It's 2:15 A.M. What AM I Doing?

Well, I'll tell you. I am about to go to bed, I think.

It has been hard, I think I have written in these pages, to sort out a structure for my days. I have chosen, at least for now, not to go back to a 9 to 5 existence. I want to write. I want to paint. I want to read. These things need not be done in a 9 to 5 frame. But up to here, I have felt guilty that I have not forced them into this frame. I like to go to bed late, in fact, my body clock has always been stay up late and get up late, even when my life role did not allow it. I have been getting up late and going to Mass, and then filling the day with various activities, some planned some not, but I have not been able schedule my writing or painting or reading.

In the last week or two, something has happened. It has occurred that being disciplined about working on something I want to does not mean that it has to start and end at a particular time, so long as I do it.

In terms of writing, I had so many ideas for  projects that I could not settle on anything, until the last couple of weeks. I have returned to a non-fiction project I began years ago. I am not sure that if I ever finish writing it I will ever seek to publish. But I decided finally to stick with it, and leave the other writing projects aside. There is, as Mr. Anonymous of the Deluxe Furnished Barbara Judith Apartments no timetable.

And so, like other nights, tonight I found myself sitting in front of my computer at around 10 p.m. just to "look at a few things" on this massive task that might one day be a book. There is so much material to whittle down into something manageable. I am not even sure I can do it. But once in front of the computer, I found myself drawn in and committed and then it was well, 2:15. What did I accomplish? More than I would have if I simply fretted over the structure of my days and night. I worked. It was good.

Maybe this is my pattern for now. What my pattern will be tomorrow, or the next day, who knows? My life may not look much different to anyone outside looking in, but it has changed irrevocably. Within the limits of human frailty and life circumstances, I can do what I want with my days.

I am still not used to it. But I can feel a shift coming. It is a quasi-bohemian life, I guess. But it has a logic and creativity of its own. I need to cherish it, while I can.

I'll keep you posted. But I think I said something a while ago about going to bed. Good night, or is it good morning?.

The Remembered

Anyone who has had a family member, or close friend, die (as ultimately happens to all of us) knows that when the time of year of their passing was around a major holiday, that holiday is forever interwined with a particularly exquisite sadness of loss. There is also the need, almost a mission, to remind the world, albeit one's microsmic one, that this person not only existed, but had an impact. Time passes, the sadness does not really attenuate, but the mission of assuring remembrance becomes harder.


When my mother died in 1974, thirty seven years ago, I knew few of the people who I call friends today. There are a couple.. There is Virgina Kelly, and Barbara Donovan, and Virgina Rohan, all former denizens of the same grammar and high school in the Bronx.  Virginia Kelly's mother and mine were fast friends, one of the few she had in my memory. As to Virginia Rohan, my mother loved to share discussions of the latest fashions, one of which she called "fun fur". There are relatives, my cousin Carol, my Aunt Teri, my Aunt Kathleen (although she is at a stage in life, nearly 90 in which she thinks both her late sisters are alive), who had regular interaction with my mother. Until she became ill, though, my mother was something of a mysterious recluse. Few people except her immediate relatives came into the apartment and my mother had some kind of secret which she shared only obliquely with my father and me. She claimed she was a hand model. I'd go through various fashion magazines and point to a hand that looked like hers, long fingers, long perfectly polished nails and ask "Is that you?" She'd say yes, but I never was sure. She went somewhere. Dad was sure of it. She talked of people named Robert (pronounced by her Ro-Baire, and Evelyn (EVE-lyn) and Lisa (Lee-za)) in the fashion business with whom she'd sometimes lunch. She insisted I had met the latter. Naturally I did not remember as I had been age 2 or less. When she died, no one of them came to the wake or funeral. As the years passed, I came to question this occasional career. When she succumbed to the wildly metasized breast cancer without ever having been told by doctor or my dad and I that she even had cancer, the internal world of this woman which had already been a major mystery was fully closed off. There was insufficient information left behind to explore whether the fashion people she referenced were ever real. She was only 48. In her last 14 months she had in some odd way been freed from rigidity and coldness which had, to my child's eye, defined her and her relationship with me. She was the mother I had always wanted. And so, in an incongruous way, the time in which she was sick was the best of our relationship. I was old enough to appreciate it at 18 when she was diagnosed and 20 when she died Thanksgiving weekend.


If I "google" my mother, nothing comes up. I hate that. She was beautiful. This is the last picture I have of her, a month before she died, at a wedding. She was buried in the outfit she wore that day and night, a day in which she was happy, and soft.  I thought she might survive.

So, I guess this is a forum in which I can, along with my other slowly developing blog about my dad, Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon, honor her and keep her in the world, a world she would not even recognize (we barely had video players in 1974). I wonder if she would have blogged? At least I have a little of her handwriting


Notebook of my mother's addresses and other items, these of stores and theatres in the Bronx, ages ago.

She is buried back in New York, in an upstate town called Valhalla.  I have visited her grave only rarely since I have lived here so many years. But I do visit my dad's niche fairly frequently, although I realized today, not since the summer. Tomorrow I go to the home of Len Speaks for a gathering we used to attend together. Often in his cups commenting on how this latest party "was the best" he'd ever attended, he would mention my mother with a combination of wistfulness and regret. Theirs was a long (28 years, she was only 18 when they married) and complicated connection, but it was an intense and I think cosmic one which affected him until the day he died nearly four years ago, at 90. He always felt that he had not done right by her, although from all I could see he had worked to make her happy. Happiness was for her elusive until life itself was ebbing. Another of the mysteries that was my mom.


Suddenly today, I HAD to go to vist Dad's niche at the cemetery in Culver City. To talk to both of them. To remember both of them. It was late in the afternoon, and traffic was lousy. I was distressed that the little flower shop in the cemetery was probably closed by 4 and it was already after 4. My dad was not particularly interested in flowers, but I have found it essential to dress up the space by bringing them when I go. It is just a token of remembrance. I felt actually a little anxiety at not having anything to bring, so much so I actually considered looking for flowers on the grounds to pick--although I felt that was somehow really bad form and did not do it. As I got there the marine layer was coming in, vying witht the remaining sunshine. I thought it might be gloomy in that little hall where his niche is, but it was quite the opposite, the birds were still active and the natural light was still caressing the area, along with the cool breeze. As I walked down the corridor, it looked like there WERE flowers in the holder of Dad's niche. There were. I began to cry. I had, I have no idea who did that. There are only a few people who know that this is the weekend on which my mother died. Was this remembrance of him by way of remembering her also? There was no one to ask. I had forgotten my cell phone and did not have a camera with which to take a picture of the sweet bunch of red carnations surrounded by baby's breath.


But I can tell you what I was, grateful, that my dad who had few friends left at age 90, was remembered by someone other than me.
 

God Bless whoever you are.


I admit to wanting to know. . . . .


Requiescat  in pacem. 





You Learn Something New EVERY Day



Charles Stratton aka Tom Thuimb and his lovely bride Lavinia 1863

In search of the vocations and/or avocations for the third act of my life, I am exploring reading books for a group called "Learning Ally." You would know them under their previous monikers "Recording for the Blind" and in the 80s and 90s, "Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic". What has become manifest for the organization is that the visually impaired are actually one of many who can use the assist of this form of educational aide. It is a wonderful tool that frees so many people, young and old, to learn without restriction.


I thought that while I was going down a new potential occupational road, I should also use my ability to read and enunciate in a manner that gives back to the community and reflects my gratefulness for a gift of gab and narration that was given to me by Divine Providence and the right confluence of genetics.


The organization is run by a great bunch of young enthusiastic men and women and I began my training two weeks ago. You don't jump immediately to reading yourself, but in fact begin by checking the work of other long term volunteers. Everything is computerized now and so with headphones planted, I listened last week to a college primer on psychological development.


This time, I learned about Tom Thumb. I checked virtually the whole book (it was only about a 100 pages). I remember seeing a movie about what I understood to be a totally fictional Tom, played back in my childhood by the dancer Russ Tamblyn (father of Amber of the Travelling Pants). And I suppose he is or was in that stories abotu him began way back in the 17th century.


But a REAL person existed who took on the name and the characterization at the age of 5 or 6.  He was born Charles Stratton and found himself a lifelong employee, then partner of the circus show producer, PT Barnum. Mr. Barnum made a career out of his pronouncement "There's a sucker born every minute", and was a purveyor of what used to be known as the "freak" show back in the mid 1800s and into the 1900's. Finding Mr. Stratton, he created an international sensation, claiming that the boy-man was age 11 when he was age six. True Mr. Thumb never grew to any great height, but he did grow about three to four inches more than his original stature upon discovery by PT. He took London by storm meeting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (before he was in a can). He married just around the time of the Battle of Fredricksberg during the horror of the Civil War and was a celebrity of his time distracting people from their woes. He died of a stroke in his early 40s and his lovely wife, remarried another little person who was either for real or not, a Count.


What else of importance did I learn today? And I have to tell you, I feel like I could now become a successful Jeopardy contestant if my memory allows  because of this new volunteer job.  You know the word "humbug"? I never really understood what it meant, partcularly as used in the short sentence by Scrooge to demean the Christmas holidays, "Bah, humbug!"  Come on, do you know what it means? Really. You always knew? Well, alas, my education has been lacking but thanks to PT and Tom I have been enlightened and I am delighted in the extreme, almost as much as when I discovered the word "quidnunc" (Really, look it up).


Well, until Mr. Barnum redefined the word to his liking, a "humbug" was a deception, a fraud, like many of his featured players.  So, when Mr. Scrooge was saying humbug, he was not just saying he did NOT LIKE Christmas, but that it was a fraud. Oh, no!


But as for me, I am purely excited by the day I have had, learning about Mr. Stratton aka Thumb, his wife, his life, Mr. Barnun, and the true meaning of the word "humbug".  This not working thing will be endless discovery I am thinking.


The Unchangeable Heart of a Faith

One of my friends is a seminarian. After more than one career, and in young mid-age, Scott has discerned a vocation to priesthood. He has immersed himself in difficult theological studies, he has studied Spanish in Guatemala by living with a family that spoke no English, and now he is spending nearly a year as an intern at a large parish in Los Angeles, to taste the life of ministering to a community of believers.
He invited a few of us from his former parish to come and hear him give the homily at yesterday's Sunday Mass at his temporary home, and assignment, St. Mariana De Paredes Catholic Church in Pico Rivera, California.

It was a gloomy day, and a particularly rainy one, with flooding everywhere. If I had not volunteered to drive, I don't know that I would not have considered taking a "rain" check on the 40 or so minute journey. preferring my closer more familiar parish and a quick return to my apartment to hunker down under a comforter. But aside from my promise, I have a soft spot for those who commit themselves to faith beyond laity and for the thoughtful process that begets the commitment and so seeing Scott speak to us as he moves toward his consecration in persona Christi. I did not want to miss this part of the transition.


The rain was still coming down as we arrived. The parking lot was, however, well filled, something, alas, not true of my West Hollywood parish on a Sunday, rain or shine. From what I could tell this area is rather industrial, and the constituency of the parish, a barn sized cinder block building, appeared to be hard working class, family, an equal merging of children, young, middle aged and older clearly long time members. It was a meat and potatoes parish, reminding me a lot of my childhood parish in the Bronx, Christ the King. In some ways, I have become a little grand as a dweller in the heart of movie industry-dom, in a parish full of Hollywood types, single adults, with only a spattering of kids, scenic designers, producers, the odd character actor, writers and wanna be's. Our parish is small and neat, maybe 1000 all tolled, where in this parish we are talking over 6,000 and one mass after another to accommodate the full occupancy of each. This was a buzzing place.


At my parish, I haven't seen a guitar in the nearly 30 years I have been a member. And I have to admit, that makes me quite content. I always thought that the liturgy lost something when the music became haphazardly folksy. But that bias admitted, I have to say that the little group of young people with guitar and keyboard and well crafted harmony was reverent AND joyous and I found myself joining the hymns I recognized. I found myself watching the wriggling families and the coughing elders being eyed suspiciously by their pew compatriots.


Scott actually comes from a farming family in Scotland, so when he was talking of Jesus' admonition to the apostles, and so to us, "Feed my sheep", he was talking literally and figuratively. And when he distributed communion, he and a deacon, both near our way back pews, I was taken by how much love there was in their giving of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. They were smiling, with reverence, but smiling nonetheless as each person came toward them, touching, with the sign of the cross, those too young to receive or those who did not find themselves ready to receive.


What came to me watching these men is the wonderment of the reality that with all the external differences from one parish to another, organ versus guitar or keyboard, expansive serious or relaxed ritual, rich, middle class or poor in attendance, ethnicity, size of the crowd, for all 1.18 billion Catholics the world over, the heart of the faith is identical. We say the same prayers (and will continue to do so as some of words have been retranslated to accord with the language from whicih they come; I admit I like that we go back to "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault" in the Confiteor) which have the same meaning for one and all in accord with Tradtion, the Scripture and Apostolic guidance.


Whatever the debates by rationalistic man (and woman), it is hard to read the words of St. Clement of Rome (consecrated it appears by St. Peter himself) in his letter to the Corinthians and not recognize something that is at its core properly unchangeable. Christ died (and rose) around 33 A.D. This was written circa AD 60-70.

"The Apostles preached the Gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ has done so from God.  Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the Apostles by Christ.  Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the Will of God.  Having therefore received their orders, and being fully assured by the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and established in the word of God, with full assurance of the Holy Spirit, they went forth proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  And then preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first fruits of their labors. . .to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterward believe. . . ."

Scott is following in a sacred order both in role and in the succession of time that was preached in the same century in which Christ lived, died and was resurrected. Truly, it is awe-some in the traditional sense of the world. Worthy of awe indeed.

Missing You Desperately: My Friend Noreen

Noreen at a party in the Bronx thrown by yours truly with ample assist from my late dad.
Circa 1979

So long ago all this was. And it seemed it would all last forever. We were twenty somethings, not that long out of college and staking our places in the world.  I offer this to the next generation---that old saw, but true one--CARPE DIEM!  It does go so darn fast.

The people I met at college and law school, they have sustained me through the years. Noreen was one of those I was so lucky to know for many of them. When I first moved to California, she called my dad regularly to be sure he was all right (he moved here 8 months later).

She used to say in her notes to her friends, particularly those of us who left  New York for other climes--"Miss you desperately".

It is one year in a few days since Noreen died.  She was a kind, loving, smart friend. A whole bunch of us miss HER desperately. And won't forget her. 

She was, by the way, a good writer. I have kept the link to her blog on mine and I would say, take a look. Sounds of the Past. It keeps her among us. And Facebook. I love Facebook for that, among other reasons.

Happy Thanksgiving Noreen. Commend us to God who no doubt keeps you close.

Walking in the Neighborhood

You know how, after occasions both happy and sad, the initial frenzy of activity tends to slow down?

That has sort of happened with me, these nearly five months since my separation from my prosecutor's career. For the first few months, there were few days of simply being home. Not only did I have the new voice over classes, but I was meeting up with people for breakfast, lunch and dinner or combinations thereof all the time. Right now, my voice over classes are in hiatus (for me). Although I continue to meet for breakfast with one of my co-severed from the job colleauges during the week, have begun volunteering at places like Learning Ally (formerly Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic)and have had various social occasions at old haunts like Papa Christos in mid-LA with former colleagues/friends as I did yesterday, with the days shorter and the novelty of my situation wearing off, I have also found I am not filling every moment.
This is difficult for someone who had a work day structured for 30 years, even if it is otherwise a most desired liberation.

Today was the first day I felt that I had nothing whatsoever to do, and it alarmed me. Really, if I were a truly meditative sort, I would have found the time and quiet energizing. Instead, I worried that I would cease having goals. I suspect I have a little seasonal affective disorder along with my other neuroses, and the clouds of the day might have contributed to the anxiety.
I got up later than is even usual for me. I knew I could easily have stayed in bed all day with the gloom outside, but I forced msyelf up and after a cup of coffee, out. I decided on a short walk.

Walking is something I love to do, but for some inexplicable reason have not been doing for quite some time. The gloom provided a cool, so it actually was a perfect day for a stroll. I stayed initially off the main drag and wandered past various houses on the way toward Santa Monica Boulevard. The houses may be close together, but they are all different and charming in their differences. I ended up near the intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica and decided to go back south to get a closer look at some of the newer establishments at the bottom of the various condos built in the last few years. Yet another high scale pet store. Yet another coffee shop, but this one not a Starbucks. As I got back toward Melrose, Fairfax High School was letting out. There was a sea of noisy students at the bus stop, none of them making way for the pedestrians like myself trying to circumvent them. I passed a young girl three some, one of whom was saying something like, "She never f-----ing called me." All of 15 and she litters her conversation with the gems of the English language.

As I was moving toward Canter's, the home of the Kibbutz Room, and many an old time rock star n his or her hey day, I saw a man walking haltingly in front of me. Homeless soul, and since he seemed to be touching the ground at intervals, an obsessive compulsive one. As I crossed Fairfax toward Rosewood, another homeless man said, "I love The Love Boat. Do you have any change". I felt a little guilty saying what was true, that I had no change, when I knew I had two twenties. But that seemed to be asking to much of my guilt to give up one of them. That is an interesting consideration for this blog, or for any idle conversation. Should I have given him my twenty? I cannot say I have never given a larger bill, a ten or a five in the past. But today, a twenty seemed a little excessive, based on the non-sequitur nature of the request. Even if I did like the Love Boat (should I admit that) in my younger days. (Love, exciting and new. Come aboard, we're expecting you!).

I decided to press on. Go east, Djinn, toward Gardner Street.  I have been looking for decorative rocks to stick in a non-growing area of my comfortably seedy back yard, so I thought I should toddle to Rolling Greens, a combination plant and unique gift shop. It used to be where my mechanic was, Town Tire Company, until the owner, a gruff but accommidating guy, retired. The new owner kept the basic facade and made it into this rather upscale but approachable store of things you don't need but must have.

It smelled of Christmas, pine, and cinnamon. I got the pebbles and like four other things I did not intend to buy. I browsed and browsed. On one of the cashier stands, one of the owners had placed her scottish terrier in a lovely basket for sale, who was amenable to much petting. The dog, not the basket.


I am always amazed at how I intend not to spend money and then inevitably do. But I had my lovely bags with my lovely little things, including an ornament that looked suspiciously like my friend Carol's Springer Spaniel Rosebud, which I had to get for her. And I walked contentedly down Beverly Boulevard now, toward my block, past the vintage store. I tried to take a picture of the old time cash register for all of you, but it did not come otu well (through a plate glass window). And then I had a cup of coffee at Buzz and watched the people go by at the corner of Grove Drive and Stanley Avenue. 

                                                                                        

Just a short three blocks from my apartment, I found that my mood had lifted. I got home and took my


It was a nice day, it turns out, just walking in the neighborhood.  In the moment. Without expectations. That's the ticket.

What IS My Job?

It is now four months, and change, since my career as an ethics prosecutor was ended. I will keep my law license active.


It sometimes seems that what I considered my mission in life, as it were, attempting to hold the line on ethics (which I have often likened to Sisyphus and the boulder that rolls on him for eternity) was important only to me and it is done.

The enforced turn of events has left me plenty of time to consider the nature of success and its extrinsic and intrinsic measures. On Maslow's scale of  the hierarchy of needs, there are five levels. The first is physiological, food, shelter, and the like. The second is safety, of body, resources, like employment, health. The third is family, friendship, the intimacy stuff. The fourth is esteem, achievement, confidence, respect of others, respect by others and last, that pinnacle, self-actualization, acceptance of the reality, morality, solving the problems before you, creating. I guess some of the measures of success and our needs have common ground at least from a psychological and societal point of view. I have a number of these needs met, and I am grateful for it. Achievement?  I am not sure.  I certainly self-actualized there. I came across the country. I passed my second bar, while working full time as a secretary with no time off to study.  I found my niche. I moved up in the ranks and managed large numbers of people. I taught. I studied psychology at night for a number of years. I even interned as a supervised therapist on nights and weekends for a couple of years. You know that old saw, does a falling tree make a noise if there is no one to hear it?  If it is about the doing, and the accomplishing, then I do not need anyone to say, "yes, you did good." Back to the old intrinsic motivation. But extrinsically, well, let's just say, of late, I've taken a hit or two, and it would appear that investing in that 25 year career (30 if you count the five years before as lawyer in New York and secretary and lawyer in California), was a bit like buying a "pig in a poke".  Did I get what I bargained for?  As you can imagine, I swing back and forth on this subject.  If this was the right place and right mission for me, then yes, I achieved that mission. If I was looking for public acknowledgment of my efforts, I was a fool. 

Believe it or not, this is all preamble for a quote I ran into last night, when I could not sleep. Some of this consideration overlaps into the spiritual realms for me. You know, the why am I here, what was I meant to do bailiwick. I have no idea what the name of the EWTN show was (yes, Catholic Television, 370 for you Directv subscribers), but I find lately in particular that when I am having a debate in my head and heart, God speaks to me in these little encounters (I can't prove it, but I believe it, which I guess is the essence of faith) with the TV and happily also with real people!  Up goes a picture of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, not exactly a slouch in the self-actualizing category, with the statement, "It is not our job to be successful, it is our job to be faithful". 

I think it might be said that Mother Teresa sought neither her own self-actualization nor did she seek extrinsically granted esteem. She simply was a faithful Christian.  Naturally, I have been focusing on the wrong things.  From my perspective as a Catholic Christian, I am actually overcomplicating things. It is really simple. And it will be liberating, if I allow it. Success, extrinsically or intrinsically meansured, should not be my direction. It probably never should have been, but even the dear sisters of my old grammar and high school talked int terms of worldly success and I was geared to it as well by a very persistent parent, my long late mother.  Nothing wrong with it, but perhaps in time, I let it all overtake me.  

The thing about what is truly simple? We don't find it so. I don't find it so. I resist the obvious because it is counterintuitive in the world around me. 

Even as I write all this I don't think I have sorted it out. But that quote, that direct piece of purity, that has hit a mark.  

Has it advanced me in my search?  Maybe. God willing.

Fire Escape Diva

A month or more ago, I submitted a piece to a little magazine called Back to the Bronx. It was acknowledged, but I am assuming that it did not make the cut having heard nothing further. I think it is pretty good. But I leave it to you. And either way, I kind of want to have the memory join the internet nostalgia train.

The actual fire escape is long gone but the image is accurate of my child's balcony.

I have been living in Los Angeles for more than half my life. Yet, I am a Bronxite through and through. To say I am “from the Bronx”, specifically Townsend Avenue between 174th Street and Mt. Eden Avenue, is to say effectively that I am from another planet, so different is the lifestyle here from that of our beloved Burrough. I live now in a neighborhood that people think to be quite urban, crushingly so. But here, at midnight I can look out my window and hear crickets and see not one car for ten minutes. This is nearly “the country”, as we used to call any place that was over the George Washington Bridge. There is no comparison of here to there. To be from “the Bronx” can certainly only be understood by those who grew up there. Trying to describe it to the native-born of this climate heaven is often unsatisfying. I must seek out my own, those of us, even the most protected by our parents, who played “scully” on the sidewalk, or learned to roller skate while going downhill, stoop sitting as the sun went down while eating a too quickly melting Chocolate Éclair Good Humour Bar.


I have many favorite memories made shinier by the passage of time and the encroaching sentimentality of the proximity of my dotage. But this one nearly physically sends me back to a time and place long gone. I am no more than 8 or 9 years old. I can still reach out and grab my joy at what was for me a rare unguarded moment on our one bedroom fire escape. My parents and I, the only child, lived at the back side of our building, 1596 Townsend Avenue, overlooking a long, cavernous alley that faced another building of equal size. It was my version of “Rear Window”, with views into the lives of neighbors I would never meet but about whom I would always speculate, even to this day. Our fire escape, on the fourth floor of a five floor brick walk up, was the balcony to this world.

I have told more than a few horrified Los Angelinos that we played on those fire escapes and without supervision, except for an occasional visual check, and a passing, “Don’t stay out there too long!” It was dangerous. It was gloriously dangerous. One of my aunts and an uncle, lived next door to us, sharing the fire escape. I would move along the wall (to avoid the stairwell and the space into which the stairwell descended, no doubt to certain death) to get to their window and then, surprisingly without being a pint sized peeping Tom, returning to my own. I just wanted to see if I could make the journey, as I was actually afraid of heights.

With a blanket to cover the metal slats so I could not look down, I owned the space. I brought all my dolls out there. I could see the curtain moving on one of the windows across from me, some neighbor afraid to be known, but always wanting to know what was going on outside her little apartment. I could hear the vibrations of the violin played by someone else whose curtains remained steadfastly closed. I always assumed it was a man. Only today, as I write, do I wonder whether perhaps it was a woman, longing to have a career like her male counterpart in a time when that was not so readily possible. Even then, hearing the strains of a concerto for violin the name of which I never knew or cannot remember seemed incongruous with the location, a dirty, dusty, gray concrete and brick setting. But it was a wondrous incongruity that perhaps planted the seed in me that grew into a desire to cross a boundary few in my family ever did—to leave New York and go somewhere else and try to be something different-- maybe something creative that was not available to my parents’ generation.

How often did I go out there? I don’t remember, but it was likely at least once a week. All children pretend, but as an only child, I cultivated pretend into entire screenplays. But it was almost always directed within, to myself where no one else could hear and certainly no one could critique.

I have rarely acted out my impulses, less then than now in any case. And to be frank, the last major impulse I had, upon which I did act at the advanced age of 27, and after law school, was to move to California. I cannot tell you how many people told me that I would fail, either directly or indirectly. And yet that impulse turned out in my favor, all of the bumps and potholes notwithstanding (they have those here too in Los Angeles!).

On that fire escape, when was it, in the early to mid-1960s, there was no thought of someplace like California, except when I watched Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” on my parents’ black and white television or when my mother mangled the name of one of her favorite actors, Ricardo Montalban (she would say “Montalblan”). There was only, in one unexpected moment, the need to express myself fully, from this jutting stage to the empty alley world of which I was the only inhabitant. It was a, me I did not know. The uncharacteristically brave one got up from her blanket, abandoning her dolls and went to the corner of the fire escape. Pressing against and embraced by the rusting railings upon which I/she placed her hands, she surveyed the alley as an opera singer might her theatre and her adoring audience. But this was no gilded theatre. There was the laundry that hung out on some of the lines. On the ground below there were the trash cans amid which cats lived and bred and sometimes died.

I was the child-diva aware of no living creature, although surely behind one of those windows someone was watching, with veiled amusement. Had I been aware of any such person, perhaps I would have interrupted my impulse with my then usual fear and meekness, retreating to my bedroom. But there being no one of whom I was cognizant, including my mother, I felt free and even invulnerable. I began to sing, and loudly enough so that the alley echoed back my tune. I would be lying if I said I remembered the music I selected. It could have been some television theme. It might even have been one of the Latin dance songs that my father favored in those days, a rumba, a meringue, a mambo. It doesn’t matter to the memory. It was fabulous simply to let go! The more my sound echoed back to me, the more I wanted to hear the echo. The whole thing probably lasted no more than a minute or two, but what a magnificent interlude.

I lived sixteen years in that apartment. My desire to hang about the fire escape no doubt waned shortly after this episode. I never burst into song there again, this much I do know.

I would love to be able to visit that back alley and look up at fire escape where once I intoned in unalloyed innocence, before I knew who I was or would become. It remains a great regret that the building, and I see from looking at Google maps, many of the surrounding buildings, was a victim of the struggles of the Bronx during the late sixties and seventies. We moved to the area around the Jerome Reservoir. My mother died only four years after that. The innocence of that day on the fire escape on Townsend Avenue naturally dissipated with the process of growing up.

Although the good news is that a public school stands on the site and so a meritorious use of the space is being made for future generations, the bad news is that I have few photographs of the building and must rely almost exclusively on the memories. I want so much to be able to show to my later in life friends, the ones who did not know me when I was taking the number 1 bus on the Grand Concourse to school, a picture of that alley, the fire escape, the building across the way. I want to convey to them what I saw that liberating day as I belted out a song, without care for past, present or future. I want to convey the smell of the Bronx on a summer’s day. I want to convey that which created the essence of me, the Bronx kid who moved across the country but still, in a way, standing on that fire escape trying to grab the gusto of life.

By the way, there was no way that I could know that day all those years ago, that I would meet my mother’s fave, for ever so brief a moment, at my Los Angeles Church—Ricardo Montalban. He was congratulating me, not on my singing, but on my reading from a lectern. Close enough.

I wish my mother had been alive for me to share that moment with her. She would still have gotten his name wrong.

It’s a long way from the fire escape.

"Margin Call" or I Just Keep Going to Those Up Tempo Flicks

Last evening I planned on seeing "Being Elmo" at the Sunset Five Theatre with my friend Len of Len Speaks. This is a documentary about the man who is the puppeteer for the little red ragamuffin character Elmo from "Sesame Street". We had been looking for something sweet, cheerful and uplifting to see and this seemed tailor made. It was of some interest to us to find out that the actual puppeteer might be present for the showing.


As we approached the window the tinny voiced cashier advised there was only one ticket left. So scanning the availablility on a split second and upon my hearsaid word that it was supposed to be a good movie, we decided on "Margin Call", although the subject matter, the beginning of the meltdown of the stock market in 2008 was less than cheery, and likely not much uplifting. In fact, I said to Len, "We are going from the feel good to the feel bad movie of the year!"


And this one, although it had more than one seat left, still had enough people gathered to put us in the virtual front where every facial expression of the actors, from Kevin Spacey, to Simon Baker, to Stanley Tucci and one of the producers, the theatrically and televisioncally zooming Zachary Quinto, playing the young rocket scientist turned Wall Street Junior Risk Analyst, could be viewed virtually microscopically. And given the subject matter, there was a lot of actor portrayal grimacing.


The movie began with a scene recently familiar to me, the termination and escorting out of a long time, mid level boss who was quite literally in the middle of a big something, noticing that the way the fictional firm was doing business had begun a statistical and market downtrend that would jettison the market gains of years before and leave lots of people bereft, financially speaking. As he is escorted out he gives the information, in a jump drive, to one of his young associates, the earnest Mr. Sullivan, played by the equally earnest Mr. Quinto. Now Len and I agree that this exchange of information would not have happened in a real life canning. There is no interaction with other employees or institutional property  allowed upon one's severing. But ok, that was a necessary Maguffin. Our young anti-hero gets the drive and finishes the projections and realizes that something bad has already happened stock market wise. I shall refrain from trying to explain it; neither I nor Len of Len Speaks understood it. My effort tonight to get an simple definition of a margin call, led to this piece, which really explained little to me, except that the method of buying, if done by too many people under a statistical circumstance that happened in this movie, and in real life, means doom and gloom.


The company big wigs  (Baker and the always compelling Jeremey Irons as the biggest wig), naturally want to salvage what they can for themselves before all hell breaks loose (as at that moment no one in the financial world has seen the grim trend in progress), and decide to sell everything and buy nothing and swap nothing in one market day. As every broker who does this, at the behest of Kevin Spacey, a 34 year veteran of market vagaries and his company's maneuvering, will become anathema to colleagues far and wide who were burned by the company, and as every person who buys will be damaged irrevocably by the move, a lot of people, young and old will be put out of business. And then there is the paying off of some of the fired players, which they must accept or find their severance packages challenged and compromised.  What would  you do? Blow the whistle or take your stock options and your $175,00 plus and go home? You can say I would do the right thing. I like to say that too. We know what the right thing is, but it's dangerous to do it, so often we do not.


The reactions of the players in this sad tale are mixed. The original mid level boss seems initially ready to fight and blow the whistle, but the grief he'd receive and the destruction of any chance of a future job anywhere ever in his life, chastens him. Even the jaded Spacey character (more interested in his dying dog than in the firings at the beginning of the movie of some 80 percent of the company's brokers and middle management), feels the taint and the immorality of his part in the action, but needing the money, he concedes to his part in the massacre. His solution to the ugliness is to bury his grief with his dog in the backyard of his old home, where his ex-wife now lives. The young Mr. Sullivan/Quinto is promoted, but he seems more to be caught on a wave. He did nothing more than his job and fell into the chasm. What he will be at age 40, we won't see. We probably shouldn't hope for the best.  We are fragile things.


You might think that I might go out to downtown Los Angeles and set up my pup tent with the Occupy Wall Street Set. No. Not likely. Because as Quinto's character says in response to some precious comment from his junior colleague associate, Seth, things are a lot more complicated. I have two examples. One from our historical life, which we as a society choose to ignore in assigning blame to banks, for example for the woes of us common men and women and one from my own life.
 

We blame the banks for the mortgage crisis, but in fact in the 80s and 90s, the banks were forced by the political powers that be, among them people now blaming the banks, to make loans to people that they knew could not pay them back. I have recently begun to read a little about and of Schopenhauer and his belief that compassion is the highest virtue. Well, compassion without common sense is problematic and making banks loan to people who could not make the payments was not a particularly good exercise of value.


Years ago, I was a young lawyer in a traffic court when a guy turned around and started complaining that his lawyer wasn't engaging in some dishonest conduct to get him off. I said that if he did that he would be committing a crime and an ethical violation. "That's what I hired him for" said the man.  Did he think that a dishonest lawyer (and alas I saw a number of them in my work travels) would spare that dishonesty for him? I saw a number of folks come to my former office complaining that their lawyer, whom they knew to be and hired for their short cuts, had short cut on them.


This movie wasn't to me  just about Wall Street and the current craze for supplanting capitalism and voluntary giving back for everybody having the same (equal) nothing, except for those enterprising folks at the top of the heap who never believed in their drivel in the first place.  It was about human rationalization, much like the Ides of March about which I wrote in these pages, for killing objectivity and Truth and justifying it with whatever nifty term is needed to sell it. But there is no objective truth as we have come to know, so these stories will continue until we destroy ourselves and have no one to blame and any place to occupy.  I wish I were exempt, but alas I am not.


Len, next week, we have got to see "Being Elmo".

Mysterious Respite

After my dad died at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, I had the perhaps unrealistic idea that it would be a long time before it would be necessary for me to back there to visit anyone.

In the last year, though, at least three people I know have needed to be hospitalized there; happily all remain with us. Still it is a strain to be in a place where not only are people healed, but where many times, and ultimately, they pass away of the conditions which ail them.  You can feel the anxiety in the rooms and in the waiting spaces. I dread the day when I will be one of the patients in the beds captive to medical jargon and too often arrogant practioners.

Yesterday, as I was walking toward the anesthesia recovery room after a friend's surgery, I felt the hallway so familiar and it was only later that I realized this was where my father had "recovered" from his last procedure, an outpatient one, the idiocy of which was confirmed by the sepsis that overwhelmed his body and brought him back to the hospital for his final few days.   I guess I am still angry about how dad was, in my view, disregarded by his urologist and his internist.

This evening I had plans to survey a possible volunteer activity, reading for the blind and dyslexic--a way to practice the use of my voice, and give back to the community. I was in such a rush after the hospital to be out and stay out amid the sun and people engaged in their ordinary activities, that I got to the neighborhood in Hollywood, an interesting mix of seedy apartment buildings and classic old craftsman houses, way too early for my appointment.

I had a sandwich at an ubiquitous Subway watcing a customer argue over the fact that the special value meal of five dollars was no more.  I took a walk around the neighborhood as the sun was just beginning its descent.  Then I came upon this Church. I couldn't quite tell its denomination from the outside, but on closer inspection I saw that it was called St. John Garabed Armenian Apostolic Church. So it was either an Eastern Orthodox or a Catholic Eastern Rite Church. Such churches are always have amazing iconography, so different from the sometimes comparatively bland American Catholic Churches. I had never heard of a saint with this particular name. Rather than aimlessly killing time, quiet meditation seemed preferable.

In I went. There were quotes everywhere, virtually none in English. There were no bulletins, nothing to describe the history of the parish. But there were long lit tapers held in boxes of sand, an ancient feeling and so different from the little votives I light in Catholic parishes. There were only two people inside, a woman who looked to be internally bewailing something difficult, and a man in intense prayer. The light was entirely natural with sun streaming through the spectacular large stained glass images, bathing the surroundings in warm amber and red and where the glass was blue, that as well.

There was the tabernacle. Ah, but the altar was placed such that it was clear the celebration of the Eucharist was done by the priest with his back to the people. Orthodox indeed. Probably not a Catholic Church, but so familiar that I decided to stay and say the rosary, and absorb deep the silence around me. The man walked to the entrance of the altar blocked by velvet rope of the type you see at premieres, and made a repetive sign of the cross that looked more like the action of a censer by the thurifer, and then, rather than turn his back on the tabernacle he backed out of the Church. It occurred to me that this was the proper way to disengage from God before him. I loved the respect.

The Church empty, I interrupted my rosary to take a few pictures, using my cell phone, which later I saw was not permitted . My sense was that the prohibition was more about the ringing than the photography, and there was no forbidding of cameras.  A couple came into the Church, looked around quickly and went back down the aisle. They did not back out.

I finished my rosary and thought to say hello to the young man in the office I had seen on my way in and maybe ask about this Church and its history. When I got there, the couple was inside with him. I asked about the name "Garabed". The young man said something incongruous, "It's just the name"."But of a saint, right?"  No answer. I told him how lovely the Church was. I asked him if there was anything I could take away to read about it. No. He did not elaborate. Civil though he was, it was clear that I was regarded as a stranger, and for that matter, not one to be trusted or particularly welcomed. My sense of peace dissipated a bit and a sadness replaced it. Here we all are people of faith and there is such a separation among us that is truly not God's Will.  Still, I thought, what a lovely place to come and sit and consider the  somber mysteries of men that make the so afraid of one another, and the awesome Mystery of God.

So, in fact, they have a website and the St. John is the Baptist himself. There are many Armenian churchs, and it was of Eastern Orthodoxy, with that name. They appear to be fierce about their view that they are descended in a true line from the apostles themselves. I wasn't interested in the debates of theology about the fullness of our respective faiths. I just wanted to sit for a while, and rest in the Lord.