Childhood dreams is a prompt from Studio 30 plus.

Because the 3WW prompt went I added it!

I stop talking and concentrate on putting fireflies into a bottle.  It’s going to be dark soon and the trapped fireflies will light up the skies.  We’re between ten and six years old and none of us have to be in until the adults unplug the TV’s from the extension cords hanging from the garden apartments in the courts to TV tables.  Some of the men smoke cigars.   They drink Coke and lemon soda, spilling the soda so that bees and flys flock around the tables and TV’s.  I stay far away from the TV tables.  There’s nothing dainty about them.  Plus I’m scared soda will spill into the extension cords and there will be a huge explosion.

It’s summer before my little sister and I go to camp for six weeks soon after my birthday.  Our parents encourage us to stay out late and play so we’ll be tired and sleep a bit later in the morning. Though I try to get up at six every morning of the year to read the encyclopedia.  I’m a word nerd that the other kids like because they can’t remember not knowing me.  My best friend, Ava Altman, is at a hotel for the summer.  My family goes to hotels but most of the families spend two to four weeks in bungalow colonies.

I don’t tell the kids that my family spent summers in bungalow colonies when we lived in Sunnyside.  Maybe my parents laugh at memories of the bungalow colonies when we stay at hotels near Monticello to visit parts of my father’s family.  His sister and her family live in Miami.  Poor me. Doomed to vacations in the Catskills, Miami Beach, and “educational places” such as The Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

We study the region for months before we go. I can’t wait for our first vacation to DC where we’ll see the FBI building which is about the most exciting building in the world to me.  The day we’re going to go we stop at my father’s client’s supermarket first and I throw up all over the entrance way to the store.  We go back to the court instead where I get over the measles in two days.

I like going on vacation. I especially like Florida because I get to spend the morning in the pool and the afternoon in the ocean.  My parents get two rooms and our cousins come and stay with us. We all get along.  My sister and I can still recite our father’s refrain: “relax, we’re going to be here for two weeks.  You don’t need to do everything today.”  Yes. We. Do.  We run through the hotel lobbies and downstairs store arcade.  If we’re in the 40′s at Collins Avenue we run to some houseboats that are on TV.  We’re going to meet some TV stars.  My sister who is two years younger doesn’t really care but she knows I only like the coolest of things.  That we never meet a TV star doesn’t phase me.  There’s always tomorrow.  Or next year.

I like being in the court. I like camp. I’m an indiscriminate life liker. I can’t wait to be a teenager and have a real boyfriend but I spend much time dreaming.  Ava and I have our whole lives plotted out.  Ava looks like a child movie star.  She has long dark wavy perfect hair, and is the prettiest girl I know.

Ava thinks I’m so lucky to be my mother’s daughter.  Unlike Ava’s mother who I secretly think is a witch who will get her coven together for a court haunting, my mother’s friendly and fun.

My mother has dark hair, large eyes, a huge smile, and is I know prettier than most of the other mothers. Before I was adopted my mother owned a fancy dress store in Forest Hills.  Her mother makes our good clothes.  Ava, my sister and I are the best dressed girls in the court.  Ava’s family has a housekeeper.  I take that for granted until I’m older and realize how tiny the garden apartments, built for returning vets are.  Everybody lives in Beech Hills because it’s on top of the largest hill in Queens, cut off from the rest of the borough, and has a lot of outdoor space for kids to play in.

There are 40 mothers in the court alone.  I’m vaguely aware that my mother’s older because I was adopted but I know this is something that can never ever be discussed.  Most parents and kids think she’s younger.  Everybody looks up to my parents.  My father’s a professional who always has time to talk to the other parents and answer any questions.  He began the first credit union for coop apartments.  I know that’s a big deal only because parents stop me and tell me how great my father is.

I don’t try to memorize summers in the court.  The TV’s, the rock & roll I love that the older kids play; the games we kids play.  It’s boys against girls, run to the trees.  One two three ring a leveo.  I’m not very good at the games but it doesn’t matter and I laugh so hard when I get to the trees.  I’m tantalized by the garden apartments.  The court is a perfect place to live.

Years later Ava and I will find our memories haunting.  No childhood could possibly live up to it.  We tantalize kids with our stories.

Then I never stop to think how good life is.  Why should I?  It’s all I know.  But I will always remember how beautiful the fireflies were when they lit up the sky like fireworks.  Then I opened the bottle and let them fly away into the night.  The other kids didn’t like that.  They liked the fireflies living for a few days in the glass jars with air holes on the jar cap.  But I liked to think of them flying to their true love.

I have no right to be sad when I live at the beach, have some resources, and a life some people would look at with disdain–too self centered; and others with envy–self centered, beach, people to laugh with, a Manhattan Upper West Side apartment that if not mine is there for me when I want or need it.

Yet every year this time of year comes and kicks me in the tuchus with stunning strength and an alacrity I’m always shocked to feel.

I’m lonely; I miss my mommy, and my daddy too–though he will be gone 20 years this coming 3/31.  Actually I miss him more than ever–and never know what to call death though that’s what it is to me.  I can’t believe in passing to another life in another side but it sounds so inviting I would love to.  I can’t believe in the big sleep and one day the Messiah will come though I will always identify myself as Jewish for reasons I have discussed too frequently.

My Mom–well Courting readers know too well how she fell 33 days after 9/11, lived for fifteen minutes while she cried into her Companion button that didn’t save her, she wanted to live.

I’m not John Gunther.

I can’t think of expressions like Death be not proud.  hell I studied that book at least twice: once  in elementary school or junior high,  and then again high school, and really have no idea what the expression means. For death, something I was too familiar with at too young an age, has never lent itself to the grandeur in that statement.

I’m jealous.  Of all of you who have lost loved ones in the blogging/facebook era.  People, often strangers or semi-strangers, reach out to you with plaudits and condolences.  I’m jealous but don’t begrudge you it.  I love that mourning has become something people can do so openly and with so much companionship (tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” prepare to puke.)

I can’t help it.  I belong to the sardonic life school.  Because I’m so frigging nice which apparently is fashionable, I embrace irony to keep me from being the sucker I truly am—but I really don’t want to go there now.  I don’t miss having kids or having a partner but either or both would have made life so much easier during both my parents deaths

You’ll never know what it’s like to take the LIRR alone (train from Great Neck to Manhattan) after planning your mother’s services with your sister and brother in law, not knowing what to do, and literally running into a crazy woman in what was Gristede’s that year.  A large basement super market that never had people in it.  I would go when I couldn’t deal with Fairway, Zabar’s, or even Citerella.  Invariably it would change names every year.

It was famous for being in the Ansonia which is not only a famous apartment building, former home of Plato’s Retreat, now classy,pre-war, too ornate for my tastes but….and mostly famous in many circles for being the supermarket closest to the Ansonia Weight Watchers. The supermarket had all the right foods.

What do I do when I’m waiting for a funeral, and all my friends are mourning buildings?  Rhetorical question.  I become embittered and then try everything to lose the bitterness for I have always been called a “lady” when not being called other names.

Empathy flew out the city when my mother died.  I don’t fixate on that; I have forgiven and moved on.

But damn last night in a rare sleepless night I realized exactly why I reacted so badly to a house fire, in another person’s home, that awaited me when I arrived home this past Monday 9/13.

The smell.  It was the same once wonderful smell of smoke that wafted uptown into my apartment that week.

Obviously it’s something I will never forget. Scents are visceral; remembered long after memories are gone or the mind might be robbed of intellect.  I wouldn’t want to forget.  I only want to remember when I want to remember.  Tomorrow (Friday night through Saturday evening–Yom Kippur, the traditional day of mourning.)  I don’t believe in God, dislike organized religion yet view my Jewishness as a culture that has survived too many years of people trying to wipe it out.

I think I was a bitch when my mother died.  Demanding.  Scared,  Unhappy.  Trying to hang onto my youth though I was no longer young.  Yet doesn’t a person have a right to be all that once or twice in a lifetime?

OK many other times.  To be brutally honest menopause changed me into a much better person.

But I always gave 200% of myself and would have done anything for people that I loved and they knew that.  I was too accepting of faults; would put up with things until I could no longer stand to be around the person and then end the friendship.  Sometimes a friendship of many years.

I believed, and believe, in Karma.  I was just going to say something and realized how critical the statement was of me and couldn’t say it.  One thing I have learned in the past nine years is that it’s up to us to be kind to ourselves; that in this journey called life in educated America, we call the shots.  I, and I alone, am responsible for me and my happiness.  For you who have known me a half decade or a lifetime–that’s obviously much progress.

I try tricking the sad season into not coming each year, and each year I’m a bit more successful.  I’m already not looking forward to 9/11/11 for I can imagine what Christine O’Donnell will do with it–she’ll probably make it into a tragedy that happened to her and people who don’t believe in masturbation alone.

I believe when people talk about wanting to forget they want to forget the polarization and politicizing.  The event itself, it’s American history we all lived through.  I would no sooner forget it than I would my mother’s death (bad example, I mean her life) or President Kennedy’s assassination though I will always see it through the eyes of a thirteen year old who thought herself much smarter than she was.  Or maybe I was smart then and each year since have declined a bit–I waver on that.  I blamed the assassination on me.  It’s the first major event I remember taking responsibility for.  It was President Kennedy’s first trip that I hadn’t been following.  As I was involved in Unpopular Girl Eighth Grade Things. Oh how I wallowed in unpopularity.  Wore it like a badge….Who knew that I would grow into an eighteen year old people (boys) would love to be with?

My mother did.  She never lost faith.  And my father thought I was the smartest kid who just had to try a bit harder–in every area of life. He thought me beautiful and managed to make me feel proud, embarrassed and sad all at once.  For my beauty was always marred by my talking with my hands or being sloppy.  Or something truly minor in the larger scheme of life but to him it was the world.  So I have no perspective.

When I turned 25 we did have that rapprochement that allowed me to become the person he told his problems to.   Though really those days began when I was 20.  Things happened that made my father lose faith in life for a short while and my mother asked me to come home and be with him.  I did because by coincidence I had been to a rally that put down middle aged white professional men.  And I thought, “but I’m demonstrating against my father,” and I couldn’t be radical anymore though I could be anti-war and wanted equality for women etc.

Oh daddy, how you would have loved Mad Men. Peyton Place for another century.  Actually they refer to Peyton Place. It’s almost too clever yet just right.  Reminds me of the time we were visiting one of the Bob’s in London.  They were two years behind and we gave plot summaries.  That night was the first time you didn’t let me meet Mick Jagger   I do understand now, of course.

The character’s are like your friend/clients.  The ones mommy disdained but entertained.  Served them chopped liver and they kvelled over what they called pate.  She smiled sweetly.  Nobody knew how cutting she could be.  How she could force me to re-examine my like or dislike of people, my ethics, my beliefs with just a few words chosen wisely

She wasn’t one to endure foolishness but some of these people actually paid daddy in a good year.  Sometimes big time; sometimes–well I have an original oil painting and the romance book cover it graced.  Sometimes daddy would insist the pot in his big time poker game go to whoever was starving or destitute  or sick.  How could you not love a man like that?  A man of valor and  great compassion.  I miss his friendship as I miss hers.  I was so blessed.  Honestly few people ever have that opportunity.

My cousins Gena and Tina did.  This past Saturday celebrating the life of their father was a wonderful experience.  I do get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I think about it but know how hard it is for them to lose such a wonderful father.  Our mothers, sisters in so many ways besides biological, did pick great men.  Though their father won the sanity award hands down!  And yes he knew how to make them feel good about themselves without lecturing on what they were doing wrong.  (Please understand I forgave my father years before he apologized to me unbidden about two months before he died., suddenly of a stroke so it wasn’t a death bed apology.  Or maybe it was.  But the important part is that I had understood he couldn’t help himself and appreciated him for himself for a long long time.)

This post, meandering and woeful as it is, is dedicated to the memory of my Uncle Jack who read everything I wrote that was published or I blogged.  It’s a bit harder to write knowing he won’t be reading. Though I should feel less censored, I don’t come from a family where people had to censor themselves and I thank ya’ll for that.

Someday I will have the sad season down to a science.  Probably in another 20 years though I always next year! Or whatever is remaining of this season–less than a month to go!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Oh right, New York was never the same after 9/11.  More beautiful than ever with incredible parks and the High Line–I have to download pictures–it’s the priciest most artificial place and I love it when I don’t hate it.  But I blame Karl Rove for everything.  So the shit I should eat–agreeing with him about O’Donnell is unbearable.  Vote Democrat in November even if your candidate is Alvin Greene.

My brother in law’s father died at the end of June.  Between Irving and Jack I have no older men left, in my life,  and feel so strange

This post is raw and needs much editing.  Yet I want it out as it epitomizes blogging as I knew it in the beginning.  And makes me feel like Yes I Really Am A Blogger!

I am missing New York something fierce tonight. It was an incredibly hot day; one where my temper was as fierce as the weather. Then we had another tropical rainstorm which lingered into evening–not very tropical but I guess welcome.

My garden has been suffering. There are some potted plants that need to be watered maybe six times a day in this heat and I just can’t, but when it rain inches in an hour or two, the rain overwhelms the plants.

This summer isn’t a “nobody remembers one like this,” but there hasn’t been one with so many consecutive hot days. It does cool down a lot at night, now, and that does help.
You can almost feel summer ending though it’s so hot and that’s sad too.

The thing about New York is it’s all about possibilities. My move to South Carolina coincided with the worst economic times since the depression, yadda yadda….I was supposed to save money not lose it!

I don’t regret the move. I love my new friends, my house, having a new life and being so close to the ocean.

I bought a safe today as part of my hurricane preparedness plan; the other part is buying plywood as I live in what FEMA considers a low risk area but then I have to ask myself questions about FEMA and do I trust them? Then I remember that there’s a fairly new admin and I get even more confused as I’m not sure how much of FEMA consists of career civil servants and do they really make the policies etc? I remember how Social Security, a former employer of mine, could have five regulations for one situation and non superseded any other. As a claims rep you had to use your judgment, and decide which is the best for the individual. Though you have three months of training, every office has its own training and biases on rulings.

I would assume a hurricane’s more clear cut but then I remember Katrina and others and….

I know because I live east of Route 17 I have to evacuate if the hurricane is over a certain category. I have all sorts of plans and back-up plans mostly involving train rides or riding it out at my friend Lil Red’s house in Little River.

I have never thought so much about hurricanes but the storm two weeks ago woke me up to the very distinct possibility……

It’s the sad season for me, though this year I barely feel the familiar dual sadness of what September signifies for everybody and October for me. And not feeling that sadness brings its own mixed feelings for it means I have moved on, and left both my parents beyond somewhere. For when I grieved so arduously for my mother I also had my father. Now I have neither. Carrying them in my heart is very different.

Finally I know the age you are no longer an adult orphan. It’s the age you leave all the grief for whatever reasons. In my case I think it was because it was just too damn hard to carry it with me.

No it wasn’t New York I was missing tonight. It was both the life of sadness and the happy life before it I was missing. And yes I still can write but truly believe I need cooler weather. Even with the AC on my brain has been on melt.

In 91 my father went to the big poker game in the sky.  In 01 my mother went somewhere not here.

You hope they reunited but your mother wasn’t betting on it.  You think they had some kind of Houdini signal he was supposed to send her if there was something up there and some way of communicating.  Houdini and his wife made up a signal.  If there was an afterlife she would know because she would receive his signal.  It never happened.  You don’t know the signal but you know the story because your father was into levitating tables and Ouija boards and more.  Your mother made him stop.  Still you think she wanted the signal more than anything in later life.

You don’t want to say you have a fear of years ending in “1″ because that sounds so wimpy. And people will assume you’re scared of another 9/11.  You’re more scared of the idiots who blamed Obama for the last miss.  Big difference between 8/06/01 memo sitting on Bush’s desk and officials who did screw up but weren’t in the Oval Office.  Not that you think Obama’s perfect but Bush didn’t inherit two wars, “the worst recession since….,” and all the fallout.  He helped cause all that.

You don’t want to say you’re confused about the past decade; it had certain incredible highs and lows like you have never experienced and hope never to experience again.

You hate the way people waffle around 9/11 or make it Todd Beamer Appreciation Day.   Most of it happened in New York and that should be always acknowledged.  Not that you’re not appreciative of Todd Beamer.   But that day really did change your life because your mother became so addled, yet not addled enough to require emergency measures.  The day she fell and died not just added to your guilt meter but made it run so fast the guilt company couldn’t keep with it and therefore demanded their overdue payment much later in the decade.

How can you complain when there are so many people with less than nothing?  You don’t want to say that your addiction to HGTV has made you cynical.  Sometimes people put down substantial down payments but other times they put down five percent or work out arrangements so that the mortgage and/or second mortgage covers 100%.  How can they call themselves homeowners?  They’re renting from the bank.  You couldn’t understand this in the 90′s; you find it unbelievable today.

You’re far from perfect.  You have an unnatural fear that the above belief will cause you to lose everything you have.   Bad Karma.  And Karma is everything to you.

You did big things last year–well beginning in 07.  You sold an apartment and bought and renovated a house.  It is a big deal and yet you say “piece of cake.” “If I could do this anybody could.”

But not everybody has a disability that causes many people to give up completely, live off other people, work in sheltered workshops despite having multiple degrees.  Of course you’re on the highest end of this spectrum.  Sort of like having  a “bit of Asperger’s.”

Still you never knew.  You worked and worked your tush off in your 20′s and 30′s while living in an apartment that was totally unrenovated and required constant care. Your neighborhood was store unfriendly.  One of the happiest days of your life was the day a Duane Reade opened five blocks from your apartment.  You would get there at eight on Saturday mornings–the only time it wasn’t packed and buy cleaning supplies and much more.

You’re obsessively clean now because you couldn’t be then. You thought it was a combination of laziness and living in an old old apartment that was party central.

Your father thought you could be the neatest person in the world if you only tried.  Your father was always yelling.  Always telling you how great you could be if only….He didn’t know and by the time he realized (after the damn testing) he only had a few years left.  Your father was your greatest admirer and your greatest foe.  You should probably be in therapy for life just to understand that relationship.

A friend was just saying he found Elizabeth Gilbert’s story banal because he knows you and you went to Europe by yourself many times and have overcome much greater odds than Gilbert will ever know.  He actually called you a “hero.”  That was so sweet.  Actually he said “you’re much more of a hero than she is.”  But…

And so a new year begins.  You never make resolutions.  You have accomplishments you want to make happen.  You’ll work your tush off to make them happen.  But if they don’t…..You do have one resolution.  Stop using the word “actually” constantly.

We lived in a small four room garden apartment when the 60′s began.  But my parents believed in partying.  Every month was cause for a celebration so New Years was a big one.  Usually they had large parties.  But I guess they decided to usher in a new decade with some of their closest friends.

My parents are in the third row.  It’s hard to recognize my Dad without the moustache he would grow in 69 and have for the rest of his life.  Oh if my parents only knew what the 60′s would wrought, they would have doubly celebrated!  The good, bad and the never talked about again.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to go from their culture to mine–sex, drugs and rock & roll

In lifetimes filled with great decades my mother said the 60′s was her favorite.  Because she finally felt grown-up! Two daughters who were too be teens in the 60′s.

They began traveling the world in the 60′s and never stopped.  If a country was open to Americans, they were there.

My parents began a small chain of stores in the 60′s.  One that specialized in clothes for the junior high set but was bought by all age groups.  My father being father to two daughters who were never satisfied with the clothes our mother bought us saw a need for this group to be catered to.  My mother just loved selling clothes.  Later we would go to Loehmann’s and the saleswomen would embrace her for when my mother was there they didn’t need to do their job.

My sister and I disliked the clothes in our family stores, and can still imitate our mother trying to give us more and more and more….

Though my father would deny it later we all loved the Kennedy family, and our world shook with the assassination.

But I have a friend who has been arguing for years that the decade really began with the Beatles arrival on American soil.  More and more I see his point.

My parents loved the changes, the 60′s brought,  in art, theater, movies.  Music–well 30 years later my father was still trying to understand the part it played in my life.  Though they loved the Simon Sisters (yes Carly), Simon & Garfunkle, and most of all the real Thanksgiving song, “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo.

We were a close family.  Though my father would have loved to go to school with me and be actively involved in all my life, he let me go to the 67 Moratorium in DC.  It was, I believe, the largest anti-war demonstration to date. I was a senior in high school then and had to take the bus with people from Great Neck.  We arrived back at 4 AM and my parents were there.  I believe they had been waiting since Midnight.

In retrospect it was the day my father ceded control of my life.  I thank him for that.  Giving your child the gift to make her own mistakes can’t be easy.  I always knew that.  And he was forever trying to take back his authority!

It wasn’t until 1976, another wonderful decade, that we were to have the grown up great relationship we both truly craved.

My mother?  She always knew that if you wanted your daughters to be your friends you had to let them fly.

I thank my parents for introducing me to all the arts, culture, great food and the world.  Today I choose to remember how wonderful they were.

Mothers are usually wonderful people. At least to their families. My mother was perfect, not, but I loved her anyway and think of her many days.

My mother was five foot tall, barely, at her wedding and then again in the last few years weighed 80 pounds.

She was adult. She was mature. In my family you always knew who the mommy was. Though from an early age (mine) she treated me with the respect due a much older person. It’s the way I treat kids I know are hankering to be adult–and they love me even during difficult years, even when older I think in part because of that.

The last five or six years of my mother’s life were difficult. She was frail but her mind was sharp. Sometimes I wished that her mind was a little less….just so she would be less demanding though I knew she would probably be more demanding.

It’s funny to say that in “those days you didn’t talk about aging mothers,” when those days were from 96 to 01. I finished grad school in 96–geriatric social work and really people liked to talk more about dementia, or advanced directives, or basically anything than how to keep a mother independent and at home when she was for intensive purposes blind and frail.

She began only eating in front of my sister and I as table manners were paramount to her. It hurt so much to see an incredibly social person still want to be social but….

The thing was as long as my mother was in this world I knew somebody loved me unconditionally. I knew somebody thought me perfect. I was still the child, though a very adult one, and she was still the mother.

For Mother’s Day we used to give her White Shoulders cologne until she begged us to stop. Then one year she asked for it again. It wasn’t as easy to find. Then there was the Mother’s Day she told us to forget it. My father got real into that and she spoke to none of us for oh maybe eight hours.

My father’s last Mother’s Day he insisted we go to the Catskills to a resort none of us had seen in 20 years. It was fun. My father was healthy or so we and he thought. He just had a feeling and when we have feelings we act on them.

I hate Mother’s Day. People should honor their mothers all year round. We don’t need a Hallmark Holiday basically designed to make all women without children feel horrible.

This was the first time I liked the recession as there were fewer ads in the paper–I DVR everything I watch on TV so…..

But still there are many mother’s I personally like so Happy Mother’s Day.

Just remember I have a birthday in July and don’t get to celebrate Mother’s Day or anniversaries or….God this sounds like a fatal illness.

And I hate all the blogs that celebrate the wonders of mothers with free gifts etc. You can make an impact on a kid without being their mother. I’m not saying that mother’s aren’t the most important people as I think they’re priceless if they don’t impart all their issues onto their kids. Just that Mother’s Day is one day I prefer sleeping through. Neither having a kid nor a mother

I guess I should tell you I bought an apartment in New York in 97 for about the amount I would have spent when we looked in 88. The difference was the building was classier, the apartment more beautiful and more renovated than any we saw but oh so small. Though in my imagination now…

I sold it this past October. I know you thought people lost IQ points for every mile they moved out of the NY/suburb area and had an elaborate formula for the IQ loss, but I could sell my apartment for more money than you would have believed and I saw last year that this past spring summer and fall would probably be the last of the good times.

Though maybe they’re going to come back in a slightly different format. Like a bad TV show remade for a bigger audience.

So much has happened. I wouldn’t know where to start. That’s probably my book.

So let me just say I bought a house. Yes a free standing house–but not being a fool I hired people to do everything. It’s much cheaper here. I moved to South Carolina.

I know you don’t think they let Jews in South Carolina but it was actually the first state to guarantee Jews religious freedom. Yes I know that was a long time ago.

It’s a nice place. I truly like it. My house is perfect for one person who likes both solitude and company. It will be perfect later if I need a roommate or help (and have the money for that–the times they are different than any you imagined in my lifetime.)

I’m one person and while I want schools and things to be great, be real, daddy. Schools in Manhattan were only becoming good in the past fifteen years because of helicopter parents–a mode of parenting you invented. Libraries–we might have the best research libraries anywhere but lending ones…not so good.

I actually like the lending library here. Not that I have joined yet. It’s near my house and I will join after I move two weeks from last Friday. And I want the schools to be good. But I love the low taxes–yes I’m a Dem but…

Our new President talks about redistributing wealth. When I personalize I hate the thought. Everybody we know is educated and to some extent a have. Shouldn’t more people be? I don’t buy the notion that many or most people are meant just to be clerks at Wal Mart. This subject is too complex for me right now daddy and I hear you arguing with me in the background…But I know that you believed people should have opportunities and I do believe President Obama means the same.

I’m burnt daddy. Being audited. I know you taught me never to fear the IRS and I don’t but the paperwork’s a bitch. And my frigging lawyer from the apartment sale in New York still hasn’t sent me the paperwork and I need it if I’m going to do my taxes on time, and you betcha I’m going to have them into the accountant before I move. Though getting my taxes to him a year ago plus a week might have caused this problem.They were very complicated and that week was the first leg of my move. The Bear went under that weekend; I didn’t know if I could sell my apartment.
I honestly didn’t think that if a brokerage house folded into another brokerage house the first brokerage house still has to send you a 1099. And four fifths of the things they asked for they have–under the names listed on my 1099′s. So I’m freaked but not overly. It’s just I wanted this time to be stress free. Or just a bit because life without stress isn’t supposed to be good.

Uh brokerage houses. I hate to tell you what happened to most of your favorite ones. You wouldn’t believe it. As I said Bear Stearns well didn’t really fold but is a shell of itself. When my apartment was in contract Lehman Brothers did fold. There’s so much you wouldn’t believe. Frank Rich who used to be the theater critic explains how much we have all changed. It’s an incredible article and sort of sums a lot up. From theater to OpEd. Life is one big stage, and Frank Rich’s the one man I would hunt down and marry if he weren’t already.

You had your stroke on 3/26 which happened to be your 52nd wedding anniversary. Poor mommy had to live with the best of days and the almost worst of days being one and the same for a decade. You died on 3/31–eighteen years ago. You and mommy were bookends as she died a decade later.

My 90′s the decade of my discontent for many reasons–including many that had nothing to do with you or mommy began on 3/31/91 and ended on 10/14/01.

Maybe next time I will explain blogging to you and how in various ways it remade my life.

The next will be more relevant to today. I found myself reliving a memory and wanted to write it without including my father’s POV. Frankly his views befuddle me though I understand more than most people. I suppose I will be going back and forth from memory posts to what’s wrong with the world today?
Hi Daddy
Do you remember when you told me that if I went with you to a meeting of the Mir Young Men’s Club, I would meet a bootlegger?

I knew that the club consisted of people from your parents generation and you were the youngest active member. I was eleven and in lust with the lure of both gangsters and FBI agents You had told Elka and me, many times, how when you were a boy during the depression you would go to Montauk with the bootlegger and ride shotgun–which makes no sense considering your youth and your fear of guns.

You probably went once or twice but in your stories you went often and while you didn’t explicitly say you were central to the operation a daughter can dream. And you knew that. After you died mommy told me that half your stories were made up and she was so surprised that I of all people fell for them Of course she wouldn’t tell me which half nor would she tell me how much you embellished. My parents. What jokesters.

Off we went from the garden apartments in Queens to some stuffy over furnished dark dingy, smoky but with doilies apartment somewhere in the Bronx. Everybody but you and I had white hair if they had hair at all and that did include the few women. Before the solemn reading of the minutes they made a big fuss over me.
“What a shana maidela.” “You look just like you looked at two.” I heard that one until my 30′s when the last of them died out and never considered looking like Shirley Temple a compliment. Or even looking like me at two. Note for you if you ever comeback to life: a girl wants to be known for her age appropriate beauty not her toddlerhood.

Then they told me how much I looked like you. And I did. We had the same deep set eyes and smaller than I would have liked mouth. I liked that one because it meant people forgot that I was adopted. Fortunately neither you nor mommy would mention that fact but thank whoever for that meant you too were good looking.

I have never forgotten that apartment or the meeting. There was rugelach (a pastry) during the reading of the minutes and new business. New business basically consisted of discussing who died and was buried in one of the cemeteries The Mir Young Man’s Society had sections in. In the cemetery you and mommy are buried in, The Mir Young Men’s Society is next to The Jewish Actors and even I know some of the names. Once Elka and I were wondering around as you had taught us to and we found Barbra Streisand’s father, between our society and the Jewish Actors.

I don’t remember what else was discussed People sat in folding chairs. The room became hotter and hotter and I could smell jars of schmaltz herring (in a an onion and white sauce, I think) being opened. I still think herring except for kippers a vile and gross food. The smell and smells of tuna and egg salad beginning prepared made me sick and I wanted to leave but didn’t dare say anything. I knew you wouldn’t make me eat anything as you thought the same of tuna and egg salad as I did You were worse as you thought if mommy didn’t make chopped foods you would immediately die.

So we sat in the stuffy stinky room and I wondered where my bootlegger was. I wondered if he looked like a gangster on TV or more like an FBI agent. You let me watch an hour of TV a day and most of my TV time then was consumed by “hip” shows catering to teenagers which I would be in a year and half–77 Sunset Strip Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6 which took place in Miami Beach and whenever we went I would take Elka and make a pilgrimage to the house boat.

I didn’t know that the houseboat wasn’t part of the show until right now when I Wiki’d it. I’m assuming that you learn about Wikipedia and other things where ever you are. Since you’re not on this earth I can make assumptions or not that I couldn’t normally. I do stick to truth in stories. It’s just the world’s changed so much in the past almost eighteen years and I don’t want to waste time explaining unless I do. (Uh, I sound just like you.)

I don’t know how I was able to watch TV in peace as we only had one set and you insisted on watching with us. Maybe “my shows” took place on your poker, pinochle, civic associations or classes at The New School nights. I think poker and classes were on the same night–more about your life outside work, and your work in other letters.

But I think I also watched FBI type shows and was confused as to whether I wanted to be an FBI agent, not that girls could be, or a gangster. I can’t explain how excited I was about meeting the bootlegger. You had told me so many great stories.

When you introduced me to an old frail man on crutches I wanted to kill you. Somehow I hadn’t accounted for the decades gone by since the depression. Your eyes were smiling. You looked as if you wanted to laugh loudly. I remember thinking “he’s trying to teach me some important life lesson,” but I still can’t think of what it could be. That I hadn’t factored in the passage of time? Daddy we all learn that one when we’re ready. That I shouldn’t expect one thing, when the possibilities are infinite?

I got my revenge quicker than I would have imagined. We went to the Botanical Gardens or The Bronx Zoo. When you looked for parking, on the street, so you wouldn’t have to pay, you the world’s most careful driver, drove the wrong way down a street and you got a ticket.

Please give us Democrats who have been doing battle with the radical right a few more weeks to celebrate our decisive victory. I would love 2012 to be an election where both the Democrats and Republicans have candidates worthy of a presidential election.
I always thought that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to be senator and used it for a presidential bid. Maureen Dowd agrees with me. Unfortunately she used her seat at the expense of New Yorkers. I do think she would make a great Secretary of State or Supreme Court Justice.
Here’s Dick Cavett quoting “the wild wordsmith of Wasilla. Her quote is so over the top I didn’t dare put it in for fear of being accused of falling for a hoax. But if Bill O’Reilly defends Carl Cameron for leaking it who am I not to mention it. Cavett is an exceptional writer, and please read this for a great look at Sarah Palin who not only doesn’t know that Africa isn’t a country but defends this lack.

We told everybody. We planned the wedding. We did everything but actually have it. Recently I was watching The New Adventures of Old Christine Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) proposed to Barb (Wanda Sykes) to keep her from being deported to the Bahamas. They went through with it.

That’s the second thing I have seen on The New Adventures of…. I thought of first. The first being birthday month, which in recent years I have turned into birthday summer. (I have birthday month in the archives somewhere written long before this show was seen.)

Life’s unfair but I want credit so if I’m not around the blogosphere much, well I haven’t been this past year because selling my apartment was so nerve wracking. This year I won’t be because I’m actually writing a book I don’t want to share until it’s safely written and published.

Usually I tell my ideas as I used to think they were too quirky to steal. Oh have I learned and I’m not talking New Adventures….

I have political things to say for one last time. But today isn’t the day. I will never forget last night. Never. I didn’t let anybody believe it until it was officially called and the screaming began. It was every holiday run into one. Oh the Europeans who act so superior because we’re so backwards? We’re not and most of us never were

People were screaming from their apartments. We ran downstairs with noisemakers, champagne and loud voices.

Ambulances hunked their horns. The Upper West Side was alive tonight. Truckers were screaming. Cabs hunked and the drivers screamed “Obama.” “Yes we can.”

Tonight was the night we took back America and I don’t apologize
for saying that

The USA went to war in our names. We didn’t want that war

I’m leaving New York but I will never forget tonight.

And I just never might write about politics again. I didn’t write about politics because I thought I was a better writer or had better thoughts. I wrote out of frustration

Tonight is a night to celebrate. I’m listening to Obama and know he can heal a wounded nation

I’m listening to my friends and well they’re crying when they’re not chanting

It was so liberating to run down the streets screaming. So so liberating

Trucks are blasting their horns. People are screaming on the streets. We’re screaming back when not crying

People other places don’t understand why we’re crying. Oh hell we’re crying because Karl Rove said we wanted therapy for terrorists. We’re crying for eight good years made bad.

We’re crying for a new generation who won’t know the type of prejudice we knew.

We’re crying for an America that once again will be great. We can travel proudly and not be ashamed. Not wear that tee shirt “don’t blame me I didn’t vote for him.” Not that I care what other countries think.

I care because I love this country and tonight people like me who didn’t support the Bush regime; who thought if only somebody actually read and acted on the 8/06/01 memo had been president life could have been so different. Tonight we got our voice back