York.

Mi Butsadan Es Su Butsadan

It means the home of the Buddha.

And where else do any of us live but in a butsadan, for we are all a Buddha in our own way and right.

The Aftermath of Revolution

Florence had once said of working one's art, "You have to train for that."

So today my comrade and my friend, Josslyn and I, as we have every year for 15 years, sat down to prepare another year of daily training.

One pot of espresso, one pot of drip coffee, two pots of tea, a huge salad, two chicken breasts, four kinds of dressing, one box of cookies, one orange, a bag of barbecue soy chips, and many glasses of water later, we chose new language never before used to describe our journey ahead.

We are, not will be.

We do now, not someday.

We demonstrate "I am" right here.

The revolution will not be televised. It happens with each breath we take.

***
The Disciples of Soul

The First Step

Metamorphosis

Sunday Memories: Traces of Love

The Delegate's counter until recently.

It Was Her New York: The Angel of 14th Street

This is the Angel of 14th Street.



Her family came from Sicily to the East Village a long time ago. This was before it was the East Village.


Then it was just 14th Street or 12th Street or Avenue A. Then it was just the new home. But when they got finished with it, it was a neighborhood.

This is in the back of the building on 12th Street. This is her great great-grandmother holding her grand-uncle.


The great-grandfather owned the butcher shop on 11th and A. The great-grandmother worked in a dress factory on the lower east side. His money went to support the family. Her money went to savings. Soon they had enough to buy the butcher shop. And then after that, they bought 173 Avenue A (now a hip restaurant), moved the butcher shop there, expanded it into a little grocery store and opened a pizzeria next door. Everyone in the family worked in those and lived upstairs on the first floor.

Her uncle behind the counter at the butcher-grocery shop.


When he was five, the Angel's dad was put in the window of the pizzeria to toss the dough. Everybody knew everybody.

Her grandfather and her dad in front of the Automat when it was still on 14th Street.


Another great-grandfather, the cobbler on 13th Street also owned his own building. He went to all the other building owners and said "We need a church for our Sicilian order."


You know that church on Avenue A and 12th Street? Mary Help of Christians. That was the doings of the great-grandfathers of the Angel of 14th Street. Every uncle, aunt, parents, kids got baptized, married, everything there. Here her grandmother and grandfather are getting married.

But things change and the A&P came in and small grocery stores stores went out. The rents at 173 Avenue A didn't cover the expenses and soon the family sold, moved, disbursed. The Angel's family moved up and out. To Stuyvesant Town. She lives there still.

I asked, one New Yorker to another, what's one thing in this apartment you have lived in almost as long as I have lived in mine, that to you is New York?

"The step stool," and she pulled it out to show the life it had lived along side of her.

And then I asked, one New Yorker to another, where she'd go if she could go anywhere. "Get me off 14th Street! Life has got to be bigger than 14th Street."

And then we laughed because we knew we lived where the rest of the world wished it did.

Radical Acceptance

37th Street at 2:00 A.M.



What if, the book asked, you accepted life, right now, just as it is?

In all its emptiness and stillness, aloneness, and solitary rests, dark corners and brief pockets of light...

What if...

Sunday Memories: It Was...

City Hall R Train Stop, 2:00 A.M. New Years Day



After sidestepping puddles of proof teenagers shouldn't drink and avoiding the belligerent couple who, in their very un-New York style, complained there were no cabs to Astoria, we stood quietly on the platform, relieved that, just two hours ago, the last twelve months were finally a thing of the past and a history we could now leave behind.

It was the best of times, it was the worse of time...

It was now just memories.

"Good-bye Old Girl..."*

It started before Aunt Ruth died.

The Laundrymat on 13th Street, now an expensive dessert place of cereal flavored milk, was packed with cheap, big machines in a small crowded concrete storefront. It was run mostly by the Russian wife, and occasionally by her husband but never by her son who looked like her in sideburns. Tons of quarters were poured into plastic dishes for the machines and little boxes of soap were for sale under the always-on TV.

Just like an old bar, it was packed every day with its regulars. All the Chinese extended families from 12th Street, the differently-able adults from the residence on 2nd Avenue, a couple of former drinking buddies of mine from 13th Street, and the growing post NYU market-rate tenants who more often than not dropped their bags of dirty clothes off to be done for them.

Keeping my clothes clean and pristine hid the fact they were old or third-hand or that I couldn't afford new ones. So that laundrymat was important to me. I nodded to the same folks every week, jockeyed with frenemies for a dryer or a washer, caught up on my People Magazine reading and commended my favorite young man from the residence on his detergent pouring technique. (He was most proud he could do his own laundry.)

And then disaster struck. Someone's ballpoint pen stuck in a machine ruined most of my carefully preserved clothes. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. But when I complained to the son he told me it hadn't happened, even while staring at Jasper John-like streaks on a beige windbreaker.

Then almost immediately after that, Aunt Ruth died and left me some money - just enough to buy my own washer-dryer unit.

Suddenly, like a few of my better off neighbors, I had the means to put myself in the realm of utter rich luxury. I was going to be able to cross over into a comfort of living I never could have imagined ever.

The minute my washer-dryer combo unit was installed I immediately started doing all the laundry I could gather, load after load after load. I forced myself to stop only because a friend was doing a reading at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble, now a luxury, upscale gym. The minute the reading was over I rushed back to do more laundry.

In the next 15 years, I loved that combo washer-dryer more than I loved several boyfriends. There was only one I loved as much and we happily did each others' laundry until the day he left.

Then some years ago, something broke and the washer tub tilted and groaned and scarcely swirled.

The repair guy, warning me never to leave the house while doing a load, quoted a number that was beyond my budget. Still, even half turned on its side and barely rotating, the washer kept my still modest collection of clothes pristine for a couple of more years. I thought it, like laundry with that man I had loved, would go on forever, regardless of broken pieces and limited abilities.

Until tonight. A simple load thrown in produced a flood from the insides. There was no more denying. My beloved little washer was tired. I coaxed another load on a gentler cycle but I could tell there was nothing left it could do.

For friends who grew up with such an appliance in their homes, my attachment to this has been a bit odd. But perhaps it is similar to say a kid in the suburbs getting his or her driver's license or their first car. It is a mark of coming of age. For other than that time of laundry and love, it has been my greatest success at bringing comfort and care into my home.


Damn Yankees

Goodbyr old friend
My old friend
There's somethin' I must let you know
I haven't said it much
I guess I've lost my touch
But, my old girl, I love you so

Knockin' On Heaven's....

These were the doors of childhood walks, parents meandering behind, sister somewhere and me running ahead seeking ways that led to hope.