Puppy Wrinkles

I can't get enough of Remus' flappy wrinkly dewlap and flews. I am thinking of buying those soft soft delectable wrinkles some flowers, and taking them out for a nice Italian meal, that's how much I love them.

The Sun-Star: a Naming Story

In real life, Hedgehog isn't called Hedgehog but rather something much lovelier, much less clumsy silly, and much more graceful. When she was soon-to-be but not quite here, Sarge and I were feeling that strong excitement that not-yet parents feel, and loving books as we do, inspiration came in part from a familiar bookish quarter, our beloved Tolkien's "The Return of the King."

At the end of that book a little girl is born to Sam Gamgee, and Frodo suggests a name: "what about elanor, the sun-star, you remember the little golden flower in the grass of Lothlorien?"

The year of Elanor's conception was known in the Shire as "...a marvelous year. Not only was there wonderful sunshine and delicious rain, in due times and perfect measure, but there seemed something more: an air of richness and growth, and a gleam of a beauty beyond that of mortal summers that flicker and pass upon this Middle-earth. All the children born or begotten in that year, and there were many, were fair to see and strong, and most of them had a rich golden hair that had before been rare among hobbits. The fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream; and later they sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids or the heaped skulls of a conqueror, and then they moved on. And no one was ill, and everyone was pleased, except those who had to mow the grass."

So it is with us. We have always thought of Hedgehog as our sun-star, a beaming little yellow flower. If a person could be known as a color, she would be known as bright yellow, full of warmth, a tiny shiny blossom of happy promise, a sign of the best and luckiest of times.

White Coral Bells

A summer afternoon very long ago, on an old woolen camp blanket spread in the pine shade, I reached a hand out and dug my fingers comfortably in the moss and listened as Grandma Eva sang to us in her smiley creaky voice for oh the hundredth time, but we never tired of it,

white coral bells
upon a slender stalk
lilies of the valley
deck my garden walk
o how I wish
that I could hear them ring
that will only happen
when the fairies sing...

we three exist there faintly still, world without end, on the old woolen camp blanket, under the pines, in the circle of song






read along or join in at Theme Thursday (where you can read more about how bloggers are ringing their bells in honor of Barry)

I Have to Look Away

We have two mirrors only in our house, I realized today. They hang in our bathrooms, rudimentary vanities to aid in the minor ablutions of tooth-brushing and hair-combing, my bit of lipstick, Sarge's shaving ritual, and nothing more.

I grew up in a house of many mirrors--the tomblike wardrobes fronted with mirrors, the entry hall and its floor-to-ceiling beveled mirrors, the little decorative mirrors framed with brass candle sconces; possibly the Victorians who built the house had grown up lacking such abundance--in place of the enormous mirrors, a piece of copper, hammered out and polished, hanging on the wall? or silvered looking glasses that held only the tiniest bit of face, warped and tantalizingly abbreviated? In adulthood, they loved the novelty of their full-length doubles and desired limitless access to their own images. I am just surmising, but whatever the reason, my own adolescent self from crown to foot could be found reflected--doubled, trebled, and quadrupled--throughout the five stories of that castle. And as the Victorians before me, I liked to look at myself.

Now, a grown woman, I'm ambivalent. But I found the answer to this quirk of mine tonight as, suddenly mindful, I caught my own gaze in one of the two mirrors, and was overwhelmed with the feeling of being looked at and truly, deeply known.

I'm unnerved by the intense brown regard, the eyes that, staring, reflect back my sins and strangenesses and secrets, my psyche overflowing.

I can't bear to be so known, by anyone

and I have to look away.

Join us HERE for Theme Thursday

Snow

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Really, why is it that the very thought of snow makes me feel so melancholy?



from my favorite short story, "The Dead" by James Joyce.

The Castle

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there were two sisters with brown eyes and brown hair that they wore in braids, and hand-me-down dresses and scuffed Keds. These girls lived in a very very old castle in Brooklyn with their grandparents, the Patriarch and Matriarch, and their parents. In those days, the regular people, the Russian immigrants and working-class Jews, the teachers and tailors, could live in castles in Brooklyn just because that's the way things were.

This castle was five stories high, and its windows and brick front gazed down on Henry Street where it sat, well-mannered, the street a parlor and the house foundation a silk settee, its stoop the polished mahogany tea table where it entertained an always-varying assortment of guests.




In the walls of the castle, the light was dim, and the air was heavy and smelled of old old things that couldn't be named. The castle had ghosts, too, and a cold spot at the top of the first flight of stairs, so that sometimes when the girls passed there, it felt like walking through lakewater, and they shivered.






In the castle, they lived their lives. They ran up and down the five flights of stairs; they shouted to each other leaning over the bannisters, floors apart; they played in the attic, the old servants' quarters, where no one else ever went anymore, and wore the clothes of their recent ancestors (the dead foxes with faces, the red chiffon nightclub dresses, the pillbox hats).

They slept in iron beds with dancing friezes molded on the headboards, under fancy bedspreads, painstakingly crocheted by the Matriarch. The nights in the castle felt sometimes long and dark, and were full of little noises, and often the sisters would reach out to hold hands across the wide yawning chasm between the beds.





Though the castle was not very cozy, it was their home.


But there came at last a time when a wicked glamour fell over the inhabitants of the castle, though no one knew who had cast the glamour, and the people who lived in the castle wondered continually "why us?" Many sad things began to happen to them. Some died, terribly, and some went mad from grief, and there was bitterness and there were complicated betrayals of the worst sort, one after another after another, like a delicate stack of falling cards. Through it all, the two little girls watched and waited and worried, to see what might become of them.

When there were only three left out of all of them, it happened finally that the little girls and their mother had to leave, and a family of strangers moved into the castle at Henry Street.

The sisters grieved their losses, and it was a very hard and long grief, until finally they could go on and grow up.

But the dreams never stopped, and often to this very day the older sister wakes in the grey dawn in her own house, beside her own husband, confused, not remembering where she is, because all night long she has been walking up and down the stairs of Henry Street, and wandering in and out of its kitchens, catching a pale glimpse of herself in its windows and mirrors, and talking with the dead Matriarch and Patriarch, who seem to sit forever at their dining table, drinking their forever cups of tea and eating their forever toast, and waiting for her to come back to them.





And to this very day, she keeps a strangely shaped key on a sterling chain, the key that fits that door, the door to my castle.

All photos of my childhood home taken by my grandfather, Max Pollack

My Inner Goth

My Inner Goth's name is Hestia. She thrives after the sun goes down: in the lengthening dusk, or silent midnight, her little dark spirit flickers like the last guttering candle end in a sootblackened candelabra, her impression in the mirror gazes back at me in shadowy reflection, her pallor streaked with the silvering of the old glass.

Surely her Halloween might be better spent: a kiss in the graveyard, a picnic on a gravestone, summoning shades in a gloomy parlor somewhere. Instead, she'll be with me, trailing behind a noisy, happy, clattering herd of small costumed children. She'll adjust the little black veil on her hat, and wipe the kohl tear-tracks from her cheeks, reciting, sotto voce

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...

As I step on Skittles, flung behind the revelers, as my boot heels crunch on watermelon Jolly Ranchers, and catch in the elastic thread of abandoned plastic drugstore masks...

...but if you should catch sight of me, across a crowded street, and call to me "Hestia!" I'll raise a languid hand in greeting...


sterling candelabra, from Grandma Eva, on our Victorian organ, a wedding gift from my dad to my mom

Collection

I'm a collector (let's not say a hoarder) by nature: beads, books, buttons, yarn, china dogs, vintage bakelite dresser sets, kawaii, pressed glass, vintage textiles, comic books, postcards, cards for my stereopticon...I won't go on...

But my favorite collection is the stack of humble hand made dish cloths that sits on the shelf above my kitchen counter. Each of these was made for me by a different lady, given through swaps, as gifts, just to be sweet. I treasure their homey cottony presence in my kitchen; they are good will and sentiment, the kindness of strangers; they recall an earlier time, before dishwashers and even cellulose sponges and paper towels. Sometimes I spend a moment or two staring at them, thinking of the many hands that made them for me, and I feel a little brighter, buoyed and cheerful.

Flight

Yom Kippur came and went, with its dizzying fast and its 10 hours of synagogue services (you read that correctly), and afterwards the communal break-fast at which we discovered not three, not five, but a total of eight different kugels, a wealth of kugels (nothing like a heavy starchy noodle pudding to bring you solidly back from the sacred to the everyday).

Each year, the Day of Atonement is a strange mixture of sad and joyful, heavy and light, boredom and uplift. Your body drags in the late afternoon, your stomach grumbles, and by the ninth hour if you are human, then you are cranky--but the songs, the prayers, the sharp notes of the shofar can sometimes have the power to force you through your physical discomfort to a good place, dare I say a godly place--

During my best moments in synagogue, my soul was light--like this runaway kite, escaped from the hands that held its string, flying higher and higher toward an approaching storm--

and then it was all over for another year, and there was the kugel waiting stolidly, patiently for us to land.

and p.s. don't forget to visit my contest, below!

Beginning

With the fall of this year comes Hedgie's first cello lessons.

In my family this is one of the most important rites of passage, the day you play the first sweet and terrible notes of your very own instrument. I can barely remember the details of my first violin lessons--I was only five--but I do remember how timid and awestruck I was--the only feeling that has come close since was the first time I held baby Hedgie in my arms, afraid to break her. How heavy the quarter-size violin was in my little arms then, how amazing the alchemy of bow to string and then sound...although the little screeches and scritches must have been dreadful indeed to the ears of my patient listeners.

My violin has been with me on my journey for nearly 35 years now, a steadfast companion always, whether spurned or beloved, through all the times musically fallow and musically fertile. Its sturdy presence shielded me from the parodically cruel tendency of Emily, my second teacher, to discipline by rapping her own bow hard across my knuckles. It was the helpful wing-man in my pursuits of a proto-Severus, black-haired Peter with the glowing pallor, the first violin in my high school string quartet (how I quavered under his gaze as he reminded me, with a haughty little tip of his bow, to come in on the correct note). My violin and I spent long afternoons together in the music rooms of my college, and it never complained that I took frequent breaks to stare out the windows at the rain, at the trees changing to fall and then from fall to spring...

We have come all this way from our long-ago beginning. There it is in the corner now, waiting for the rosined bow and for me.

Festival

Although the summer days are long and hot, my thoughts have turned to the Jewish holiday cycle that will soon be upon us.  Beginning with Rosh ha-Shanah, we spend a week and a half turning inward to sometimes difficult self-reflection,  chanting our ancient, quiet prayers, and finally, fasting in somber repentance on Yom Kippur.   The Days of Awe are radically unlike any other part of my year.  Jews during this time exist in a sacred space that is part of the world, but also apart from it; it is always a challenging time for me, a Reform Jew in the modern world, a communal and personal moment of reckoning.  

Immediately after Yom Kippur, though, we begin to reenter the regular world with an eye toward the practical, as we celebrate the Jewish harvest holiday in the festival of Sukkot.  Preparation for Sukkot (which means "booths" or tabernacles in Hebrew, representing the little huts set up alongside the fields during harvest in ancient times) involves the quite literally grounding act of building a sukkah, whether in our own backyard or with our synagogue.  During the Days of Awe we engaged in quiet reflection; at Sukkot, we are busy giving thanks to God with hammer and nails!

Once built, the sukkot are decorated with photos of the ancestors, and all manner of colorful paper chains, tissue paper flowers, and magic marker drawings hanging from yarn--the provenance of the children of the family, who are thrilled to be included in the creation of what is, after all, really just a wonderful playhouse.

Sometimes prayer is an intangible, words that roar or whisper symbolically; but during Sukkot, our prayer is a solid little structure, a very real shelter built with our own hands. 

ופרוש עלינו  סכת שלומך

spread over us the shelter of Your peace

The permanent structure for the temporary sukkah we build upstate; the upper beams will be covered with pine branches, creating a roof that will allow us to see the stars, to feel the rain.

Kiss on the Corner

I had kissed other boys before him, but I will always remember this as my first real kiss.

I was invited by my slightly older, slightly wilder friend Hannah to a party on the Upper East Side. Hannah went to another school, and was, during my restless eighth grade year, a personal portkey to a fresh crop of boys. So that Saturday, I negotiated a 1 a.m. curfew and saddled up in my black cocktail dress and fishnet stockings.

As I write this, I suddenly recall the sweet feeling of walking into a crowded party, young and dressed up, self-conscious and self-confident at the same time. I hung onto Hannah's hand and scanned the room, and I noticed him right away--surrounded by an impenetrable phalanx of girls, he was intent on breathing nitrous oxide from a huge blue balloon. Hannah looked in the direction of my gaze, and rolled her eyes. "Christopher," she said succinctly. I couldn't stop staring at him; he seemed to be enclosed in a soft bubble of blond Catholic radiance.

All evening we passed looks and he winked at me, once. I lost myself in ostentatious conversation with another boy, all the while telegraphing, so I hoped, my diffident invitation.

It was Hannah who finally, impatient with the pretense, interceded on my behalf.

"Christopher!" she called to him.  "Leah's ready to leave, and you live right around the corner from her. Take her home." and to me, sotto voce, "he's yours!"  Hannah was just like that.

Christopher shrugged and put his suede jacket ("buttery olive green," I noted specifically in my diary that night) around my shoulders, and his arm over that, and we left together, and as easy as that, I made my first tiny conquest...

We kissed in the taxi--a real kiss, a soul kiss!--and his mouth held the sharp thrilling taste of whiskey. We kissed all the way home, and then he paid the cabbie and we kissed on my corner one last time, under the street lamp, and parted ways and I never saw him again, although for a week after that, my dress held his scent of soap and liquor and cigarettes, and, very very faintly, his boyish lust...

I quietly entered the house, so pleased with myself, with my victory, as innocent as any killing ever was.

photo by my grandfather, Maxwell Pollack

I Just Wanted to Bite the Buttons off His Frock Coat, One by One

All through the "Half-Blood Prince" matinee I attended today, I couldn't stop thinking about those buttons on the Potions Master's coat.

I've mentioned them before.  I thought I wanted to lick them.  But today I realized that they are cloth, not glass, and they would need to be bitten instead.

Bitten off one by one.  While he waited impatiently but with a stillness born of well-practiced discipline.  While the frock coat opened just a little bit more.  And then a bit more.

Shades

Continuity is the main pursuit of my adult life. I live three blocks from my childhood home, I send Hedgehog to the same school I attended for 12 years, and before that to the little preschool that I went to in the 1970s, and my own mother attended in the 1940s. We summer in an old cabin by a lake in which four generations of Weather in the Streets girls have summered over the span of seventy years.

Sameness is a sort of obsession for me. But it is not always easy, inhabiting the places of one’s youth and of the generations before. There is a sometimes awful burden of memory that one must carry in the places of the past. On some nights, putting Hedgehog to sleep in my old bed, I hear my dead father’s mug of hot chocolate gently tapping down on the side table, the soft swish as he turns the page in his novel, an occasional creak as he shifts in the chair, and much later the click of the lamp being turned off. His chair sits in the very same corner of the living room in our lake house. The very books he read still occupy the nearby shelves. I know he’s gone, but at the same time he isn’t really. Just as my grandma Eva still hangs her sheets on a sunny windy day. As Aunt Abby drinks Tab and lime in her striped beach chair by the water. As Grandpa Max walks the Dobermans in the field behind the house—I can hear their collars jingling—and sometimes I know I see his shadow among the lengthening shadows of the trees.

I like that they’re still there, where I live; the animals and the people. But I know also that I’m bound to the old much too tightly; I can’t get away. If I leave, you see, I leave them all behind and it is over.







(I like ghost stories very very much, and if you'd like to read two more from my past, check out Window Ledge and one about dad.

Funky (a guest post by Sarge)

Was Heaven in the Backseat of My Cadillac? Possibly. I feel that I may have some expertise in this matter, as I once owned a 1970 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. In fact, I am not seriously opposed to the notion that Heaven could very well have been in the front seat of my Cadillac. The front seat was a bench-type seat which is not too remarkable since few sedans had what we called bucket seats in those days. What was remarkable (besides the vastness of it) was that it was a 6 way power bench seat. It went back and forth, tilted, reclined, I swear you could turn the damned thing into a bed-- one with "Magic Fingers" at that, if you were given to constantly jiggling the little toggle controls rapidly back and forth. I was not so given. I was more interested in jiggling... well you can see where juxtaposition and innuendo are taking us. And that car was a great place to juxtapose.

With a front seat of those dimensions the back seat was not even necessary. Of course on a double date (God, how gross were we? Did we have no shame? No? Not even a sense of privacy? Strange I could have sworn I had one, apparently not.) Heaven was often in the front and back seats of my Cadillac, with room for a Coleman cooler full of beers to boot. I'm just getting started so Don't Stop Me Now, You Sexy Thing.

We'd Get Up and Get on Down (Like a Sex Machine).

Yes, we would Partyup and Kiss (actually if I remember right, I saw Purple Rain sitting on the hood of that car at one of the last drive-in movie theaters in New Jersey) and we would probably Do It All Night

We experienced Pain, Pleasure, Ecstasy, and Bliss in that car.

But don't get the idea we were just a bunch of Sexoholics. We'd park and turn up the radio and get out and leave the doors open and we'd Shut Up and Dance (okay those were probably unfair references, they were songs by one of the best bands nobody ever heard of, El Grupo Sexo).

Those were great days, when driving a ten or fifteen year old car meant you were driving a piece of serious Detroit Iron, not just that you were driving an old car. We would do stupid, dangerous things and know that they were stupid and dangerous (let's face it, we lived in pretty much a perpetual state of what the Penal Law defines as Reckless Endangerment) and when we got our boo-boos we laughed at each other instead of crying to someone else. But we knew that What Is Hip was doing your own thang unashamedly. The Caddy was not a trendy car, Porsche 924's and Trans Am T-Tops were all the rage, but it was cool and it had a style of its own, what's more it had substance (472 cubic inches under the hood and 2 and a half tons of GVW worth of substance).

Let Me Take You Higher. We'd go out driving, put on the radio (NOT the stereo) and Sing a Simple Song.

We went everywhere in that car. Can You Get to That was a question that was always answered affirmatively.

That car epitomized funk to me (and not just cause the power windows didn't properly seal and there was a slight mildew issue). In fact you could probably fit a moderate sized band, plus roadies and equipment in the beast. The trunk was roughly the size of the car I currently drive.

Sarge signing off from Theme Thursday guest blogging. Thank you faletme be mice elf.


editor's note: that editor being me, Leah--I must add, I have learned a great deal from reading this post. Now I have to live with it. When Sarge and I were first dating, I made him a special sexy mixed tape (remember those?) that included that Hot Chocolate song, "Heaven's in the Back Seat of My Cadillac," never dreaming of the memories it evoked...at the time, he was much too circumspect to tell me...Sarge, you motherf!@#$er. And p.s. "Can You Get to That" is my personal bar none funky song, by Funkadelic, and if you've never heard it, please go do so immediately.

Adirondack Light

outside my kitchen door, 6/24/09, 8 p.m.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

--W.B. Yeats

Clock-Watching on a Saturday Afternoon in Brooklyn, circa 1955

My mother the other afternoon told Hedgehog a familiar story, while I listened in interest (not for the first or even tenth time) to a tale of Old Brooklyn, one without plot or denouement, but peopled by characters...

Every Saturday when she was young, my mother would visit her Grandma Katie in the old apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn.

Grandma Eva and mom would set off in the morning, in rain or wind or sunshine, and ride the subway to Great-Grandma's apartment building. Each and every Saturday bore a tedious similarity to the Saturday before and the Saturday to come, with few exceptions: on the way, they might stop at a deli for some luncheon meats and pickles to bring along. And on one memorable occasion, my grandmother bought my mother a gigantic stuffed pink seal at the old Abraham & Strauss down on Fulton Street. My mom lugged this thing to Ocean Parkway and back that day, and after its adventure it settled into a long lifetime, two generations of children loving it to gray, homely, fur-less oblivion...

But, as my mother tells it, these weekly jaunts were, by and large, an exercise in abject boredom.

There was a momentary flurry of excitement upon their arrival, as mom would run to check out the table; my Great-Grandma Katie was a talented baker, and invariably had laid out a spectacular display: rugelach, tortes and jelly rolls, babkas and cakes of all variety to tempt the family. However, accompanying this treat was the time-honored Jewish Catch-22, the passive-aggressive food-pushing/fat-commenting dichotomy which drove so many many generations of Jewish girls to the brink of despair. The innocent-looking sweets were in fact a cruel trap, of which one was aware but fell into nonetheless each and every time. My mother was allowed and expected to take a single piece of something. Were she to reach for more, as naturally any child confronted with a bounty of sweets would do, she would suffer a strident critique of her little female form, present and potential. But reach she did, how could she not? And stuffed before the commentary began...

--"Bubbe!" Hedgehog interrupts this, suddenly inflamed. "that's not fair! Why couldn't you have the second piece of cake?"

--"Hedgehog," says Bubbe sadly. "They were very punitive back then."

--"If you put out all that cake, you'd let me have the second piece though."

--"Yes, Hedgehog, I would."

After the Gauntlet of Sweets was thrown by Great-Grandma Katie and retrieved by mom, the challenge accepted and the consequence suffered, the shame swallowed along with the babka...the afternoon settled into dull torpor.

While Grandma Eva and her mother chatted and crocheted the hours away, my mother sought ways to prevent herself from slipping into a boredom coma. Every week, she says, she ventured into her grandma's bedroom and pulled a book from the shelf--always the same book--a biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered that by washing one's hands, one could prevent puerperal fever. Week after week, she lay on her grandma's meticulously crocheted counterpane and read of Ignaz Semmelweis and his great accomplishments.

--"Bubbe!" here Hedgehog interrupts again. "Why didn't you bring your own books and crayons?!"

--"Hedgehog," says Bubbe. "I never thought of it."

When she was done reading, she wandered from room to room, staring at the familiar worn trinkets and tzochkes, the antimacassars and china lamps, the few books and the Judaica, the view out the sparklingly clean windows of the wide Parkway, the benches, and the Saturday strollers. And of course, glancing at the clock every moment or two.

--"Bubbe!" says Hedgehog. "Why couldn't you just play a game by yourself for an hour or two?"

--"Hedgehog," says Bubbe, shaking her head. "I just didn't have the inner resources that you do."

--"Oh." says Hedgehog.

The visit would often end up, when the weather was clement, on the benches outside the apartment building. Ocean Parkway, enormously wide then and now, has a famously iconic median, lined with trees and benches, where babushkas, bubbes, and bubbelehs have clustered since time immemorial to idle away a Saturday afternoon.

My grandma and great-grandma would continue their conversation out in the sunshine, while mom sat on the wrought-iron fence behind the bench, staring into space, waiting and watching for her dad, my Grandpa Max, to pick them up in the car and drive them home again.

--"Bubbe!" Hedgehog pounds her fists in frustration. "why didn't you bring your roller-skates?"

--"Hedgehog, that's a good idea. I wish I'd known you back then."

--"That was a terrible visit, Bubbe!"

--"Yes, Hedgehog," my mom says laughing. "It was."




*Photo: "Bench to Infinity" by Buraianto, Flickr Creative Commons

Theme Thursday: One Man's Trash, or, The Return of the Bums of New York

As I watch, New York City is turning back to its former glory. Graffiti, crime, rats, panhandlers, and crazy bums. Lots and lots of crazy bums. I haven't seen so many bums since the '80s. Where were they during these last 20 years? I guess maybe city services had enough staffing and funding to medicate them and get them sheltered. Just long enough so that the annoying ex-urb yuppies (notice my use of a retro-'80s word!) could move here, jack up the rental and real estate prices, pretend that Brooklyn was the suburbs...

At this juncture, re-enter the Bums of New York. They're bearded, they're paranoid schizophrenic, they love to menace their imaginary enemies and sometimes, just sometimes, they'll push you into the subway tracks. It seems bizarre to me, but the yuppies are too politically correct even to admit that they notice the sudden proliferation of bums, let alone to call the cops on them when they loiter around children's playgrounds carrying on a formal duel with themselves.

And right here I'm going to admit to you: I like the bums. They really have a special sort of charisma in their eccentricities. And like fingerprints, no two are alike. I like to think of myself as a bit of a Bum Connoisseur. I treasure the little details that go into their delusional, shambling existences. Take the bum who confronted me and my sister the other day. He shouted garbled imprecations, then flung a handful of something at us. He managed a really spectacular throw, and the objects caught the sunlight high above our heads before they came to rest, scattered, at our feet. I looked. They were red and yellow Chiclets. Was he giving us a gift in the only way he knew how? Maybe. Was he a performance artist fallen on hard times? Could be that too. Who knows the motives of bums, but really, they intrigue me.

More important, they have a foul odor that's somehow more honest than the smell of new money. Ironically, their appearance might be the harbinger, Oh how I'm hoping, of a place once again for the middle class in this city. Perhaps eventually all the transplants will have enough of the screamed obscenities, the visible cases of lice, and the psychotic menacing, will get to a point where they can no longer deny the grit of the city, and will pack up their annoying lifestyles and move back to whence they came.

All this ranting gets me to the topic of Theme Thursday: suitcase.

Pictured above is the scene outside my livingroom window this afternoon: a bum had taken up temporary residence in the playground across the street, having parked his "suitcase" in the middle of the street. Said suitcase was actually more of a towering mound of burstingly full garbage bags, stacked on his stolen shopping cart in a brilliant feat of engineering. What was in those garbage bags? Beats hell out of me. But this suitcase stood a majestic seven feet tall.

Now that's a suitcase.

Packing the Car

The classic summer story: mid-June 1979, a turquoise Pontiac Catalina with white vinyl interior waiting patiently, quietly overheating in the hot sun, trunk open to be filled, at the fire hydrant on a corner in Brooklyn.

Father sweating and shouting and banging luggage down the stairs, mother standing guard against ever-advancing meter maids wielding ticket pads, two little girls flittering, racketing, and generally getting in the way.

Finally, the car is packed. It is packed. To the gunwales, the trunk filled to bursting, and besides that every last nook and cranny crammed full. Of what? Children; various pets; a cello, two violins, a flute; art supplies; clothes; toys; journals; books to be read; for several summers my mother's dissertation notes, her typewriter, her manuscript; special pillows; an elaborate lunch of fried chicken, or egg-and-caviar sandwiches, or cold hamburgers.

We did not travel light.

When I think of all those summer vacations in the Adirondacks, I always think first of the packing and unpacking of the car. The dread, the heat, the horror. The anticipation, the fussing, the aching muscles. Things forgotten and turned-around-for. The unnecessary things packed and transported but left, all summer long, in a dark corner of the cavernous trunk.

Arriving and unpacking. Already thinking two months ahead to the end of summer and the inevitable re-packing.

Summer vacation, as a little girl, was framed by these packing episodes. We were seized with a madness of Mustn't Leave Behind. A desperate shoring-up of familiar objects against change. Every eventuality, seen and unforeseen, must be provided for.

There would be no badminton game without a birdy, no quiet moment without a comic book, no summer cold endured without the grape-flavored Dimetap, no scenic view confronted without pastels and sketch pad. Never would we be caught unprepared!

*"Pontiac Muscle" by Mike Mertz, from Flickr Creative Commons

Oops: A Brief Tale of an Unrequited Girl-Dog Crush

There is a dog run across the street from our house, and many of the neighborhood dogs go there to play. It can be pretty yappy and noisy, but I don't mind because I love dogs so much, and it gives me a chance to lurk and ogle surreptitiously whenever I'm going in or out of our door. Mostly the dogs don't notice me, which makes me feel a little weird. I think they're so good-looking, so why won't they give me the time of day with a reciprocal ogle?

Yesterday morning, letting myself into the house, I stopped to check out the dog run. Sure enough, a disarmingly hunky boxer was rumbling along the perimeter. He stopped when he saw me checking him out, and came over, and pressed his drooly muzzle to the bars, his ears pricked up, staring at me. Finally, I'd gotten a dog to notice me back! I called to him across the street, but sotto voce, "Good boy, you're so handsome..." etc. etc. He didn't move. Wow, this was unprecedented! I must have been looking pretty good, I thought, for this beast to stare for so long.

But suddenly it occurred to me, why would the boxer be interested in me? This wasn't low self-esteem, just pragmatism. I didn't have Pippin with me any longer, nor was I carrying a giant salami hoagie. Just me and my purse. So, realizing it might not be me he was staring at, in my best wallflower move, I turned to check behind me to discover the real object of his interest. If this was a story with a happy ending, there would have been no one on the block, and I would have realized that the stare and little tail wag were indeed meant for me.

But alas, there, right behind me a few paces, was a little Jack Russell terrier, staring back at the boxer and wagging adorably.

Oops. I was as embarrassed as if this had taken place at the prom and I had mistaken the captain of the football team's little finger waggle in my direction for a come-hither aimed at me, instead of at the quarterback standing behind me (I was going to say the head cheerleader, but come on, it's so much better as a story of undercover gay love).

I managed to cover my shame with an elaborate show of unlocking the door while trying to hang onto my iced coffee...



*photo: Siba the Boxer Dog by Elliot Moore from Flickr Creative Commons