The Pleasing Artifacts of Days Gone By

The packing continues for the move I hope will be accomplished in September, sometime, to my dad's condo. Aside from the packing, there has been shredding of documents that go back more than a decade, mine and my dad's, there have been donations to Good Will, there have been deposits by what I call the "magic tree", the tree outside my current place where, if you leave something you no longer want, someone comes by and adopts it for his or her own. I recently left a free standing bar out there, and I was delighted to see a young couple grab it up! There has been a whole loftof plain ole tossing of things that I have held onto for years (see the entry about how hard it is to get rid of stuff, going back a few months on these pages). It has been hard. The item pictured above is just one such particularly precious piece. It came with me from New York nearly 31 years ago, just about as empty as it is now, and I had it with slightly more liquid in it, some five years before that.

Yes, it is a barren bottle of cologne, called Aliage, which I wore until the contents were no more, except for a few drops that still cannot be sprayed out from the bottom. Perhaps because of the trouble the gifter took to have my initials placed at the top, the item has had even more value to me on the sentimental scale.

For the briefest of three months or so circa the fall and winter of 1975, I sort of dated a classmate--the second and last one, in college.With me, dating was always a bit of a "sort of". Don't get the idea that I am blaming anybody but myself. I just wasn't good at it, and never became good at it. Therein lies another tale, perhaps to be told, or not, we shall see. This young man was in a class taught by an aged stage actor, Vaughan Deering--who carried clippings from his 1918 appearances on stage (I believe as Iago) in San Francisco in his pocket, and lived at the now defunct Lamb's Club, and who, was a prototype for the absent minded professor except one who looked like he was homeless. Len Speaks will remember this class, not only for Mr. Deering's distress at the lack of our actor abilities, but for the fact that he was the note passing conduit from my would be suitor to me, one I recall inviting me to meet him by the coat rack at WFUV. I was suspicious of these entreaties because he had been involved in an intense relationship with another of our classmates, which had broken up with equal passion, and I knew he wasn't over her. And I knew, and I say this with absolute honesty, not self-deprecation alone, I could not compete with that lovely girl on any level.

But this was the second time I had actually been pursued with such obvious intensity (having not been pursued at all before) and well, he was already a friend, and I already liked him. He was New York cute, which for me is a little rough edged but with a boisterous sense of humor. So, for those few months, we went out casually and I enjoyed his company. It was he, I guess around Christmas, who gave me the cologne in the initialled bottle. I still have the card he sent with it (yes, I do. . .) a sweet thank you for my being there for him at a tough time.  By January of 1976, he transitioned to the woman, also a classmate, who would become his wife and with whom he had his two beautiful children. I was hurt but I never believed he was serious about me.

It was indeed the sweetness of the gesture of initials on the bottle that made me keep it, and I think, looking backward to my too quiet salad days, it was a reminder of things that could have been but weren't mostly because I lacked the necessary social and romantic skills. Or was afraid of them.

That bottle represented the possibility of youth. It will be hard to let it go, this bottle. On the other hand, I realize I don't need it in the same way anymore, even as only something to discover in the back of a closet and take in my hand with a smile. It will be enough I think to have the picture on this blog.

And move on, with a contentment that surprises even me, to another chapter of my life, with gratefulness for the ones in the past.  

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The Quasi-Bionic Djinn

Up until I was 18 years old I had great teeth, not even one cavity. And then it all changed. Probably my less healthy diet, but I really never knew for sure. Suddenly I had a plethora of decay and fillings. By the time I came to California in 1981, I still had my teeth (except for a couple of wisdom teeth that did not fully develop), but they were filled with gold, amalgam and man made porcelain type products. My father thought this was mighty fine, as he had lost all his teeth in his 20s, and was wearing dentures while he fought in WWII.

I had a wonderful dentist from about 1982 until hummm, I can't exactly remember, the early 2000s, I am thinking, Roy Nakaiye. We even dated a couple of times; I met his lovely family, but I just did not see us as a couple. He stayed my dentist until he retired to Florida (he was an avid fisherman) and sold his practice. I did not like the crew that replaced him, who seemed to have checklists of all the cosmetic dentistry that they felt needed to be done for the outrageous prices that these non-urgent repairs required. They called and sent me notes of such a number and caliber that I considered they were less concerned about the well being of my mouth than of the well being of their pocket books. Although not necessarily a wise decision on my part, I avoided them henceforward and had no dentist for three years or so.

Mr. Anonymous of the Deluxe Furnished Barbara Judith Apartments had the same problem I did--for Roy became his dentist as well upon his transplantation from NY to LA. It was he who introduced me to my new dental office, Hanna Hoseli. When a dental pain became too much to bear, I sought her out. I fell in love, with the office, with the receptionist/office manager, he sister, and with the fact that I was always the only one waiting as the prior patient left--Hanna's approach was that each patient required her full attention, for a full hour at least, and there was no serial seeing, or it was limited. And she worked with steady hands and a quiet patience. After only a few visits, she became ill (she later died at far too young an age of brain cancer), and the young woman she hired to stand in for her while she fought her battle Nicola Malik, was in her mold, although she had not been licensed that long. I hated to lose Hanna, but I knew Hanna wouldn't select someone who wasn't a chip off the old block. I had let a germinating problem fester into a big one, an old root canal that had fluctuating pain. It would hurt. I'd take aspirin. It would go away, and then the cycle would begin again, until it hurt just too much. It was a tooth that Hanna had recommended I see a specialist over--of course I didn't.

By the time Dr. Malik saw me, she told me the root was fractured and the tooth, pretty well infected, couldn't be saved. She referred me to an oral surgeon, Dr. David Salehani in Beverly Hills (apropos of nothing, it was the building where in a Hamburger Hamlet I saw my very first LA celebrity, back in 1978, Michael Callan--anybody remember him?). He pulled the tooth, in a most elaborate display of surgical care, cleanliness, etc, but they still pull a tooth with what looks like a pair of pliers. My other teeth were ok, so I wasn't going to have any removed for a bridge. So onward to the dental implant, which is quite the process. I had a bone graft that day (I had to stop him for a little more information when he used the word 'cadaver'; you see the material is made from cadavers, along with some synthetics--thank you whoever's bone I now have integrated into my upper small molar space), and the I waited for three months to see if the graft would take. It did.

So yesterday, was the second, biggest part of this process--the actual implant. Yes, essentially it is a screw that is put into the space where your root used to be--and this is done after drilling a nice little canal into that newly replaced or edified bone area. It's all just below the sinus (you shoulda seen the consent form!). But I felt secure somehow. This doctor is young (if he's forty I'd be surprised), with just enough gray at his temples to allow for a sigh of relief and his calm is profound. The office is high tech and spare. The implant--it's made of titanium, right out of the Bionic man, or woman, in this case. It took all of 45 minutes for the whole process, which included a few moments to twist the screw into place such that I felt like I was a tire--I could hear the click, click, click until it tightened.

I was expecting a fair amount of discomfort when the local wore off, I mean, the man used massive drills right into my bone and there's a screw in my face now to which in another three or four months, assuming the implant "takes" which he thinks likely, will be added a crown.  But except for a bit of throbbing an hour or two after the surgery--I admit I took ibuprophen with codeine, just in case, because I was going to a Dodger game with Lenspeaks, I woke up this morning with nearly no discomfort, except for the sites where the needles went in to numb me up.

So, here I am, the happy quasi-bionic Djinn.

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu

Two intersecting ordinary events have triggered this entry. The first is that I am getting ready to move from my rental apartment, in which I have lived for over 30 years, to my dad's former condominium. The space is roughly the same size, but it represents a shift in my time space continuum. My dad died over four years ago. My long time job/career, as those of you who follow the DjinnfromtheBronx blog know, became moot. While a good thing, in retrospect, that change was seismic as well.--that which I had invested a quarter of a century was proven to be like the mist, fine and transient.The girl who came to this apartment at age 27 has become the seriously older woman of age 58. Like the Professor in the Time Machine, I have watched life change from out of my window as time passed. Unlike the Professor, as I moved into the future, I did not remain young. The second thing was catching up on the blog of my friend from a couple of weeks ago, his paean to the now late Ernest Borgnine, and, in particular, his role in "Marty".  That role resonated with me as well. Aside from the location appeal--it was shot in the Bronx back in a more innocent time just around the time I came onto the cosmic scene--Marty is the story of the everyman, the not so beautiful people. He is the Italian butcher who still lives at home with his widowed mother at the age of 35, and though trying to keep up with the better looking (they think) guys who search for the girls at the prim and proper dancing halls prevalent in those days, pretending that he's on the "make" for something lithe and pretty like all the sensible guys, he is a man full of a sense of inadequacy and loneliness. He watches the parade of men, like his brother, who find if not the loves of their lives, the companion of their days, and he wonders how the heck he managed not to get whatever it is that other men have, if not good looks, some vague charm that overcomes them. little later in the time scale, I would know these people, who lived and died in the Bronx, and I could easily have been one of them, as someone who never liked change. Luckily I hated the weather there and liked it better here, or I'd probably still be near the Jerome Reservoir, walking down to 233rd Street on a muggy summer's day.

Well, maybe it was a third thing that set me to this entry. I pulled out my photograph albums for storage in the little space that comes with the condo's garage. And the albums with the detritus of occasions long since past, a ticket stub, letters, diplomas, articles, term papers, report cards--the proofs of my "success". As I look backward at my own face, at 5, at 20, at 27, at 30 something, my fortieth birthday, I don't entirely recognize me.  I see in that face, in that time, something I clearly missed then, potentiality, even prettiness. You see, except for fleeting moments which were more about convincing myself, than about a real feeling, I always thought I wasn't particularly pretty. And of course, I sealed my feeling by fighting a  weight problem, well not fighting it, really, as I eat and always have eaten, obsessively.  I have done many things, obsessively, one replacing the other and occasionally overlapping the other. Well, I suppose it was understandable, considering my high school graduation picture--talk about a bear like visage with a helmet of hair and fuzzy eyebrows.

Well, that's how I felt. I remember it well. Oh, yes, lots of kids feel that way. I know we are a vast club. And looking at the other pictures in the yearbook, the others did not fare much better. But that's how I see it now, not then.  Guys see themselves as Marty. I saw myself as a cross between him and the girl that he meets that everyone says isn't good enough for him. You know, the girl most likely to be a wallflower.  Every time I ever watched that movie and he said, "You ain't the dog you think you are.," or something like that, I cried, a little more or little less depending on the state of my dating life, which did not begin until sophomore year of college--you can't count Ginny's cousin for the Sophomore Tea or Denise's good friend Ray, so I could get to the Senior Prom at all.  He was shorter and thinner by the way, so my already pretty shot self-esteem was fully exploded when he noted the height disparity--or was it, as I remember that he pointed out I was "bigger" than he was. He later sold me an annuity which I think I lost money.

But it was more than thinking I was a "dog". It was about something missing in my training, or my learning, outside of the educational training, the intellectual stuff (though I am not much of an intellectual if it comes to that for all the effort thrown that way). Attracted though I always was to men (yes, really, for those of you who think I am gay, not, as a la Seinfield "there's anything wrong with that"--for we each have our paths in life), I had no meaningful commerce (my apologies to James from Monticello; he actually asked me out in 1970, but I didn't realize that's what he was doing, so oblivious was I) with them until college and I was ill prepared in every way to encounter them when I got there. So what was in fact sufficiently attractive was hiding her light under a barrel for fear of what to do if the light got out, plus all the other psychological twist and turns the mind takes in order to convince itself that something stupid in behavior makes sense.  I just didn't "get" what other people, boys, and girls, men, and women, seemed to as part of the rites of passage. I wish I could say that I ultimately did, but I can't.

So, here I am in one of the pictures I actually always liked--there were about 15 of those pictures in the multitude of pictures taken of me over the years--circa 1982 ish in Santa Barbara. That makes me about 28--oh boy. . . .y'd never know that this face hid a mass of neuroses, fears, a hatred of her very vessel, her body and knew, at some very deep place--no doubt the essence of self-fulfilling prophecy--that she'd be a spinster like one of her mother's three sisters.

The title of this entry is from Marcel Proust, alternately translated as "In Remembrance of Things Past" or, "In Search of Times Lost". Well, the latter is more my sense of things--I am, as I pack up and shift gears, in ever my so small a way, in search of times lost--lost because of choices that did not seem to be choices, but now I realize despite every bit of resistance that tugs at me, were indeed choice. My "can'ts" as often my therapist tried to get me to see were "won't's". They still felt like "can'ts". But now it all doesn't matter that much to me--my mind and soul, if you will, has gone in a different direction, which may be hormonal or Divine Mercy, or both.

I'm guessing that everybody, whether he or she will admit it or not, realizes that in those things which did not "work out" in relationship--was a matter of being one's own worst enemy. I certainly twisted myself into knots most of my life.

The thing about "Marty" is that he wakes up faster than many of us do. It's his game to win or lose. Well, that's the other reality--it isn't a game.

I have had a very full life in my eccentric way. So, if it seems I am, I'm not complaining. And that is a first! I spent much of my life doing just that--complaining. To myself. To my journal, which was my alternate self. To my father, when he was alive. Probably to a few people that I would deny I complained to if they said, "Oh, yeah, you complained to me." 

And, what hasn't been enough, well, I'm responsible for that, but don't press me on it 'cause I could easily look for some external force to blame, and have, and will again.

The time that's lost, it's gone. End of story. Won a few, lost a few, failed to play the game more times than I'd like to count. Thought I wasn't invited to the game, truth be told, my mistake. But, if I live a statistical life, I have time to use without reserve the time left to me. I don't mean in activity per se--I'm talking the things that are ineffable, the mind, the soul.

So, what's the bottom line--grab with gusto the time forward, which will quickly be lost in the haze of memory. What will that look like? I have no idea. But if I have learned anything from Marty, it's better late than never. And, if I haven't said this before, though I think I have, I am happier than I have ever been, and I am grateful indeed.  I have good friends and a blessed life. What I don't have well, it's part of my journey, and you know what, it's not too late to use each day well.  There's an entire universe in a day!