Unstoppered

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours...

Since the beginning of time

(or let me not exaggerate, since Eva first knew Maxie)

there was the bottle on the dresser.

My grandfather didn't believe in doing things by half-measures, and it was real perfume, not cologne. Like the fabled bolt of cloth, it would never run out, for no sooner did my grandmother apply the last precious drop to her skin, than a new bottle would appear nested in its blue velvet box with looping gilt writing: Shalimar.

I remember standing by that dresser, a little girl much too young for ablutions designed to seduce, tilting my head back, exposing my own soft neck like a vampire's girlfriend waiting for the bite...or in this case, grandma's fingertip dabbing the potion...

(I'm making this part up, for my usually generous grandma Eva was decidedly miserly when it came to sharing this gift, and so I never got the chance to wear it, and to smell like her)

So the bottle sat, unshared, sapphire stoppered, lightly signalling, in diffuse sunlight and lamplight, its private message: something I couldn't decipher at the time, a romantic love between two old people, who had once themselves been young. Mouth to neck, inhaling the scent...for why would such a gesture cease with age? After the children, ten thousand nights in the big bed, the mountains and deep shadowed valleys of years and years together, the private jokes and whispers, love letters re-read?

Now I know it all, and none of it: the idea of a love of decades, but not the secrets in the bottle, the letters, the Yiddish whispers, the bedroom after the door closed.

There was always a look that passed between them, not meant for children to see, a glance that contained, like a password to an arcane mystery religion, the whole ancient hidden meaning of love itself.






For more remembering, visit the Sepia Saturday blog

Ne Igrushki (No Toys)

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

This is my Grandpa, and his two sisters, Liba and Tilda. They must have been new immigrants in America when this picture was taken. My grandfather rarely spoke of his early years in Soviet Georgia, and I was left with just a few dark images...foremost among these bits and pieces was the fact, oft repeated and with a stark solemnity, that there were no toys for the children. None.

But none? My young mind couldn't accept a child's life with no toys, and I made for myself a little fiction about the peculiar wooden man and bear, who would take turns clacking at the stump with their axes if you pulled the handles back and forth (and I did this very often when I was little). I imagined it was the lone gimcrack entertainment of Max's childhood, and that he derived great pleasure from its existence in the fashion of one unused to more. After all, even Laura Ingalls, living deep in the dark woods of Wisconsin, had the homely rag doll Charlotte, and paperdolls cut by Ma from butcher paper.

I hoped for so many decades that this had been his toy, when he was a boy in the Old Country, that I came to believe in the saving truth. So it was with sadness, this morning, that I was forced to forfeit this constructed memory. I took the bear and the man off its shelf and showed it to my mother, who told me that it had been among the leavings of the previous owners when she and Max and Eva and Abby moved into their brownstone in the 1950s. My grandpa had not, in fact, had any toys.

Ne igrushki.

Acquainted with the Night

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

When I was feeling low one day my grandpa Max told me something. How when he was a young man, feeling low, he would walk and walk and walk the streets of Brooklyn, smoking Sobranie oval cuts and thinking to himself until dusk turned to evening and evening to night, in and out of the pools of light from the street lamps, even in the rain, in the cold, in the heat, until something righted itself in his mind and he could go home again.

The vision of the young man walking, walking, smoking oval cuts superimposed itself and made me the same, made me as he was, as we all were, young people everywhere in every time. I am sure that if I were to go now, some drizzly April night, down to the Promenade that overlooks the harbor and the cityscape across the harbor, I would see the un-substance: brooding and walking, walking, brooding, the only solid thing the curls of smoke disappearing on the wind off the water. And I could take my place beside him and walk along there, until my mind cleared and I could go home again...

Emilia Romatowska

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I woke to the memory of a name: Emilia Romatowska. Sometimes it comes to you this way, sudden and contextless as the scent of salt on the wind when you are not near any ocean.

The scene followed in a rush of detail. Curled up in the big leather armchair in my grandparents' formal parlor, hugging my knees, downcast over a romantic reversal. I'm fifteen. My grandfather Max listens to my story and counters with one of his own. The name of my heartache is long gone now, but the name of his remains: Emilia Romatowska.

She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, he tells me, a real beauty. A heartbreaker, I loved her once. But alas, he says, it wasn't in the stars for us. Good thing too or you wouldn't be here!

Is is not in the details that I find comfort--of his days working at great-grandpa Benjamin's tailor shop in Brooklyn, long evenings of night school, fortuitous hours that yielded the prize of Emilia, of the girl and her pretty ways, how he took so boldly her young immigrant hand--not so much in these details, but in the telling itself. He says her name again and there is a note in his voice, a certain delight in the tale of his downfall, as if he has just unwrapped a caramel, and eaten it, and his mouth is still full of the taste.

Sixty years after the fact, there is a fresh feel to it--the hunt, notes passed and walks taken, a pleasant yearning, the very loss of love itself--even at fifteen, I hear my grandfather's words, see his smile (half rueful, half wry, no part sad), and am reeling from sudden epiphany: these old pangs are what keeps one really alive.

p.s. don't forget to check out more Sepia Saturday posts HERE

Freedom from Fear

On the night of September 11 into the dawn of September 12 2001, when Sarge was in a living hell of coordinated chaos and fear, ending his first of three days of non-stop disaster response work, I kept vigil quietly at home, cuddling my 9-month-old daughter tight against me. Unable to sleep in our bed, I gathered every quilt in the house and made a cozy nest for myself and our little girl on the living room floor, turned off the horrifying news coverage, and lay down with Hedgehog. Through that night, I nursed her and cozied her and kept us safe from imagined disaster. She was free from fear, unknowing in her sweet bubble of babyhood, though I was not.

In March of 2011, she is ten, lucky in the calm regularity of her life, lucky to end each day of school and friends and light and play in her own warm bed, under the cheerful pink and green smiling owl coverlet we chose for her last August, her arm around her stuffed dog; a lamp in the hall glows in steadfast reassurance, keeping the monsters and the darkness away.

But upstairs, after her bedtime, we sit close together on the couch talking in frowns, because her father and I know better--that the world is terrifying, that darkness can only be held back so much and so long, that we can only make our best effort to keep her out of harm's way, and that for some people in some places, even a best effort is not enough. So we can only try--and probably--please God--succeed...

But how to keep her free from fear?

How do you keep your awake and aware ten-year-old child free from fear?

Peanut-Ham Spread: Excruciating, or Delectable?

I collect old cooking pamphlets, and the 1950s appetizer publications are chock full of concoctions that read like a passage from de Sade as rewritten by William Burroughs. Naturally, I'm fascinated to know: are some of these woefully misbegotten ingredient combinations somehow alchemized in the mixing, into something scrumptious?

Case in point, Good Housekeeping's 1958 peanut-ham spread:



Those guests look cheerful enough, as they begin their delicate ravaging of the hors d'oeuvres table, don't they? Nothing seems particularly amiss, does it?

I laid out my ingredients, each individual food item much beloved:



I measured and observed, how the impending mixture might be so insulting to the senses as to induce existential nausea:



I mixed, and looked again. Aesthetically unthinkable:



Attempted to plate it, a heaping dose or two on wheat rounds:



Choked it down with the help of ice-cold Dr. Pepper:



THE VERDICT: If you can get past the texture, the taste is, remarkably, quite inoffensive. The appearance and feel of it are quite another matter. I can only use the adjective: malevolent.

I wouldn't serve this to guests, not even if I were to be transported back in time to the 1950s, when, I believe, enough hard liquor flowed at these events to render visitors helpless before the truth of a dubious repast.

However, luckily the same booklet offers some other options, including this:



p.s. a friend suggested Miracle Whip instead--I think I should have gone with that...

Blackbeard's Challenge, or, Naughty-Naughty Putt-Putt

We had a few hours to enrich before we left Orlando, so we took Hedgehog to Pirate Putt-Putt near the hotel.

This is what greeted us at the first, er, hole.



Sarge and I stood staring, balls and sticks firmly in hand, squinting to determine whether it was just a trick of light and shadow. Then we exchanged a glance. Blackbeard's Challenge was apparently of the concupiscent rather than mercenary variety.

High and Tight and Sophomoric

I was sitting in the old-school, no-frills Brooklyn barber shop the other morning, waiting for Sarge to get his high-and-tight. Sounds dirty right? Not if you've ever been in the military, but I won't interrupt the image with an explanation.

So anyway. I was bored. The only reading material was a year's worth of issues of Maxim magazine, a "men's interest" publication not quite as naughty even as Playboy, but still chock full of those ubiquitous shiny-skinned knee-socked ladies with their racks and asses (see? I can talk like a proverbial "man") at 3/4 visibility.

Okay I'll admit I was intrigued if skeptical. Then more intrigued and less skeptical. Then completely won over. Maxim is my new favorite reading material. I laughed my way through two issues. And had a realization that my sense of humor is totally sophomoric. I'm not even going to analyze my enjoyment as I usually do.

But I am going to subscribe. Yes I am. And I look forward to seeing which mailing lists this puts me on. I will keep you updated.

Disney World: a Journey into Meh

Flight cancelled, stranded by the fancy pool in the fancy hotel in Orlando (courtesy of the MIL, whose brainchild this trip was)...I suppose I can't complain...

Or can I?

Not capable of well-phrased linear sentences, so will instead resort to lists

Things I Hate about Disney World:

1. Disney World
2. Walt Disney
3. Mickey Mouse
4. The extortionist prices of everything from postcards to hot dogs.
5. The dictatorial nature of the place: you must do certain things in certain ways and feel a certain way about it.

Things I Love about Disney World

1. Daisy Duck
2. The bizarre, stylized way the beautiful princesses hug the little girls.
3. The exuberant loveliness and well-meaning racism of "it's a Small World."
4. Watching dads posing with Ariel and trying to cop a feel.
5. Watching Ariel evade dads' pinchy fingers.
6. Listening to Sarge do his Evil Mickey impersonation.
7. Getting to deconstruct my experience rather than being in the moment.

Things I hate about Universal Studios

1. Universal Studios
2. Not meeting a costumed Snape character in Hogsmeade


Things I Love about Universal Studios

1. Hogsmeade
2. Hogwarts
3. Animatronic owls
4. Frozen butter beer
5. Cold pumpkin juice
6. The Hogwarts Express
7. My new Slytherin scarf
8. The possibility of meeting Snape around any given corner. I didn't, but I might have.
9. The Hogsmeade postmark.
10. Did I mention, Wizarding World of Harry Potter?



Well, suffice it to say, I am a cynical cynical woman, and prone to self-conscious analysis and social commentary. In the end, these places are not for me.

You Know You Want a Disney Princess Postcard

Hey you!

I'm off to Florida in a few hours, and I suspect it may well be The Land of Postcards, a veritable dragon's hoard of them.

So...if you would like a postcard from Orlando, leave a comment here to remind me, and then send me your addy at

theweatherinthestreets@gmail.com

even if you think I have it, send it again! I'm feeling disorganized this morning.

xo

Leah