Steven Colbert wrote Maureen Dowd’s column and he claims Frank Rich’s too.
This is the anniversary of my mom’s death and I turn back into a person tomorrow. A person who has to focus on selling an apartment and other realities of life. Will be at blogs during the week.
Can America begin to right a grievous wrong and elect a great president? Draft Gore,
Blogfriday
I have romanticized very few celebrities in my life. That’s not to say I haven’t been caught up in celebritymania, or taken men in my life and made them into celebrities in my own mind. But true celebrities: Alan Bates, Eric Clapton and James Spader. Continue Reading »
I was missing my mommy when I wrote that one. She was one beautiful lady, in every sense. I’m not taking the post down as it is well written with good sentiments, she says modestly.
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I tracked part of my parent’s family. Both my grandfather’s came on the same boat. Couldn’t find my paternal grandfather. Knowing that side of my family, he probably used another name, just because. But I will never be able to find half my birth family, and there are questions I would like answered. As long as all adoptees are considered children in the eyes of the law adoption will always be a mystifying experience–if your adoptive parents weren’t told the truth either. My parents told me everything they knew, and didn’t try to make it into a “your birth parents died in a car crash the week after you were born” thing. I adore and love them for so many reasons. They were so unselfish in their quest to help me find my birth family. They were honest with me. I was honest with them–except the rebel years which my father considered necessary for emotional growth. Continue Reading »
The epicenter of this Upper West Side apartment search was Zabar. Mine was Fairway. Not really, but I had a very specific geographical area in mind: as far west of Broadway as possible, though not in the river, and between but not including West 70something and another West 70something. We pay too much for too little space. It might as well be exactly where want it to be.
High school confidential is before my time. Check out the cast–a few famous daddy’s and famous TV daddy, now dead, a very young–well see
My time was tie dye and neon and I had 24 carat gold glasses that I never wore because I wouldn’t be seen without contact lenses–it was the era of groovy and other expressions I won’t use because I hated them then.
I come from a very unusual town. It’s not really a town. More a collection of developments, a strip mall that has been jazzed up, a firehouse, and some schools. Actually I grew up in a school district.
It wasn’t the richest community on Long Island by far. It was probably the only one without any poor people. Diversity came in shades of white.
There were people who peaked in high school, and people who have hated it as a lifetime activity. I don’t fit in either category. I did spend years telling stories about how I didn’t fit in my community. The thing is most people didn’t feel they fit. Even the people who who seemed to meld seamlessly.
High school was over many years ago. Why did I see people tonight I knew but wasn’t really friendly with? For many reasons. some that I can’t quite articulate.
Our lives went in different directions. Yet they all led back to an exit off the Expressway.
There’s something comforting in connecting with people who knew me when I felt awkward, weird and out of sync with the world, yet they wanted to see me anyway. We all had our high school horror stories yet it was the stories of small kindnesses we wanted to share.
I didn’t know that cheerleaders felt out of place. Yet when I think about it, I have known many high school cheerleaders, after the fact, who felt that they hadn’t quite belonged. I never thought about that before.
I’m not going to tell people they should edit the bad memories out. For they do serve a purpose. If only to bond in college and later with other people who felt like a dork. Though today that’s a good thing.
It was strange that I came to terms with my past just when I’m writing about high school angst.
As a society we point to some years, and say “and this is when the world changed. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were killed when I was graduating high school. Cities burnt. None of this directly affected us. We were sheltered.
But what did our parents know? My mother couldn’t tell marijuana from oregano. I should have said I had that last thing once. I won’t tell that story here. Nor will I talk more specifically about tonight right now. Maybe I’m not ready to. Maybe I do have an aversion to telling stories about my present day life.
It was a fun night. I feel validated or vindicated or whatever you feel when you come to a new understanding about yourself.
And we could speak in a kind of a short hand only known to people who were in all your classes or around you from Seventh through Twelfth Grades. I always felt cheated that I didn’t go to a larger school where I could meet new people in High School and maybe that would have been better.
But you’re dealt the hand your parents give you during those years, and I guess it’s up to you to make it work. Maybe it did work better than I believed.
I have long expected people to like me and to want to get to know me. Maybe I did expect that, just a bit, because I grew up in a place where everybody knew my name.
Usually I believe that if you can make it out of this community with your head attached to your body you can make it anywhere.
I am learning that at this stage of life, I have to reach for fun. It’s not going to come calling. Maybe most people learn that much earlier.
I like making things happen. I always have but never really understood that even when I wasn’t consciously reaching out, I was. People really don’t reach out to somebody who isn’t receptive. People really don’t want to hang with somebody who doesn’t give of themselves. That isn’t to say I gave anything of myself in high school. I loved high school angst. But I did know that I was known.
I think of the 90’s as my dark decade. I was constantly striving to make my life better. I felt bitter because so many things that weren’t great happened. My parents died. My youth ended. Is that such a horrible thing? I thought it was but several years ago realized that I could make the next chapter as much fun, but differently, as my late teens, 20’s, and 30’s. Tonight helped seal the deal.
I do find it a bit sad that I always expected “great things” to happen. I defined “great” a bit more loosely than most people. I wouldn’t go to law school as my father wanted me to because I honestly loved working, much of the time, didn’t want to be a lawyer though I knew I could use the degree for other things, and didn’t want anything to interfere with my social life.
I loved staying out until very late and going to work on three to five hours sleep. It was a kind of high onto itself.
I wrote this when I was one drink over the line. One drink too many for me is one more than two with food. Lots of food.
Summers that end in Seven always signify new beginnings to me–67, well I won’t talk about that here. 77, Summer of Sam, summer of six weeks in Europe, come to home to a six week temp job that began in October and ended…10 years later October, 87, interviewed for new jobs. Shearson Lehman opened a job for me on Black Tuesday, October, of course. 97–circled many coop ads, 20something on my birthday. Seven brokers got back to me.
“Please if there is a god, let this be the apartment,” I remember thinking as I entered my building’s lobby. The apartment was even better. Closed on 10/1, coincidentally the first night of the Jewish New Year. Would take a sleeping bag and sleep in the closet until I actually moved in two months later.
Summers with Seven make me feel anticipation. Seven should be my lucky number. It’s not.
Summers with Seven have a definite edge. They live on way past the end.
Summers with Seven have a sweet forlorn beauty. They make me yearn for somethings new, as I hang onto the wonder of the present.
People get New York in the summer of 77 all wrong. It was the cusp of new beginnings. So was I. Made myself remember the events and the nuances. I began looking back to it before it ever ended. Geneva was a different world than New York. Geneva made me into a girl who could throw the best parties. They had them there.
77 will always be a watershed wonderful summer for those of us not affected by the affects of the black out. Yes there was Sam but really what were the odds? We did live in quasi fear probably brought on by our parents who most likely wished they could order us somewhere else.
Mine paid for a six week trip. True I stayed with friends, and a few bed & breakfast type places, but air fare was much more. As I was working for my parents I could take the time.
Spike Lee got 77 right. The only one to do so. It wasn’t my New York then. Mine was the New York of privilege. It embarrassed me, an emotion I know people today can’t relate to.
In the fall I was to take a job where for the first time since I was a kid I was going to come into en masse contact with children of the boroughs. Somehow I felt a part of me had come home.
I have always wondered if that was a deficit. If I was hiding from my identity. Scared of potential, I didn’t want to know I had. Or if I was searching for other worlds in the city of my birth.
real real gone…
I can’t stand up by myself
Some people say you can
make it on your own
You can make it if you try
I know better now
•••••••••••••
in the youth of a thousand summers
like a sweet bird of youth
in my soul
••••••••••••••••••••••••
memories of summer days
so long ago, people and places
that we used to go
oh, those memories
all I have now is memories
Van Morrison should be winter. But he’s all seasons. In the summer of 77 I went to Max’s,
CBGB’s, Upper East Side fern bars otherwise known as restaurants where you drank too much, picked up strangers and sometimes took them home. Sometimes you got to see cable in the morning. Reuter’s news flashing, ‘NEW playing in the background. All these years and I never realized what the call letters meant. Began in the summer of 67 I believe. All album sides.
Summers with Seven always bring something wonderful. I’m a sucker for summers with Seven. The unimaginable becomes reality. This damn well better stick to the pattern. I believe in the power of a summer with a Seven.
We’re having the kind of rain that hurts. Hurts my head. Hurts my mood. Hurts my productivity. Wish I could send some to all of you in drought states. It’s the kind of day that I hate anybody who acts happy or perky.
It’s the kind of day where I want to give up on all ambition and just move. I don’t want to take Advil, not because I enjoy suffering, but because I have reached a place called “worry about the side affects.” I’m tired of worrying. I’m tired of not enjoying every day to the fullest. I’m just tired of many things.
In adoption, as with any type of child abuse, there are survivors at one end of the scale who are quite happy with or adjusted to their lives, while at the other end of the scale there is an over-representation of adoptees in America’s mental institutions and prisons.
My book is about me and my parents. Not overtly. It’s about me, boys, sex, drug, rock & roll, my parents and adoption. Honestly I didn’t think often about adoption in those years. He-who-has-played-every-role in my life was fascinated by my being so matter of fact about being adopted.
It was a fact of my life. The last thing I wanted to think about in the late 60’s-early 70’s when I was in my late teens was my parents. Why would I want to think about adoption? It happened and was a good thing.
I knew my parents were special people. I knew that most girls didn’t have the freedoms that I had, and the semi-wise parents to lean on when needed.
My parents let me explore life. I did things that drove them crazy, and they let me know it. But finding an ounce of pot in your teenage daughter’s room….and then later accidentally finding her near her boyfriend’s apartment in the East Village when she was supposed to be in school….those things might have set me off later.
The later was very accidental. If my Mom wasn’t going to Cooper Union Museum and if idiot, me, hadn’t spotted her and screamed: “mommy, mommy…” Thing was I was eighteen and really needed my mommy that day.
It was hard to be a parent of a rebellious teenager in the late 60’s. The rules had been thrown out with no new ones. I was a sweet girl but not a good one.
The next year Dr. Spock asked if he could have lunch with my boyfriend and I, during a lull in a rally. Could he? I was beyond flattered.
I told him that my Mom had worn out two copies of Baby and Child Care and that I would love to tell her about meeting him, but partially because of his teachings, I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
He laughed. He heard that one often.
In many ways Dr. Spock was a bigger influence on my childhood than being adopted ever was.
Dr. Spock began the parenting revolution and my parents were 50’s early adopters.
My book and now my re-uniting with people I went to junior and senior high with has caused me to reaxamine everything.
I don’t enjoy being introspective. I was overly-analytical for too many years and became sick of that.
I am about the age my parents were when this all happened. I do see it through there eyes. Plus I know too many people who didn’t live to see 25. I know many damaged people.
I am a survivor. I owe it to my parents. So I won’t attempt to answer people who think all adoptees suffered child abuse.
Doctors, except Dr Spock and a few other great ones were too quick to blame having been adopted for too many problems. My real problems might have come to light.
I still would have rebelled. I loved most of my experiences. Thing was I had two built in safety meters. One was something strong in me that was probably imparted by my parents, a basic sense of self-respect. The second was my parents themselves.
I never got into real, real trouble in any sense. If I had, i could have gone to them. But I lived with that strong shield they helped me develop.
I don’t understand why we’re so quick to place blame on our parents without examining ourselves first.
There could be many reasons for the over representation in mental hospitals and prisons that become obvious if you think about a population of people who have been typed since infancy or childhood. There are many other reasons that I won’t attempt to discuss. They’re biased variables.
I put my adoption/Google rant on the sidebar. Now it’s gone to a Courting page
I don’t know why I was picked up by a Wall Street Journal blog on balancing being a mother with a career. I have never been a mother.
Being a single parent, of either sex, has to be the hardest job in the world. Unless you have the most incredible support network that never fails.
Little Luce is going to be a Senior in high school in the fall, and it’s harder for Lucia than ever. Little Luce is a great almost woman. Her Mom just wants to make sure she gets the best college education she can, at a school not in New York City.
Their bond is strong. It’s time not to sever it, but to expand both of their worlds. In a couple of weeks they’re going to the condo in North Myrtle, and I’m demanding pictures of Lucia asleep in the bedroom. They live in a one bedroom and when Lucia and George first separated she gave Little Luce the bedroom.
Given my closest friend’s situation, it’s hard for me to complain about my life, but I do it so well….
Last night at dinner I felt, once again, Little Luce, has two moms as I told her stories about her childhood. But Lucia deserves solo credit for raising an incredible girl. Many years she used all her vacation days for Little Luce. I don’t think I could ever be that selfless. Not that Lucia is perfect….
Seven years ago I decided that I wanted to give my lifetime dream a real chance. I had no idea how to go about so I took some courses. When I was offered a job as a reporter five years ago, my teacher then stopped speaking to me as she thought I was selling out by working for an alt paper rather than going the lit journal route.
Maybe it was, but i was able to use skills I had become expert in during my three prior careers. They all entailed interviewing and assessing individuals, and researching and critiquing in many subjects.
Because I didn’t have the worlds greatest imagination, was the opposite of assertive (when it comes to things for me), and didn’t think the world was clamoring for a book or magazine articles by me, I thought this was a good way to break in to publishing–given my advanced age.
“Offered” was the key word. Somebody believed in me. That we have both believed in each other and have driven each other crazy since our late teens was, truthfully, comforting. While it was comforting, it was also awkward for basically the same reason. If those two sentences appear as if written in code, they almost are.
I couldn’t advance any further than I did. That said I wrote a damn good cover story for any reporter, including one in her first year.
I didn’t look for other reporting jobs because i really didn’t want to be a reporter. I would say it gave me the confidence needed to pursue other venues but I began a blog, and vowed to complete complicated dental work in two years, some months. My long time readers know more about teeth than anybody wants to know.
I was so goal oriented I completed the dental work in 21 months. My amazing healing ability had more than a little to do with that as did my true want to get this over with.
And, duh, I’m obsessive. I have to complete what I begin–hence staying in social work school after I knew it was the wrong career for me. I wish I had gone to school for something I really love such as sociology or urban anthropology. I purposely didn’t say writing.
I have come to the conclusion that one can really learn to write from doing. So I wrote in this blog. Wrote chapters for books, edited them, revised them, edited, and threw out. Hence the 1783 posts–two thirds in draft, the endless word documents, and my gmail capacity being up to 26% because sometimes I write in gmail. If I know I’m going away, I save to an external modem and write in gmail as a back up. I have to have something saved to the Internet to feel secure. Possibly falsely, but…..
The story I’m now telling comes easily to me at times. At other times, there’s a huge concrete wall between me and the material.
Actually, just when I need to rev up, I have hit the wall. Hence my apartment is incredibly organized, I’m planning my move, and accept three out of five invitations.
In a few weeks I’m going to do something I would have laid bets just a few months ago I never would do. Have dinner with three girls–always to me, I went to Jr/Sr High with. Then we’re having drinks with at the pre-reunion of the class ahead of ours.
I was so intent on being miserable, I never gave the girls in my class a chance. Two of the girls were in almost every class with me from Seventh through Twelfth Grades. Our school rotated teachers not students. The other girl, I just knew, because our community was so small everybody knew each other. Almost. There are a few people in our yearbook I don’t remember at all. I might have stood out more than other girls as I had the hippie thing going before it was fashionable in our Long Island community.
Or maybe, my parents asserted less control over my clothes and life. In the end, of course, this gave them more control as I listened to them, very occasionally because I liked and respected them. Though my father did attempt to run my life I never let him.
My Friday Flashback will be on Thursday. It’s a letter my father wrote, but never gave to me, on my 16th birthday.
Reconnecting with people who knew me, even if slightly, in those pivotal growing up years has caused me to reexamine my life. Fortunately I had already written much of a first draft about Senior year, can bring up the feelings at will, and the story takes place outside our community.
Even more fortunately the only people I bad mouth are me, doctors and teachers. I’m not about to change this book, and I want it to reflect my truth.
My parents come off as much more permissive than they were. When my mother called Shelby’s Mom, she had no idea Shelby’s mom would lie for me.
It’s hard for me to remain mired in the past. I have developed a big want and need to make new great memories and to just do.
When I wrote that i was busy, I meant assimilating recent events, writing, organizing my apartment in preparation to sell it, and a few other things necessary to making a living and/or career.
I have spent so much time prepping that I forgot there are more steps. No I didn’t forget but began to feel entitled. Something only pop princesses should ever feel.
This road I’m traveling is a hard one. It feels good to have people from all junctions of my life aboard.
I do believe that we can make our own destiny. Yet obsessive as I am, I feel that I might give up before I have even really begun to try.
Sometimes I stare at the same piece of paper for hours, and play games with the words. I have never had such organized files, dressers, closet, and kitchen. Had I known that the secret to organizing myself was to become close to the end of a first draft, I would have done this years ago. I have come close to the ends of first drafts; they weren’t organized. I wasn’t ready to be organized.
I only look like an organized person and have an organized apartment. Inside I’m still as disorganized as ever.
I saved my final grad school evaluation. Nowhere does it say that I’m disorganized, quite the contrary actually. The person it presents couldn’t have Aspergers; my only “four” out of “five” was relating, and caring, too much. To do that job effectively you have to almost create a Plexiglas wall between you and the residents, and I could only do that with one schizophrenic who drove me crazy, but less crazy than she drove the rest of the staff. Yes, I was staff as well as a student. The Newt cuts had taken affect.
I’m still assimilating the realization I was right all along and my problems are borne out of spatial relations. The knowledge made me feel empowered immediately but I kept waiting to be prove wrong.
Instead I have taken charge of my life in ways I could only dream of before. I don’t think that this time next year I will say “I was wrong, it is___”
So much is going on in my head, it’s hard to feel the passion needed to complete a book about the teenage me. I think I recognize that this is one of the times I have to both be gentle to me, and to just do it.
While I don’t belong in a mommy and work blog and apologize to anybody who has come here looking for one, I do belong in a person, work, and shaking up your life one.
Courting Destiny This writer is absolutely amazing. She may be too busy, but I hope not.
Thanks Riley!
I used to have a page of good things bloggers said about me. I gave equal time to the ones who didn’t like me. I had the quote in The Christian Science Monitor out. Tried linking to the group interview in Newsday but, uh, they wanted me to buy it, and I have never bought a newspaper article that has my name in it. I do keep out the paper that loves me’s cover because I just find it so darn adorable.
I suppose that I should be more publicity-oriented but staying under the radar suits me right now as I am focusing on my book when not obsessing about throwing away money each month.
One person thought the four figures I give my building was rent. No it’s money I pay on top of having bought the apartment outright.
i did that because I sensed that real estate was going to go to the sky. My bank kept offering me a mortgage and I never even inquired. Now real estate in most of the rest of the country is going down and in New York it might go up a bit. I’m not selling yet.
The condo in North Myrtle was so organized that cleaning four and a half rooms took at most half hour a day and was fun.
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When I came home I thought I was depressed and had one of many revelations.
I wasn’t depressed. I was sad.
That was before I saw a book in B&N about people buying into thinking they’re depressed when they’re sad, which is a natural thing and can be easily helped without medication.
So I acted which is, I think, the only thing that can solve sadness.
i spent the week organizing my apartment. I have done everything but one dresser in my one closet that is 6′ by 12′ so I really can’t complain, get rid of clothes, and uh, the storage cage in the basement. But those things can wait or be done when in between other things.
Any more time spent organizing and I will be procrastinating. It was sad to leave a duplex for six hundred square feet, or two and a half rooms with a granite kitchenette and a marble Doris Day/Rock Hudson bathroom.
When I finally sell, I will come back to New York often.
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I have been having a perfect New York weekend. Yesterday afternoon I took a nap because all this organizing uses parts of my brain that haven’t been used in years. Lucia called while I was still sleeping but before I would have overslept and been too tired to go out.
I met her and Little Luce at their apartment. The building only has about 20 apartments. Everybody knows everybody and it’s what people think of when they think of the Upper West Side. As we had friends living there 30 years ago, i know all the older tenants and most of the new ones. It feels a lot like home.
I say “it’s me” and have checked to make sure that I’m “0″ on speed dial, on the landline. “0″ is the really coveted spot because it’s the operator, and was my mother on mine for many years.
We went to a new sorely needed Italian wood burning pizza restaurant, and sat in the tiled and brick covered terrace that faces the street. They were prepping before filming a new thriller On the hook
It used to be that filming a movie was a tortured experience for the pedestrians that passed by. I would be on my own street, and a lowly PA would physically stop me from walking up the block. Never stopped me for more than 30 seconds. i do feel that people come before film shoots.
Now they’re more humane. They only stop people when they’re actually shooting. They only shoot for about a minute, and they try to let you pass even if filming. Yes, the people of New York won that one.
It was interesting to watch from a table because they were doing the light to simulate daylight. I see that often and assume it’s because night light can be used to make the exact lighting they want. There was a time in my life I would have Googled this, called the union, and found out everything I could.
Now I like the magic.
People began screaming from apartments for the noise to end as Elliot Gould was being filmed, and filmed, and filmed. Don’t know how many takes they took.
He wasn’t noisy, but some machines were.
Tomorrow the first overhaul of New York noise laws, in 30 years, will go into affect.
I don’t think that construction noise will be affected, but I’m getting my revenge on the penthouse next door anyway. They have incredible furniture that was obviously custom made. My building is on its second summer of pointing work on my line, and the dust goes into the deck also. Revenge can be sweet. Of course I sit here sneezing from the dust edging its way in as I have the windows open because it’s too beautiful for air conditioning.
After dinner I walked the eight blocks and two avenues home which is only a bit over half mile. A mile is 20 city blocks. Avenues are measured differently, and have differing widths.
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This morning Lucia came over and we walked on the Hudson River Parks to the West 30’s and back up. At one point we were walking in a bike only road, but didn’t see a pedesterian one, nor did it say “bikes only, no peds” anywhere. We were given a friendly warning by a policewoman. I wish I had my camera or a phone with me, and should next time, in case I’m given a ticket. Actually, exactly where she stopped us, it said “yield to peds” so uh…..
Then we went to the 79th Street Boat Basin for brunch. They only have white toast. How weird is that?
This is why I generally don’t write about my day. It’s not exactly fascinating. And I talk about things like toast.
We tried buying tickets for a New York Waterways Fourth of July fireworks cruise but we should have tried months ago. And don’t even ask about this.
Dylan in Bethel.
For all you Wikipedian’s, Bethel was the site of Max Yasgur’s farm where Woodstock, the one and only was.
However Lucia and I are determined to go to every thing we can. New York’s at its best in summer. The new river parks are everything I have dreamed of. They have many activities and we plan…..We’re also into a boat thing.
This morning we toured a tiny wooden boat that came here from Germany. They’re raising money to go to Scandinavia. I had neither camera nor phone nor can be trusted to photograph the right things. Also I have panic attacks when walking down staircases without good bannister’s or ones I’m not familiar with. it is part of my inability to judge space properly.
Now that I know there’s a physical cause, I wish I had let myself believe what I always intuitively knew years ago. It’s amazing the changes a bit of faith in oneself brings.
I’m listening to a Dylan song that sounds an awful lot like Tom Waits. I have to admit Dylan’s voice is uh easier on the ears. Yes I am that weird. I love Tom Waits and will come back to New York the next time he performs at The Beacon. I’m beginning to love Dylan again.
I count the years
and I shed no tears….
The games gotten old…
I’m going to have put you down for awhile
Dylan’s amazing. When I was in Junior High, he lived in the Marlin Hotel on Eighth Street. My great aunt, or my mother’s much older cousin, I was never quite sure of the relationship, managed and lived in apartment in it. My father and I went to visit her, and I won’t tell the rest of the story.
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Cooper get over the yuck crab factor. I have been kind of forced to watch people trap them and then we would cook and eat them.
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This is both a Friday flashback, must have happened a decade or more ago, and a Courting classic. New fiction is below it.
It was 30 years ago this coming summer that New York had a heat wave, black out and very sick serial killer on the loose. When I write that it seems so innocent. Oh we also had a subway system that was barely functional, and many other problems.
People forget that it was our then new Mayor Ed Koch, the issuance of so called Big Mac bond by my personal god, Felix Rohatyn, and private conservatories and other groups that helped New York get back on its feet.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“Who are you? He asked me in a perplexed but flirtatious voice.
“Who are you?” I asked the older man who had been waiting outside my apartment door when I came home from night classes at The New School.
My long brown hair was up in a ponytail; I wore a thin cotton summer dress, not too revealing which wasn’t usual for me, and brown platform sandals. That summer of Sam, no girl wanted to stand out or look anything like a potential victim. It was hot; it had been hot for weeks and my apartment lacked air conditioning. But I was young and didn’t feel heat like most people did. No matter how fast I walked and I walked like I was dodging bullets because maybe I was, I never sweated.
The man’s suit jacket was off as was his tie. His thin white shirt glistened from sweat. “Let me in,” he said.
I looked at him, confused. “Why?”
“You’re one of Reba’s girls. I can tell. You have that sweet school girl look.”
“Oh, her. She retired down to Florida last year. Sorry, don’t know anything about her. I live here now.”
I wasn’t sure if I should say that last part but didn’t know what else to say. Nobody had schooled me in the art of telling men that I wasn’t what they thought I was, in this particular situation or others.
“Sure you are. I can always tell who Reba’s girls are.”
I was getting angry. I wanted to go in; it had been a long day. I worked in a store in Queens, prime Sam country and the temperature had hit 90 long before noon. My nose was stuffed; I needed a shower.
He put on his glasses and examined me from head to toe.
“Even if you’re not one of Reba’s girls; you must have sublet the apartment from her. She’d never give it up. Reba’s too smart to give up a rent controlled Fifth Avenue apartment.”
“Look, sir,” I said, emphasizing the sir—a title I would never use in real life. “This isn’t quite Fifth Avenue, just off it, and the apartment’s no longer rent controlled. It’s stabilized and my husband and I live here now.”
I was wearing a wedding ring though I wasn’t married anymore. Anything to make me look unavailable; anything to ward off the evil that ran through New York that hotter than hell summer. I waved the ring in his face.
“My husband should be home any minute and he’s the jealous type.” Lying didn’t come naturally to me, but lying about men was something that did come easily that summer. I had put on my street face; the one that could turn men into stone, and he looked at me with a little less arrogance.
Nobody lived in the apartment right next to mine then, and a crazy psychiatrist with hair that stuck out all over his body and a look that could frighten Sam and frightened me lived in the other apartment on the first floor. The man who lived above me walked into the building.
“Oh honey, you’re home,” I screamed to my perplexed, older WASP neighbor. He had recently been listed as one of Manhattan’s ten most eligible bachelors. Frankly I thought he was gay because he was always smiling when he saw me and was usually with another man that I thought was his lover and the reason for the smile. Boys and men and anything in between had been smiling at me since I was sixteen. There was something about his smile that almost engaged me. It was more real; more something, than most males. But I did think that he was gay, and I wasn’t the short haired male with Docksider shoes on, type.
My neighbor, Roger, began to understand, stopped heading for the stairs, and came over. He kissed me, a wet passionate icky one that I forced myself to endure.
“Honey, this man thinks that I’m one of Reba’s girls. You know the madam that lived here before us.”
Roger was a bit tipsy. He put his arm around me, and said in his lazy WASPY voice so different than my fast somewhere in the North East one; “honey, I keep telling you we should put a sign on the door, ‘Reba doesn’t live here anymore.’”
“Oh Roger, I keep telling you that’s so classless. People will learn eventually.”
I unlocked my door; Roger followed me in. As I closed the door, the man said;
“I don’t believe you. Reba would never give up this apartment. You two don’t look like you belong together. Is he your appointment?”
I almost lost it. “I’m not one of Reba’s girls. We’ve been living here for a year and seven months almost to the day. And Roger and I are very happy. Aren’t we sweetie?”
I knew that was overkill but couldn’t stop myself.
The man handed me his card.
“If you ever change your mind.”
He was a vice president of an oil company. Years later he would become world famous in some now forgotten scandal.
“Okay Roger,” I said, “you deserve a drink for saving me. God, just thank god it was you and not, the shrink, or Al or that useless cab driver.” Al smoked cigars and looked almost old enough to be Roger’s father.
The cab driver had been born in the building; well, in a hospital I assumed, but close enough. He lived in an apartment two floors over Roger’s, and was famous for bringing in garbage to the building. Stacks and stacks of garbage: Newspapers; magazines; empty boxes; half-filled ones; anything metal. Once I passed his apartment when the door was open, and went into shock. I’m not the neatest person in America but his apartment defined the word Collyer Brothers. I had lived in tenements in The East Village with my boyfriend, and had never seen one that sickening. They had all been very clean. Unless I lived in them; I wasn’t exactly a natural housekeeper. Though I aspired to be.
I passed the cab driver’s apartment while on my way to sleep with a local TV talk show host who lived in the larger apartment next door. He would talk about me to his shrink on the show. My ex-husband, who wasn’t working would call and tell me all about the show. It was kind of flattering as he never said anything bad about me. Quite the opposite actually.
Megan lived above Roger. Periodically she would turn the gas on and try to end her life. She always managed to try just before a delivery was scheduled, and just after the piano player she liked to think was her boyfriend dumped her. She was really in love with Roger, and whenever there was a break-in, in the building or a New York Times was missing from an apartment door, she would tell the super that I had done it.
He would laugh as he knew I had separation ideation problems over The New York Times. I was clueless when it came to housekeeping but I liked having company over so it would always look good.
Roger accepted the drink. When I had moved in my father, the almost tea toler, took me to a liquor store and insisted that he buy me a full bar worth of liquor. It was the proper thing to do in 1976 when most people drank hard liquor and smoked. My family, except for me was perfect. Fun, sociable and never smoked nor drank.
I poured Roger a glass of Stoli from a bottle in my ancient almost ice box freezer. It was gross and had to be defrosted every three months with tons of boiling water. After that summer, I bought a new refrigerator. That would have been sad had it not been so necessary, because I had to take out the wooden Pullman doors. When you walked into my apartment, you walked straight into the kitchen and saw the refrigerator, sink, and ancient stove with an oven that seemed not to have been cleaned since Reba had first moved in. I bought a new convection oven, and never used the real one.
Roger asked where I got the Hunter Ceiling Fans as he had never seen them in the city before.
“The Bowery, near where I got the butcher block table and chairs. Hey, do you mind if I…”
I walked through the kitchen, past the huge archway into the giant studio, and went to a silver case on the coffee table filled with joints. Years before, while seeing Jane Fonda in Klute, coming home from work, (yes like Reba’s girls), going to sit at the kitchen table with her legs up, and smoking a joint, I thought a woman who could offer people joints and who seemed so satisfied with her own life was the height of feminist sex appeal.
Though Roger was in his late 40’s, he’d occasionally buy drugs from the super, who was the building dealer. It was much cleaner that way, and you never felt like you were doing anything illegal. The Rockefeller laws had gone into effect the year before but it didn’t affect people like us. The Rockefeller’s lived across the street, but I never saw them. I must have passed famous people each day but I could have bumped into Woody Allen in a phone booth and not noticed.
They were my streets and the only place I could get lost in thought was while walking, so I walked everywhere, in all seasons. That summer I had promised my parents I wouldn’t walk much by myself at night, and would take cabs everywhere.
All my girlfriends had long brunette hair, and we all felt vulnerable. While we sat at my kitchen table, Roger asked me what if felt like to be a young, brunette girl in the city.
“I’m not going to stop going out. I have to wear my hair up; it’s too hot not to. No girl’s been killed in Manhattan and I work in one of my parents stores in Queens, and they won’t let me work past six. It’s just a summer job. I’m going to visit my college roommate in Geneva for six weeks in late summer, and fall….”
Roger and I talked through the night and then didn’t socialize again for twelve more years. Just before I left for Europe there was a black out with much looting. My sister lived on West 72nd, and it was very rowdy. People threw beer cans at the apartments all night, and I spent the night on the phone talking to her.
The next day my best friend Shelby and I hit the Second Avenue Upper East Side bars about noon. They were afraid of food going bad, and both food and drink were on the house. It felt like a snow day in the summer; we didn’t think about the neighborhoods that had been looted; we didn’t think about much but ourselves and the boys we were dating. We forgot to feel scared about Sam that day. Like most people we staggered home somewhere around midnight Al’s next door neighbor, Mrs. Herrick, passed out in the tiny elevator. She did that often.
While I was in Bern, Sam was captured, and Elvis died. I couldn’t really care about that old fat man, but Son of Sam. My god, he looked familiar. He wasn’t; just had a look. Continue Reading »
On April 30th there will be one day of blog silence. He just walked into a store, paid $571 and with that money bought a pistol and bullets. People want to get rid of the wrong amendment. I can’t be quiet about that. Guns directly kill. Only the search for religious freedom kills.
Will have 3WW later today or tomorrow. It’s always Wednesday here
Wrote this for a competition to Jazzfest in New Orleans. Must have lost It’s 147 words.
New Orleans, city of marching band funerals, voodoo, amazing food, jazz, Cajun and Creole music. New Orleans, city of people who dare put fun high up on life’s agenda.
New Orleans where Jazzfest means standing ten feet from Aaron Neville, suddenly you find him so sexy, you slow dance with your best friend. No other festival has you buying fried green tomatoes and crayfish.
In New Orleans, you make a special trip to the Camellia Grill for chocolate pecan pie. A Cajun friend takes you to a native restaurant, Suddenly you’re transported back in time.
You follow horn players blindly while marching to the beat. You pass shotgun houses, enter a bar, and hear a piano player/singer who makes you weep.
Once you fell in love with a man because he was from New Orleans. New Orleans casts its spell onto its natives. It’s a powerful mojo.
Only an impeachment hearing will bring out the truth. I hope the prosecutors hearing can bring out some semblance of what’s been going on. On April 25th people will be at the capitol asking for a hearing.
I have reached that stage in life where I pray that every student at Virgina Tech has a cell and could easily reach their parents
This is beyond belief. I used to believe in The Second Amendment for various reasons. I can’t anymore. IF GUNS AREN’T GOING TO BE OUTLAWED MAKE BULLETS VERY VERY EXPENSIVE
¢¢¢ Darianna nominated me for two bloggers choice awards
I don’t really believe in blogs competing against one another. I can’t even find my blog. And there’s a totally snarky category for “worst blog of all time.” Personally I find that offensive.
I do believe in bloggers solidarity. That all said, if you’re going to vote for me, when you get to the site put in courtingdestiny.com and it leads straight to my blog
But it’s a gray and dismal day. We had 6.5 inches of rain. What does that have to do with a blogging award? I always wanted to write “it’s a gray and dismal day.”
Thanks Darianna who is promoting one million blogs for peace a very worthy cause. They hope to have a million blogs by the fifth anniversary. I hope we’re out by then, but we do have an administration that believes in escalating the war.
Yesterday I got particularly virulent spam from piatanidotcom. My middle name is Tani. It’s in the blog somewhere.
••••••••••
This isn’t a day to be at the computer or so I tell myself. It’s been pouring since the middle of the night. It took me a long time to wake up and realize that the sounds I heard were rain drops, and longer too remember to get up and close a window that left open surely would have caused a major flood.
A Barnes & Noble, at Astor Place, is closing because their rent is too high. If it’s too high for B&N?
A small bookstore owner mentioned how B&N forced Shakespeare & Co in my hood to close. I would have loved Shakespeare’s if not for the people who worked there, and maybe that played a part in its closing.
They let you know if they didn’t approve of a book you were buying. Why sell it if they deemed it not worthy? The reason is obvious. The editorializing not necessary.
They had a good mystery section but the workers didn’t seem to think mysteries were worthy. I tend to buy books from different sections, some considered “intellectually worthy,” and some not.
Were they trying to sell books or manage a small club of underemployed MFA’s and other literary types?
I mentioned this once at a small party and two out of the other five people had the same experience.
Perhaps we began to shop at B&N because nobody types you. Perhaps we began to shop at B&N because we felt more comfortable.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s went under because it didn’t treat all customers with respect
I wonder how the workers at Shakespeare’s would have greeted the proliferation of chick lit? I especially wonder that today because the second book that had its beginnings in my writing class, three years ago, just came out.
I read an interview with my writing teacher. He talked about the types of mistakes wanna be writers make; telling not showing and the like. Then he talked about organization, and how people who can’t organize a thought can’t organize a page let alone a book.
It’s not as if I feel so important that I think it was directed at me. But if he thought that about my work, I wish he would have told me rather than telling me how he saved my submission for last because he knew would always enjoy it.
I wish that when I contacted him for individual help last summer, he told me that I just wasn’t organized enough, rather than telling me that he was too busy and inviting me in to his next class.
There’s honesty and there’s honesty. Denigrating a person’s choice in books they’re buying is stupid when it comes from the people representing the book store. Telling a person that this or that problem hinders their marketability is hurtful but ultimately could be helpful.
Most of this book is written, yet I don’t dare shop it around because I haven’t come up with a good beginning. Each time I think I do, I come up with too many stories in one, and have to go further back into my life.
Honestly, I’m just not that interested in coming of age in high school stories. While I had a more than slightly interesting Senior Year, and probably some unique yet universal experiences, I was a kid with a completely different mentality than I had at 25. I feel the same way about college and I know I had fascinating experiences.
I’m much more interested in slow blooming coming of age while technically an adult stories. Maybe I do need to tell the high school and college stories. I have written most of them for one workshop or another.
My sister decided that my niece is old enough to hear some of my stories. I went to the school Jacquelin is going to now. I told her the real reason I was kicked out of Driver’s Ed. It’s not a pretty story. Maybe i do need to write it.
Thing is I have written, and rewritten, edited, revised, rewrote these stories so many times, I feel like a robot when I write them. Maybe that dispassion is needed. Being kicked out of Driver’s Ed led the way to many things.
Only I wasn’t ready to see that until now. I placed the blame on me. I’m prone to that.
I told the real story to my parents 20 years after the fact. They were the only people in town who didn’t know. I’m not going to say the reason I was kicked out, but it wasn’t true.
I shouldn’t have been too ashamed to tell my parents. They would have advocated for me, as they knew I had hidden disabilities that very possibly made it hard or impossible for me to learn to drive. I assume that was the reason they were given. Maybe I had to tell them. I don’t remember.
This is the school district that let me at twelve decide whether or not I wanted to be in the Honor’s Program. I’m really not willing to take this memoir back to Seventh Grade.
It’s so easy for me to write a synopsis when it comes to other writings and keep to it. When I come to my own life, the one thing I should be most expert at, I’m lost.
I know the story too well. There are no surprises, nothing to keep me fascinated. But then I come to certain realizations and realize that if I hadn’t replayed the story from so many different frames I would have never truly understood why things happened.
Maybe that’s the key to a good memoir, it allows the author to understand.
I'm Pia Savage. Just a writer with a blog title few people truly get. I suppose my destiny has taken me from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Myrtle Beach as I barely heard of it eleven months ago. My email is Pia(dot)talks@gmail(dot)com.
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It’s 147 words.
