Bloggy Hiatus

Hey sweet readers!

Going on a vacation from the interwebs--hopefully it'll be salubrious--


xo

La Boue de Verdun

The last WWII veteran in my family, my dear Uncle Harold, died several years ago. With the passing of the generations goes too the immediacy of the wars of their generations. I have never had visceral experience, not even on the home front; only what was told to me by those who fought, and whose fathers, brothers, and uncles fought: the letters, stories, and memories that offer only hints of what it was like for them.

We live in wartime, but many of us are so removed from the fighting on foreign soil that it doesn't affect our daily lives, except in the political arguments we sometimes engage in from our safe distance. Yet, I know that for many other families here in America, of course, there is not this remove, and their loved ones are "over there." That Sarge, were it not for an accident of age, would have served.

When Sarge and I visited Paris, we spent some hours at the Musee de l'Armee at Les Invalides, where we found a strange little exhibit, an old WWI French Army uniform resting in a glass case. It appeared to be completely caked in dirt. When I bent to read the plaque, I saw that it said, simply, "La Boue de Verdun," the mud of Verdun. I will always think of that uniform, displayed in a corner behind glass, a tangible remnant of the fear, suffering, and the bravery. He was covered in battle, and he saved that muddy uniform carefully for so many many years, and although I don't remember the soldier's name, I remember today that mud, and think of him.

Psychic Hangover

I have come to the grim conclusion that it is not necessarily salubrious to go delving into the dark parts of one's psychological past, especially when one is prone anyway to fits of black gloom. When I was younger, I liked to air the details of the more peculiar aspects of my childhood, to myself in my journals and to any willing live audience. Looking back, I think it was a bit of showing off: my life was like a book, and I the romantic protagonist. I had created a new genre: European Jewish Gothic. It suited me perfectly.

Over the last week, though, I've come to think that revisiting the pain was, shall we put it mildly, most unhelpful. Although I announced to Sarge last Wednesday, after I'd finished with staring at the photos of my old home and writing my last post, that I'd achieved a major catharsis. I stood in front of him and proclaimed it with joy and relief, "Sarge, I just had a catharsis!" to which he replied, skeptically I venture, "really? So you're purged of your weird feelings about Henry Street?" to which I replied, "Yes! I have no weird feelings left in me!"

It turns out that this was not the case (as Sarge had sussed out even in the face of my grand optimism) and in fact, far from achieving catharsis, I have actually dredged up no small amount of sadness and discomfort. You can't imagine how disappointing that is.

All my study of psychology (I even have a higher degree in the field!) has not, apparently, led me to a place of peace and understanding. Just when I think I've begun to understand myself, I find that I'm plain wrong. My past, it seems, is better left in the heavy safe that is locked, combination forgotten or deliberately lost, and stowed deep deep down in my subconscious--or better still, my unconscious. There, stripped of its uncomfortable realness, its metaphor acquires a certain lightness (a paradox, I know, but for me it's true). Let's just say that I feel better when I don't eat such a heavy meal of details.

So here I sit, paralyzed with feelings, the fog of depression clouding my spirit. A pox on my last post.

My current unfortunate state can be summed up in Nigel Tufnel's line from Spinal Tap: "Like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none: none more black."

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

A New Post, about Nothing.

You know when you don't have much to say? And you want to say it anyway?

I've got nothing at all clever, or even particularly interesting today. I just wanted to post over the spirit pictures below, as Halloween is over and my little girl is back to being a little girl rather than a chiffon shade.

Yesterday was Sarge's birthday, and he's on vacation. I took Hedgie to school and we spent a quiet day together, just hanging out. Nothing exciting, just hanging out. I watched him wander the nuclear wasteland in "Fallout." We listened to Flamenco music for an hour, then to bazouki music and he grew nostalgic for his upbringing. We had lunch together--raiding the fridge for leftovers. I baked him a chocolate cake. We did three loads of laundry and he folded, very nicely I might add. We watched some Monty Python--you know that obscene sex education skit, the one that always makes me blush and cackle at the same time. We spent a long time discussing how to keep Hedgie grounded even though she attends a school full of uber-wealthy, silver-spoon children and we live modestly. I begged him to write me a "meme" to post and he refused. I knitted and he pottered.

Then he left to pick up Hedgie from her cello lesson, and to grab take-out burgers and french fries, a delight that I don't often indulge in. They returned home for presents and cake, and Looney Tunes, and after that, in true Victorian dinner party fashion, Hedgie gave us a cello demonstration, and we were amazed at her good tone--no squeaking and screeching!--and then she gave Sarge a little lesson, laughing as he hunched over her quarter-sized cello.

That was my day. And this was my post. Oh and I left out the very private bits because I am nothing if not circumspect.

Victorian Spirit Photography

An ethereal little girl, a few yards of silk chiffon, an inexpensive camera...a spirit.

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

Answers

I sat quietly on the couch this afternoon and watched the two heads bent together over Hedgie's math homework, and listened to their voices in earnest discussion: Hedgie's high little one piping up in interest, questioning, and Sarge's bass notes answering.

I remembered those dark winter evenings with my father, our heads together over my math homework, the lamplight glinting off his gold glasses, the red of his beard; I could hear the bass notes in his voice, the patient explanations, feel the sweet eureka moment as I understood the equation; I could see us together again.

Solitary

everyone tucked away in bed but me,

I peeled my apple with the little paring knife

and ate it,

drank the hot sweet tea

the only stars visible in all of Brooklyn tonight were these bright sparks amid the books

The Shoe Canon

Shoes. I've been thinking about shoes. Such potential for fetishizing, and you know how I love a good object of fetish (oh please, won't I ever shut up about my fetishes?)

I wrote many months ago about my favorite clothes through the years. I thought I'd add an endnote to that post, about the shoes that have held special meaning for me.

Here are the ten seminal pairs of shoes from my personal Shoe Canon:


1. The orthopedic shoes of my childhood. I got to choose every year until I was seven or eight from the three colors available: navy, burgundy, and brown. Simply dreadful. Why orthopedic shoes? I was quite pigeon-toed. And guess what! I still am. I like to think of it as a delightful quirk.

2. My aunt's black suede grommeted platform shoes. She had tiny feet, so I could play dress-up in them without falling over. I think the contrast between my clunky orthopedics and these marvels of glamor made me think that life, or at least shoes, would not always be so drab and defeating...

3. Patent leather tap shoes with wide grosgrain ribbon ties. I adored my tap instructor, George. He was about a million years old and had been in vaudeville, and could still tap the hell out of a floor.



4. Ballet slippers. I remember the excitement of sewing the little pieces of elastic across the instep.

5. Black Capezio character shoes, my first heels. Same now as they were in 1983. Let's be honest, they really don't look all that thrilling, do they? It's hard to imagine what I saw in them, but back then the faux leather and ingenue heel screamed possibility.




6. Macdougal Alley Skimmers. When I just googled them, what did I find? The only reference online seems to be a comment I made ages ago on someone else's blog: "The '80s for me are typified by a quintessentially NYC fashion: the MacDougal Alley Skimmer. Capezio flats in about eighty colors; many girls I knew collected them like girls in the '50s collected cashmere sweaters." My one lone pair was electric blue.

7. Steel-toed motorcycle boots. In college, I thought they made me look tough and sexy. Who knows, maybe they did, but it's up for debate. Though I could certainly kick frat boy ass if I needed to...

8. The hiking boots that I wore every day in Israel, when I wasn't wearing sandals. Those boots took me across deserts and up Masada. I absolutely destroyed them that year.

9. Sarge's army boots: when we first fell in love, he was a drill sergeant in the Army Reserves. Once a month, he'd leave college to do a drill weekend at the nearby Fort. I loved to watch him polish those boots in preparation; he was a brilliant, meticulous, patient, and dextrous polisher. I knew it was a very good sign.

10. Hedgehog's first shoes: Irish linen slippers with a linen button on each. So ridiculously expensive, so difficult to tuck her fat little feet into them properly. So lovely.



I asked you about clothes in my old post, let me ask now about shoes, about the special, meaningful pair in your personal history.

So, nu?