Visual, and Olfactory, Memories of A Summer Night in the Bronx

Me on the first stoop 1596 Townsend Avenue, in an early bad mood! But it WAS summer.



It's been a tad warm in Los Angeles this early Fall. In the 80s today, but as is more rare, fairly humid. When I left the office, in the gloaming, and got in my car, I decided to go up Pico Boulevard to avoid a protest that was over by MacArthur Park. Pico has always reminded me a bit of my Bronx, circa 1960's, well populated, and just a little seedy, but in a way that somehow is nostalgic. I was thinking though that I can always tell a scene in the movie where LA streets stand in for NY streets. It looks mostly the same, but there is just something that usually isn't precise about the buildings, or the sidewalks, or the general feeling.

Tonight, with the humidity and the lingering heat I found myself feeling like I was there, in the Bronx, after a hearty game of "Freeze Tag" that meant lots of jumping and leaping off the stoop that we were now resting on, summing up the summer day. We might be eating a pomegranete--this was before health was the measure of all things and it was just fun to peel and pick at the red seeds until your mouth and fingers were smeary red.

We were still sweaty from the running, and because the sidewalk radiated the day's sun still. The sidewalk gave off a smell that I suppose should have been unpleasant, a combination of heat, dirt, garbage gathering nearby mingled with cat or dog pee, but somehow wasn't. Old folks were taking their evening walks, a neighbor in the first floor window talking to another still on the street, kids making the last throws of their pink spauldings as high as they could as long as he dusk light lasted. A few kids still at a game of "Skully" with wax filled bottle caps on the chalk made street board. A couple of middle aged guys wandering down to Louie's, the laundry man, so they could place an illegal bet in the back. It was just before we'd be going upstairs to watch a favorite TV show on our black and white TVs, maybe the "Mod Squad" or "Honey West" (well, that was probably only me) or something like that. Maybe mom gave us some money to get a couple of hot dogs each with mustard and sauerkraut and a knish down the block to bring back for dinner.

Yeah, that's what came to mind as I went up Pico tonight. And I had to do Google Maps and "walk" the old neighborhood. So much has changed (my old apartment building is no longer there and is a public school), but so much hasn't. You can get really close up with the satellite stuff and I went all the way up Mt. Eden Avenue and to the Grand Concourse tonight,and all the way down to the Jerome El, 175th Street stop, just moments ago. I took a deep breath and marvelled at how much time has passed.

If I ever miss the Bronx, that's the one I miss.

I Am Born

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously."

Nope. The quote isn't about me. It's the famous beginning of "David Copperfield", but a combination of a conversation with my friend Len of http://Lenspeaks.blogspot.com/ and mulling over these literary lines this morning while I stretched out of sleep led me to an idea for this reconstituted version of my blog.

The conversation was on Friday night. Len and I saw an awful movie with Ricky Gervais that even Greg Kinnear's charm couldn't save. Over my guacamole and chips with a Margarita chaser and his potstickers at a Grove cafe, he looked at some photos from our just post college days gone by and some of my way before college life. I must have made my millionth mention of the regret I sometimes feel about not having anyone to leave photos, and other personal memorabilia to, when (I almost said if, silly me!) I shuffle off this mortal coil, kick the bucket, buy the farm, all the Monty Python euphemisms galore.

This always brings out the "There she goes again" look from my otherwise fairly tolerant friends. I try to convince them of my sensibleness when I regale them with my now 15 year ago visit to the Exploratorium in San Franciso that featured an exhibit on all things related to memory, including personal histories which are a microcosm of a society's history. I loved that show. It included information and experiments on how we learn, about Alzheimer's. It had artifacts from the lives of ordinary people, people just like me. And these people long dead were fascinating. It is just a variation of what made walking through Pompeii so exciting for me--touching not only the past, but bringing the people of the past into the present, where they are in a way alive again. Alive in the red paintings on crumbling walls. Alive in the container spaces where ancient food was placed and given to passersby. Alive in the mosaic mat that says "Cave Canem" ("Beware of Dog").

But the truth is, let's face it, as much as I believe in eternal life in the "Hope I make it to Heaven" variety, I am narcissistic enough to want to carry on in minds and hearts beyond just the few people who thought I was okay enough to hang out with from time to time. I want this, my earthbound immortality, and heaven too! There, it's out there. The truth. And I also want it for the people who have meant something to me. Some of the "stuff" I have, it's from and about other people. An invitation to a Halloween party at "Black Rock" in the Bronx. A series of letters or cards from Ralph, Len, Noreen, Andrew, John, Dennis, Glenn, Connie, Ginny, staying connected to the first of us who travelled out West to seek her fortune. (Two others have joined me in the lap of weather's luxury here in Southern California since those days). Wedding invitations galore. Love letters from my father to my mother in 1956 from his three month exile in Camp Gordon, Georgia as a reservist.

I want what has had meaning to me, and to others, to last beyond our limited score of years. I can enjoy it now, but I want to, I need to, preserve it, so that it can be bequeathed to? A generation? Posterity? I don't really know. I like the idea that nothing and no one is really ever gone. Maybe that's part of it.

Whatever it is, my new plan, in the ever changing spectrum of plans I have, is to write about things from "I am born" and day to day to here and whatever is the fullness of my years, whatever God has in store for me. `

Tales of Djinn from the Bronx. That's it! That's the ticket!