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.

 **

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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.

***

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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.


***

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God Of My Understanding

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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.

***
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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.

***
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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."

***
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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.


***
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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.