A Crutch By Any Other Name

Years ago, Florence broke her leg in an unfortunate accident that involved relatives.  After that, I had a phobia about leaving anything at anyone's house because what if they tried to return it and broke something in the process.  Too risky.

 before the leg broke

Florence didn't do much doing those days of a heavy white cast and a pair of heavy wooden crutches.  She went from bed to piano to bed to kitchen, back to piano.  She didn't need to more than that.  She had me to do her serious walking. 

And so I did: to the Coop Supermarket on Grand and the Dry Dock Bank on Delancey.  To the Library on East Broadway or Houston, back to the Dry Dock Bank and then home and then the supermarket and then...

Only looking back did I wonder about my many visits the Dry Dock Bank.  For each day I would hand over a note, written in my mother's hand, requesting a withdrawal from her account to be given to me.  Who, I guess, the teller assumed was truly her daughter.

These days, things are a bit different.  Besides debit cards and photo i.d.s., crutches are lighter, casts are flexible and New York is a bit more easy to get around.  Especially if you don't have a kid to do the legwork.

**

From writer, Adrian Margaret Brune  who grew up in Oklahoma and learned a few things while temporarily "disabled" in New York where she now lives:

1. Locals are gracious and will hold doors, but don't expect package carrying -- they're going somewhere, too.

2. Subways have elevators, and if someone points it out, it means you're taking too long on the stairs.

3. Crutches come in handy when theatre-goers attempt to steal your cab.

4. "Pimping out" said crutches with extra padding is worth every bit of the $25 you spend.

5. Carpet is wonderfully soft for walking.

6. Despite former athleticism, if someone put a gun to your head, you still could not run; a fast "crutching and ducking" amounts to the best possible outcome.

7. Some passers-by look suspiciously if you are sans huge cast.

8. Riding a train during rush hour without a seat creates a strange sense of accomplishment and pride.

9. The East River will make for a wonderful javelin-style "crutch toss" when all is said and done.

10. Moving freely will never be taken for granted again.

**
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Refugees Don't Just Look Like Sunday Memories

This is my family. Grandmother, aunt, great-grandmother, grandfather.

It's the kind of picture you find in sentimental exhibitions at so-called museums touting immigrants in America.

My family came in steerage class on crowded boats because they believed the poem at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she
With silent lips.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

My family believed that poem.  Living in poverty on the Lower East Side, working grueling jobs...  no matter.  They believed.  And because of that leap of faith, I got to get an education, buy a computer and write about them.

But that's not what pictures of refugees look like today.

They look like this.

 Reuters/Dimitris Michalakis

And my job and yours and each and every one of us, especially those of us who came from that heritage of diaspora and flight and fleeing murder and slaughter and genocide, each and every one of us must do everything we are capable of so that child in those arms gets to settle some place so that maybe one day her descendant will get an education, be able to buy a computer and write the story of the day, as her family was fleeing certain death, her grandmother was carried to shore and to safety.

Shame on you, 31 so-called governors from the United States who are refusing to welcome in Syrian refugees.  Shame on you.  You did not earn that poem and you do not belong in our country.

For the rest of us who are American citizens, here's how you can help:

The Guardian: Where to donate to help the Syrian refugee crisis



**
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Respite

Years ago, I asked a medical examiner about how she survived the daily heartbreak of her job, so often having to investigate the aftermath of insane evil, of brutal cruelty, of raging violence.   

She told me she had asked her boss the same thing.

"I surround myself with beauty," he had answered. 

Good plan.

**
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This Is What A Muslim Looks Like

Adel Termos tackled a suicide bomber in a market place in Beirut.  He died in the explosion but saved dozens, maybe hundreds of people.

This is what a Muslim looks like.

He looks like a hero.

Pass it forward.


 **
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When the F*#&$ Will This JUST Be a Sunday Memory: Use Your F*#&$*g Words

When the F*#&$ Will This JUST Be a Sunday Memory: Use Your F*#&$*g Words

Originally posted after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, and then as an encore after the "Charlie" massacre, today it is posted for Beirut and for Paris and it heralds and celebrates the #NotInMyName campaign 

**

10:30 at night, the United Nations still toils

Before my auspicious interview with a famous artist to be his intern, Florence  begged, "Please don't curse. And don't talk about sex."

I'm not sure where she got the idea I talked about sex with strange men who could or could not allow me gainful employment.  I had never slept my way - literally or metaphorically - into any professional commitment.

But the cursing? Perhaps she had forgot lessons learned at the feet of masters, me following her down beaten-up streets as she screamed at me or my father curses more foul and vicious than the shocking comments I sometimes spy on a niece's facebook page or now overhear on nicer streets.

Perhaps her spewing blew off enough steam that she was too tired to make a third attempt at stabbing her husband with the letter opener.  Perhaps it was why she only swung at us with open hands or closed fists, not with knives.

Perhaps, like my dad locking himself behind bedroom doors so he wouldn't destroy us, her cursing allowed her to say what was on her mind and not go to jail for murder.

In the middle of a 12-hour day hammering out words of peace, news came of the bombings at the Boston marathon.

It's tougher to find words than throw punches.  It's harder to curse than to destroy. It takes longer to build than to bomb.

But, if you really want to change the world, use your fucking words, asshole.  Use your fucking words.

**
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#NotInMyName

Shades of Blue Take the Stage!

IT'S TONIGHT!!!!!

IT'S AT PARKSIDE!!!

IT'S....SHADES OF BLUE!!!!

WE HEART NYC WRITERS NIGHT + OPEN MIC!!!!

THURSDAY!! 
NOVEMBER12!!

PARKSIDE LOUNGE!!

317 East Houston Street, NYC

8-11pm

A great lineup of featured writers: 

Nicole Hefner Callihan, Sarah Gerard

AND FROM SHADES OF BLUE 

Amy Ferris
Matt Ebert
Claire Olivia Moed
Elizabeth Rosner
Sherry Amatenstein

Hosted by Megan DiBello.

21+ age limit.

**
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When This Was Normal

Sunday Memories: The Walk and the Talk

This is Leigh.

She's brilliant.

I know because on a rare free night we went to see her one-woman show.

It is a wild stroll down her memory lane, some 30-years ago, of days that crushed her heart and left her hope in rubble. 

And between laughing and crying and gnashing my teeth because HOW COME I DIDN'T WRITE THAT LINE, a light dawned in a dim brain and a memory bubbled up.

I remember a walk she took with me then.

My heart was also crushed and and my hope also in the rubble.   I couldn't trust myself to be alone and safe at the same time.  Leigh was someone who seemed so together and stable and strong enough to withstand the disaster I suddenly was so I asked her if I could for just a few hours visit with her.

We visited.  But at some point she needed to keep an appointment.  I remember us walking down Second Avenue as the light faded. I was bracing myself to get through the next couple of hours.

I don't remember the words we said.  I just remember this strength and stride of Leigh's.  I just remember wishing I could be her, be stronger than what ailed me, and so much did then.

It was now 30 years later.  I was suddenly hearing how those days for her were just as crushing as they were for me.  Only this time, in a dark theater, it was me keeping her company... 

And still, I marveled at her, marveled, and even though those days were long behind both of us, I still wanted to stride as fiercely as she did.

**
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Fucking Him Flies to Switzerland!

 
If you are reading this, FUCKING HIM, the video collaboration of C.O. Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez, is in competition at the renowned Kurzfilmtage Festival in Winterhur, Switzerland and Adrian is representing!

And if you are IN Switzerland, you can find the list of screenings HERE.

 And be sure to say hello to Adrian while you are there.

This is Adrian in Switzerland!


**

The piece asks the simplest of questions:

• What is fucking?
• What is love?
• What's the difference?
• When do you know?

Adrian Garcia Gomez is an interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, photography and illustration. His artwork, which is largely autobiographical, explores the complexities of race, immigration, gender, spirituality and sexuality. His short experimental films, photographs and drawings have exhibited around the world. He currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. (superadriancito.com)

C.O. Moed chronicles the heart and soul of a disappearing family and a city in the throws of extinction and evolution on IT WAS HER NEW YORK. A recipient of the Elizabeth George Grant for fiction and a Rockefeller Media Arts nominee, her short stories and dramatic works have been published in several anthologies and literary reviews. (myprivateconey.com and myprivateconey.blogspot.com)

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Operating Instructions

Forgot early morning was like deep night.

All this promise of something magical about to be revealed

...almost like traveling the last couple of hours to your birthday or Chanukah or Christmas or whatever day had a ton of presents waiting for you.

I didn't want the tram to land.  I wanted to float a little longer in the last possible moment of magic.
 

**
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Sunday Memories: You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

It's so lovely and easy to,  like the angels in Wings of Desire, slip invisible through millions of people's stories.

 Returning to a little piece of Heaven on Earth that felt like Home, that's all there was, a sea of millions of other moments in other peoples' lives.

Who was Addy and who painted this for her birthday?

Christ by the rolls of shipping paper and boxes and envelopes you always needed when you didn't have them.

And how come we all gathered so many pens and markers? 

The perfect place to have an angel to pray to.

Somebody once loved these white tigers.

and the clothes...the clothes just begging to be tried on, even if there wasn't one thing needed...

All it was buoyed by a delight of wandering through, unfettered but engaged.  Almost like an interesting chat with someone also waiting on line for the bank.  Amused but not involved.

Then a pile of blank notebooks beckoned.  Could always use those.

Except...

There was nothing blank about them.  They were, in fact, filled with parts of my own story.

The phone number of an old high school classmate, the amazing one who one day in English class, got up and tap danced on the teacher's desk and we all knew he was destined for greatness, the one who died too young, too soon...

the beeper of another...his photos so astounding they capture rare moments of our souls so well his name has become a verb to us (have you gotten "..." yet?)...

the daily reminder notes of a third...the one who, decades after being a young professional dancer, literally danced up a wall at a party..UP the wall... there's a picture somewhere proving that...

HEY I KNOW THESE PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK!  I shouted to the guy who was selling all this stuff.  I KNOW ALL THESE PEOPLE.

"Anything happens here," the Heaven on Earth guy shouted back at me.

And anything does.

I went to school with his brother.

**
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Heaven on Earth Feels Like Home

Eight years running up First Avenue, this was just part of a long stretch of chain link covering a long black iron fence that hid mysterious doors and shaded windows.

Until this morning when in the middle of what had seemed like an unbreakable fortress a gate was suddenly there. 

Open.

And all around it were things like china bowls and wind chimes and a straw basket and a bizarre red robe.

And right past the gate was a door.

Open.

And inside that door was a block long treasure chest of just about everything and anything and what you used to see all the time in tons of shops on every avenue and street but now barely ever unless it was in a movie about a New York that wasn't anymore.  Or you were out of town.

But this was real. 

You open? I shouted to the guy in the back.

"Yeah we're open. "

How much for the basket?

"How much you do you want it for?"

2 bucks.

"Gimme 5."

I was late so I didn't insist on 3.

"I got lots of designer stuff..." he said.  "I got this guy and that guy and her and them and..."

Nah, I told him.  I wasn't interested in all that.  I was interested in a two dollar basket I paid five for.

"I got books that will blow you away..."

NO.  No more books allowed.  That and bags.  And maybe boots.

I gotta go.  I gotta get to work.   Can I take a picture?

"Yeah, take whatever you want" he shouted after me as he answered the phone.

Snapping away but unable to stop looking at all the nooks and crannies that had promises and secrets and things you didn't see anymore unless you were in a movie or out of town.

"Are you still here?" he shouted from the back.   "Get outta here!"

"I'm going! I'm going!"

But I'm coming back.  I'm coming back.

If Emily Dickinson Had Lived in New York

If Emily Dickinsons had lived in New York, maybe she would have written....

 "a pigeon came down my window sill; 

he did not know I saw 

he pushed his sibling out into air

so he could have the nest..."

or  ...

"Hope is the thing in my shopping cart, 

packed with veggies from Union Square...."

or...

 "I'm somebody, who are you? 

are you somebody too? 

Then there's a pair of us -- too cool for school.."

Still.. I cannot imagine the poem she'd write of the young man...

...who, when no one was watching, snuck into the back doors of the movie theater.

on the other hand...

"Because I could not afford the movie

The Movie kindly afforded me

The doors held open but just a second

and I got to see the Intern for free! "

**

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When I watched Doug swing his friend around, I remembered what joy and celebration looked like when given the space to dance.

**
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Going to the Game, New York Style

No cable TV at home, a shitty transistor radio in my pocket and another 10 hour day finally ending just as the Game began.

But keeping score wasn't hard at all.

Because all down the avenue, from bar....

....to bar....

....to pizzeria....

...to another bar but this one served sushi....

...to another bar... everyone was watching the game.

Everyone.

Together.   Eating, drinking... and all of us, inside pressed against the bar or outside pressed against the window, all of us were holding our breath ...

...three-two count, two outs, two men on base, here's the pitch and he ...


**
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What Dana Says is a Blessing for the Future

Bits and pieces of Dana are slowly beginning to visit other places.   

Yet, she is like a lighthouse.   

When you least expect it, her brilliant light explodes into clarity and words that change the world.  David, her son takes as many down as he can and shares them with me.

Over the next while, old stories and new moments of Dana will be noted.  What Dana Says is worth pulling close and holding tight. 

**

Dana and David gave us a little apres-wedding celebration with Veselka's mushroom barley soup and borscht and apple pie with vanilla ice cream

We showed off happy pictures and regaled them with stories of the wedding and the party.

Dana listened intently.

But she didn't say much.  That gave Polly plenty of chances to take a gander at the vanilla ice cream melting on Dana's plate.

They spoke privately to one another at some point.

And then Dana surrendered the plate and returned to our babbling and gossiping.

"Give them a blessing," David asked his mother.

She rose to her feet and we all held hands.

What was said next was so beautiful, we all knew we'd never remember every word.

Sometime the purest of love is like that.  You just get to be in it for a moment, like standing in soft wind and knowing autumn was slowly going away.  You still grab at the air.  You still try to keep it forever.

You can keep time.  But you can't keep it.

The few words we caught in our sticky fingers were these:

"My memory, which I have lost most of, lives inside you.  The future ahead needs much work.  So go into it with my memories..."

She would insist on walking us to the door ("how would you find it otherwise?") but not before she and Polly looked ahead into a new memory.

**

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Suddenly Everything Became A Sunday Memory

I really wanted a martini.

I had only one in the last eight years and that was two months ago and the olives were disappointing.

So after a long week, the Mariner said he'd take me out on a real date and get me a good martini.

The fancy bar next door that disguised itself as the neighborhood "Cheers" seemed the best bet.

And it was.

No TV.   So you could actually look around without a lot of hyperactive flickering lights of the eight billion different sports events and commercials that shot out of multi-screens in other bars.

Good jukebox.  O.K., it probably wasn't a jukebox; it was probably a satellite prepaid, preordered music selection being piped in over a computer but SOUNDING like someone really hip was standing over a glass cover, perusing the names of 45's (those are vinyl records, just in case you didn't know) and then popping in quarters and dazzling everyone with such good taste.

There were people over 40, maybe even over 50 in the bar.

Bar food.  So what if the chips were handmade and personally seasoned with spices that you don't find in glass jars in supermarkets and yes there was mint artisan jelly on the lamb sliders.  (Already there are two many words in those sentences to deny hipsterness but those sliders tasted good.)

And the martini.... dirty as all hell and three FAT olives that rounded out dinner.

It was almost like being at the old bar-home almost forty years ago.

Except... Even though I ate all the olives, I could barely make a dent in the martini itself.

Except... A gaggle of adorable (they were laughing and giggling and really having fun)  young (they were under 40) tourists (shopping bags of stores I don't go to) came in and sat next to us and asked us to take pictures of them with their phones.

Except... when I asked to take their picture with my camera....

...and they asked what I did and I told them... they got all excited oh that's so cool and oh a New York writer that is so interesting!

And I remember when there was nothing cool about New York or being a writer or being interesting.

Suddenly becoming a tourist's memorable moment of meeting an authentic old part of the city , I had no choice but to gulp the rest of my martini.

**
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