A Summer Day

In Their Own Words

An Eternity
by Archibald MacLeish

There is no dusk to be,
   There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
   And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
   Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
   White peach bough.

Dying shall never be
   Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
   Death never was.

Advice

Everything is true, and its opposite is true as well. People give advice. I give advice. Nothing is so much fun to give as advice. People do not always like to give money or food or sex, but they are always willing to give advice. Advice costs nothing and it has the added benefit of allowing the giver to feel much wiser than he or she in fact is. Nothing is more fun than to sit back, stroke one’s chin, and lay it down for others: what life really is; what needs to be done; how it needs to be done. It is axiomatic that few people ever really take their own advice. But of course Advice is the one area in life where it is way more fun to give than to receive. Now the thing that always strikes me about advice is this: Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well. Now how’s that for an axiom: “Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well.”---Gene Schmidt. If you want to be a writer, sit down at the typewriter every day and bang out a prescribed number of words: Discipline is the thing. If you want to be a writer, sit down at the typewriter and above all else do not force yourself to write. Sit…wait…’don’t’ go searching for a subject, your subject will come to you.’ Patience is the thing. Discipline or Patience? Well, I’m sure both of these methods have worked for different people at different times. So once again…Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well. For every three people who get there faster by taking a short cut up Green Street, you will surely find another three people who have gotten their faster by taking a short cut up Bagel Street. Cut out carbs from your diet. No, don’t cut out carbs, cut out fat. Don’t cut out anything, just count those calories. Haste makes waste. He who hesitates is lost. So the question becomes, ‘is anything true at all?’. Well, in the realm of advice, it is all true: “Everything is true, and the opposite of everything is true as well.” Of course, the opposite of Everything is Nothing. “Everything is true. Nothing is true.” At least nothing on this mundane level. The search for Eternal and Transcendent Truth continues apace, without doubt the most important of all human endeavors.

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise to balance it."---George Santayana 

In Their Own Words

“Last night somebody sang a song…’Come back to Erin…come back around to the land of thy birth. Come back with the shamrock in the springtime…’

“This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection, and I certainly will come back in the springtime.”

---John F. Kennedy, at Dublin Airport, June 1963

A Small Brooklyn Memory

So in Brooklyn when I was a kid we used to make prank calls, and some of them were mean, and I am not saying I am proud of that. Others weren't very bad at all:

“Hello?”

“Good Evening, Ma’am. We’re calling from Con Edison. We are sorry to trouble you but we've had a report that the streetlight directly outside your window is not functioning properly. Is there any way you can just quickly check to see if the light is on?”

“Certainly. Just one moment….Yes, the light is still on.”

“Good. Then blow it out.”

Disconnect.

Silly. Dumb. But fun. Of course you needed an older kid for that one, or at least a kid who could sound a bit older.

Then there were the other tricks designed for the people you really hated. The one’s who complained to the police about you and your friends playing stickball in the street just because a red rubber Spaulding ball (red---they should have seen it coming!) smacked them in the face and broke their eyeglasses. The old Italian lady we called Signora was one for that. And we didn't even break her glasses, all she got was a good whack and a bit of a bloody nose. What did she expect, it was a foul ball. So for a week a so in the high hot days of summer the cops kept cruising by and threatening us with life in prison (if not the electric chair) if they ever caught us so much as bouncing a ball on the sidewalk again. We were terrified. Then after a few weeks, in the normal way that these things go, the cops forgot to come around and hassle us, and we forgot to be afraid, and so soon we were back at stickball and punchball in the streets again.

We drew First and Third base and Home Plate with chalk, but the sewer plate halfway up the street was Second Base. But that’s all beside the point. The point is we couldn't let the Signora’s attack upon us go unanswered. So one morning a small Maytag truck from all the way out on Long Island pulled up in front of her apartment building and two burly repairmen got out and rang the old lady’s bell. We of course were watching from a distance. What ensued as Signora stepped out onto the stoop to confront her visitors was as fearful a battle---and as rewarding a payoff!---as you’d ever want to see. The old lady denied any knowledge whatsoever of the call, while the repairmen showed her a piece of paper with her name and address and insisted they were going to come inside. Italian swear words echoed down the Brooklyn street, and even from where we were standing we could see the infuriated Signora’s face turning as bright red as a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. Moochie started taking bets that the old girl was going to pop her cork and drop dead right there on her own front stoop, but then Moochie had no father and his mother never took him to church at St. Mary’s on Sunday mornings, so he didn’t have the natural fear of going to hell for his sins that the rest of us had. We were starting to think we’d maybe gone too far this time when Signora finally allowed the two repairmen to enter her apartment and see with their own stupid eyes that in fact she didn't even own a washing machine, and therefore had no possible reason on earth to call for their services. Only then did the unhappy repairmen climb back into their truck for the long drive back to Long Island. We breathed a sigh of relief as watched the old Signora shaking her fist at the departing truck and cursing in both Italian and English the stupidity of washing machine companies who sent men all the way from Long Island to harass a poor old lady who had spent a lifetime washing her dishes by hand over a hot sink for the benefit of her lazy husband and ungrateful kids.

After that, we mostly confined ourselves to innocuous pranks like ordering a large anchovy pizza or a box of diapers for our specially selected victim. And after a while the local merchants got to know our voices and would merely hang up on us whenever we called. And as the summers marched along we became older and other things occupied our minds, and so our phone pranks went the way of spinning tops and toy soldiers.

Oddly enough, I myself was brought down when I pulled the mildest and most harmless prank imaginable. And in the process I learned that the one person in the world you couldn't play tricks on was the telephone operator. In those days you dialed “O” instead of “411” to get information.

“Do you have the number of the Rainbow Theater?”

“Certainly.”

“Well call them up and let me know what’s playing.”

I was maybe eight at this time, and thought I had reached the heights of wit and hilarity. I would have considered myself the Noel Coward of Maujer Street  if I’d had any idea at the time who Noel Coward was. I hung up the phone walked away convulsed with laughter. But a few seconds later the phone rang and my mother answered it and it was the operator wanting to know who had made the prank called. I hadn't known that they could see the number that was calling. So I got yelled at. But at the same time I had been given one of the most precious gifts one can receive in life: the gift of paranoia. The knowledge that Those in Authority might be watching you even as you think you're watching them is perhaps the greatest incentive for staying on the straight and narrow path that has ever been devised.

Writers in Their Youth (faux)

"The classroom was large and clean and well-lighted. It was a good classroom. There was the smell of new books and pencil shavings and an early September breeze coming in through the half-open window. The teacher's name was Miss Barkley and she had fine legs and a good face. I wondered if she would let me stay to clap the erasers after class. I wondered if she would call on me to ask me if I knew the answer to this question or that. I hoped she would. I hoped she would pull me out of line and tell me what a fine looking boy I was. But the whole morning long she called on the other kids and never once looked in my direction. 'The hell with her', I thought."

-----From the lost childhood journals of Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway, age 6, with his sisters Ursula and Marcelline on their first day of grammar school, 1905.

In Their Own Words:

“I don't know who I am or who I was…I know it less than ever…everything is totally contradictory…but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
-Alberto Giacometti

Spider's Awakening

"Can't you just go like this"---Louis extended his forefinger straight out and held his thumb bolt-upright---"bang! bang! bang!"

Spider shook his head. "I need a gun," he declared flatly. "If we're going to play guns, then I need a real gun".

"You shoulda brought one then."

"Well I didn’t."

"Stupid."

"Moron."

The game of ‘guns’ came to a standstill. 

“I’m not the moron" Louis insisted. "If you need a gun so bad, why don’t you run home and get one?"

Both boys looked up. A downpour of rain darkened the skylight over their heads. Some great Saturday morning, Spider thought. Out loud he said: "Why don’t you just give me one of your guns? What do you need two guns for? You don’t need to have two guns."

"Yes I do" Louis insisted. "They’re a set. If I give you one I’ll have one empty holster. I’ll look stupid."

"You are stupid, so what does it matter if you look stupid? No one’s gonna see you except me. And I already know you’re stupid so it don’t matter."

"Yeah? Well, you’re a retard for not bringing a gun in the first place."

The door of Louis’s apartment opened slightly and Louis’s sister, Francesca, slipped out into the hallway. She took a few steps toward the boys and stopped, staring at some point in the distance.

"What do you want?" Louis snapped at her.

"Nothing."

"Then go back inside," he ordered.

"I don’t have to," Francesca told him.

"We’re playing out here."

"Who’s stopping you?"

Francesca turned to Spider for the first time and smiled.

"Hello, Matthew," she said.

Spider felt the rims of his ears start to burn. No one ever called him Matthew. His mother and father called him either Matt or Matty. The nuns at Holy Cross called him Mr. Gladwaller, which was just one more thing about the nuns that he hated. Everyone else called him Spider.

Louis thought the name hilarious.

"Hello Matthh…yooou" he mimicked. "Oh, Matthh-YOOOU…Matthh…YOOOU…"

"What’s so funny?" Francesca wanted to know. "Matthew is his name."

"Oh, get lost, will ya?" Louis told his sister. "We’re playing out here."

"I can play too if I want."

"We’re not playing some dumb girl game. Go back inside."

"Why don’t you just shut up and leave her alone?" Spider heard himself say.

Louis’ head snapped back as if he’d been slapped. Spider himself seemed to recoil at his own words. The boys were silent for a time. Francesca took it as an opening.

"Would you like to come inside for a while, Matthew?" she asked.

"Inside?"

"I can show you my tank, if you’d like."

"Ah, go away" Louis told her. He’d recovered from his shock, but his words didn’t carry much force.

"You can look at my tank" Francesca said. "I got some new guppies this week."

"No one cares about your dumb fish" Louis informed her.

"Come on" Francesca insisted.

Spider felt he had no choice in the matter but to follow her inside the apartment.

"You’re morons, the both of ya’s" Louis called after them.

Like everyone else Spider knew, Louis’ family lived in a ‘railroad’ apartment. The rooms were laid out one after the other, from the kitchen to the front room. Spider followed Francesca across the living room and through a doorway, into what he knew was Louis’ room.

"You better not touch anything in there" Louis shouted behind them. He was standing in the kitchen now. Francesca opened another door and Spider passed into a section of the apartment he had never seen before.

This was Francesca’s room. It was a girl’s room, but not quite like Spider’s sisters’ room. Spider’s two older sisters shared a bedroom, and it was usually messy with stockings and hair rollers and jars of creams with their caps off. Franceca’s room wasn’t like that at all. The bed was neatly made with a fluffy pink spread. There were shelves on the walls, lined with a collection of dolls and teddy bears of different sizes. A pink-and-white dresser, and next to that a writing table. There was a door beyond which was surely a grown-up room, where Louis and Francesca’s parents slept.

Francesca snapped on a lamp that stood on her dresser. "Over here" she told Spider.

In front of the window there was a low table that held a large, rectangular fish tank. The tank was packed with small fish of different colors that swam its length, back and forth. Spider and Francesca sat down on the edge of her bed and watched the fish. They were red and black and silvery-yellow, with large fan-like tails that shimmered in the clear water.

"Aren’t they pretty" Francesca asked.

Spider shrugged. "I guess" he said.

"Guppies are my favorite fish" Francesca told him.

Time began moving very slowly for Spider. He felt he was supposed to say something. He couldn't imagine what it might be. They were both quiet for what seemed a very long time.

Francesca extended her arms out in front of her and examined her fingernails for some reason.

"I’m already nine," she told Spider. "I’ll be ten in eight months."

"Oh." Spider said.

Francesca turned and smiled at him "Do you think I’m pretty?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"Do you think I’m pretty?"

In all his eight years of life, only his mother had ever asked him that question. Spider had responded then by throwing his arms around her neck and assuring his mother that she was beautiful and promising that he would marry her when he grew up. This did not now seem like the appropriate thing to do with Francesca.

But if he could have formulated the thought, he would have said that Francesca was prettier even than pretty Deborah Montello, who sat behind him in third grade and, excepting Francesca, was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. And if he’d thought some more about it he might have said that Francesca was  prettier than the electric red fire truck he’d owned when he was four, or  the porcelain face of his mother’s Victorian doll, though they were pretty in a different way than girls were pretty, so maybe they didn't count.

For no particular reason, Spider stood up. Francesca stood up too. She leaned in close to Spider and kissed him on the mouth. Spider responded by plunging his hands into his pockets and looking up at the ceiling.

Time, it seemed to Spider, had pretty much stopped for good. He know that now he had to say something, *anything*, or else they might remain stuck here in this room for all eternity. He forced his gaze down from the ceiling and focused it on Francesca's forehead.

"I have the new Superman and Green Lantern" he told her. "But I haven't read them yet."

Francesca looked at Spider very solemnly for a moment, then suddenly burst out laughing. It was a loud laugh, the way kids sometimes laughed at you if you tripped and fell in the schoolyard or dropped your lunch. The kind of laugh that made your face burn, as if you’d been slapped on both cheeks. Francesca laughed in that way, and it filled the small room.

"Ah, why don’t ya shut up, ya moron" Louis said. He was standing in the doorway of Francesca’s room now. "Told ya she was a real moron, " he said to Spider.

"Oh, go outside and play your dumb games" Francesca said. She sat down at her writing desk and picked up a book that was lying there and started to read. "Stupid little boys," she added.

"Shut up, you jerk," Louis told his sister. She ignored him. To Spider he said, "Here, you can take one of my guns. Let’s go outside"

Spider looked at the gun in Louis’ hand.

"Here—take it. You can play with it," Louis insisted.

Spider took the gun, and followed Louis without looking back.

They went out into the hall and played ‘guns’ for the rest of the morning, but the game had lost its flavor. Spider went home early and told his mother he felt hot, feverish. She felt his head and gave him half an aspirin just to be on the safe side. She had him lie down and take a nap. Spider dreamed he was trapped in the bedroom of a burning building holding a tank of brightly colored fish as the floor collapsed under his feet and plunged him down into the flames below.

In Their Own Words:

Halley's Comet

When in your middle years
The great comet comes again
Remember me, a child,
Awake in the summer night,
Standing in my crib and
Watching that long-haired star
So many years ago.
Go out in the dark and see
Its plume over water
Dribbling on the liquid night,
And think that life and glory
Flickered on the rushing
Bloodstream for me once,
and for
All who have gone before me,
Vessels of the billion-year-long
River that flows now in your veins.

---Kenneth Rexroth

Grandparents

I never knew my mother's parents. Neither did my youngest sister. This was a natural consequence of being last to arrive in an already crowded family.

My maternal grandfather, Vincent Zita, seems to have disappeared behind a curtain of mystery around the time my own parents were married. The story I had later was that he had gone into a state of severe depression after losing his powers of 'manhood'---i.e., becoming impotent---which was generally considered the worst of all possible catastrophes by Italian men of his generation.

“He wasn’t a man anymore,” is the way I heard my older cousin Helen say it over coffee and cake one afternoon. I was maybe four or five at this time, and my tender imagination could only translate these puzzling words into a disconcerting image of my grandfather suddenly changed into one of the sleek, feral cats that haunted our backyard.

“What was he then?” I demanded. “What was he if he wasn’t a man anymore? A cat?”

But the assembled company only laughed at my youthful ignorance in that way that is always so infuriating to children, so I just put it down to adult stupidity and dropped the subject for the time being, though the cat image troubled me for a long time after.

My grandfather had worked at a number of jobs, most notably as a ‘fur puller’, which as near I can make out (I had to look it up) involved ‘pulling’ or skinning the fur off of rabbits so that the skins could be used to line coats and jackets. It doesn’t sound like very pleasant or lucrative work, but he supplemented this income selling plaster-cast animal figurines he turned out at his basement work bench, and a second job as a bank night watchman. My Aunt Carmela, who lived in the apartment next to ours, still kept a couple of his old clubs hanging in her closet, and I recall many fond childhood hours whiled away playing 'policeman' with my cousin Joseph from upstairs. Vincent Zita fathered nine children, eight of whom survived, made jugs of red wine from grapes in the cellar, and was by all accounts a hard working and sober-minded gentleman. But the loss of his manly powers was not to be borne. He became increasingly detached from things, made some kind of attempt on his own life, and was thereafter consigned to---a tuberculosis sanitarium! Evidently he was not crazy enough for a mental institution, or else the care was better in the sanitarium, and so there he went and there he remained. Who's to know how much he suffered? In these days of Viagra it seems a thing to snigger and joke about. It was a tragedy for my grandfather.

My grandmother, Rosa Pegano Zita, known to make the greatest Italian sauce and meatballs anyone in Brooklyn had ever tasted, and who had been strong enough to chop wood for the stove and lug it up two flights of city stairs when she was no longer a young woman, succumbed to a heart attack during the closing days of World War II. Somewhere in a pile of papers I have a photocopy of the passenger manifest for the Anchor Line of steam packet ships arriving in NYC on June 21st, 1882, that carried my grandmother Rosa to America when she was one year old. Seeing her name penned in a florid hand by a harried immigration officer on a fading but still legible ‘official’ document, Rosa seems somehow more alive to me than ever. Starting with pretty much nothing, she somehow managed to buy the four-story apartment building where all of her children and their families would live, the building I grew up in. My father used to brag that he was her favorite son-in-law. He would go down to the basement and chop the wood for her when he was home, then shovel coal into the furnace. As a reward he was allowed to sit at her kitchen table as she poured him glasses of red wine and fed him meatballs fresh from her frying pan and drenched in homemade tomato sauce. My father told me that the hallway was always filled with my grandmother’s cooking, an aroma richer than the lushest garden, fragrant with tomatoes and garlic and olives and spices from distant provinces. I’ve often wished I could have been around to bite into one of those meatballs, but Grandma Rosa is gone and no one now knows how to make them.

A story my father told over the years was how on the night my grandmother died, he had been dreaming for some reason of a sailor frantically running back and forth on the deck of his ship searching for a life preserver to toss to a drowning woman in the sea, and how he was awakened by shouting and looked out the window to see my Uncle Frankie, home on leave from the Navy, running toward the house, but my grandmother was already gone by the time they all reached her.

All of these things occurred long before I was born. My maternal grandparents exist for me today in a handful of creased and fading sepia and black-and-white photos. And yet, they are no less real to me for all of that.

I was a bit luckier with my father's parents. I can remember my paternal grandmother, though only vaguely. We were pure Italian on my mother's side, and German-French on my father's side. My one real memory of my grandmother was from a Saturday afternoon (It must have been a Saturday, that was the day my father and I would visit) when I was no more than six or seven. I had received permission to go to the little grocery store down the block to buy some candy or something, and I must have been a long time about it (then, as now, I spent most of my day walking around in a daydream), because I have a strong memory of my grandmother coming after me to see what was taking me so long. I don't recall my grandmother as being particularly affectionate or 'huggy', though of course as a general rule these are not particularly 'German' attributes.

My only other strong memory of my grandmother was when she was dying. I might have been eight. It was near Christmas and my father had taken my sister and I as usual to the big holiday blowout at the Knights of Columbus Hall, which was really an excuse for my father and his brothers to drink a lot of beer an eat a lot of German sausages and sauerkraut, while we kids were bought off with ice cream and candy and cake and gifts. The highlight of this occasion was when we got to sit on Santa's lap and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. My sister and I had been coached beforehand to request, on this pivotal occasion, that "My grandmother gets better for Christmas." I was up first, and for some reason I had all along flatly refused to make this request. I am no longer sure why. It surely wasn't that I wanted something more important. I think it was that I understood even at that tender age that this response to Santa's eternal question would bring a chorus of 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from all the adults present, and a spotlight of unwanted attention oh my head. I suppose I was born with a reticent personality. I went up to Santa indignantly shaking my head 'no' to my father's continued pleading. And yet when Santa popped his big question, "And what would you like for Christmas, young man," I responded without hesitation, "I want my grandmother to get better." And sure enough, Santa felt called upon to repeat my answer for those grownups too busy eating or chugging beer to hear, and they predictably 'oohed' and 'ahhed' and applauded, and I just as predictably hated it. When my sister's turn came she dutifully said her piece, but by then no one cared. That kind of 'cute' trick only works once.

Finally, I remember the night my grandmother died, my parents coming home from the hospital, my father, with many beers and shots of whiskey boiling over along with grief inside of him, crying as he staggered to bed, and my mother, whom I loved but who could be pretty heartless at times (and who had never much cared for her in-laws anyway) telling him to shut up and go to sleep. And those are the things I remember about my paternal grandmother, Eva Schmidt.

My strongest memories are of my father’s father, Gustave Schmidt. Along with the ties of blood I shared something special with my grandfather: our birthdays fell on the same day, June 27^th. On that day every year my father and I would take the bus to my grandfather’s house, and because the place was always full of relatives who’d come to celebrate his birthday, I was always sure of getting a little something from each of them as well, these distant, distant cousins I hardly knew. Then we’d take the bus back home and after supper that night there’d be a cake (made by my mother) or maybe some lemon meringue pies (always my favorite) and vanilla ice cream, and I’d have some of my friends up. For kids today a birthday is sort of a personal national holiday, but when I was growing up it was a much more private and quiet affair; there were no theme parties, no clowns hired for the afternoon, no bouquet of helium balloons, no back room at Chuck-E-Cheese. But it was a great day just the same. Since my birthday was in the summer I could always stay up late, there was no worry about school the next day. In summer, school is always a distant ogre you don’t believe will ever really return. I didn’t really like when they sang Happy Birthday because everyone would stare at me, but otherwise I enjoyed this day of days, which I shared in common with my grandfather.

I was twelve when my grandfather died. But he was ill for much of this time, an invalid who needed to be carried from the bed to the toilet to the kitchen to his easy chair. He could eat, but after a while he needed to be fed by hand. Five days a week he was minded by his eldest daughter, my Aunt Emmy, and her husband, Herman, a quiet and dignified man who wore a Masonic ring and who had made enough money in some business or other to retire very early, and whose one interest in life now seemed to be following his wife around and wordlessly attending to her every utterance. Saturdays and Sundays, my father and his brothers would take turns watching the old man while Aunt Emmy and Uncle Herman returned to their own apartment in Queens. Most weekends when it was my father’s turn I would go with him. We’d take the bus to his house and stop off at the little candy store along the way and I would load up on comic books for the weekend, or I would bring my own copies of Famous Monsters Magazine, or a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Books for me have always been the ultimate aim and end of life; buying them, reading then, owning them. Books are the reason the world was created. Stretched out on my grandfather’s sofa I would climb the scaffold with Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and I would revel again the story of my great childhood hero, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Though I have a vivid image of my grandfather in my mind, I cannot recall his ever speaking to me directly. I don’t think that this was a matter of coldness or indifference. My grandfather simply didn’t talk much. What words were spoken were to my father. He had evidently lost much of his interest in life after my grandmother died. And yet he was not only aware of my presence but solicitous of my comfort as well, though I was to forever remain in the third person.

“Did the boy have enough to eat?” he would ask my father. “Does the boy want to watch something on television?” “Did the boy sleep well on the couch?” The boy was well taken care of.

My grandfather lived in one of those old-fashioned apartments that you could still find in Brooklyn in those days; basically a long dark hallway, with doors leading off the sides into bedrooms, anchored by the dining room and small kitchen at one end, and the living room at the other end. There was an old-fashioned toilet with the water tank overhead and a pull chain hanging down from it, and I have to admit it was fun to flush. All of the furniture was dark wood, and there were heavy white lace drapes that effectively kept the sun out, so the rooms were always dark and cool, even in summer. When I sat on the couch to read, which was pretty much all I ever did, I had to put the lamplight on even in the daytime. And that's the way I've liked rooms to be, ever since; cool, dark, and quiet, with just enough light to illuminate the printed word. Sometimes when we were staying there for the weekend my uncles would come to keep my father company on Saturday afternoon, and they would sit around the dining room table drinking beer and playing pinochle or discussing baseball or world events. All I ever wanted to do was read, though occasionally if the weather was mild I would go and play in the empty, weed-strewn lot next to my grandfather's house. That was like my woods, my private forest, and I could freely run around like a wild boy, acting out the Saturday morning Tarzan movie I’d watched earlier, or leap about with a plastic bow-and-arrow set pretending I was Robin Hood. There is something about the wilderness, even an empty lot’s worth of wilderness, that brings out the repressed savage in a boy.

One Sunday afternoon, it must have been in spring, I was sitting on the front stoop reading and waiting for my father to call me in for a dinner of pork chops, or maybe it was roast chicken and mashed potatoes (my father was an excellent cook). The day had the kind of oppressive slowness Sundays often have. I did not know that it was a moment that would stay with me my entire life, but as I sat there a young girl in a red coat walked by me. She was a few years older than me, a teenager to my gangly boy, and she had the blondest hair I had ever seen in my life. She was walking slowly, looking down at her shoes, kind of singing or humming to herself, the way you sometimes do when you’re young and you are sure no one is watching. When she was almost directly in front of me she turned her head up sharply, startled by her awareness of my presence, and stopped short as our eyes met. As I remember it, she smiled, or almost smiled, then frowned, then quickly moved on out of my line of vision forever.

This was about a year before my grandfather died, and when we returned to his house every third or fourth week thereafter I set myself up on the front stoop almost all of Saturday and Sunday afternoon waiting for her to pass by again. If the weather was too cold or it was raining I sat on a hassock by the front window and watched. Once, for what reason I no longer remember, I even spent an entire afternoon perched on an upturned paint bucket hidden by weeds in my empty lot, and was rewarded with numerous mosquito bites for my trouble. And even on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when the entire family came back to his house for a lunch and the place was filled with the post-funeral conviviality of distant cousins and relatives laughing and shouting with each other for the first time in years, I took up my station by the window and waited for her to pass by, but I never saw her again.

And on that last afternoon, the afternoon of the funeral, I remember my mother and my aunts washing all the dishes after the guests had left, sweeping the floor and leaving the kitchen immaculate. And I remember my father and my Uncle Freddy sitting smoking by the parlor window, discussing all that needed to be done in the coming weeks, the detritus of official busywork always engendered by death. As we turned out the lights and locked the door for the last time that day, it doesn’t seemed to have occurred to me that I would never be coming back here, or if it did, the fact did not mean much to me. What can the concept of vanished time ever mean to a child?

And this is all I can tell you of my grandparents, who are gone from this world and will never return.

"The houses are all gone under the sea"-T. S. Elliot

The Knish Man

For Proust, it was the delicate and poetic Madeleine.

With me, it was the far less exalted potato knish.

The sign over the cooler in Wegman’s refrigerated food section read: The original Coney Island Square Knish. Microwaveable. Delicious! Potato, Mushroom, or Red Cabbage. Low in saturated fat. Cholesterol free. Source of dietary fiber.

I bought one, took it home and popped it in the microwave, and hoped for the best.

Do you recall the taste of a Knish? Perhaps you're not really sure what a Knish is? Some foods are known in one part of the country but not in others. My friend in Minnesota had to tell me what lefsa was. I filled her in on the egg cream, kielbasa, and, of course, the Knish.

To begin with...it's pronounced ka-Nish. Stress is on the second syllable.

Knish: According to my dictionary, the Origin is Yiddish, from Russian knish, denoting a kind of bun or dumpling.

I didn't need the dictionary to tell me all that.

When I was a boy there were guys who would come around on the streets of Brooklyn selling knishes from a pushcart, the same way they still sell hot dogs today. The "Knish Man", however, is no more. These days fancy stores like Wegman's stuff them full of mushrooms and cheese and red cabbage, but back then a Knish was the simplest of simple foods: mashed potatoes wrapped in fried dough. Maybe they don't sound like much, but they were truly delicious. The Knish Man would slice the Knish open sideways and spread thick spicy brown mustard on each side, then hand it to you wrapped in wax paper. There was a small door on the side of the puschcart and inside there was a fire that kept the knishes warm. I don't remember how much they cost. Seven Cents? Ten? Certainly no more than Twelve.

We loved them, my sister and I. These days high-minded know-it-alls admonish us to avoid potato-y, starchy, high carb foods and feast ourselves on broccoli and lettuce instead, but back then no one gave a damn what they or anyone else ate. Whether we are better or worse off nowadays I leave for others to decide. I only say that on the streets of Brooklyn in the days of my boyhood the Knish Man was a welcome sight.

But if I follow him down those streets after all these years on the dimming horizon of memory, I find that there is a whole world standing behind that pushcart peddler, a world sad and tragic beyond words. These were real men who dispensed this exotic treats. Men who sometimes had numbers tattooed in blue ink along the sides of their arms, men who had lost their families and loved ones and every single possession that could be called their own, who had escaped from hell and survived to sell potato dumplings to kids in Brooklyn for twelve cents a shot.

In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Williamsburg, Brooklyn became home for thousands of Hasidic Jews. By the time I was growing up in the early nineteen-sixties, our neighbors included hundreds of refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe. In the summer they would sit out on beach chairs in front of their apartment buildings as the world moved past them. They would watch us wild American city kids playing stickball or punchball in the street, and when you passed by them they never smiled, nor do I recall ever hearing the sound of laughter coming from where they sat. They just sat there and sat there, day after day, with the cloud of death hanging over their heads. Perhaps they were still trying to work out how they had been ripped from their homeland and exiled to this strange and alien place.

Sam and his brother Phil, who ran the little superette up the block, both had numbers stamped on their arms at Auschwitz. Sam, the swarthy, perennial bachelor, flirted with all the women in the neighborhood, but I remember being told that Phil had been forced to watch his wife and children murdered in front of his eyes. Whether or not this was strictly true or just a story people told, I had no way of knowing. Certainly it could have been true, especially from the way Phil seemed to always be staring off into the distance with his face empty of all expression. And if it wasn’t true for Phil, it was true for so many others. The brothers were an indelible part of the neighborhood. My Italian Catholic mother and all of my aunts shopped there several times a week. And for years after the brothers were long gone and the store had changed hands numerous times, had gone from superette to bodega, there were people in the neighborhood who would still insist they were going to Sam's when it was another place entirely.

It may seem strange to go from the humble Knish to a subject as vast and fraught with peril as the Holocaust. But growing up in Brooklyn, we knew about these things. The war had been over less than twenty years at this time. It was still fresh in our parents’ memories. And there were our neighbors, living evidence of the great atrocity. We had heard the stories. I seem to have known from an early age that Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were gassed and cremated at places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz. We even heard stories of body parts used to make soap and lampshades. And I can remember watching the trial of Adolph Eichmann on television when I was eight or nine. I don’t know how much I understood of it at the time, probably not much, and yet I remember watching it on my aunt’s TV in the apartment next to ours. Eichmann was a top Nazi (I knew that much) and he had organized the deportation of five million Jews and others to the ghettoes and concentration camps. He was one of those responsible for their sufferings and their deaths (I knew that too). After the war he had escaped to South America, but the Israeli police were on this trail for years, and they finally captured the bastard in Argentina, and brought him back to Jerusalem for trial. One of the iconic images of that time was of Eichmann sitting in a glass booth (for his own protection) listening to an interpreter through headphones as the evidence mounted up against him. There was even a play written about it later, The Man in the Glass Booth.

The trial is famous today for Eichmann's notorious "I was only following orders" defense, which of course began the legend of good Germans always marching along doing just as they are told. But orders or no orders, Adolph Eichmann was found to be as guilty as his better-known namesake, and he finished his days dangling from the business end of a long, sturdy rope. Good riddance.

I don’t know if I ever made any connection at the time, but my father’s family was German: beer, sauerbraten, pigs-knuckle German. Of course, once he married my mother, that kind of food was pretty much banned from the house forever. Today I am eternally grateful today that I grew up on lasagna and sausage-and-peppers and not hasenpfeffer and bratwurst. But my father still drank foaming mugs of beer as he played pinochle with his brothers every Friday night. Did they feel any guilt or embarrassment over what Germany had put the world through in the Twentieth Century? I don’t think so. The family had been in America since way back in the eighteen-seventies. There was no connection with the other side. And my grandfather’s parents had come from France, so there was a little French in the mix. I am sure they never felt any connection at all with the Germany that had given rise to Hitler and the Nazis. For myself, we were closer to my mother’s side of the family, so growing up I always felt more Italian than German. And I might mention that both of my mother’s brothers married Jewish women. So, in terms of extended family, we were a pretty varied group. Nor was that so unique those days in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

And there is this: one cold winter day I stopped at the knish cart on my way home from school for my regular treat with extra mustard down the middle. Perhaps the knishes weren’t hot enough because Knish Man leaned over and opened the side door of the cart and began stoking the fire with a metal rod. As he did so huge licks of flame came shooting out, nearly catching the edges of his dirty apron. I must have jumped back and shouted an inane warning to ‘watch out!’ or something of the sort, because down through all the years I still recall the man’s casual shrug as he continued to stoke the fire, indifferent to the flames.

“So?” I recall him saying, not necessarily to me, “If I burn, I burn. What of it?”

Looking back, the man was probably in no real danger, but I remember to this day that I was profoundly shocked and disturbed, not so much by his words as by the absolute flatness and despair (though I probably didn’t know that word back then) in his voice. That anyone could be so uncaring of their own life was too much for my child mind to wrap itself around. That night I told my father what happened.

“Sometimes people can become very unhappy,” he told me, “and then they don’t care much anymore.” I vowed that no matter what happened to me in life, I would never allow myself to slide down into such indifference and sadness. Of course, it helped that I was growing up in the United States of America, and not Eastern Europe in the murderous time of Adolph Hitler.

And now the years have passed and the Knish Man is long gone from the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Just another memory in the vast storehouse of memories that make up our lives.

Postscript: I tried the Wegman’s knish. It wasn’t bad. But of course some things never taste as good as they do when you’re a kid on the streets of Brooklyn.

An Elegy for Borders

As all the book-loving world surely knows by now, Borders Books and Music is going out of business.
The big black & Yellow signs are draped all over my local Bridgewater NJ branch:
LIQUIDATION SALE!
UP TO 40% OFF!
ALL SALES FINAL!
NO CHECKS-CASH, VISA, DISCOVERY CARD ONLY.

A great swarm of vultures who have probably never cracked a book in their lives but who just can't resist a black & yellow sign promising them deep savings, no matter what the product may be, have already begun to descend upon the stacks, running amok through the aisles and leaving chaos in their wake. A clerk told me the other day she has to spend three hours after closing each night just cleaning the place up and getting ready for the next day.
By the time you are reading this it will be all over.
Borders is no more.
And I am not happy about that.
I have never before in my life felt sadness about a store closing, but this is close to heartbreak.

In some ways, the Borders in Bridgewater has been near the center of my life for the last 17 years. I just can't believe it is not going to be there anymore. The store has often been my lifeline, in good times and bad. No matter what was going on, I could always think to myself, "well, at least I can stop at Borders for a while." My great refuge from the world. We do have a large Barnes and Noble nearby, but I'll get to that in a minute. I don't know if I can even explain it if you're not a Borders devotee, but it was simply the greatest bookstore ever in the whole history of the world.

The really sad part, of course, is that we seem to have come to the end of the age of bookstores. And maybe even libraries too. Someone was telling me the other night that in this day and age libraries are really just a waste of space, since the information is available and more easily accessible online. I did manage to point out the libraries are also used for studying, for community events, reading groups and storytimes, etc. I don't know if I quite convinced him.

And how could I explain about the joys of roaming through the stacks of books that no one ever checks out anymore, just picking up whatever strikes you at the time---a history of great fires in New York, the autobiography of Jack Benny, or the worlds greatest chess matches, to name just three I've come across recently. Sure, maybe it's costing a lot of money to house books that no one is much interested in anymore, but for some of us it's one of life's great pleasures. I mean, there must be more people than just me doing this! It's a shame that this seems to be something that is going out of the world.

Well, I do understand why this is happening. I myself own a Kindle reader, and I do order most of my books from Amazon. I really do believe that this is the wave of the future. But if we lose bookstores we are losing something in modern life that can't be replaced. At least not for book lovers. These days I tend to spend more and more time at home or visiting with family. As I have gotten older, I haven't been going out a lot. Borders was one of the few places I would make a point to visit a couple of times a week. And there is a sense of community among book lovers, like a place where all of us belonged. Without Borders, there's just one less reason for even leaving the house.

A word about Barnes and Noble: I don't much like it---except for the DVD section, which is excellent. But as a bookstore...better than nothing, I guess, but it is more a generic bookstore, like the old Marlboro and Waldenbooks, only on a much larger scale. Borders was always a brighter and more cheerful place, that seemed to be run by people who knew and loved books and reading. Barnes and Noble just doesn't have the same feel. I guess it was partly that there was way more books in Borders. If you were looking for a copy Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities in Borders, you could be sure of finding at least three or four editions of the book, a nice hardcover, a quality paperback, a special illustrated version. In Barnes and Noble, you get the standard issue Bantam paperback. No comparison.

And then there is the fact that Borders was always more roomy and inviting, and the decor was warmer and more cheerful...I don't know, but just about everyone will tell you the same thing. People are heartbroken over the closing. Maybe it is just something indefinable. All I know is, B&N just isn't going to be able to fill the gap.

As I said above, I have never before felt sadness over a store closing. This is a first.

And when I die, and arrive at the Pearly Gates, the first thing I'm going to say to St. Peter is, "Forget the harp...where is the local Borders around here?"And if he tells me, "But we don't have a Borders here," then I'll know I've gone to the other place instead.

1974 (1)

So there was this place called Texas Weiners on Somerset Street in Plainfield NJ, and I remember one night waiting inside for the bus to arrive in a bad snow storm. Just one of those memories that stick with you throughout your life.

To help pass the time, I knocked back three dirty-water dogs with onions and Dusseldorf mustard and everything else they had piled on top. I was a teenager then, I could eat wood and wash it down with turpentine. Today, they'd have to call out the fire department.

I remember the owners, a married couple (or so for some reason I assumed) looked tired and anxious to close up and go home (the snow was really piling up), and yet they actually kept the place open an hour and a half so the three or four of us waiting wouldn't have to stand outside in the blizzard. I suppose we were all secretly wondering if they bus would ever get there, and then someone came right out and nervously joked about spending the night sleeping with our heads down on the counter. It didn't seem too pleasant a prospect, not to us and certainly not to the owners, but I couldn't help thinking at least there would be be eggs and bacon and pancakes hot off the grill for breakfast.

Then the conversation started up, the epic conversation, the one that can run on all night if you let it. We talked about favorite movies (unanimous agreement: The Godfather), about Vietnam and Nixon and about searching for something in life and whether or not anything means a damn thing in the end. When the bus finally did arrive, moving slowly but surely along the treacherous road, we ended up almost missing it. So we all went home and never saw each other again. Just one brief moment in the great warehouse of moments that make up our lives. A warm diner, friendly people, and snow falling outside.

Where does it all go to?

In Their Own Words:

“[O]f all the night that ever I slept in my life I never did pass a night with more epicurism of sleep; there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me, and then it was a very rainy night, and then I was a little weary, that what between waking and sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life, and so my wife says it was with her.”
---Samuel Pepys

A Saloon Story

OK, so my father liked his beer. He drank, but not to excess---not really. Just one or two or a round dozen on a slow Saturday afternoon.

And he loved horses, too. Not the docile, half-lame pack horses my sister and I used to ride along bucolic trails in Prospect Park for a dollar an hour, nor yet the beautiful spotted Appaloosas we fed slices of our lunch-bag apples to over a high white stable fence when we stopped to stretch our legs on a long drive up to Bear Mountain.

No. Those horses he liked well-enough, I suppose, but the ones he was really passionate about had names like Spicy Bones and Beggar's Choice, and they ran in races in places called Aqueduct and Belmont and Saratoga and Pimlico. And since my father worked hard five days a week, supporting his family and supplying our every need, and as Sunday morning found him in dutiful attendance with the rest of us at 10:15 mass in St. Mary’s, it seemed only right and fair that he should have Saturday to do whatever he liked with.

What he liked to do of course was to go down to Falco's bar on Grand Street where his thirst for lager and propensity for equine wagering blended together very nicely.

Sometimes I'd go with him. In those days no one saw the harm in a kid sitting at a bar where alcohol was served. I could have even had a sip of my father's beer if I'd wanted, but I hated the taste. Instead I was kept supplied on those long ago afternoons with Coca Colas and thick slices of Sicilian pizza topped with pepperoni and anchovy. That was what I liked. Plus there was a big color Admiral TV over the bar---a rarity in those days---and when it was tuned to the baseball game you could actually see the blue in the Yankees' pinstripe, and the grass was more vividly green than anything you’d ever find in any backyard in Brooklyn.

(Of course that’s not counting the times, not infrequent, when the color tubes went ‘blooey’ and everything looked to be swimming in green gunk, like the inside of my friend Tommy Flood's aquarium that he never took care of. Truth be told, I never much cared for baseball anyway, but color TV was still a treat to watch in those days).

Mostly though, I went along to the bar because I was worried about my father's drinking. It got into my head that if I wasn't with him he might drink just a little too much and lose his way coming home and end up getting run over by a truck, leaving my mother destitute and the rest of us orphans. That was ridiculous, of course. My father never drank to the point of falling down. But I was the kind of kid who thought that way.

As we settled onto our usual high stools by the window my father would place a crisp new twenty-dollar bill on the bar in front of him , and over the course of the afternoon, between his ice cold Rheingolds and my soda and pizza, that crisp, clean twenty would transform itself into a series of beer-logged tens, crumpled fives, half-torn singles, plus a stack of smudgy quarters, dimes and nickels, until by five or six o'clock all that was left was a single and some change which my father left behind for Joe or Dominick, whichever Falco brother was tending bar when he finally slid off the stool and said 'good night.'

Twenty dollars was a lot of money in those days, but happily my father was able to afford it. We lived in working-class Brooklyn where a really good job meant you belonged to the printer's union or better yet had a cushy job with the city. My father, who went off to far-away New Jersey every morning, worked the other side of the street. He had gone to night school and held a good management job with the Standard Oil Company and he brought home a pretty good check, as they used to say. That was a blessing for us kids. My sister had a closet full of the latest teen fashion clothes, and I was never short of money for movies, comic books and monster magazines. In every other way though my father remained true to his blue collar roots. It just meant that we all had a few more bucks to do what we liked with. I liked comics, my sister liked clothes and records, and my mother liked buying groceries for the nuns at St. Mary's, which I suppose gave her a leg up in the climb toward heaven.

What my father liked was to play the horses. Along about two in the afternoon Charlie the Bookie would saunter into Falco’s and make his way down the bar, shaking hands with the patrons and enquiring after the health of their families. On the sartorial evidence, Charlie made a very good living at his chosen trade; he was always splendidly turned out in a chocolate-brown suit, bright pink shirt, tie and pin. And you couldn’t help notice that he wore on the little finger of his right hand a pinky ring with a small diamond that sparkled when it caught the light. Guys in that neighborhood didn’t wear rings on their little fingers, certainly not rings with diamonds that sparkled. Charlie was making out OK I supposed.

"How's everything, Jack?" he'd ask when he came to my father. If I were sitting alongside dad at the time Charlie would ruffle my hair and ask, "How are things, kid? How old are you now?"

"Nine," I'd tell him, "but I'll be ten next June."

"That so?" I could feel his interest in me waning (assuming it ever actually existed in the first place) as he made his way to the next customer. Every week Charlie asked me how old I was, and every week I gave him the same answer, but what with being a bookie and all he probably had too many numbers banging around in his head already without being bothered about remembering my age.

When he was finished making his rounds Charlie would take a seat in a booth on the other side of the low wall that divided the bar from the restaurant, and he'd take out a small black notebook and a pen and place them on the table in front of him. Throughout the afternoon most of the men at the bar, my father included, would find a few minutes to slide across from Charlie in his booth, whisper a few words and surreptitiously slip him some bills that had already been folded to the size of a match book. Charlie would make a note in his book. Once in a while a cop would stop by to see Charlie, but instead of arresting him the cop would just put in his bet like everyone else. No one saw any harm in it.

When all the men who were going to whisper to Charlie had whispered to him, he'd get up and make his way back along the bar, shaking hands again and wishing everyone well. "Stay out of trouble now," he'd tell me, for no particular reason I could discern.

At around four o’clock Joe or Dominick would turn on the racing on Channel 9. Or if it wasn’t being broadcast, all the men who had been at Falco's would check the results that night in the early edition of the Daily News to see if Charlie the Bookie owed them a pile of cash the next day. His immaculate chocolate-brown suits and sparkling ring attested to the fact that he seldom if ever did.

Sometimes after Charlie left, a character named Apples would stop by. Apples was also a bookie of sorts. More specifically, he ran the 'numbers', an illegal forerunner of the lottery based on the 'total mutual handle' (all the money raked in) at the track that day. The 'number' was popular throughout the neighborhood yet oddly less prestigious than playing the horses. Like the other men, my father would slip Apples fifty cents and a small piece of paper with three digits written on it. I can't say I remember that he ever actually 'hit' the number. No matter. As with all other games, the fun, I suppose, was in the playing.

Was all of this a bad influence on an impressionable nine-year-old kid? It seems not to have been. I never developed a taste for beer or any other alcohol, I don't like bars, and I don't gamble beyond kicking a couple of bucks into the office lottery pool. So maybe there's a lesson somewhere in all that. Or maybe not.

Characters abounded in Falco's. Late in the afternoon a strange, disheveled man known to me only as "Wacky Benny" would make his way down the bar with a large brown shopping bag that held his wares: handkerchiefs, socks, shoelaces, ball point pens, and the like. My father usually bought something for a buck. When he'd finished his rounds Wacky would drink up his profits in a corner by himself where he kept up a running monologue about President Kennedy and the Masonic Lodge and a plot to overthrow the Queen of England. No one paid him any mind.

On the whole, my father's drinking companions were an agreeable crowd of oddballs and eccentrics, their 'uniqueness' reflected in their colorful 'names': Apples was so called on account of his puffy, booze-red cheeks. A fellow called the Cabbage was awarded his moniker based on the general shape of his head. The Gag was known to down his first beer of the day so fast he invariably choked on it, while The Bomb fretted over a possible attack on the US by Russia. Stilts was named for his long, skinny legs, Wacky Benny for his precarious mental state. I was always glad that my father, whose name was Jack, was called simply Jack.

In spite of all this colorful activity I always became restless after an hour or so. Like all kids, I was bored by the adult world. I was lured to the bar because of my concern for my father and because I would go anywhere that included pepperoni pizza. But after a while I would start spinning around on my stool. My father knew then to slip me a couple of bucks, and if there was a horror movie with Vincent Price playing at the Rainbow I'd catch a matinee, otherwise I'd go down to the Grand Book Center and pick out some used monster magazines. Sometimes I'd go looking for my friends, but they usually bored me as much as the grownups did. Mostly I lived inside my own head, I suppose. Sometimes I thought in advance to bring a paperback with me, stories by Edgar Allen Poe or maybe A Tale of Two Cities or The Hound of the Baskervilles. But always I was back at my father's side before he had a chance to wander off by himself into the nether reaches of Brooklyn and become lost to us forever.

So the day would come to an end, and we’d slide off our stools and make our way across Grand Street and turn onto Manhattan Avenue for the six-block trek home.

One afternoon as the late-winter sun flooded the big plate glass window and suffused the bar in a lovely coppery-red glow, my father stood up from his stool and lifted his glass for his customary last swallow before saying good night.

“Not leaving already, Jackie?” someone I knew only as Frankie asked. “Little woman got you on a schedule?”

Several other men chuckled good-naturedly. My father lowered his glass, laughed, and seemed about to make some likewise good-natured reply but then stopped. He glanced down the bar at the well-accustomed sight of men hunkered down for a night of drinking. I remember that for the briefest fraction of a moment a kind of puzzled, almost startled expression passed across his face---as if he were looking at something familiar but seeing it for the first time. Then he laughed again, took his last swallow, and set the glass down on the bar.

“Good night, guys,” he said.

It may just be the way I’m remembering it, but it seems to me now that from that night on my father’s interest in Falco’s and even horses started to wane. He still dropped in on Saturdays of course, only now he’d miss a few here and there. He’d buy a six-pack and watch the baseball game at home on (black & white) TV. Eventually he stopped going altogether. By the time he retired after his many years with Standard Oil he had given up drinking (and horses) completely, and was inspeparable from my mother.

That's the way it happened. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

As for Falco’s, it shut down after Joe or Dominick took a sudden heart attack and the surviving brother sold the place and moved to Florida. It was a delicatessen for a while, and later a shoe store. For a number of years whenever I drove through the neighborhood to visit my mother I saw it was boarded up and deserted. Since then that particular neighborhood has gone upscale in a big way, and I’m told that Falco’s now houses the offices of a stock broker and the offices of a financial planner.

It makes me think that somewhere Charlie the Bookie and Apples are smiling

In Their Own Words:

"Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost."

-- Oscar Wilde

A Holiday Observation

Funny thing about Christmas gifts. For a few days they're still new and special enough to keep out under the tree or even piled up neatly in a corner of the living room floor, but even before the tree comes down these wonderful shiny new treasures just sort of become...absorbed...into all the other 'stuff' we own.

And maybe one day in late January you look around and say, "Hey, where did all those Christmas gifts go to?"

Well, speaking for myself, the no longer exactly 'new' shirts are hanging in my closet, and the books I bought with the gift certificates thoughtful family members were kind enough to gift me with are on the shelf mixed in with my 10,000 other books.

This year I received from my sister a very nice brass floor lamp which I have positioned next to my recliner, allowing me to read in that comfortable chair for the first time. A great gift, but after a while I probably won't associate it with Christmas, it will simply be part of the general furniture.

Well, you would think at my age I'd have more important things to think about than the fate of Christmas gifts...but I guess I don't.

Where Does Everything Go?

Now there was a girl when I was young who lived in the next block and who used to pass our door every day on her way back and forth from school. I remember that her name was Phyllis. She used to wear a blue skirt and a blue blazer and a crisp white Catholic school blouse, and the pocket of her blouse was always stained with blue ink from a leaky fountain pen. She had very large, very round eyes, and I remember too---or at least I think I remember---that they were also blue like ink. And even though I was much younger than Phyllis, an ungainly boy to her blossoming teenager, she did not turn away and avert her gaze the way older kids always did, but instead she would look directly into my eyes and smile the brightest smile I had ever seen in my very young life and whisper "Hello". That was over forty years ago, but I've never forgotten.

Where O Where Dear Lord does everything finally go to?

"God Bless Us---Everyone!"

Scrooge and Time

Re-reading Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" for the umpteenth time. An annual Christmas ritual.

As always, I am intrigued by Scrooge’s promise to live in the ‘past, the present, and the future’ all at once.

What could it possibly mean to do this?

Conventional wisdom exhorts us to ‘let go’ of the past and ‘not worry’ too much about the future. Every pop-psychology guru worth his or her salt has this refrain down cold. Not past, not future, only NOW equals happiness.

But is this really the best advice for us to follow?

(For a novelist or short story writer---certainly not. The past invokes memory, the future---imagination. These are the two basic tools of any fiction writer. A writer who exists only in the here-and-now is not likely to be very productive. But even for non-writers, our cherished memories and our hopes for the future are what give the greater portion of meaning and joy to our lives).

But getting back to Scrooge...

As we meet him in Stave One Scrooge is a man who has clearly taken the pop gurus' wisdom to a bitter extreme. Scrooge is completely cut off from his past---the finer feelings he once held for his sister Fan and his lost love Belle, as well as whatever ideals he may have begun his life with; and, with no children of his own or anyone else’s to care about, Scrooge has no stake whatsoever in any possible future. Sitting day-after-day day in his ‘money-changing hole’, amassing a hidden fortune to no apparent purpose, taking his melancholy meal in his usual melancholy tavern and slurpping up his bowl of gruel before going to bed, Scrooge is a man locked into a bleak and dismal present. The whole concept of ‘time’ is rendered meaningless in his life. For Ebenezer Scrooge, time, quite literally, ‘is money’.

(Notice that I said Scrooge is 'locked into' the present, not 'living' in the present. Whatever Scrooge is doing, it can hardly be called living in any sense beyond physical survival).

So alienated, in fact, is the unredeemed Scrooge from any sense of Time, that until the Ghost of Christmas Future leads him by the hand to his own cold and neglected grave, it never seems to have occurred to him that one day he will actually have to die. A sense of one's own mortality is, of course, inseparable from the experience of Time. But it is the last part of the puzzle; Scrooge will first have to voyage in other directions.

It seems to me, then, that A Christmas Carol is not so much a ghost story (as Dickens himself calls it) but rather a time-travel story, of the kind in which J. B. Priestly would later excel in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. The Carol is the story of a man recovering the experience of Time in his life.

And of course, the instrument that re-binds Scrooge back to Time is Love.

It is love alone that transcends death. Love for the people and days we have lost keeps them alive in memory. Love of the children in our lives involves us in a future we ourselves will not experience.

(For Scrooge, of course, the children are Tiny Tim, to whom he becomes a 'second father', and presumably nephew Fred's brood, when and if they make their appearance).

In finally recognizing the truth of all this, Scrooge is once again able to take up the burden of Time that he abandoned so many years before, and, while unable to ever go back and undo his past mistakes, he is able through Love to make the present a bridge between the past he has lost and the future he will never see.