May 29, 2018--Kim & Trump Together At Last

Don't be taken in by all the on-again off-again business about whether Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will or won't meet on or about June 12th.

They'll meet. 

About that you can bet the house. And they will make a deal. Or a version of a deal, including possibly a faux deal. They'll be OK with that since anything resembling one will work. Will work for each of their purposes.

Never before have there been two political adversaries who so desperately need a deal. And so we will have one.

Kim's country is falling apart. Not that for decades, since his grandfather's rule, has there been much remaining to fall apart. Pretty much everything has been collapsing since the Second World War. Though one would not even be able to notice how fallen apart things are, especially after dark, since with the exception of the capital, Pyongyang, there is no power and thus there are no electric lights.

That should be the worst of the situation. Even more dire, most North Koreans are grossly undernourished if not out and out starving with parasitical worms common in most North Koreans' digestive systems.

But there is a small North Korean elite who are loyal to Kim as long as they keep getting their goodies (electricity, TVs, things to buy, and overseas trips and bank accounts). If they sense that Kim is imperiled by unhappy elements within the country and thus might be in danger of being overthrown, the military might rise up and preemptively do the overthrowing. 

Kim has had dozens from the elite killed, including, especially brutally, family members. As a signal that he can play rough. But he could be more precariously in office than he appears to be from our vantage point halfway around the world.

So any deal would prop him up, particularly if some of our sanctions were lifted and things for ordinary North Koreans improved. After Kim and Trump meet, if we see lights burning at night across the country, we'll know things are getting better.

Evidence that Trump will be satisfied by any version of a deal is his more than usual refusal to do any prep work prior to the summit. Briefing papers have been prepared but he has refused to be briefed. He plans to wing it, guided by his "instincts," which he has previously proclaimed are the best in all of history.

He knows making a deal, even one in which he makes more concessions than Kim, will boost his approval ratings by at least 10 points and this could help Republicans in November maintain control of the House. And if that were to happen, there will be no impeachment. 

So the stakes for Trump are very high.

A deal would also allow Trump yet more leverage when it comes time to savage the Mueller report and the inevitable additional indictments that will be forthcoming this fall or winter.

Then there is the Nobel Peace Prize. If they make a deal it would be difficult for the Swedish Academy not to award one to Trump (and Kim) and this would allow him to further obliterate all traces of Barak Obama and his presidency. More than anything else, perversely, Trump's controlling obsession.

Why, one might wonder, would Kim trade away his nuclear weapons based on promises from the world's most dishonest and untrustworthy leader?

Again, things for him are desperate and it's the only card he has to play.

That reminds me a joke. One of my father's. He had only two or three jokes in his repertoire, so pay attention.

It's about sardines.

Louie gets a call from his friend Dave. "Louie," Dave says, "Do I have deal for you. A warehouse full of canned sardines. And they're yours for a special price. Only $5,000." So Louie buys the sardines.

A week later, Louie calls his cousin Murray and says, "Murray do I have a deal for you. A warehouse full of canned sardines. Priced especially for your only $7,500." 

Sight unseen Murray buys the sardines and after a few days calls his friend, Steve, "Steve," he says, "Do I have a deal for you. A warehouse full of sardines. They're for sale at a special price just for you--$10,000."

This sounds like a good deal to Steve and after sending Murray a check he goes to the warehouse to check out his sardines. They are in huge shipping crates. He opens a crate and then one of the cans of sardines.

They smell awful. "I'll try another one," he thinks. "This one must be a defective tin." But the next one and the one after that are also spoiled. 

So, angry, he calls Murray to complain that all the sardines are rancid. 

Murray is not surprised and tries to calm Steve down.

"You don't understand," Murray says. "These are not eating sardines. They're buying and selling sardines."

So Kim will tell Trump that he has a deal for him. He's willing to denuclearize because his atomic weapons are not for bombing purposes but for trading purposes.

At least let's hope so.

On Sale at the White House Gift Shop

June 18, 2016--Presidential Hair

Commenting about candidates for the presidency as we entered the age of campaigning on TV, my father used to say, as John Kennedy was moving to succeed Dwight Eisenhower, "Without a full head of hair like his, you don't have a chance to be elected. Ike, with just that wisp on top, would not have fared well if he had to run on television."

With that my Dad would stroke his bald pate and look, ruefully and disappointedly over at me, noting my own rapidly receding hairline, realizing he would have to settle for my becoming a surgeon (which I failed to do) and not president. His real American dream.

So what to make of our current crop of candidates' hair?

Scott Walker (remember him, the governor of Wisconsin and Koch Brothers' favorite), the establishment GOP's great white hope, faded fast and dropped out first because of hair problems. His bald spot--much like a monk's tonsure--was made more visible on HD TV by the fact that his remaining hair was dyed extra black with what could only have been shoe polish.

It didn't help his candidacy when a letter surfaced that he wrote to a Jewish constituent in which he said, "Thank you again and Molotov," when he meant Mazel tov.

Marco Rubio, already suffering from the problem that he's youthful-looking and short (sorry, vertically challenged, and thus those 2-inch lift boots he was spotted wearing last week), both of which make it hard for voters to imagine him as commander-in-chief ensconced at the head of the Situation Room table, also has a hair problem. Though artfully disguised, at only 44, he is already sporting a comb-over, which becomes apparent when on the stump in windy Iowa where he has to pay more attention to beating it back in place than repeating his over-rehersed Mr. Robot talking points.

Raphael Cruz is also working on a comb-over. Look carefully and you will spot the beginnings of serious thinning along the seam of his part.

But the three candidates who have by far the most politically interesting hair are Donald TRUMP (an easy call), Hillary Clinton, and even Bernie Sanders.

In reverse order--

Bernie's hair looks as if it's cut by his wife. No $1,250 haircuts for socialist Bernie like the one that undid poor Two-Americas John Edwards. And no hair dye either to make him look more youthful (not that he needs that--he's pretty much got all the Millennials voting for him). And certainly no hair gook. The windblown, absentminded professor look do appear to be working for him. But from time to time I've been noticing evidence of a comb-forward. A modified Chuck Todd. This alone suggests that he's thinking of himself as a viable candidate, not just Crazy Bernie.

What to make of Hillary?

During her years as First Lady she struggled almost as much with what name to adopt--Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Eva Peron, Golda Meir--as she did with her hair.

Beyond her name shifting (really struggles about her identity) even more on her mind was her hair.

On the Internet there are people keeping track of everything going on in the world, including how many hairstyles Hillary sported while First lady. From their and my research I have counted at least 32. Thirty-two!

With even more on display during the past few months in Iowa and New Hampshire. Neither place good-hair-day territory.

Then, beyond imagining, irresistible to make fun of, is the now iconically famous whatever-it-is that The Donald does with his hair.

If there is anyone on the political circuit paying more attention to his or her hair than Hillary, it is TRUMP.

The style never varies and the color is consistently applicated. Couple that with all the sculpting, fixing, and the pumpkin-colored spray-job on his face and the chauk-white mask around his eyes and you have  a living, breathing cartoon superhero.

Counter-intuitively, all this attention to his hair and looks is stereotypically . . . feminine.

So we have big-bully Donald TRUMP coming off at least as girly as Hillary Clinton.

How this campaign continues to fascinate with its surprises.

Hillary Clinton a mass of contradictions, calling on her husband to pull her out of tough spots (as now in Iowa) while at the same time showing off her cajones as a potential commander-in-chief, while blustery tough-guy Donald Trump spends hours each day fussing with his hair.

Though, he said, if he's elected he'll be so busy in the White House that he won't have time for his hair and will get a buzz cut.

That prospect is almost enough to get me to vote for him.

July 13, 2105--Ockham's and Dad's Razors

We've been sorting though things at my mother's apartment, stopping frequently to savor a picture or letter from long ago and only vaguely remembered.

Thus far my favorite is a thick looseleaf notebook in which my mother kept the minutes of the Groucho Society. It was in effect a cousins club that included Zwerlings and Neubauers, the Neubauers being from my grandmother's side of the extended family.

The Newbauers were great characters and even included a gangster or two. As you might imagine, they were my favorite of all Zwerling and Neubauer relatives. Just think how my youthful imagination was fired by the fact that Uncle Herman knew Mayer Lansky and had a pistol, which he allegedly needed and even used in one of the bars and grills he owned in New Jersey.

The Grouchos met every month or two during the first ten years after my parents were married--the late 20s to late 30s. During their lifetimes, though pressed frequently by me wanting to know about secrets from their past, neither of my parents had a good explanation about the name of the group--was it derived from Groucho Marx or just because many of the members were, well, grouchy?  They never said, which incited me to want to know more. Perhaps now in the minutes . . .

I haven't had time yet to read through the minutes my mother meticulously kept, but even a glance at her literally perfect handwriting reveals not a blot or edit on any page through which I have thus far thumbed. But just to marvel at the perception, her perfection is full of meaning and challenge. The standard she set for herself and the rest of us. To be perfect in all regards is to hold us to the highest standard, which has it attraction, but is also one we can never reach. Maybe that too has value--it humbles us to experience the unobtainable.

My other favorite thing thus far is a Bic razor of my father's that my mother brought with her to Forest Trace when she relocated. Nearly 20 years ago. Quite a shelf-life for an otherwise disposable razor!

I remember using it on much earlier visits to my mother when I either forgot to bring one of my own or wanted, by using it, to have the feel of his hand on mine and on my face while shaving. It was very intimate.

I haven't used it in 15 years and was not surprised to find it still in the guest bathroom since my mother was very good at keeping things--of course in perfect arrangement and preservation.

I took it with me to our apartment in Delray and used it twice while here because I forgot to bring one of my own or, closer to the truth, wanted my father literally close at hand at this emotional time stroking my cheeks. It worked well in those regards.

It also made me think of another razor, a metaphorical one--Ockham's. I have that helpful or dysfunctional ability to switch from deep feelings to the abstract as one of my ways of dealing with sadness or memories that overwhelm. Thus, Ockham's Razor.

It, or the Law of Parsimony, is a problem solving principal devised by William of Ockham in the 14th century that says that the best solution to a complex problem is the simplest one that accounts for the largest number of facts, variables, and phenomena. For example, in contemporary particle physics, there is the Standard Model that connects in the simplest terms yet understood the electromagnetic, strong, and weak nuclear forces.

My father was very much an Ockham man.

He was a great problem solver and, I must say, problem maker. He was adept at putting things in contexts. Often simple ones that, as he would put it, held a "grain of truth." Like, his favorite--religion is at the root of most of the world's most intractable problems. That gets to a truth in a version of the simplest way.

I should add--his version of truth. Just like Ockham's, which could be, always was, ultimately superseded by other elegant solutions that explained even more, so were Dad's challenged by members of his striving family who were coming to insights and conclusions of their own devising.

His literal razor, however, which is still functioning, over time has lost some of its sharp edge and it now scrapes across one's flesh, plucking as well as cutting. Rough while also gentle--just like my father.

August 15, 2104--Best of Behind: The Dead Rosenbergs

This is from a fictional memoir that I have been working on for a number of years. I posted this chapter on Behind on September 28, 2012. 

Yes, on June 20, 1953, Heshy Perlmutter and I made our way to the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor in Brooklyn to see the bodies of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who had been executed the day before in the electric chair at Sing Sing. I had never seen a dead person and the prospect of seeing two, and such notorious Soviet spies, was irresistible--

When we heard that the Rosenbergs had been electrocuted up in Sing Sing and that their bodies would be laid out and available for viewing at the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor just six blocks from where we lived, Heshy and I raced over so we could for the first time see some real dead people. In my neighborhood we had seen lots of dead cats and dogs, but no dead bodies and thus had developed an inordinate interest in death.

But a lot of others had the same idea that hot June night, and thus we wound up near the end of a line that stretched around the corner. Since it took hours for the line to crawl toward the entrance, we learned from what we overheard that no one else shared our morbid obsession: We were there to see some corpses. Everyone else was lined up to pay their respects to these martyrs of “progressivism” and to protest not just their executions but the injustice of the entire American and Capitalist System. We barely understood any of this—the raging about Judge Kaufman, the abuse heaped on President Eisenhower who refused to stay their “murder,” and especially the fury reserved for someone named Roy Cohn, who, as a Jew, was venomously vilified for his role in their prosecution.

“He should rot in Hell,” we heard these atheists mutter.

Heshy and I understood what they were feeling. His father, Mr. Perly, was the local glazier and window blind maker but was better known for wandering the streets at night talking to himself, debating some inner furies, waving like a saber a rolled-up copy of the Daily Worker. Heshy knew that what his father was so agitated about also had something to do with Capitalism and “surplus value,” whatever that was, and lynchings and anti-Semitism and McCarthy and also that betrayer Roy Cohn.

More important, having Heshy with me meant that we would actually be allowed to enter I. J. Morris. You see, as we got closer to the door, word filtered back to us that to be admitted you had to be at least sixteen. He and I were a few years younger than that and were worried that they wouldn't let us in and that we would have to wait for subsequent executions before being able to see some dead people. But when we got to the entrance, the man guarding the velvet rope took one look at me, already almost six feet tall, and especially at Heshy’s premature beard, and waved us in. Heshy’s nickname, you should also know, was Big Dick.

Once inside, things settled to a hush. No more sputterings about the Running Dogs of Capitalism, just the muted sound of shuffling feet as we inched our way toward the chapel. As we crept forward, Heshy and I were whispering to each other about what to expect. We thought Julius and Ethel would probably just look like the dead cats—with stiff arms and legs and bulging, staring eyes (would they be attracting flies too?); but we grew increasingly nervous about how dead people who had been electrocuted would look.  We had never seen an electrocuted cat or dog.

What we knew from The Street was that when someone from Murder Incorporated went to The Chair, the next morning, screaming in six inch type from the front pages of the Daily News and Mirror would be the headline, “Bugsy Berkowitz Fries!” And since we knew how my mother’s fried liver looked—the closest thing to shoe leather not worn on a foot—we were trepidiously expecting the dead Rosenbergs to look like huge slabs of fried liver in side-by-side coffins. We were thus rethinking the whole situation: Maybe we should wait until we were really sixteen when perhaps someone would just die of a heart attack or something. That would be a better way to get started with dead bodies.

But before we could reconsider and get out of there, we were pushed through the chapel door by some grizzled shoemaker.  If we had thought about it, we might actually have been glad to have a shoemaker nearby as we approached the leathery Rosenbergs. He again began to spit about that “Jew bastard Roy Cohen.”

And then, there we were face to face with the dead Rosenbergs whose side-by-side coffins were tipped forward for better viewing. Dead they were, but under spot lights with orange faces and black hair that looked as if it had been touched up with shoe polish.  Julius’ mustache was so blackened that he appeared more like a Semitic Hitler than a Jew from the Bronx. It was not hard to believe, from their squirrelly looks, that they had been spies and had indeed given away to Russia the secret to the Atomic Bomb, which as a result caused us to have to practice taking cover under our desks in school in case the Reds decided to drop one on the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The undertakers moved us along quickly so we had time for just a quick but sufficient glimpse and, in truth, a sniff because all the dead cats and dogs we knew stank something awful. We were curious about that too. But the Rosenbergs smelled more like the science lab in school, which was fitting since this whole experience was more like an experiment to us than a pilgrimage, except perhaps to Heshy who would be interrogated and lectured, we were certain, by Mr. Perly, about more than their hair, painted faces, and smell.

I had entered this cult of death as the result of being most responsible for taking care of the family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery. We couldn’t afford Perpetual Care for the graves so unless we were willing to let them become a jungle, someone had to go there regularly, spring through fall, to cut the grass and pull the weeds that were indigenous to that part of Queens. As the most dexterous family member this truly awesome responsibility fell to me. So clip and pull I did with barely disguised eagerness.

As I would work my way among the headstones that multiplied through the years, as I drifted further from the bench where my mother and aunts sat huddled, talking silently to their deceased mother and father, I began to think about more than what was growing above ground. What, I wondered, was happening below the ground? That was not a question I could openly ask about poor Uncle Hyman who, I had been told, died of a heart attack before he was fifty. The weeds, by the way, were thickest at his grave.

In the spirit of experiment, when one day Chirps my parakeet died, rather than leave it to my mother do whatever she did to dispose of our dead pet birds and guppies. I suspected the guppies got flushed away, I absconded with him, found an empty Hellmann’s Mayonnaise jar, washed and dried it thoroughly, put Chirps inside, screwed the top back on securely, and buried him in a shallow hole of a grave in the vacant lot next door. Thinking I would dig him up periodically to see what was happening to him in that jar, interred as I imagined he was, not so unlike Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Hyman at Mount Lebanon. That would finally answer my existential question.

A week later, when I exhumed Chirps, he looked a little dried out, sort of what an apricot left too long in the sun begins to look like, with his flesh now sucked tight against his tiny bones. The second week it appeared that his eyes had disappeared. Where they went I couldn’t figure out—though I turned and shook the jar they didn’t seem to be in there anymore. This was getting profoundly interesting, and mysterious.

But when I went to unearth him for the third time, about a month after he died, I couldn’t find him or the jar. I had marked his place with a distinctive stone but couldn’t find it; and without that, I couldn’t remember precisely enough where he was buried. And so over the course of the next week, I dug up virtually the entire lot, which must have been 30 feet wide and 75 feet deep.

My mother wanted to know what I was doing out there at all hours. I reminded her that in the past I had planted a successful, even legendary vegetable garden and was thinking about doing that again.

She said, “But it’s November.”

And thus I gave up on Chirps, but not on my quest.

Next came my obsession with Egyptian mummies. Even before I was aware of King Tut and all the stories surrounding his discovery and his treasures, from Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, a huge and enthralling book given to me one birthday by my well-traveled Aunt Helen, I learned about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which included the Pyramids at Giza. And how they were in reality giant tombs for the most famous pharaohs. And that the dead pharaohs, turned into mummies, were sealed in those pyramids.

So when our public school class went on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I managed to sneak away from the group and got “lost” for an hour in the labyrinth of the Egyptian Hall where, secured in glass cabinets in open coffins, what the Ancient Egyptians called sarcophagi, I could see actual mummies, dead pharaohs’ bodies that were more than 4,000 years old.

I was getting closer to the real thing. But there was still a problem—I couldn’t actually see the pharaohs’ bodies since they were so tightly wrapped in cloth shrouds. But the fact that I could sense more or less full bodies obscured within those wrappings suggested to me that both Chirps and Grandpa and Grandma might still be recognizable if somehow I could only get to them. After all, if the mummies were in such good shape after 4,000 years, Grandpa and Grandma and Chirps might still be quite like I remembered them.

Little did I know that before very long I would have a close encounter with a dead body, right in my own family, when one of Aunt Madeline’s husbands killed himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

I barely knew him because they had been married less than six months. He seemed nice enough to me. Minimally he was the first of her husbands who wasn’t bald and, even more important to her, was taller than she and thus a better dance partner. Stories circulating in the family suggested that after living with Madeline for a few short months, he took the “easy way out” by killing himself. Though he may have had enough of her, from her carrying on after his death, she appeared to have lost the love of her life. In fact, things were so bad with her, and his ten year old son from a previous marriage, that it took her brothers’ and their wives’ total attention to console her.

Perhaps because of my experience weeding the family plot, I was assigned to help make arrangements for his funeral.

My primary responsibility was to give the mortician a suit in which to bury him. As you might imagine, at twelve, though tall for my age, I was not fully prepared for this. So I just grabbed the first suit I saw from his closet and spent the rest of my time hoping that at the service they would have an open coffin so I could at last . . .

To my considerable disappointment they didn’t.  But at the chapel, the funeral director to whom I had given Morty’s suit, pulled me aside and directed me to a very private corner where he whispered so as not to disturb anyone, “Was that his suit you gave me?”

“Certainly,” I said, “It was in his closet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so,” I stuttered, my certainty now eroding, “Why are you asking?”

“Because it looked as if it was a suit for a ten year old.”

I looked over to where Morty’s ten year old son was sitting and saw that he was in casual clothes. He was not wearing a suit.

The undertaker rasped in my ear, “I can’t tell you what we had to do to get it on the body.” I was cringing, “But we did,” he added with a twisted smile.

And so, on that day when I got to see the Rosenbergs, I was reminded of the guilt I felt about what I had inadvertently done to poor Morty.  But more, I couldn’t stop thinking about what the I. J. Morris needed to do to get that suit to fit.

My education and interests took some new directions as I began to grow into my body. And though a total failure at Hebrew School, where I was presumably to receive a religious education, in spite of my lack of facility for things of this kind, I begin to think about what one might call “spiritual things.”  Adolescent meaning-of-life questions—Where did we come from (not Facts of Life kinds of matters)? And where were we going (and I didn’t mean Mount Lebanon)?   Heshy, under the influence of Mr. Perly and his surging hormones, was ever the materialist and said, non-biblically, that we’re just a bunch of atoms and molecules and thus to a version of dust we shall revert, if we're lucky, after a life of feeling up the Siegel Twins in the school coat closet.

By then I was also into atoms (remember the A Bomb), but the dust-to-dust thing didn’t work for me. I had begun to think there were higher issues and meanings to being human. I saw a very different place in the world for us as compared to Chirps, the neighborhood cats,  and my guppies.

                                                                *    *    *

Many years later my father, well into his eighties, began to fail. He had always been such a force of nature. I know to children fathers often seem to be that powerful and arbitrary, but my father was truly tectonic. When he raged, all trembled; when he commanded, all obeyed; what he expected, we did; and when he acknowledged and in his own coded-way loved, we were smitten. So when his big body was being reduced by time and he could no longer move forward but was afflicted by what the medical people called “retrograde movement,” which meant he fell backwards when he attempted to move ahead, I saw this to be a metaphor for his decline—he was heading backwards, even while attempting still to cut his way through life.

To see him like this raised many more questions about the meaning of life, at least the meaning of a life. The answers I came up with were not comforting. Everything seemed to reduce itself to biology—eating and pissing and shitting was the final summing up. Not so different from what Heshy had been saying some years earlier.

Dad lived in Florida and we in New York; and so when my mother called to say, “Come down,” we got on a plane to Fort Lauderdale. We immediately lost our way from the airport to the hospital, grinding in frustration that we would miss the end. From my mother’s voice and her deserved fame as the family “witch,” invariably perceiving the future, we knew there was very little time and every missed turn made it less likely that we would find him still alive.

But with a sense of the miraculous, the hospital appeared just as we were about to make another futile U turn. We skidded the car into the parking lot and raced up the steps afraid that even to wait for the elevator would make us fatally late. We found his room and him in bed, unconscious, breathing with obvious final distress.

I sat beside him and held his withered hand, saying what I knew would be a few last words. There was no way to know if he heard me as I attempted to sum up what I had by then come to conclude about us (contested), his life (contradictory), and life itself (still imponderable). I longed to feel even a reflexive squeeze from him and perhaps there was one or at the very least a last spasm to let me know he understood, and that was what he too had come to understand.

And then all was utter, utter stillness.

I closed his quickly cooling eyelids and put my hand to his chest as he had done so many times to me when he would say to me as child and adult, “Such a good boy. Such a lucky boy.”

And then he was no longer there. Even during his last unconscious moments it was apparent that whatever he was was present but then that was gone. Just gone.

I looked at his body to see if I could perceive his spirit depart or whatever it was that was him.

But all there was was just a body.

January 1, 2014--My Father's Son

There is a story my Aunt Madeline took delight in telling. It was about something that happened twenty years after her brother, my father and my mother retired and moved to Florida.

Every six months Madeline would call to tell it to me yet one more time. I enjoyed hearing it again and again and took pleasure in her unrestrained joy when she recounting it.

You remember your cousin Irving? The dentist from Jersey City? He called all excited to tell me about something that happened on a visit to New York City.

"You'll never guess who I saw," he said.

"Who?" I asked.

"Your brother. David." 

"Where?" I asked, very confused. "Were you in Florida?" 

"Like I told you," Irving said, "I was in the city." 

"New York City?" 

"Yes." 

"That can't be," I told him, "He's lived in Florida. For twenty years."

"Maybe he's here for a visit." 

"I would know it if he was here. He's not here." I could hear he was becoming annoyed with me. 

"But," Cousin Irving insisted, "I saw him. In Greenwich Village. Walking along the park."

"You're wrong!" I yelled at him. You know me, I'm not shy about expressing my opinions.

"Well, I did see him in New York. And you know what's most amazing? I haven't run into him in more than twenty years, right?"

"Whatever you say," I said. "But," to humor him, I asked, "What's so amazing?" 

"Though I haven't seen him in twenty years, he looks exactly the same."

Aunt Madeline and I always laughed at this because, as she told him, "You didn't see Dave, you saw his son Steven who lives in the Village and looks just like him. I mean, he looks like how Dave looked twenty years ago."

Madeline long ago departed but I was reminded of this story the other day when I caught an unexpected image of myself reflected in a store window on Sixth Avenue. What struck me was that after twenty years, I now look just like my father did the year before he died.

Then about three years ago, visiting my 103-year-old mother, as she is inclined to do these days, we were talking about the past. It was and is for her the most vibrant time of her life.

She suggested we look at old family photographs. This gives her great pleasure. She has them loose in neatly-labelled boxes, not arranged in chronological albums. So a formal picture of her parents as bride and groom in late 19th century Poland is as likely to be found among photos from Passover dinner five years ago, or of me as a six-year-old, or Cousin Chuck at 12 on Brighton Beach showing off his Charles-Atlas-toned body.

Falling out of the box was a picture of a bearded, patriarchal figure clearly from the Old Country. "Who is that?" Rona asked. "I don't remember seeing him before."

"I don't know," my mother said, testing her memory. "He looks familiar, but . . ." I could sense her becoming frustrated at what she took as more evidence of her decline.

"I think maybe it's your father's uncle. He was a very learned man. Almost a rabbi."

"One thing, though," Rona said, "He looks just like Dad did."

"And Steven," my mother said, smiling at me.

Indeed he did, I thought. Not a surprise, but--

Last winter, two years later, we were back in Florida, again in my mother's living room, again listening to her stories from the Old Days, and again going through fading photographs.

On my lap I had the same box in which there were pictures of adolescent Chuck and her parents' wedding portrait.

"Let me take another look at Steven's great-great Uncle," Rona asked. "The one who looks so much like dad."

"And Steven," my mother recalled, with her cognitive powers intact.

"Where is it?" I asked, rummaging among the pictures of past Passovers and cousins' weddings and bar mitzvahs. "I'm sure it was in this box two years ago."

"How could it be missing?" Rona said, beginning to get annoyed at my inability to find it. I suspected wondering about the state of my own decline.

"Here. You look." I thrust the box over to Rona, who was curled up on the sofa.

Systematically she took each of the dozens of photographs out of the box and, while she was searching, stacked them in what appeared to be some kind of order.

"I can't seem to find them either," she confessed. "Whatever could have happened to them?"

"It's happening to everything here," my mother said. "Nothing is not where it's supposed to be. And everything is missing."

"No, it's not Mom," I said, reaching across to take her hand. "Everything is still in place. You're very careful about that. The apartment is perfect." And indeed it is.

Mystified, Rona put the newly-organized photos back in the box. "It's the strangest thing," she said to herself.

I  thought--are we losing the past? My father. Aunt Madeline. Cousin Chuck. My great-great uncle. The list is lengthening.

That's what time does, I rued. The circle is closing. Would I be next?

After a moment of sadness, I consoled myself by recalling that the image in the Sixth Avenue store window where I caught a glimpse of myself looking like my father did a year before he died was fully two years ago.

November 21, 2013--NYC: The Shoe Lady

The only thing I have from my father--in addition to his DNA--is a pair of black leather gloves. When I wear them I feel as if I am in his hands, a place I occasionally want or need to be.

Like last week.

The transition from small-town Maine to very-big-city New York was traumatic. We have done this many times before but each year it becomes more difficult. Perhaps because any change at a certain time in life is disorienting and frequently upsetting.

And upsetting this time it was.

I have less motivation and stamina to negotiate the teeming life of the streets. People, cars, buses, careening taxis, and now more and more people on municipally-provided bicycles--Citibikes named for their sponsor Citibank.

Everything feels even more commodified than in the past; and though we are fortunately financially comfortable, reentering the world of the one-percenters is a vivid reminder of the other 99 percent. Of both what people have and do not have. Reality here ranges from $100 million condos to rent-controlled walkups in the outer boroughs. And the palpable frustration nearly everyone appears to evince, particularly those blessed with so much who ironically, in that state of being, are aware of what they do not have and which will always be out of reach.

It's a tough town.

My father's gloves needed some repair. I am careful with them, as you might imagine, but during the 15 years he has been gone one of the finger tips frayed and needed to be expertly stitched.

Rona knows a place where the work will be carefully done. Shops of this sort have become uncommon in the city where even modest retail space ranges upwards from $5,000 a month.

As we were heading toward the shop Rona had in mind, she said, "I hope it's still there and hasn't been converted into a cafe or bank."

"Unlikely," I said, "As I remember it, it's too small for a bank or--"

"But not for a coffee shop. We've already passed three new ones that opened while we were up in Maine. I'm beginning to think New Yorkers have become coffee addicts."

It in fact the shoe and leather shop was still there on Sixth Avenue.

The glove required a simple repair and we were told that if we had the time we could wait while they stitched it. So we plopped down in comfortable chairs and read through Curve magazine, which says that it is, "The nation's best-selling lesbian magazine [and] spotlights all that is fresh, funny, exciting, controversial, and cutting-edge in our community."

"We are for sure back in New York," I said, for the first time since returning feeling good about my town.

In came a woman who looked frazzled. On the counter there was a bell to ring for service. Sweating though it was chilly outside as well as in the store, she began pounding on it.

From the back, someone said, "Hold on a moment. Please. I'm fixing someone's glove. I'll be out in a minute."

The woman seemed so agitated that I feared she would have a thrombosis. "It's OK," I called out, trying to help, "We're in no hurry. Please take care of your other customer."

The repairman appeared and the woman thrust a claim ticket at him. He squinted at it. "Am I right?" he asked, "This is for 14 pairs of shoes?"

"I'm in a hurry."

"That's a lot of shoes. Give me a moment, if you will, to round them up." She began to tap her foot as he disappeared behind the counter.

"Yes, fourteen. Make sure you find them all. I don't have forever."

"I'm doing the best I can," he said from floor level. "From the ticket I can see you brought them in ten days ago. There are so many and space here is so limited that I'll have to look carefully to be sure I find them all."

In separate brown paper bags they began to be tossed up onto the counter."

She was tapping her toe even faster. "Be careful with them, will you. Most are Pradas. I only brought them in to be polished," she sounded overwhelmed and exasperated.

"Are they all yours?" I couldn't help myself from asking. She glared at me. "I mean, I thought you might be--" I don't know where I was going with this.

"They're mine," she snapped, not looking in my direction. "Count them, would you." The shoemaker had reemerged, smiling at the heap of shoes he had tossed up on top of each other."I want to see what's in each of the bags. I don't want someone else's shoes."

He bagan to take the shoes out of the bags. "I think there are fourteen."

"I can count, thank you." She was sorting through the shoes. "As I said, I want to be sure they're mine. The last thing I want is to have to come back later and fight with you about giving me the wrong shoes."

"Whatever," he said, shrugging in my direction.

"I think these are all mine. You put new heals on these, right?" She showed him his handiwork. He nodded. "And tips on these?" He nodded again, smiling. "And what about these? Weren't you supposed to replace the full soles?"

"Not those," he said, taking the shoes from her. "But these. As you can see, these have new soles."

"How much?"

"Please?"

"How much do I owe you? For everything?"

"I think I have the bill in one of these." He began again to look into each of the bags in the pile. "Here it is. All together, it comes to, let me see, $276. Tax included."

"You charge tax for polishing shoes?"

"Just for the materials. For the heels and soles."

She snorted and muttered with some disgust, "Taxes, taxes. What'll they think to tax next? The air?"

"In some cases it wouldn't be such a bad idea," I said under my breath.

"You take checks?"

"Cash is preferred, but a check from you is OK."

"All these people love cash," she said to no one in particular.

She flipped the check in his direction, scooped up the shoes--which he had consolidated into three large shopping bags--and stomped toward the door, allowing one of the overstuffed bags to bang into a woman and small child who were trying to negotiate the tight space and approach the counter.

"Excuse me too," the childcare woman said to the back of the departing customer. "I guess time is money."

"Not to her," I couldn't help myself from saying. "In her case money is money."

"I get yuh," the new woman said with a knowing smile. Rona in the meantime was attempting to engage the little boy who appeared to be about three years old.

"Can you fix the chain on this pocketbook?" she asked the repairman.

"Let me take a look." He bent to get a closer look. "No problem. None at all."

The boy was fiddling with a stack of innersoles. Rona asked, "Do you know what they're for?" He smiled shyly. "You're too young to need them. When you get to be his age," she gestured toward me, "then maybe you'll need them." He continued to take the foam inserts out of the packages and stole a quick glance in my direction.

"How much you say this costs?" The caregiver seemed outraged.

"Twenty dollars," he said.

"I paid only twenty-five for that old thing."

He shrugged apologetically. "What you gonna do," she sighed, resigned. "Everything here costs so much. It's a wonder anybody can live in this place. Mercy." I thought about the woman with the 14 pairs of shoes.

"Now leave that nice lady alone," she said to the child. "Don't you see she's reading her magazine?" At its mention, Rona slipped Curves out of sight, not wanting the child to see any of the pictures.

"It's OK," she said, "He's not bothering me. Are you?" she turned to him. "He's adorable. How old are you?" Not looking at her he held up three fingers. "My, you're big for three."

"You should see the mother," the nanny said under her breath, to illustrate, raising her arm to at least six inches over her head. He moved toward her and hugged her leg, burying his face in her coat. "He gets like that sometimes. Clingy. Whenever I mention his m-o-t-h-e-r. To tell you the truth, he misses her. 'Specially mornings."

"I can understand that," Rona said. "It isn't easy juggling so many things."

"To tell you the truth, though it's what I do, it wouldn't be my choice."

"Choice?"

"This." She pointed down at him. He continued to cling to her thigh. "Is this really the best way? I mean."

"Wouldn't be the way I'd do it," Rona said. "But I can understand. As you said about your pocketbook, things here are really expensive."

"I know I'm talking myself out of a job I need, but . . . ," she trailed off.

She left after leaving her bag, saying she'd be back in an hour to pick it up. "Glory be, twenty dollars."

Even though the weather was unseasonably mild, all the way home I wore my father's gloves.